How Do I Want to Retire? With a Mug, a Mandate, and a Mandarin Tree

I’ve well and truly shot myself in the foot. I chose a life of creativity — which, let me tell you, sounds romantic on a podcast but looks a lot less charming on a superannuation statement. I’m 51. I have no retirement fund. Not a cent of super. Zip. Nada. A lifetime of creative compulsion — making as much art as I could while working shit jobs to pay the bills — means my “golden years” are shaping up more like a DIY disaster movie: messy, chaotic, and forever chasing that creative dragon.

And the art I was making? Writing feature film scripts while travelling the country, screening other people’s creative visions on the big screen of my little travelling cinema. Scripts that, to this day, still haven’t been made. But maybe I was just planting seeds. Seeds for a future where I can bring those stories to life without the multi-million-dollar price tag — maybe with prompts, my words, and a dream. I never really knew what was coming. But the truth is — you never do.

How do you want to retire?

I don’t feel 51. I feel 30. Maybe 28 on a good day with a strong coffee and a tailwind. Art feeds me. Creativity is my oxygen. If I stop making, I stop being. My dad retired at my age. Me? I’m just getting warmed up.

My idea of retirement isn’t stopping. It’s finally getting to live fully off what I love: my art. Supporting my family through it. Telling the stories I need to tell, like the story of the Queen Charlotte Goshawk — a rare bird with a rarer presence. Like many of the animals in my book, it’s endangered. Just like artists who try to make a living from their creativity. That’s why I made these mugs. That’s why I make all of it. To prove that creativity can be a career, not just a hobby or a side hustle.

I’m living proof that you can start late. You can hit restart at 50. You can throw the starving artist myth into the compost and plant a new seed.

Literally.

When I do go, I don’t want a box. I want to be buried under a mandarin tree. Because peeling a mandarin smells like happiness and inspiration. And because I want my last creative act to feed the soil, nourish the fruit, and maybe inspire someone walking past the tree to go home and make something — a poem, a drawing, a kids’ book about oddball birds.

So how do I want to retire?

With muddy hands, a full heart, and a mug of Queen Charlotte Goshawk coffee staring back at me, saying: Get back to work, you’re not finished yet.