Stopping work at 58 felt different from retiring. For a while, saying it out loud felt like putting on someone else's clothes. I'm still not entirely sure they fit.
When people asked what I was doing after I handed in my notice, I had an answer ready.
I'm stopping work. Taking a step back. Leaving.
All accurate. All deliberately chosen. All avoiding the one word that everyone else was using about me.
"Retirement."
I couldn't say it. Not naturally, not without a slight internal flinch. And I've been thinking about why, because the resistance is more interesting than I initially gave it credit for.
What the word meant to me
Retirement, in my head, belonged to a specific person. Someone older. Someone who had reached the official finish line - 65, or 67 now - and was doing the thing you're supposed to do at that point. Collecting the pension. Getting the card signed by colleagues. Moving into the next chapter in the way the system had always intended.
That person wasn't me. I'm 58. I still wake up at 6am. I can walk for hours. I'm not waiting for anything in the way retirement implies waiting.
There was something else too, something slightly harder to admit. The word carried a kind of finality I wasn't comfortable claiming. Retiring means you've finished. Stopping work just means you've stopped working. The first one is a verdict. The second is a decision. And I wanted it to be a decision, not a verdict.
So I became someone who was stopping work. Or stepping back. Or leaving. A person who had made a deliberate choice rather than arrived at an end point.
How the shorthand took over
What I hadn't anticipated was how quickly the alternatives became impractical.
Once I'd resigned, the questions came quickly and regularly. Colleagues in corridors. Friends at the weekend. Family asking what the plan was. And "stopping work" - accurate as it was - needed a follow-up that I didn't always have ready. Stopping work to do what?
Retirement answered the question. It was complete in itself. People knew what it meant. It didn't require explanation or defence. It closed the conversation cleanly rather than opening another one.
So I started using it. Not comfortably, not with any sense of having resolved the discomfort, but as a shorthand. A label that worked even if it didn't quite fit.
The thing about a shorthand is that it gradually becomes the primary description. You use it enough times and it starts to sound normal. Not natural, exactly. But normal.
The stigma question
I want to be honest about something that's slightly uncomfortable to admit.
Part of my resistance to the word was about age. Sixty-five is the retirement age. I'm fifty-eight. Using the word felt like jumping a queue I hadn't reached yet, or claiming a status I hadn't earned.
But underneath that was something less defensible. There was a faint embarrassment in it. A sense that retirement - particularly early retirement - required explanation. That it might look like giving up rather than moving on. That there was something slightly suspicious about a man in his late fifties who wasn't working.
People don't think twice about a 35-year-old leaving work to travel for a year. They don't interrogate a parent who stops work to care for children. But retirement at 58 still gets a particular kind of look from some people. A slight narrowing of the eyes. Are you ill? Did something happen? Did you have to?
I wasn't ill. Nothing happened. I didn't have to. I chose to. And for a while the word retirement made that choice feel like it needed more justification than it does.
When the resistance started to soften
I couldn't tell you there was a single moment when retirement started to feel accurate rather than approximate. It was more like a gradual wearing down of the resistance.
Partly it was repetition. Saying the word enough times to enough people that the flinch got smaller.
Partly it was other people's reactions. Most people, when I said I was retiring, responded with something warm and uncomplicated. Good for you. You've earned it. What an exciting thing. They didn't look suspicious. They didn't seem to think it needed justification. The projection of judgement was mostly mine.
And partly - something I hadn't anticipated - it was this. Writing for FreeBefore65, researching the posts, sitting with the questions that the site kept asking me to answer honestly. You can't spend months writing about early retirement, reading about it, arguing for it as a legitimate and considered choice, without the word gradually becoming more comfortable in your own mouth. I've typed it hundreds of times. At some point the typing and the saying started to feel like the same thing.
There's a small irony in all of this that I noticed only recently. The site is called FreeBefore65. Not RetiredBefore65. Not EarlyRetirementUK. I chose "Free" instead. Either a more honest description of what I was actually pursuing, or evidence that the resistance ran deeper than I'd realised. Probably both!
The gradual acceptance followed eventually. Whatever I called it, the reality was the same. I had a pension. I had a plan. I wasn't going back to employment. I was choosing how to spend my time rather than having it chosen for me. If that's not retirement, what is it?
Where I am with it now
Still working, for a few more weeks. Still occasionally catching myself about to say "I'm leaving" and correcting to "I'm retiring" with the slight self-consciousness of someone using a word they're not quite sure belongs to them.
My wife uses the word about me naturally. My adult children use it. Colleagues who've heard the news use it. I'm the last person in the room still slightly resistant.
I can't remember the first time I told someone "I'm retiring" out loud rather than "I'm stopping work" but I have started saying it - but, even now, it still feels weird.
What I've come to think is that the discomfort was never really about the word. It was about what the word was surfacing - the identity question, the question of who I am without the job, the sense of finality that comes with a decision this significant.
Retirement is accurate. It's just that accurate can take a while to feel comfortable.
The word describes the external reality. The internal reality is still assembling itself. And maybe that gap, between the label that fits and the identity it describes, is where most of the real work of this transition happens.
Not in deciding what to call it. In figuring out who you are inside it.
Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.
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