Okay, so I’m 68, just retired from… well, let’s just say a very demanding job that involved a LOT of travel. Like, constantly. For decades. And now I’m here, in this house, this big, quiet suburban house that I bought years ago because it felt like the right thing to do, you know? The family house. But my kids are grown, obviously. Gone. And my husband, bless his heart, he’s… well, he’s just *here*. And I don’t mean that badly, he’s a good man. But for forty years, my life was airports, boardrooms, time zones blurring, always being somewhere else, always having a *reason* to be somewhere else. And now… nothing. I mean, I used to wake up in a hotel room in Tokyo or London or whatever, and the first thought wasn't "what's for breakfast?" it was "what's the schedule today? Who am I meeting? What fires am I putting out?" And it was exhilarating, you know? A constant buzz. And now I wake up and it's… the same. Every. Single. Day. And I look at this house, this enormous place that feels so empty and quiet even with him puttering around, and I think, “Is this it? Is this what I worked for?” I spent so long building something, always looking ahead, always to the next project, the next deal, and now there’s no next. Just… this. And the silence. It’s deafening, sometimes. Is anyone else out there finding this retirement thing… really hard? Like, I should be RELIEVED, right? I worked my butt off. But I feel like I’ve lost my entire identity. I look in the mirror and I see this woman, definitely older, a little… faded, I guess. And I walk around the grocery store and it’s like I’m invisible, you know? Like, people just look right through me. My body’s doing all sorts of weird stuff that nobody prepared me for, even though I was always so on top of everything else. And I feel this enormous… void. This giant, yawning void where all the excitement used to be. Am I the only one who feels like they’ve just dropped off the face of the earth? Like, is this what the rest of my life is going to be? Because it feels… SMALL. And I don’t know what to do with that. At all.