At 43 and half I gave up on everything I knew in the workplace and started all over again in a place where I knew absolutely nothing.

I had been the editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine, ELLE UK, for almost four years at that point. The previous decade I’d spent editing Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health. I think I was pretty good at it. I certainly won awards which are supposed to verify such things. The truth was magazines were all I knew and all I had done for my entire 22-year old career- well, apart from a brief spell selling fermented drinks door-to-door when I was 22, but we don’t talk about that.

To my generation working on a glossy magazine was one of the best jobs in the world. Not only did Hollywood endlessly romanticise the magazine editor - Funny Face, 13 Going On 30, The Devil Wears Prada, but back then at least, editors wielded power, status and in many ways bridged the gap between fantasy and real life. Editors were influencers before social media. They decided what was in and what was out; what was interesting and what was not.

I loved my job. I got a buzz from sending pages to print, and would spend hours coming up with coverlines that I hoped would make people smirk whilst scanning the magazine aisle at the supermarket. (The Erection Detectives: The Women who catch ‘cocks’ for a living being my all time favourite for Cosmo. Deeply puerile I know, but it was the mid aughties and I had never had the opportunity to be mischievous before.)

Magazines were all I thought I’d ever do. Until the very moment I got to the top of them.

I was reminded of this this week when I saw the news that Will Welch, the global editor-in-chief of GQ was resigning. He is moving to Paris to go and work for Pharrell Wiliams - doing what exactly I’m not sure, but it sounds fascinating. He is 45 years old. Two year older than when I left publishing.

Over the years I’ve watched dozens of others start all over again in their 40s, 50s and even 60s. After all, magazines are a precarious game nowadays wielding none of the power, security and even creativity they once they did. A job for life? Forget it. And so for the many of us who staked our careers on the publishing industry, we find ourselves starting all over again at the very moment we least expect it. (At 56, the legendary editor-in-chief of Allure magazine, Linda Wells left to be Chief Creative Officer at Revlon, whilst at almost 60 years of age David Grainger walked out of Esquire magazine to become a literary agent.)

Starting over again in mid life feels scary for sure, but it’s also more than that. It is a reckoning of sorts. It is your way of putting your hand out into the world all over again and seeing if anybody still wants to hold it. When you’re young it’s okay to fail, get rejected, not fit in and basically mess up. It can even, in its own odd way be charming. Certainly it’s the well worn script for finding ‘your way.’ But when you’re older? It’s crushing. Nobody wants to see an old person try and fail. It feels transgressive somehow, like watching a toddler in heels with a briefcase.

Share

But here’s why else it’s hard. When you start over, especially after a successful run at something else, all the old markers of who you once were quickly slip away. There’s no shorthand to narrate who you are anymore and so you are left adrift, fending for yourself in a world that feels like it has little space for you.

I didn’t especially want to leave journalism in the summer of 2021, but I knew that I must. I had twenty years of my career left in front of me and the truth was I wasn’t sure whether the industry could sustain me for that long. Things were still good when I was at ELLE. Sales had increased. I had an incredible team of bright, brilliant men and women to lean on. I was even, a few months after handing in my notice, told that I would be awarded an honour by the King for my services to the British media. (Oh the irony!) None of it stopped me from going home every night and fretting about the future.

But it wasn’t just anxiety about the future. I also fretted about how much more potential I felt I had left to give to the world of work. I’d set out to do what I’d hoped in magazines. But now what? I was living, to quote Philip Larkin, in ‘fulfilment’s desolate attic.’ And I wanted more from my life.

Then one day, completely out of the blue, a friend told me about a potential position at a company called Substack. I knew Substack. My husband and I followed many of the journalists who had been jettisoned out of mainstream media to write on the platform. But I didn’t know anything about tech. And I certainly didn’t know how a person like me could fit in at a young, hip start-up.

Long story short, one of the founders, a former journalist himself, Hamish McKenzie took a chance and offered me a job heading up the UK market. My title was to be Head of UK Partnerships, which meant very little to me at the time. For this I was to be a team of one, working from home, alone. There would be no PA. No flashy business cards. No huge team to brainstorm with. It would, in many ways, be the ultimate test; to the company but also to myself.

I knew what I was doing in magazines. But in the world of tech I was not so sure. I remember travelling to San Francisco on my third week to meet the rest of the company. I packed an entire Rimowa trunk of clothes- trousers by The Row, Chanel ‘Dad’ sandals, my beloved Celine trench coat. These were totems of style and power in my old world. But not, it transpired in my new one.

The minute I walked through the door I realised how painfully overdressed I was. People here were casual- trainers and hooded tops. My new CEO wore a black T-shirt and jeans. The other founder wore a beanie hat.

But that wasn’t the only difference. Over half of the team were engineers, which, truth be told, I thought was someone who came to look at your exhaust pipe. And almost everyone in the office was younger than me-including my own boss.

I felt embarrassed at first; an interloper in a brave new world that was not expecting me. My new job title meant very little to both the world around me and ex colleagues who were still trying to fathom where exactly I had gone. When meeting new people for the first time I would say I worked in tech, then hastily follow it up by saying, but I used to edit ELLE magazine, to which people would raise their eyebrows and make approving noises.

In the cold, hard February of 2022, three months after I’d joined Substack, I remember sitting at my desk in our spare bedroom wondering if perhaps I’d made a mistake. My predecessor at the job I had just given up had already started and ex colleagues had all moved on. I was old news and the world I had left behind continued on without me. It wasn’t that I mourned my past life exactly- I knew deep down I had been right to make the leap, but I mourned for the identity I once wore so well. Looking back now I see the problem was that where my outer world had shifted so radically, my inner world had yet to catch up.

Share

So there I was suspended in the messy lag; scared to give up who I had once been but afraid to move forward to find out who I might become.

Tech is a fast world. It can quite literally change overnight. There’s a phrase people use in Silicon Valley a lot: ‘you’re building the plane whilst flying it’ and it could not be truer, not only for the world I now inhabited but also when thinking about my own new identity.

Because once you have know what competence and a hard-earned reputation feels like- for me that was awards, bonuses and profiles in the national newspapers, it’s hard to shed it all and start back at square one. This isn’t about external validation either (for example, I never felt for a moment that anyone at Substack judged me); it’s far more about internal expectation. You become harder on yourself when you know what you are capable of. Time, which for younger colleagues is a medium in which to experience and grow, for you becomes work’s most essential fuel.

In that first year I didn’t waste a moment. I asked every question I could, I skirted battles I knew from past experience wasted time, I jumped at opportunities I felt would push me further and faster; the self knowledge I had gleaned from my first career allowing me to charge ahead at full speed in my second.

Starting over is hard whatever worlds you’re moving from into. But moving from publishing into tech was sobering on many levels, namely because the values are so different. Take titles for example. The world of tech doesn’t really do titles; whereas the world of magazine is obsessed with them. Where the world of tech dislikes hierarchies; publishing is built on them. Tech is fast and believes in breaking things in order to move forward; magazines are slow, steady and with a fervent reverence for the past. Which meant on the surface at least, everything I had been taught to believe was right, suddenly felt wrong.

And I think this is the part where many who have taken the leap, start to falter. They second guess themselves and start to feel like fitting in is futile since their entire value system is tuned to a different frequency. I say this because I thought the same at the beginning. I worried who I had become through twenty years in magazines was set in clay and thus to try and change that would shatter everything. But it did not.

Because there are a few things that no one ever bother to tell us. The first is that we are build of water not clay which means change is not only possible but vital. Secondly if your first career is about discovering who you are, your second career is about discovering what counts. You are less ego driven the second time around, and far more invested in mission and meaning. I come from a family of writers and teachers. That means I’ve always cared deeply about that side of life. And so whilst it might have been luck that brought me to the attention of Substack, it was not luck which made me join them. Finding a workplace where their mission was also mine, felt deeply gratifying in a way no award could ever match.

And here’s the funny thing, the world of tech is filled with people who are starting over. At Substack I discovered a former world famous rugby player who is now a trusted colleague, a renowned poet who now works on our events and a former book publishing wizard who has become a dear friend.

What’s more my role at the company has now changed. This year I will have a big team once again as I move to run our international expansion. And that’s the funny thing- once all the things I thought I missed from my old life start to reappear again in my new one- the teams, the status (as Substack has grown, people in the UK now finally know what I do for a living), the travelling, a London office…you realise those things no longer matter in the way they once did. They’re simply markers of progress.

What really matters is the revelation that you still have the capacity to change. Identity is not set in stone and ambition is not dulled by age but sharpened by it. You also come to realise you are not saying goodbye to what came before, you are simply building on it except with a different roadmap for success. Personal value trumps external validation the second time around; whilst internal growth beats out external speed.

The truth is second beginnings are messy, but it’s in the messiness that the meaning lies. You don’t get to see that at 17 or 27. But do you get to realise it, I have discovered, at 47 and 3 months.

Share

Are you thinking about starting all over again? Or have you done it and did you have a similar experience? I’d love to know..

Leave a comment