I've been retired for three months now, and honestly, it’s not what I expected. Not at all. I thought I’d feel relieved, finally free of deadlines and difficult clients, but instead, I just feel… lost. Empty, really. For forty years, my identity was "writer." That's who I was. People would ask what I did, and I'd say it with pride. Now, when someone asks, I stumble. I say "I used to write," or "I was a writer," and it sounds like an obituary. Like that part of me is dead. And it feels like it. My days stretch out, long and formless, and I find myself just staring out the window, wondering what I'm supposed to do with all this time. I should be happy, shouldn't I? This is what everyone works towards. The real confession, though, the thing that’s really bothering me, is something I noticed even before I stopped working. For the last year or so, my focus just… vanished. It was like a switch flipped. Projects that used to take me a week, I was spending two on. Sometimes more. I’d sit down at my desk, open a document, and then suddenly an hour had passed and I’d just been looking at the blinking cursor. It wasn't laziness, I don't think. It was more like my brain just couldn't grab onto the words anymore. I used to love the feeling of crafting a sentence, making it perfect. Now, it feels like pulling teeth. Like a chore. I convinced myself it was burnout, that I just needed a break, but now that I have the break, the same feeling is there. The desire to write is just… gone. And that's what keeps me up at night. What if I can't get it back? What if the thing I built my entire life around, the one thing I was truly good at, just disappeared? I feel like I cheated my last few clients, charging them for my usual rate when I was taking twice as long and probably delivering half the quality. I didn't mean to. I tried, I really did, but it just wasn't there. It feels like a betrayal, to myself and to the people who trusted me. I should have done something, said something. But what? Admitted I was broken? I don't know who I am without that skill, without that drive. I just don't know.