Last week we saw the 1957 movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man” on the Svengoolie show on the MeTV channel. We’ve never seen it before and it actually got pretty good reviews back in the day. The main character, Scott Carey, was played by Grant Williams. You can watch the movie for free on the Internet Archive.
According to some interpretations, the story uses the metaphor of diminishing size to highlight the diminishing role of masculinity in American society in the 1950s or human notions in general about one’s self-worth in society.
It got me thinking about how the challenges of adjusting to retirement as a process has been (and still is to some degree) for me. I started out with gradual reduction of my work schedule in the form of a phased retirement contract. It was difficult.
I was reminded of how difficult it was to slow down, especially as a teacher of residents and other health care trainees, when I was going through some old papers after the recent move to our new house. They included teaching awards I’d received over the years.
I was struck by how small my self-perceived role in psychiatry and medicine has gradually become in the last few years. I’ve been shrinking, similar to Scott Carey. In fact, I’m a shrinking headshrinker.
I don’t want to spend too much time ruminating about what retirement means to me. I think it’s a very common response to perceive the world gets smaller when you retire.
It doesn’t help much to intellectualize about shrinking in this way. Scott Carey eventually accepted his diminishing stature, even to the point of disappearance. Grief about this kind of loss is normal, although I’m realizing that grief might never completely disappear.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 
Good metaphor. I still miss it, especially as I am exposed to the approximations of psychiatric practice that I see while blogging. I don’t think I am being too grandiose by saying that we offer a very unique approach to human problems. I still get plenty of emails and messages from people not getting the same thing. So I think there is something to getting that secret handshake and being part of an elite crowd.
My other association today is from IPT and that is overidealization of past experience based on mixed qualities. Ideally being a psychiatrist is a great job. Unfortunately in reality it is a very mixed bag of impossible situations, dealing with other people’s anger (patients, family, staff, administrators), and a continuously deteriorating practice environment.
If I was going to pop out of retirement it would have to be as my own boss and unfortunately I never acquired those skills.
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Well said, George. I would never come out of retirement either. I think I’m reacting to this transition of moving stuff from one house to another. It involves digging through the past to find out what I want to keep and what I need to let go of.
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