I found this very uplifting and thought-provoking article on retiring from psychiatry by Juan C. Corvalan.
He sounds like he’s successfully navigating his retirement. On the few occasions I’ve felt compelled to make a remark about my own retirement, I typically say something like “It’s a mixed blessing.”
My retirement is a process, unfolding as time passes. It was difficult in the beginning, which was only a little over 3 years ago. It’s not what I would call easy even now.
What gave me joy since I retired were getting messages from the learners I was privileged to teach. Some of them I’d not heard from in many years. Someone from my department said, “We miss you.” I answered that, in some ways, I never left.
Time itself feels different. The days go by so quickly that I want time to slow down.
I like Corvalan’s way of expressing himself. He’s a writer and likes to talk about words and their meaning. He talked about the definition of the Spanish word for retirement, which is jubilacion, which reminds me of the English word “jubilation.”
Retirement has been, at times (perhaps often), anything but cause for jubilation.
On the other hand, I can think of several things I will never miss about being a psychiatrist. I don’t write about them, as a rule. In fact, I tend to write about anything but psychiatry: cribbage, juggling, making wisecracks about extraterrestrials.
I really appreciate colleagues like George Dawson, MD (who writes the blog Real Psychiatry), H. Steven Moffic, MD (who writes the articles “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News”), Ronald Pies, MD, Editor in Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times, and Jenna, the psychiatry resident who writes the blog “The Good Enough Psychiatrist,” who is very far from retirement, unlike me and the other writers just mentioned.
And I appreciate Dr. Corvalan’s excellent essay on retirement from psychiatry.
Reference:
Corvalan JC. A Retired Psychiatrist on Retirement: Rejoicing Jubilatio. Mo Med. 2022 Sep-Oct;119(5):408-410. PMID: 36338006; PMCID: PMC9616447.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 
The main thing I miss is “being in the zone” for the lack of a better term. When you go to work for decades and talk with people all day long – you come to the realization that not many people can do what you do. All sort of common sense metrics apply, but the best one is probably the overall information content of the discussion – in both directions. I came to the late realization that in all of the lectures I have given – I was the only person in the room excited about the content (maybe too excited). In that two-way interaction mutual interest is high and it was generally very productive. Hard to believe that an introvert from the shores of Lake Superior could develop that kind of super power. When you put it on the shelf – something is missing in the Universe.
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You hit the nail on the head, George. With me, lectures not so much. But with a small group of trainees, a floor nurse and me, demonstrating how to conduct the IV lorazepam challenge test for catatonia almost invariably was a “being in the zone” event.
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