After a lifetime of working, I’m back to freelance writing in retirement. The pace is slower. I’m learning to enjoy the quiet before work, the work, and the freedom to do things my own way.
A Lifetime of Working, Not Quite a Career
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working. Even before I graduated from college, while worrying about what I would do with my diploma, I
had already landed a job as a medical representative. To take up the job, I had to bribe my summer History teacher to let me out of audit and into the adult working world. Not the most conventional way to start a working life, but in I went. And from there, I never really stopped.
For someone who has spent so much of her life working, I don’t have a career achievement I can neatly point to. There’s no grand professional story to tell, no ladder of success I climbed one rung at a time. My working life has been more about taking on assignments, grabbing
opportunities, and figuring things out as I went along.
Those seemingly tedious jobs and engagements have taught me skills I might never have picked up on my own. When I was young, I had no idea what I wanted to become when I grew up. People asked often enough, but I never had a ready answer.
Language, though, was already part of my life when I was barely a year old. My mother would parade me before our neighbors in the province because I could rattle off the English equivalents of many Tagalog
words. My Uncle Apen added to my vocabulary by pointing out the English names of things around us: animals, plants, the sky, the sea. I sometimes think I was already a translator at one year old.
Writing, on the other hand, wasn’t even on my radar until high school, when I discovered how good it felt to see my byline in the school
paper. My very first poem appeared there. But writing wasn’t like Engineering, Accounting, Medicine, or Architecture—the career paths most young people aspired to in the mid-1970s. We were all aiming for these career ladders. Even priesthood was an option, and one of my classmates eventually became a priest. But what was a writer? Was that even a job? Nobody was asking, and it was perfectly normal to treat writing as something less than a real profession.
The Familiar Comfort of Freelance Writing
I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing about writing, wanting to write, and not being able to write what I really want to write. Meanwhile, the work itself has become familiar and ordinary: reading, thinking, gathering ideas, writing, revising, and finding the right words for what needs saying. I like to think that whatever I produce is useful, relevant, and responsive to the people who commission my work. A big part of freelancing is learning to manage the process, do what needs to be done, and eventually let go.
Coming back to this craft in retirement doesn’t call for reinvention. I don’t need to become somebody else or find a new identity. I just need to keep going, enjoying the work, drawing on what I’ve learned over the years, knowing when to wait, checking my perspective, and remembering that language is more than a tool. It can be an instrument for making something meaningful.
Where the work goes and how people use it may not be up to me. But if it can travel widely without losing what matters, then perhaps there is a career here after all, a way of making more of a gift I probably took for granted when I was young and clueless.
When the Colleagues Have Evaporated
My working life now is completely just me. Here at the co-working space, anonymous workers sit with their gadgets, getting through their day without so much as a glance in my direction. Do I miss having colleagues? Happily, I don’t. Of course, at my age, isolation isn’t healthy, so I still have to find company somehow. The trick is doing that without having to take on all the noise that comes with other people: their ideas, opinions, personalities, expectations, and complications.
Work is always richer in collaboration, but not being part of a family or community of workers suits me just fine. I like the comfort of this aloneness. This is less about withdrawing from the world than settling down in it. The professional urgencies, the need to establish myself, the need to get somewhere, all of that has lost its hold. I’m simply getting on with the work.
The absence of colleagues hasn’t left me disillusioned. I’m abnormally fine with it. I love the quiet, the slow pace, and the freedom of being accountable to one piece of work after another. Every hour still needs to be filled with something meaningful, but my to-do list is the only check and balance I need. It keeps track of what I’ve accomplished without somebody else having to do it for me.
That kind of accountability comes down to the discipline of the work itself: giving it my attention, patience, curiosity, and dedication. Sometimes that means remembering, observing, making connections, or simply letting my mind wander. I’m no longer satisfied just because I’ve managed to squeeze so much into a day. I’d rather have a routine that leaves some room for imagination. The career becomes a hobby, one that no longer demands that I become some big byline.
Working Alone Does Not Mean Standing Still
Working alone doesn’t mean tuning out the world. If anything, it calls for paying closer attention. Thinking carefully, communicating clearly, and producing work that serves a purpose are still part of the deal. As a freelancer, I spend my day alone at my coworking desk, yet I continue to collaborate with other writers, editors, and translators through digital connections. The world has become flat and wide, and the pace of activity keeps changing. Even our gifts and talents are monitored, measured, and captioned as though they were permanent game chips.
Only my relationship with time hasn’t changed much. I wake up at five and clock down at ten. Same same. But somewhere in those hours, my energy begins to dissipate. Old age has its own way of making me slack off, and I find myself better suited to reading and reflection than to producing finished pages. I can give writing the attention it deserves and still end the day feeling as though I haven’t done anything at all. The feeling is familiar, even when the to-do list says otherwise.
The work is still there, along with everything I’ve learned and the freedom to decide what to do with it on the pages ahead. I can keep doing something I know and value, one assignment at a time, and call it a career if I must. This isn’t a retreat. It’s a hefty treat: the pleasure of patting myself on the back.
