It’s My 10 Year Blog Anniversary! – retirementtransition

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It’s hard to believe that I’m celebrating 10 years of writing a blog. [Yes, that also means I’ve been retired for over 10 years.] The blogging world has shifted in the past 10 years; many bloggers I started following early on have moved onto other things as life transitions happened. Other bloggers have moved to podcasts. But I’m still a words-on-paper girl and prefer blogs over podcasts. I find that writing has a way of helping me sort through my thinking and I love how comments from readers provide me with different perspectives.

Given the magnitude of this anniversary, I did a long look back over the years of my blogging.

I have made 439 blog posts. Not as prolific as some others, but who knew I had that much to say! I’ve had over 53,000 visitors to my blog – again, not as many as many other bloggers but simply amazing to me. My most popular post this past 12 months was Living with Uncertainty. In the past 3 years my most popular post was Retirement A to Z. [I can’t figure out older than that – my blogging technical skills are not that good.]

My first year of blogging was all about how I was applying the product design process from my career to my retirement. I blogged about many of life’s domains and how to approach them as one transitions into retirement – relationships, healthy living, to work or not to work, location, exploring possibilities. Much of that blog content ended up in my book, Retirement Transition, still available on Amazon – link here.

Year two of my blog saw me finding new life tools, many of which I still use. My Morning Journal will often include an Emotional Assessment and I’ve chosen a Word Of The Year (WOTY) on and off through the years. This second year of blogging about retirement transition saw me “trying on” new things like yoga (which I still do) and becoming a certified Retirement Life Coach (which I don’t still do).

Year three of blogging saw big life changes and the realization that retirement life, like non-retirement life, was full of transitions. We downsized into a new house (in Ohio) with the plan to snowbird (in Florida), took a trip of a lifetime (African Safari), and I got cancer. There was a refinement on my retirement lifestyle vision and the introduction of seasonal bucket lists/action plans (another new tool that I’ve used on/off through the years).

Year 4 saw more transitions with me stopping the consulting work I had been doing since I retired, us finally trying on snow-birding (my retirement life vision), and me trying on even more new things like learning to ride a motorcycle and do meditation (neither was successful). I also published my Retirement Transitions book!

Year 5 was a year of personal exploration. I blogged about exploring spirituality, positivity, and gratitude. We made the decision to move full time to Florida (a major retirement life vision shift), but could not execute it immediately. Year 6 was The Pandemic where I focused on a deep exploration of positive psychology, self-limiting beliefs, and personality profiling (Enneagram). I did some major refinement to my retirement lifestyle vision, with a big push of putting Positive Psychology into Practice.

Year 7 was the major transition of the Big Move to permanent residency in Florida. This was not my original retirement vision, but refinement is a critical aspect of my Retirement Transition Process. The ups and down of creating a new lifestyle was blogged about, and I relooked at my entire Retirement Transition Process in a series of throw-back posts.

Blogging in year 8 had my first summer study as I dabbled in exploring and summarizing areas of interest – goddess archetypes, feminine consciousness, triggers and glimmers. Summer in Florida is hot, so indoor summer study projects seemed like a good thing to do! Year 8 was also learning the reality of living in Florida – from our first evacuation to settling into the hobbies I love. And there was the heartache of losing my mom just weeks after we had moved her to live closer to us.

Year 9 had me working though grief, coming back to seasonal action plans, and finding acceptance in life as it is – the reality of friendship (versus the fantasies of friendship), the realization that I’d finally found my volunteering places, and accepting I was a dabbler at heart (it’s all about engagement, not mastery).

Blog year 10 began with another summer study – this one on salt-tolerant plants, not realizing the full impact of that as we then experienced complete house and yard devastation with hurricane storm surge (salt-water) flooding. Year 10 has turned into a year of blogging about recovery – both physically (house) and emotionally (me).

It’s fascinating to see recurring themes through the years – questions on identity (Who Am I), the challenge of being versus doing, understanding what is accomplishment, purpose, and friendship are at this stage of life. I’ve shared a lot of my personal development, from putting Positive Psychology into Practice to changing self-liming beliefs to dealing with grief, trauma, and anger.

Back in July 2015, I entered the blogging world naïve, with a desire to write and share my thoughts. The inner sage in me wanted to share my learning about retirement transitioning, so I called my blog Retirement Transition, thinking it was about transitioning from full-time work into the unchartered (for me) space of retirement. I didn’t realize the significant transitions that would happen in our retirement– from the major ones (cancer, the pandemic, moving states, my mom’s unexpected passing, losing our home) to the minor ones (“trying things on” with many things not working out, learning how to live with a more positive outlook, coming to terms with expectations versus real desires, working on self-acceptance). I also didn’t realize how much I would learn from others – the bloggers I began to follow, the comments I receive on my blog.

It’s been a wonderful journey. I’m glad I modified my blog theme to recognize that Retirement Life is a Series of Transitions. I’m not sure what the next 10 years will hold, but I’m going to keep blogging about it for a while!

Thanks for reading!

Picture credit: me, the backdrop from a wonderful play about storytelling we saw this past weekend.

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