Middle Age

“When I Retire, I’m Going to Be a Brain Surgeon”

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment
file0001532482557 - stethoscope

By drummerboy, morguefile, http://mrg.bz/U6R17F

In his book, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power, Peter C. Newman relates a well-known story about author Margaret Laurence. “The magnificent Ms. Laurence was a proud professional, offended by anyone who didn’t adequately respect her craft,” he writes. “Once at a Montreal reception, a distinguished gentleman came up to her and gushed, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve read everything you’ve written. I’m a brain surgeon, and when I retire, I’m going to do novels, too!’ She looked at him with pretend enthusiasm, grabbed him by the elbow, and bellowed, ‘What a coincidence! When I retire, I’m going to be a brain surgeon.’”

I saw this on Facebook the other day and, as a writer of 30 years myself, I immediately nodded in recognition. I try not to get annoyed when I’m at some sort of social gathering where someone asks me what I do and I say, “I’m a writer,” to which they respond, “I’m a writer, too. I write in my journal every day.” No, I’m sorry, that doesn’t make you a writer any more than my balancing my cheque book or doing my own taxes makes me an accountant. It makes you literate. There’s a difference.

At the same time, though, it occurred to me when I reread that Margaret Laurence anecdote that, although I understand the sentiment, the reality in the early third millennium is not the same as it was when she made that statement. In this era, it is feasible for people to retire from whatever they’ve been doing all their lives and become writers. Numerous current students and alumni of the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s college fall into that category. Some of them are likely to finish and publish at least one book, if not more.

Self-publishing makes it even more possible for people to retire and become published writers. It’s easy to say that’s just vanity publishing, but I edit a lot of authors who hope to be traditionally published but are willing self-publish, as well as many who choose a self-publishing model from the start, and I’m often impressed with the quality of writing and the story ideas that come my way, regardless of which publishing model the authors are pursuing.

My point is that, particularly in an era in which people are living much longer and often remaining productive until close to the end of their lives, the notion that one might retire from one profession, move on to another, and attain some degree of success—sometimes a considerable degree—is not unrealistic.

Look at Claire Sower, whom I’ve written about here—a successful writer for many years who is now thriving as a visual artist. And Guenther Krueger—another successful writer who earned his PhD in his late fifties/early sixties and worked at his dream job for the last three years before he retired. Clark Elliott, who wrote The Ghost in My Brain, is a gifted professor of artificial intelligence, not a writer, yet he published a book last year.

The whole point of this Start Now blog is to tell readers that it’s never too late to start something new. There are writers who not only did that but became very well-known and widely admired for their writing: although both Charles Bukowski and Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing earlier in life, neither were published until they were in their fifties, and Frank McCourt didn’t publish Angela’s Ashes until he was 66.

It’s also not unusual for doctors to become writers. Think Oliver Sacks, Norman Doidge, and Peter D. Kramer. (Is it a coincidence they’re all psychiatrists?) On the other hand, my son and daughter-in-law are both in medical school and I can’t imagine anyone retiring and becoming a doctor, never mind a neurosurgeon. I can imagine a person starting in medicine perhaps as late as 40, but it’s at least a nine-year process (after completing a four-year undergraduate degree, usually in the sciences) from starting basic sciences to completing a residency, comprising long, stressful hours every step of the way. So, no, I can’t see a person retiring and becoming a physician.

That’s not to say I don’t see Laurence’s point. I work hard at my writing. I’ve been told I have a gift, which I think is horseshit. I’ve spent over 30 years learning my craft, most recently in a master’s program that had me working harder than I have in years. I have as little patience for people who think writers have a gift and writing comes easily to them as I do for people who refer to themselves as writers just because they’re literate. (I have even less patience for people who use these wrong-headed perceptions as excuses not to pay writers adequately.)

So right after I read that old Margaret Laurence anecdote and nodded my head in agreement, I had to think twice about what she’d actually said and whether it still applies. The spirit of it? Yes, unfortunately, it still applies. But the letter of it? No. It’s increasingly apparent that it is possible to retire from a career, take up writing, be serious about it, finish one or more books, find one or more publishers, build an audience, and maybe even win awards.

I’m glad about that, because it gives me and a lot of other people an opportunity to believe that if we work hard at it, we will be able to achieve what we’ve always wanted to but never before had the time or opportunity to do so directly. But I’d also like it if people would get the message beneath Laurence’s quip, which is as valid today as it was when she said it: writing is hard work and deserves to be taken as seriously as any other craft, art, or profession.

If you’re not a professional writer but you aspire to become one, more power to you. But before you say “I’m a writer, too” or “I plan to become a writer when I retire” to someone who’s already been doing the work and paying the dues for decades, ask yourself if you’d say the same thing to an accountant just because you balance your cheque book every month and do your own taxes every year. And maybe then consider saying something a little more appropriate, like “I write in my journal every day, and I often think I’d like to write more when the kids are grown and I have more time. Tell me what it’s like to be a professional writer.”

Starting Over . . . and Over . . . and Over . . .

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment
Guenther Krueger

My friend Guenther, non-Birkie wearing musician, nurse, therapist, writer, PhD, retiree, and now meditator.

Guenther Krueger is no stranger to starting over. I met him back in the early 1990s when we were both working as freelance journalists. At that time, I had no idea how many times he’d already started over.

Since then, we’ve been the kind of friends who see each other once every few years at social events. It was only recently we started getting together more often, after he read a blog post (which I’ve since taken down for personal reasons) in which I wrote frankly about some of my recent life troubles. He asked me out for coffee, and I found out a lot I’d never known about him, including that he’d recently been through a difficult time of his own, which led to his most recent “start over”—with meditation.

I would not have guessed Krueger was into meditation. To the best of my knowledge, he doesn’t wear Birkies. As far as I could see, he’s always had a sardonic wit and never let things bother him much. But after what he went through a couple of years ago, meditation was what gave him a fresh start—the thing that’s allowed him to ease into retirement and enjoy it instead of fretting over it, the way many new retirees do.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Krueger’s first “start over” came when he was young, as happens for many of us. His youthful goal was to be a concert pianist but “I only lasted two weeks in the faculty of music at U of T.” He made a pretty radical career switch to nursing, where he worked in pediatrics for the better part of 12 years. He knew he wanted to work in health care and with kids, but nursing “was never really what I wanted to do.”

Then he did a master’s degree in counselling, but when he was finished, he realized he had only three real options: go on to a PhD, work for a company that was helping people get back in the workforce, or go into private practice. The first two didn’t appeal to him; the third, “I found frustrating because it would mean working with clients who could pay but had easily resolvable problems, rather than working with people with more challenging problems but who couldn’t pay.”

(Eventually, he did a second master’s, a liberal arts degree. Although it didn’t lead to a career, he does realize in hindsight that he got better and better at being a student with each degree.)

Then, in his late thirties (the mid-1980s), he realized “what I really wanted to do was write.” Like me, he started by taking a course with Vancouver’s legendary freelancer, Daniel Wood. (We might even have been in the same class.) Krueger remembers one class where the assignment was to write a query. “Daniel read it out as an example of everything NOT to do!” This is one of the things I love about Krueger: instead of taking it to heart, he took Wood’s advice, sent the revised letter to an editor, and “sold my first article on the basis of the very first query I ever sent out.”

He loved freelance journalism but, like most of us, he quickly realized there was not much money in it, so he got into reporting at medical conferences (the same type of work Claire Sower was doing), and picking up other contract jobs, too, as all freelancers do.

(“One of the things I noticed about freelancing is that nobody really understands it,” he says. “You’ll be at a party and someone will ask you what you do. You’ll say you’re a freelance writer and they’ll ask you one or two questions about what you write, not realizing that when you’re freelancing you basically write whatever pays. Then they lose interest.” I know just what he means. I’ve had exactly the same experience a hundred times.)

Around 2000, the medical reporting he was doing began to lean toward advertorial work for the pharmaceutical industry, which Krueger didn’t enjoy. “It was just what paid,” he says. Then in 2003, when he was in his late fifties, Krueger’s partner, Barry, who was then still part of the communications department [edited] at Simon Fraser University (he’s recently retired, though still in demand as a guest lecturer and performer) suggested Guenther talk to a colleague in communications about working with her on some grant applications she was writing [edited]. She was already pretty much assured of receiving a $3 million grant and suggested Krueger do a PhD there so they could work on that project together. “I thought about what I might like to do and realized I was really interested in how people cope with tragic loss,” he says. His acceptance to the program “effectively ended my freelance career.”

This is where things get really interesting for me. Other than my peers in the MFA program, I don’t know many people who are willing to start a new degree in their late fifties, much less a five-year commitment to a PhD. In his early sixties, freshly minted doctorate in hand, Krueger found his dream job on a three-year project at BC’s Children’s Hospital, bringing him full circle back to working with sick children, but in the way he’d always wanted.

Life was good, at least for a while. But in July 2014, his mother and father both died, just 10 days apart. He wasn’t close with his parents, so he didn’t expect to feel the loss acutely, and at first he didn’t. “I was the sole executor of the estate, and I treated it like I would any other project.” The whole thing was wrapped up by Christmas, and when he and Barry later went on holiday to Hawaii, he felt fine.

It was the following August, about a year after his parents died, that he suddenly started having anxiety attacks. “I’d wake up in the night, unable to sleep, and go out for a walk.” He found himself so wound up with anxiety that sometimes, in the evening, he’d go downstairs to his partner’s work space—something he’d never done in a relationship of 30-some years—and just lie down there for the sake of being close to someone who cared about him. “Barry felt badly because he wanted to do something to help, but being near him was all I needed.”

Eventually, Krueger started putting things together. He’d been through three major changes in his life almost simultaneously: the career-capping project at Children’s Hospital  had wrapped up; he’d retired, which meant he wasn’t working for the first time in 50 years; and he’d been so busy with his parents’ estate that he hadn’t had time to think how he felt about their deaths. The losses had piled up, and were now compounded with a prostate issue and a hernia.

Once [edited] he realized this, he says, “I decided I had to attack the problem from all angles.” He went to his doctor to schedule surgeries for the prostate and hernia issues, started seeing a therapist to work out unresolved issues with his parents, and, on the advice of his therapist and some friends, started meditating.

Never one to do things in half measures, “I decided to read everything I could about meditation,” he says. The book he recommended to me when we got together last July was Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I promptly ordered and read it, and tried to follow Kabat-Zinn’s advice to the letter, but his eight-week program of building up to 45 minutes a day of a type of meditation he calls a “body scan” didn’t work for me.

“I don’t adhere to any one style of meditation,” Krueger says now. He doesn’t sit in a lotus posture, but lies down due to back pain (so do I). He doesn’t insist on any minimum amount of time, either. “I find that even if I sit still and focus on my breathing for as little as 10 minutes, my whole day goes better. I’m less stressed and more able to appreciate life in the moment. I’ve spent my whole life worrying about what comes next, and I’m not doing that anymore.”

Krueger’s partner recently retired and went off to Berlin to teach for four months. After his anxiety issues last year, Krueger was a little worried about how he’d do on his own for four months. “It’s been fine, and I think meditation is making the difference.”

Mid-sixties and still starting over—inspiring or exhausting? I’ll go with inspiring. Oh, and meditating for shorter periods and without doing the “body scan” is working better for me, too.

Claire Sower: Rocking Her Art in the Middle of Life

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments
Claire Sower in her Granville Island studio.

Claire Sower in her Granville Island studio.

I’ve never seen my friend Claire Sower happier. Not that I see her often; we’re colleagues who bump into each other once every few years. But when I saw her displaying her work Art! Vancouver 2015 last spring, and she told me she’d been invited to participate in a show at the Agora Gallery in New York in October, there was a joy in her face I’ve never seen before.

“In my heart, I know this is what I was born to do,” she says of her mid-life switch from computer to canvas. “When I’m not painting, it’s what I want to be doing.”

Like me, Sower started out as a freelance journalist. And like me, as the years went by and well-paying freelance journalism gigs became fewer and further between, she filled in the gaps with contract work. Eventually, she landed a great gig as a medical journalist, writing reports about clinical research that had been presented at conferences prior to peer-reviewed publication. It was a stressful job, with ever-tight deadlines and a need for pinpoint accuracy, but it included world travel and good money—enough to buy a piece of property, not a common thing for a freelance journalist these days.

Her career switch had its seeds in 2007, when the FDA changed regulations regarding third-party reporting of medical conferences so it could only be done by those with university accreditation for providing continuing medical education. The bottom fell out of the industry; many communications companies went out of business. Out of work, other than the usual jobs most freelancers eke out a living on before finding something more life-sustaining, she set out to create a website providing medical information. But the internet was changing too quickly, social media had not yet evolved into the marketing tool it’s since become, and she was competing against dozens of other health websites, like WebMD, and tens of thousands of out-of-work medical reporters.

“I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t have deep pockets.” She was just making ends meet, and getting to the point where she realized, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do what I want to do, goddammit!” She’d always wanted to paint, but “it never seemed like an option. I never had the time or money.”

Then in 2009, a friend mentioned she’d signed up for an art class and invited Sower to join her. Within weeks, she was hooked. After perhaps a dozen classes, “my friend and I went out and looked for a studio,” she says. “We had one within 10 days down on Granville Island. I just knew at the soul of my being this was what I should be doing.”

After a while, the paintings started to pile up and she figured she might as well try to sell them; if you don’t, she deadpans, “eventually, you’ll just be found dead under a pile of canvases.” Her first show was just a display of her work in West Vancouver City Hall, but it generated enough interest to keep her looking for opportunities.

I’ve been admiring and sharing her work on Facebook for a few years now; there’s something about the flowers she paints that draws my eye. She does landscapes, too—there were a few on exhibit when I saw her last May—but it’s the florals that are written about so glowingly in her artist’s bio for the New York show:

Claire Sower’s florals are tactile and interpretive, conveying a strong sense of tension and joy. . . . Eschewing detail in favor of essence, Sower works quickly, using palette knives to build depth by layering paint, allowing colors to mix on the canvas. This brings a sense of immediacy to her work, which conveys a flower’s “living energy.”

The New York show happened through social media. Claire has a website, of course, and a Facebook presence, but finds Instagram a great platform for emerging artists because it’s where a lot of galleries look for new talent. The Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York, found her there and invited her to participate in a group show, which opened yesterday (October 9) and continues through most of the month (to October 29).

There’s a whole business component to any art, she says, as any artist knows all too well. You can’t just sit back and relax; you have to be constantly self-promoting. You also have to make some hard choices financially; you have to love what you do or it won’t feel worthwhile. You have to be willing to embrace a somewhat precarious existence, have some faith, and let go.

In some ways, that can be easier for a young person at the beginning of their lives, but Sower feels it’s an advantage to be making this kind of life change at an older age.

“I think being older serves me better because having had 20 years as a self-employed writer and running my own business, I have a lot of experience to draw on in terms of how I want to set up my business as an artist. I understand there’s a lot of pitfalls. I mean, yes, there’s debt, but there’s always debt. I think that’s just a way of life these days. . . . I’ve learned to trust my gut, trust my instincts, and they’ve never steered me wrong.”

At the moment, Sower spends her mornings on freelance writing opportunities to help pay the bills; rent from her property helps, too, another way being older is helping her fulfill her dream. But throughout those mornings at the computer, she’s always looking forward to afternoons and evenings at her studio.

Her long-term goal is to paint full time. “I’m going to have a big studio with a studio assistant and I’m just going to rock and roll!”

I believe she’ll do it. Her work is beautiful and original, and she has the drive and passion to get where she wants to go. And why not? People are living longer and healthier lives these days. Why shouldn’t mid-life be a time when we switch tracks and gear up for something completely new?

If you happen to be in New York City this month, visit the Agora Gallery in Chelsea between October 9 and 29 (opening reception October 15). If not, check out her website or Facebook page and see for yourself. Claire Sower’s art rocks—and, by the way, so does she.

“If You Don’t Like Starting Over, Stop Giving Up”

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

I recently read somewhere, “If you don’t like starting over, stop giving up.” At first, I was taken aback. After all, I’d only just started a blog on the subject of starting over in mid-life. But then I thought, “Wait—there can be all sorts of reasons one might start over that have nothing to do with giving up.”

I’ve started over several times in my life. I don’t care how many people say it’s exhilarating; putting oneself out in the world in a new way is always hard, and I find harder as I get older. I’m not sure if that’s because I don’t have any personal role models for starting over late in life; among my family and friends, everyone did what they did until they died or retired.

Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert—a person who recharges their batteries by being alone, as compared with extroverts, who get their energy from being with people—and starting over typically requires energy to put oneself out there. It’s not unusual for people to have less energy as they get older, whether from a naturally slowing metabolism or because they’re dealing with personal, professional, or health issues.

More likely, I think anyone who starts over in mid-life finds it hard, in at least some respects, but doesn’t necessarily talk about the hard parts. I’ve never been a member of the say-only-positive-things-all-the-time school of thought. Almost inevitably, when people subvert so-called “negative” feelings and experiences because everyone else would rather only hear about the “positive” ones, they enlist unhealthy coping mechanisms.

The problem, of course, is that difficulties only become more difficult when they’re not talked about, but it’s all the more difficult to talk about them when no one else is taking a risk and talking about them lest others target them for not being positive enough. North American culture, I find, is as obsessed with non-stop positivity as it is with relentless self-sufficiency, effortless perfection, and endless youth and beauty. But that’s a whole other rant.

Getting back to the many reasons one might start over, I started over as a youth worker after university because I realized that, although I loved studying anthropology and archaeology, I wasn’t as drawn to the career options as I’d thought I’d be (and wasn’t aware of some of the other options that might have been open to me).

I stumbled from there into youth work almost accidentally. It influenced the course of my life in countless ways, but after seven years I was burning out. Besides, I’d always wanted to be a writer; it had been in the back of my mind for years, but I’d always felt like I needed more life experience. After university, archaeology, travel, youth work, and marriage, I felt ready. It was time to start over again.

I set about to be a freelance journalist around the same time I started my family and stuck with it for 12 years, until our third child came along. At that point, I still wasn’t making a living—freelance gigs were already becoming scarcer and more poorly paid, and I finally had to admit it wasn’t just a personal failing and put my family first. So I started my fourth career, as the sole proprietor of a communications business, working with small nonprofits, with a long-term goal of getting back to creative nonfiction writing after the kids were older.

That’s what I’m doing now, though it feels more like “starting over” than “getting back to it” at least partly because the publishing world has changed much more than I anticipated 20 years ago—and, frankly, so have I. And all those changes make it more difficult than I thought it would be, to the point that I have many moments of regretting that I ever left writing behind.

When I look back with hindsight, I can see there was a third road. On my bad days, I feel bitter because the choice not to take that road wasn’t entirely mine. On my better days, I remember doing what I felt was best for everyone and I remind myself that harbouring anger over old choices doesn’t change anything, past or present.

I imagine a lot of people have those sorts of feelings, which is why I think talking about them is a good thing. The point is, though the statement “If you don’t like starting over, stop giving up” took me aback when I first read it, I soon realized it only sounds true until you think about it.

Anyway, I’d forgotten all about it until I read an article in the Globe and Mail last weekend about an accomplished writer who started over as an Anglican priest in her fifties. It was something she’d always wanted to do, something related in many ways to what she’d been doing all along, something that continues to carry on aspects of life she’d started much earlier. I found it a good read.

It sounds like a completely joyous journey for her, and maybe it has been. Some people really are relentlessly positive, while others battle depression and “negative feelings.” But maybe more of the latter would find the courage to start over in mid-life if they knew more about others who are doing it, and that having/sharing fears and negative feelings about it is not a bad thing. It’s not a sign that the only reason you’re struggling with starting over again is that you’ve spent a lifetime giving up.

I’ve started over many times, for many reasons. None of them had anything to do with giving up. It’s difficult starting over now, but I want it, so I’ll stick with it. I hope it will be my last start-over, but if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that you never know what’s coming up. You never know when life is going to throw a start-over at you, you never know how you’re going to feel about it until you get there, and it’s probably better not to judge people who are in the process of finding out.