Today marks the start of Reading Reality’s FIFTEENTH Blogo-Birthday Celebration Week. When I looked ahead this time last year, I realized that this year’s celebration would be weird as both Reading Reality’s official blogoversary, April 4, and my own birthday, April 5, both fell on a weekend. This time last year, I thought I’d be conducting the Celebration Week BEFORE the official dates. I changed my mind. I’m starting today. Because why not celebrate early?

As is always true for my Blogo-Birthday Celebration, this is a Hobbit Birthday. Like Bilbo’s “eleventy-first” (111th) birthday in The Fellowship of the Ring, I’m giving presents away every day this week, starting with today and finishing up on my actual birthday on Sunday – which also happens to be Easter Sunday this year.

Reading Reality began on April 4, 2011, under the name “Escape Reality, Read Fiction”, which is also the reason the ratings are “Escape Ratings” and “Reality Ratings”. This blog, and all of the other reading/writing/reviewing activities that have grown up around it over the past FIFTEEN years have turned into both my longest and my absolute favorite job. At least in part because I created it out of things that I wanted to do, and can do the work at whatever time feels right to me.

As this is Reading Reality’s 15th blogoversary, I’ve been thinking a lot in recent weeks about how it all came about, and more importantly how it works, how I work, how it works for me, and how important it’s been to my continued health and well-being. Because giving up the structure of a ‘regular job’ is hard, no matter how or why one does it or how much one looks forward to not having to deal with the parts of it that are, let’s say, less than stellar.

Which leads to this essay, titled “Purpose, Structure, Control” because those are my three keys to living without the structure, and the ballast, of a regular day job. As I say in the essay, technically, I’m retired. But the reality is that I work every day and I’m happy to do so because I’ve come up with a PURPOSE I find stimulating and fulfilling, a STRUCTURE that makes it possible and keeps me focused, and that I have enough CONTROL of my circumstances that I can make those things work for me most of the time.

And if those are things that you’re thinking about – or even in the middle of – or if you’re just wondering what “the rest of the story” is and why I’m writing this here and now, read on.

Purpose, Structure and Control

My very first post on Reading Reality, then called “Escape Reality, Read Fiction”, occurred on April 4, 2011. Fifteen whole years ago this Saturday. How time flies when you’re having fun – and I am.

I was then, too, but I was also on the horns of a huge dilemma. It was the middle of the ‘Great Recession’, we were in the process of moving to Atlanta for Galen’s job, all while I was in the midst of my own job search. I didn’t think it would too terribly long, as there are oodles of libraries in the Atlanta metro area. But during the recession, all the public library systems in the area were operating under hiring freezes. There were no jobs to be had – at least not in the immediate term.

Which left me with a big problem. I had to do something with myself. Something productive. Something that kept me in touch with my profession. Something that gave me a reason to get up in the morning and would keep me busy and mentally occupied for as long as it took to get another job.

In other words, I needed a purpose. And playing video games all day was just not going to cut it – as tempting as that prospect might have been.

I did get another library job. It took 18 months and a move to Seattle. It also wasn’t a terrific choice, but it was what was available. After two years I realized that it wasn’t working for me, that working for myself on Reading Reality was more interesting, more fulfilling and yes, more purposeful, and I was fortunate enough to be able to retire early.

I never stopped working on/at Reading Reality while we were in Seattle, and since we moved back to the ATL it’s been my primary occupation. Technically, I’m retired. But in reality, I work every day and plan on continuing to do so indefinitely.

At least in part because I learned a lesson from my parents. My dad retired at 63 and died six months later because he just didn’t know what to do with himself without the purpose, the identity, and in his case the sheer adrenaline of solving crises and having a job. My mom worked very part time and mostly for favors rather than cash until her final illness at the age of 89. My mom was already ‘retired’ when my dad retired, but they did not have the same ideas for retirement – at all. My mom was very much a homebody and my dad wanted to learn to fly. (I mean that literally. He was taking flying lessons AGAIN when he died and hadn’t even told my mom he was doing so.) As much as I am like my dad in a whole lot of ways, this is definitely a case where I’m much better off being like my mom.

However, the thing about planning for retirement is that there is LOTS of focus on the financial aspects. Which is, of course, uber important. If one can’t afford to retire, what one is going to do when one retires matters a whole lot less. At least, not until you end up like my dad, retired and completely at loose ends.

Because a job, any job, even a job that you utterly hate, does a whole lot more than just provide a paycheck. It becomes the structure of your entire life. Not that there aren’t plenty of other things in that life, but everything has to get scheduled around work hours and work locations and whether or not you’re on call for work, who you interact with every day at work, and a whole lot of your identity gets tied to what you do and where you do it.

When you retire, ALL of that goes away, not just the paycheck. While the job may be terrific, terrible or something in between, we humans need all the rest of that stuff. We need a reason to get up in the morning. We need a purpose. We need something to structure our days around or nothing ever gets done.

And in order for that reason and structure to work, we need some control over what goes into both of those things.

Or, at least, this human does. Based on conversations with a lot of other humans who have gotten outside of the forced structure of a day job – including starting a business of one’s own or the day job of being a stay at home parent – the issue applies to more than just retirement.

That’s where Reading Reality came in for me, as well as the life-structure that makes it possible.

I needed a thing to do every day. That’s the way I’m wired. I’m better off with lots of short goals rather than one big one. Which is why I latched onto writing book reviews instead of taking a stab at writing the Great American Fantasy Novel. (Yes, I thought about it. I still occasionally think about it.)

My purpose is to share what I read with whoever is interested in reading my reviews. Not just at Reading Reality, but also at Library Journal – and anyplace else that will have me. So every single day, there’s a book to read and a review to write or an event to post about. I can work ahead, and I do when I’m on vacation, but there’s always a thing that needs to be done.

Yes, I could skip a day. There’s no one making me do any of this. But I feel better if I have a thing every day. Which is also part of the point of all of this. There were all sorts of things I could have chosen to do. People often speak of all the things they ‘could’ do in retirement. The trick, for me, lay in finding something that I WOULD do.

I could join a club. I could volunteer somewhere. But I’m not, as my mother said of herself, a joiner. I’m an introvert and at this point in my life I recognize that and work with it instead of against it. Reading – and writing – aren’t just things I could do, but they are things I recognized that I WOULD do. In fact, the writing makes the reading more interesting and enjoyable because I’m sharing it.

The same thing applies with other aspects of my working retirement. Regular exercise is important. So is interacting with people besides my husband. There are lots of ways that I could accomplish both of those things but I needed a method that I would enjoy and therefore sustain. So I go out every day for either Pilates or strength and cardio training, and structure my day around that session. I do individual sessions because I know that I won’t ‘flake’ on a one-on-one session the way I might for a class.

The idea is to work WITH my natural tendencies and not pretend that I’m going to magically change who I am because I don’t have a regular job to work around anymore.

Which leads to the last part of my three steps to a busy retirement, and that’s control. The reality is that Galen and I were never going to retire at the same time. A lot of people who write into advice columns do so because the retirement they’ve planned on involves the active participation of other people in SPECIFIC ways that don’t pan out. In order for this to be the thing that sustains me, I have to have a big portion of agency in it. That agency part is true for everyone, whatever their individual circumstances. If you’re planning something that is intended to sustain YOU but you aren’t the primary driver of it, you’re in for endless frustration and dissatisfaction.

If you’ve stuck with me this far, you might be wondering what any of the above has to do with Reading Reality and its 15th Blogoversary. For me, they go hand in hand. I started Reading Reality to keep myself busy and mentally occupied, and it has sustained me and my mental and physical health for 15 years, and I have no intention of stopping. Not any of it.

But all of this feeds back into what I said earlier. There is plenty of advice available when it comes to the financial aspects of retirement. My dad was an accountant, he knew all the numbers about whether his retirement was financially viable for them. But there’s not nearly as much information available when it comes to what a person needs to do with themselves once they’ve retired. What parts of their working life structure they should think about replicating or replacing, what they can do – and more importantly what they will realistically do – to stay mentally and physically active.

And that’s where all of this comes in. I review books in the hopes that I can reach readers looking for something good to read. I wrote this, in part to get my thoughts in order but mostly in the hopes of reaching people thinking about what they’ll do when they start thinking about a new structure to sustain them after their day job is done. Whether my dad would have listened to something like this then, or even now if he were still around, if this helps one person then the writing of it was worthwhile.

As worthwhile as Reading Reality itself has been for me these past 15 years. To infinity and BEYOND!

So, to make a long story short – or not as the case might be – that’s how and why I’m still here, 15 years later, at Reading Reality. It’s been my longest “job” and also the most fulfilling and rewarding one that I’ve ever had. And I’m thrilled to share book reviews and bookish news and especially cat pictures with each and every one of you who has followed me on this journey.

Which leads right to the part that you’ve all been waiting for! Today’s giveaway. On this first day of Reading Reality’s Fifteenth Blogo-Birthday Celebration Week, I’m giving away (1) $25 Amazon Gift Card and (1) $25 Barnes & Noble Gift Card. The Amazon Gift Card is an electronic gift card, and it will be emailed to the lucky winner. If said winner is outside the US but in the vicinity of a local Amazon in their own currency, it can be the equivalent of $25 (US) from their Amazon in their local currency. If you have a local bookstore in your area (US or otherwise) that sells gift cards over the interwebs, I am happy to make that arrangement instead.

The Barnes & Noble Gift Card is a physical card that’s been sitting unexpired and unused in my desk drawer. It will need to be snail-mailed to the winner. So that winner will need to be in the US somewhere. (Note that the giveaways are separate. The first is for the Amazon GC and the second for the B&N GC. If you qualify for both, you absolutely CAN enter both!)

As always and forever, from the bottom of my bookish and cat-loving heart, my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you who has been a part of this adventure. There’s more to come!