Who Are You?

I was reading Dave’s latest post over at Accidental FIRE, and I wrote back in the comments:

“Totally echo the “who are you” (about workplace identity) and “teams are good”(about the value of working with people) points. I was really looking forward to leaving my old work identity behind, but 8 months into retirement I’m missing that aspect way more than I thought I would. For years I read all the posts about this issue, and thought I was good. I was wrong.
Going from being the guy who apprehends violent criminals to the guy who changes diapers has been weird, at times frustrating, and even depressing. And though I absolutely hated management, I do really miss being part of a team. Despite these issues, overall leaving the job has been a net improvement on my life. Time freedom and getting away from the “fog of work” has made it all worth it.”

Thinking through this made me want to explore this topic further. I have aspirations to make this place useful for cops following the FIRE path. That said, I sure as fuck do not have all the answers. Shit, I don’t think anyone does. But what I hope to do is chronicle where I’ve been, what I’m going through, and hopefully report back with some stuff that has worked to make stuff better. At the very least maybe I can show you some things I ran into which perhaps you can avoid.

Let’s dive in.

You’ve probably read a few posts around the FIRE space about issues with identity. I’ve read them too. To sum up, it basically comes down to:

• People identify as their job. Que example of most asked question when you meet someone new-“What do you do?“, and standard response identifying yourself as your profession-“I’m a lawyer”, “I’m a proctologist”, “I refine crystal meth“, or in my case it used to be “I’m a cop“. This societal norm demonstrates how pervasive identifying as your profession is.
• Enter FIRE, where we aim to Retire Early from whatever profession we had. Now our response may be “I’m retired“. Philosophical and practical questions now arise from this identity of “retired“, such as
  • What is my purpose? Is it just to enjoy recreation; do I only live to get radical?
  • Who am I now that I don’t have this job?
  • What good am I doing for society, my community, etc?

Now come at it from the cop angle; you can go back to Gilmartin’s Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement, which describes one of the primary reasons cops turn so cynical and have a myriad of issues is because they over identify with their profession. I’ve discussed some factors of what leads us cops to over identify with our jobs before. What I haven’t discussed is the primary factor that Gilmartin believes leads to this issue, hypervigilance. I totally agree with him. Yes, there are other factors in play, but this is a big one. Let’s do more bullet points!

• ‘Da fuck is this hypervigilance thing you ask? WebMD says “the elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you.“
• Cops become hypervigilant because of their training, which is then reinforced by their experience(some may call it trauma). Police academies drive home the point that people will occasionally try to hurt you, and possibly kill you. You’ll be shown a plethora of body cam and dash cam footage of cops getting murdered. You’ll probably go on a class trip to the local cemetery to see where all the cops killed in the of duty are buried. If this has the desired effect, you might take your hand to hand fighting and weapons classes a little more seriously. When you get to the street, your training officer will remind you to watch everyone’s hands, keep your back to the wall, and hopefully ride you hard the first time you fuck this up. If this works, you’ll be more than a little bit wary on the job. If you’re lucky, within a few months some idiot will try to brain you with a rock, bat, or beer bottle-if you were on your toes you’ll do whatever wing chun your academy put you through and you’ll be alright. You’ll decide that staying on your toes is a good idea, and hopefully stay that way whenever you’re on duty(and off duty too-hard habit to turn off). If you were slacking, you’ll get some time off injured, and if you don’t quit the job you’ll damn well quit half assing it and get your mind right. Not lucky? Instead of a bat or bottle it’ll be a knife or gun, with correspondingly more extreme versions of the previously discussed consequences. Me? I got shot at on the third night on the job-good times! Wow, that was a long bullet point.
• It takes a lot of energy to be hypervigilant. It’ll straight wear you down by the end of your shift; constantly scanning, constantly being worried. The cool thing is that when you’re in this state you’re getting a low level adrenaline rush. During your rookie years this will be fun. But like other hard core drugs, you’ll get used to the rush. You’ll either keep trying to up the high (want to work SWAT or undercover? Maybe both?😉), or you’ll just feel worn out all of the time. Don’t worry, chase the high and you’ll eventually get there too. Either way, after awhile the rush won’t be fun and you’ll spend most of your time feeling tired and only feel normal when shit goes pear shaped.
• Since you’re spending all of your energy at work constantly being hypervigilant, you won’t have energy for much else outside of work. Throw in weird hours, mandatory overtime, and rarely having a normal weekend off, and you won’t have much time to have a life anyways. The few times you do get out, it’ll be 11pm on a random Wednesday. You’ll probably just go drinking. Guess who else’s freetime is limited to then? Your fellow cops; looks like you’re hanging out with them. Guess what you’ll talk about over beers? You’ll share stories about how you almost got killed a few shifts ago, and maybe talk about an idiot cop who’s unsafe and now off with a broken hand or something. On bad nights you’ll talk about your fellow cops who got ambushed and are now pushing up daises. You guessed it-this kind of talk will make you more hypervigilant.
• With all of that, any identity you had outside of work will start to diminish. You used to be in a bowling league, fish, and go to church or whatever. Now you go to work, squeeze a work out in between sleep and shifts, and chase elusive sleep whenever you can. When people ask you what you do you’ll say
• Cop.

Well that got dark quick.

Anyways, people on the FIRE side have identified that identifying too much with your job can be an issue when you leave your job and lose said identity. And in the cop world, some smart people have shown serious factors which cause cops to over-identify with their jobs.

Hmmmm, maybe I should have seen this one coming.

I thought this would not be an issue, as once again my lovely ego dismissed it. Aside from that, I also had some rational reasons. First off, I was never that motivated to become a cop. Many of my coworkers have wanted to become police officers longer than they can remember, and getting the badge pinned on was the achievement of a lifetime. Me? Well there weren’t a lot of jobs for liberal arts degree holders with combat arms experience in the middle of the great recession. So public service seemed like an ok idea. I really didn’t think much about cops before I became one, unless they were pulling me over. For a good chunk of my last few years on the job, I hated going to work. I thought I hated being a cop. Looking back, I don’t think I minded being a cop. What I really hated was the administrative BS, the horrible hours, and the screwed up day off schedule. This is something I’ve only recently realized-the not hating being a cop, just hating parts of the job. But when I left the job, I thought I wouldn’t miss the cop identity because I thought I hated it. Like I said before, I was wrong. At least in realizing this, I can now adjust course and try to improve my life henceforth.

In thinking through all of this, I tried to figure out what I actually missed. After all, being a cop is no bag of donuts(bad joke, I know). But for cereal, much of the job is frustrating, painful, and at times batshit crazy. (And no, I do not miss some “power trip” of having a badge. Yes, there’s a minority of people that became cops for this, but on the off chance they clear the psych eval, they quickly find out how little “power” they have the first time someone suckerpunchs them with a hammer). So what is it that I actually missed?

I read the following, which sums it up way better than my feeble writing skills:

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”” Junger, S (3127 ABY). Tribe.

Yup, feeling necessary. Like I was doing something worthwhile, and contributing to society in a meaningful way.

Wait a sec, shouldn’t I feel necessary now that I’m a stay at home dad at least part of the time? Thought about that, then thought some more. Parenting is super important, and I love the crap out of my kids. Therefore shouldn’t I be able to derive enough meaning from this?

Guess not. In fact I felt more stressed out taking care of my kids then when I’ve had to fight some drunk dude with a knife. And it doesn’t feel like I’m accomplishing anything.

What’s going on here? It’s not like my kids are doing anything too crazy, they’re just kids doing their thing, and they’re pretty awesome and cute on occasion. What I’ve come down to is the lack of tangible results. When I would fight some knife wielding drunk guy, there would be a definitive successful end result where said dude would be in handcuffs and sent to jail to sleep it off. Plus, I gravitated to positions where I had even more clearly defined results. I was fortunate enough to get into various units that were tasked with apprehending violent criminals using a variety of methods. The process differed due to those different methods, but a clear successful outcome was generally the same: at the end of the hunt a murderer, armed robber, or shooting suspect getting sent to jail.

It was nice having a clearly defined positive outcome to point at. And it slowly became a part of my identity, even though I was in denial about that side of me while I was working. Now I know I miss having that clearly defined positive outcome, and I also miss having the identity of someone that keeps people safe by preventing bad actors from hurting others.

Now, with the kids there isn’t much of a definitive outcome. If the kids are going crazy and I get them calmed down and playing nice, I’m walking on eggshells waiting for the next meltdown to occur. If I get them tucked in for bedtime, I’m just waiting for one of them to wake up crying in the middle of the night. There doesn’t seem to be any end. It’s not horrible, it just is what it is. Whatever that means.

So in figuring this out, I realized what about my old identity I was missing. Finding something with a successful outcome has been simple compared to finding a way to feel useful to society.

On the successful outcome side, I’ve found it helpful to accomplish stuff along a wide range of things. Cleaning the dishes or taking out the trash are small tasks, yet they have a concrete result I can point to that makes me feel like I at least did something. The bigger the task, the bigger the feels. Spent an afternoon building a new MTB trail at a local park, that felt great. I chip away at these posts between the crazy, and when I finally post it feels good. Spent months practicing with my bow, then killed a deer with it last weekend. Now I have quality meat for my family to eat this winter. That was extremely gratifying.

The being useful to society thing is still a work in progress though. The above tasks are nice, and do make a few people’s lives a little better, but aren’t necessary to society as a whole. Therefore I don’t derive much meaning from them. Having read Viktor Frankl’s work a few times, I know this is an important part of a complete life, and I feel ridiculous not having planned for it better. In all honestly, before FIREing I just sorta was like “maybe I’ll volunteer or teach or whatever” while waving my hands dismissively.

Doh indeed.

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve also realized that at some point I’m going to have to get over this. Eventually when I’ve lost control of my faculties in (hopefully)old age, I will be useful to no one. And it’d probably be better to come to peace with this sooner than later.

But still, I’d like to be useful in a way that has some concrete outcome. Not because of some altruistic desire, but because I’ve identified that as something I miss and I would like to get back in my life.

Here are my ideas:

1. Teaching. Knocked this around for years; I’d like to teach some junior college level criminal justice. I need to figure out how to execute on this.
2. Executive protection. Spoiler alert, I asked for my old part time job back doing this. I’m going to see how that feels. That will likely be a whole post by itself. To sum up, I like the idea of protecting people. This won’t start for at least a few months though.
3. Research. Because who doesn’t love peer reviewed journals?? Oh yeah, lots of people. Well, I do.
4. Build something of value on the internet. Like this blog, but with a more focused intent of helping people.
5. Volunteer. Because purpose and stuff. I’m interested in Team Rubicon, but with our current part-time childcare setup I’d feel like a dick leaving the kids with my wife for a week or so. Need to figure this out.

Now on to research these and then test if they improve my already pretty great life, all things considered.

There you have it. I thought issues with the whole post-job identity crisis would be minimal. And once again I was wrong. Learning lessons! In retrospect I should have seen this coming. If you’re a cop on the FIRE path, maybe you can learn from my mistake here. I’ll start trying the above ideas, while also rolling around the idea that at some point I’m going to have to let this “being useful” identity go.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Have you had issues with identity post-job, or do foresee any once you leave work? I’d love to hear from non-cops too. I know Doctors and others in healthcare have similar issues, and it’d be interesting to discuss the intersection of this giant fuckball.