I haven’t been back.

That surprises some people. There are retirees who stay deeply connected to their schools. They volunteer. They stop in to visit. They attend concerts and retirement parties and district events. They have lunch with former colleagues and keep up with all the news.

I am not one of those retirees.

Part of that is geography. The high school where I spent the last fifteen years of my career isn’t around the corner. But if I’m being honest, distance isn’t the real reason.

The truth is that when I retired in 2023, I needed a clean break.

Recently, I learned that a colleague is retiring. Another librarian, and I found out completely by accident. A year earlier, a librarian I had been hired with back in 1996 retired. Someone asked if I would be interested in attending a dinner in her honor. I said yes, absolutely, and then never heard another word about it until after the event.

I was offended. And a little hurt.

Not devastated. Not angry. Just genuinely wounded.

After twenty-seven years in one district and thirty-seven years in education, I thought someone might think to include me.

What made it stranger was that only a few weeks ago, I attended a district retirement celebration because a friend of mine was being honored for twenty-five years in education. She told me about it, and when I said I’d like to attend to celebrate her, she was genuinely happy to have me there.

The room was filled with names I recognized. Teachers. Administrators. Support staff. People I had worked alongside for years. Some were retiring. Others were celebrating professional milestones. Many of them seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

Not politely pleased. Genuinely pleased.

We hugged. We caught up. We laughed about people, places, and stories that only make sense to those of us who lived them. At one point, several retirees were invited to come forward and share their best advice or the thing they loved most about retirement.

When it was my turn, I said, “I don’t have to get up in the dark anymore.”

The room laughed.

I wasn’t joking.

People expect retirees to talk about travel or hobbies or grandchildren. All of those things are wonderful. But after nearly four decades of teaching, the thing I appreciated most was waking up because I was ready to wake up, not because an alarm clock informed me it was time to begin another carefully scheduled day.

What I didn’t say was that retirement gave me something even more valuable than extra sleep.

It gave me back my choices.

For most of my adult life, my days belonged to other people. Students needed things. Teachers needed things. Administrators needed things. Parents needed things. There were meetings, schedules, deadlines, emails, evaluations, curriculum changes, state mandates, collections to develop, and countless little crises that arose whenever hundreds of people occupied the same building.

Teaching is a profession built on service. That’s one of its greatest strengths. It’s also one of the reasons it can become emotionally exhausting.

For thirty-seven years, I spent my days thinking about what everyone else needed from me.

Retirement gave me the opportunity to ask a different question.

What do I need?

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

I started teaching in 1986. I retired in 2023.

Between my years as a student and as a teacher, I spent 55 years of my life in school.

Fifty-five years.

School wasn’t just where I worked. It was the framework around which my life was organized. My calendar followed the academic year. My vacations followed the academic year. My understanding of time itself followed the academic year. I measured my life in Septembers and Junes.

There is something profoundly strange about stepping away from a structure that has shaped your life for more than half a century.

I don’t think people outside education always understand that.

When a teacher retires, we don’t simply leave a job. We leave a community, a rhythm, and an identity that have been with us since childhood. Even before we became educators, we were students. School was the backdrop of our lives for decades before it became our profession.

Perhaps that’s why finding out about retirements after the fact bothers me more than it probably should.

It’s not that I need an invitation.

It’s not that I need recognition.

It’s not even that I particularly miss being there.

I don’t.

The last years of my career were extraordinarily difficult. Education changed. Expectations changed. The public’s perception of teachers changed. COVID intensified every existing challenge and introduced new ones. By the time I retired, I was tired in a way that had very little to do with physical exhaustion.

Walking away was the right decision.

I have never doubted that.

I love the life I have now. I write. I coach authors. I spend time with my family. I travel. I say yes to lunch on a Tuesday afternoon. I drink my coffee while it’s still hot.

I’m happy.

But happiness doesn’t erase history.

Fifty-five years is not nothing.

You don’t spend fifty-five years inside a world and walk away without carrying pieces of it with you. Even now, three years later, there are moments when I discover that part of me still assumes I belong to that community. Part of me still expects someone to think, “We should let Jeannie know.”

Maybe that’s why being left off the retirement grapevine stings.

Not because I want to go back.

Not because I regret leaving.

But because every now and then I’m reminded that retirement isn’t a single event. It’s a gradual process of learning where you still belong and where you’ve quietly become part of the past.

Three years later, I’m still figuring that out.

I'm Jeannie Moon—a novelist, retired teacher-librarian, author coach, rabid hockey fan, wife, mom, and nana. Around here, you'll find stories about writing, books, hockey, creativity, second acts, pop culture, and the beautifully messy business of figuring out life as we go.

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It starts innocently. You sit down to work on a scene. Just one scene, maybe an hour, you have a 2 o’clock thing, and the next time you look up, it is dark outside, your coffee has achieved room temperature sometime after the sun went down, and you have received four texts from your husband that escalate from Hey. To What do you want for dinner? To Are you okay? Did you fall in the shower? To I’m on my way home.

You did not fall in the shower. You did not, in fact, shower.

You wrote 5,200 words.

This is the miracle and the curse, and if you have AuDHD, you already know exactly what I'm talking about, and your pulse just went up three points reading it. AuDHD is what it sounds like — autism and ADHD sharing the same brain, each one amplifying the best and worst of the other in ways that are difficult to predict and impossible to fully explain to people who don't live there. Hyperfocus is the executive dysfunction's evil twin — the same system that loses your keys and ghosts your phone calls suddenly locks onto a scene like a heat-seeking missile and refuses to stand down. It's the neurological equivalent of having a car that won't start for months and then one day does 0-to-90 in four seconds while the radio plays at full volume.

It is a gift. It is genuinely a gift. Some of my best work has come from disappearing down the rabbit hole.

It is also how I missed a dentist appointment twice, forgot a Zoom call I’d set three reminders for (I snoozed all three without realizing I was doing it), and once showed up to a lunch that had been scheduled for the previous Thursday.

Here’s what it actually feels like from the inside, in case you are a neurotypical reading this and wondering: imagine that the story you’re working on becomes the only real thing. Not metaphorically. Literally. The kitchen doesn’t exist. The dogs are a rumor. Time is a concept that applies to other people, people with different brain wiring who can hear the time ticking by without it sounding like a suggestion rather than a fact.

I was deep in a scene recently — two characters, a difficult conversation, the kind where what they’re not saying is louder than what they are — and I looked up because I thought I heard thunder.

It wasn’t thunder. It was Frankie, my four-year-old beagle who has the lung capacity of a much larger animal and the unshakeable conviction that his needs constitute a public emergency. He’d been communicating this for some time. I hadn’t heard him. I was in the scene. The scene doesn’t feature a beagle. So, I didn’t register what was happening around me. But you should know Frankie contains multitudes. Other times, he just wanders in quietly, accepts a pet, and curls up to sleep, keeping me company in the way dogs do when they've decided you're fine, but they're staying anyway.

The beagle has judged the situation acceptable, so we continue.

Sometimes it’s not the daytime hours that disappear. Sometimes it’s the night ones.

I’ll open the laptop in bed when sleep won’t come — just to look at a scene, just to read back through what I wrote earlier, just for a few minutes — and my husband is snoring next to me and I am in it, and the next time I surface the sky outside the window has gone from black to that particular gray that means the night is over and I have a decision to make about whether this counts as staying up very late or getting up very early.

It’s 5 AM. The scene is good. I have not slept.

This isn’t a complaint. It’s a confession.

Now, for 37 years, I was a teacher. I want you to understand what that means neurologically, because it matters: my days had shape. There were bells. There were schedules, class periods, the library opening at a specific time and closing at a specific time, students arriving in waves that told me where I was in the day, whether I was paying attention or not. The structure wasn’t something I built. It was handed to me every morning, and I walked into it, and it kept me grounded.

I retired, and the structure left.

Nobody tells you that. Nobody says: hey, if your brain has been using external scaffolding to function for your entire professional life, and then you remove the scaffolding, you might discover some things about yourself. Things that have a name, as it turns out. Things that were always there, running quietly underneath, kept in check by bells and schedules and the fact that there were children who needed me to be somewhere at a specific time.

I’ve been doing this — functioning, managing, getting through — for a very long time.

I powered through depression for years because I knew I had to, so I made it happen. I developed workarounds for everything. I hated making phone calls — the scheduling, the not knowing exactly how the conversation would go, the having to be on in real time — so I learned to do everything by email or online booking whenever humanly possible. I procrastinated on the things that felt impossible, got very efficient at the things that felt manageable, and called the whole system my personality.

Menopause made everything louder. The things I’d been quietly managing with workarounds and willpower and a schedule that held me together got harder. The exhaustion that had always been there, the kind that lives in your bones and doesn’t lift no matter how much you sleep, got worse. Except I also couldn’t sleep. Both things, simultaneously, because of course.

But none of this is new. There are things that happened in my life, things I experienced, as if I were watching them from underwater. Present, technically. There. But separated from the surface by something I couldn’t quite name.

I thought that was just how I was.

I know I was at every Christmas with my kids. I know I was there for the after-school routines, the traditions, the ordinary moments that somehow became the ones that stick. I was there. And yet when my grown children talk about those years, I’m listening to their memories more than accessing my own. They remember vividly, while I’m fuzzy. They have the detail; I have the general shape.

For a long time, I told myself it was because I was exhausted. Three young children, a full-time job, and a household to run. Of course, things got blurry. Of course, I wasn’t fully present for every moment. That was just the math of that particular season of life.

And maybe that was part of it. But not all of it.

Here’s what I know now: they remember. They remember fondly. They’re laughing when they tell these stories. They’re saying, "Do you remember when Mom..." the way people do when the memory is a good one, one worth keeping. I cannot overstate what it meant to understand that the fuzziness was mine and mine alone — that I was there enough, present enough, that they got what they needed even when I was running on fumes and functioning from somewhere just below the surface.

It is, not to be dramatic about it, one of the biggest reliefs of my life.

A little over a year ago, I got a new therapist. Mine had retired, and I’d gone years without seeing anyone, and I finally realized I needed help developing techniques to manage whatever was going on. Just that. Some techniques. I wasn’t expecting anything else.

She listened for a while, and then she said: I think we need to check a few things out.

There were tests. Consultations. Conversations with specialists. A process that felt, while I was in it, like an awful lot of effort for “some techniques.”

And then they told me: I’m on the spectrum. (The neuropsychologist said I had “touches on the spectrum.” Which is not linear, by the way.) And I have ADHD. I had been masking for so long — blending, adapting, building systems around the edges of the thing, performing functionality that it had just become part of how I moved through the world. I didn’t know I was doing it. It was simply what I did.

Getting that diagnosis at this point in my life felt like finding out the game you’ve been playing for decades had instructions the whole time. Which is both a relief and—not gonna lie — kind of a lot to sit with.

I’m not on medication. That door is open if I decide to walk through it. For now, I’m still learning what the map looks like when you can actually read it.

But even with all the chaos in my head, there is one thing I have never forgotten. Not once. Not ever.

Wednesday afternoons, I get my grandchildren off the bus.

I set multiple reminders, but I want to be clear that the reminders are not why I remember. I would remember without them. In a brain that will cheerfully forget a doctor’s appointment and let a Zoom call dissolve into the ether, my grandchildren are simply not forgettable. They exist in a different category. The rabbit hole has edges, and they are one of them.

I find this comforting. It tells me the wiring isn’t broken, exactly. It’s just selective. The things that matter most cut through. Everything else is negotiable.

My calendar would prefer I negotiate less. We’re working on it.

My husband has been with me since 1979. Married since 1988. He has had a long time to observe this particular feature of my personality and has developed a system.

If I’m in my office, the house is quiet, and I haven’t emerged in what he judges to be Too Long, he sends the dogs. Not because he trained them. Because they figured out how to crack the spiral on their own, which honestly tracks. He uses them so he doesn’t take the brunt of whatever creative wave I’m riding.

Casey goes first. She’s thirteen, a black lab mix, and she has the energy of a dog who has been a good girl for so long she’s earned a kind of quiet authority. She doesn’t bark. She just appears at your knee, her chin on your leg, her eyes doing the whole "hey, we’re here” thing until you do.

If Casey fails, Riley arrives. Riley is 88 pounds of rough collie and ten years of strong opinions, and he does not fail. There is no “ignoring” Riley. He is not a suggestion. He is an intervention with fur.

And then there is Frankie, whom I mentioned before, and who operates entirely outside the system. Sometimes he’s the alarm. Sometimes he just wanders in, checks the situation, accepts his pet, and goes to sleep on the dog bed like a small furry co-worker who has decided to log his hours from your office today. You take what Frankie gives you. That’s the deal.

I write romance novels and romantic women’s fiction. I want to be clear about what that means in practice, because people have assumptions. It means I have spent four hours mapping the emotional architecture of a conversation that takes up three pages. It means I’ve cross-referenced the sightlines in a fictional arena to make sure a scene is physically plausible in a building that does not exist. It means I once spent an amount of time I won’t confess to making sure my hero’s coffee order felt true to who he is as a person.

Was any of this visible on the page? Maybe a sentence’s worth.

Did it matter? It mattered enormously in ways I cannot explain to anyone who doesn’t live here.

The hyperfocus is ADHD’s contribution. The ability to hold an entire fictional world in my head with internal consistency — character voices, emotional timelines, the exact temperature of a relationship at a specific point in the story — that’s the other side of the equation. It’s why I can write thousands of words in a fugue state and have them mostly hold together. It’s also why if I’m pulled out of that state at the wrong moment, by an interruption I wasn’t braced for, it takes a humiliating amount of time to find my way back.

“Just pick up where you left off” is genuinely funny to me. That’s not how this works. That’s like asking someone to step back into a dream they were in the middle of having before they woke up.

The dream is gone. You can get to a new one, eventually. But that one is done.

I’ve learned some things, across a career’s worth of getting lost in a document.

I have learned to write appointments in more places than seems reasonable. Physical calendar. Phone. Sticky note on the monitor. Second sticky note on the coffee maker, which I will definitely visit.

I know that “I’ll just finish this one thing” is a lie my brain tells with complete sincerity and zero accuracy.

Hunger doesn’t register when I’m deep in it. I’ll eat when I surface and realize I’ve been running on coffee and momentum for six hours.

I have learned that the best work sometimes lives on the other side of the lost Tuesday. That the scene I couldn’t crack, the one I’d been circling for a week, sometimes finally gives itself up in the middle of a hyperfocus spiral if I just let it run.

And I have learned to apologize without too much drama for the cold dinners and the snoozed reminders and the missed appointments, because the people who love me have made peace with the whole package. The writing brain and the time-blind brain come as a set. You don’t get one without the other.

I’m still learning to make that same peace with myself.

The diagnosis helped.

The rabbit hole has no bottom. I’ve checked.

The grandchildren are on Wednesday. The dogs have a system. My husband has been here for decades and shows no signs of leaving.

Frankie is currently asleep in the corner.

Everything else is negotiable.

(I did eventually shower. That’s all I’m saying.)

Off the Shelf publishes weekly (if I remember) for readers, writers, and anyone else who has ever looked up from something they love to discover it is inexplicably tomorrow. The subscribe button is right there.