This is called UGC, or user generated content, and you don’t need an audience or any experience to start earning money.

I will die on the hill that this is one of the best side hustles there is for women our age (more on that in a minute).

But, that is not what I want to talk about today.

What this article is about is why I have found something else that might actually be better for women in midlife.

So let’s get into it.

The UGC Promise, And Why It’s Real

Before I get to the other thing, I want to actually make good on that promise, because I don’t say it lightly. Midlife women are wildly underrepresented in social content, and yet we are the audience making the buying decisions, in our own households, for our families, for ourselves. Brands know this. They are actively looking for women who look like us, sound like us, and shop like their actual customers, and there simply aren’t enough of us showing up in their content. That’s not a hypothetical gap. That’s a genuine, current opportunity sitting wide open.

And the barrier to entry is almost nothing. You don’t need an audience. You don’t need a following. You need a phone and a willingness to learn. A year ago I had never made a single UGC video. My first month doing it, I made £500. If you want to know exactly how I got from that to nearly £5k a month, my UGC roadmap walks through the whole thing, step by step. You can find out more about it HERE.

So no, this isn’t a piece about UGC being a stepping stone to something better. I think it’s brilliant, full stop, for all the reasons above.

But It’s Not For Everyone, And That’s Fine

Not everyone wants to be on camera. I love that part of it, I love being seen, hello Leo sun, but I know for a lot of women, the idea of filming themselves talking to a phone fills them with genuine dread. If that’s you, I don’t think that means the opportunity to build something of your own at this stage of life closes. It just means you’re looking for a different door into the same room.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to talk about today. Eight weeks ago I started taking Substack seriously, properly, as a real part of how I build an income, not as a side project I dabbled in between everything else. And in that short window, I think I’ve found the thing I’d tell every midlife woman to at least try, whether or not the camera is ever going to be for her.

Writing is the dream, isn’t it? It always has been, for women like us. We grew up on a diet of Carrie Bradshaw narrating her life from a laptop by the window, on the fantasy of Eat, Pray, Love, the idea that somewhere out there is a version of your life where you get to sit with a notebook and figure yourself out on the page. Substack is the closest thing I’ve found to actually living that, rather than just watching someone else do it. It’s slower. It’s completely yours. And it’s a genuinely growing platform right now, which means the timing is real, not just romantic.

My writing didn’t start as a business plan. It started after my marriage ended, when I was trying to work out who I actually was underneath everything I’d built my life around. I went back to something I’d once dreamed of doing at 17, before a marriage, before kids, before a business swallowed a decade, and I started going to creative writing classes, just for me, with no plan for where it would go.

It unlocked something. It helped me find my voice again, in a way nothing else in that period did. And somewhere in the process of writing for no reason other than wanting to, I remembered that once upon a time, all I ever wanted to do was write.

Eight weeks ago, I decided to stop treating that as a nice hobby and start treating it as a real way to build something. Here’s exactly what that’s looked like, what I’ve learned, and the ten things I’d tell you before you write your first post.

🔒 Behind the paywall:

• The real subscriber numbers behind eight weeks of taking Substack seriously

• Why my subscribers span six different currencies, and what that told me about this platform

• What it means that several people paid for a full year upfront, before reading a second post

• Why I write at the pace I do, and exactly who that pace is wrong for

• The ten specific, practical things I’d tell any midlife woman before she publishes her first post, not vague encouragement, the actual mechanics I wish someone had handed me on day one

Everyone Tells You To Post Every Day. That’s Advice For People Who Have The Day To Spare.

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Well, as crazy as it is for me to write this, I am that story.

And I want to tell you the truth about it. Not because the number isn’t real (it is, I’ve refreshed it more times than I’d like to admit), and not because I’m anything less than over the moon about it (there have been several happy dances in my kitchen over the last few weeks). It’s because I’ve been the one watching someone else “blow up overnight” so many times before, and I think the story underneath the number matters more than the number itself.

So let me rewind a little.

I used to watch this happen to other people all the time.

For years, I watched other creators blow up. On INstagram, on TikTok, and yes, more recently on Substack too. I’d see someone go from nothing to fifty thousand followers in a matter of weeks, or watch a Note rack up thousands of likes overnight, and I’d feel that very specific little twist of ‘that must be nice.’ Not so much bitter, more resigned I suppose. And the quiet thought that sits underneath so much scrolling of ‘that’s something that happens to other people, it’s not ever going to be me.’

And I think a part of me really did believe that. Maybe you’ve heard that little whisper too?

Because here’s the thing. I am just an ordinary mum from near Brighton. I spend more time than I like to admit in athleisure. I go to be at the same time as my kids most nights. Mos corners of my house are messy and I have more parcels waiting to be posted than I should say on the internet.

There is nothing about my actual life that looks like the life of someone about to have a ‘moment’ online.

But something shifted recently.

Over the last few months, I have felt a change. Not one big, dramatic thing. It’s been more subtle than that.

For some reason, I started showing up more like myself. Not the version that I thought I should be online. A bit softer, more palatable, maybe more curated. The actual me. The one I have been getting to know since my divorce.

Side note, I actually really like her. It’s a strong recommend to reconnect to who you were before life happens.

So that’s who I have been showing. The 45 year old woman, rebuilding a life and a business from something that fell apart. Someone who doesn’t always say the polished thing but has learned to actually say the true thing instead.

And the strange part it, the more unsure I felt about whether I should say something, the more it seemed to land. Every time I posted something and thought, is this too much, is this too honest, will people get what I mean… that was usually the thing that people needed to hear. that was the thing that made someone stop scrolling.

So I kept doing it and it felt like the first time in a long time that I was actually being myself out loud, in public, without apologising for it.

The truth is that if I think back to some of the things I have posted over the last few months, they actually made my stomach drop slightly the second I hit publish. Not because I was being controversial or trying to shock, but just because there was a vulnerability in the truth.

it is easy to publish something that is a version of what someone else is saying. Because of no one likes it, it’s no reflection on you.

It is much harder when it is your truth you’re speaking… it hurts much more if no-one responds to it.

None of this felt like a smart content strategy. If anything it felt like being a little bit too exposed. But, it seems that the slight discomfort, that little flinch before sending it out into the world, seems to be the thing that actually, truly connects me to people.

And since doing that, doors have started opening. Opportunities have been coming my way and numbers have been moving in the right direction. Week after week.

Conversations I wouldn’t have had even just a few months ago, with people telling me they feel seen by something I wrote, which is still the strangest and best feeling in the world.

And then, it happened, one Note. Just my honest observation, which felt a little bit raw and frightening to post about women spending the first half of their lives trying to be loved and the second half learning to love themselves, well… it just took off.

My worries of maybe it’s only been my experience were clearly unfounded and 2630 new subscribers later… here we are.

Here’s what I actually want you to take from this.

I could tell you this is a story about Substack strategy, about Notes, and hooks, and posting consistently. And to be fair, you do need to know that stuff, which is exactly why I’ve written it all up into a guide for anyone who wants it, logistics and all. That side of things matters.

But that’s not really what I want to leave you with today.

What I really want you to leave with is hope. Genuine, real, ‘this could actually be me too’ hope.

Because here’s what I have learned, sitting on the other side of a few months that have started to change things for me: I am not special. And I don’t mean that in a self deprecating, falsely humble way. I mean it plainly, as a fact. I am an ordinary woman, with an ordinary life. But I have spent time learning who I am, figuring out what I actually had to say and now to say it without hiding behind a safer version of myself. And that is genuinely in. That’s the whole secret.

So, yes, growth on any social platform can happen fast, but it is directly related to how quickly you can get to know yourself and what you want to say.

And it could be about anything, but it has to be in your voice.

I still have a long way to go to build the creative business that gives me the income and freedom I dream of, so I am not pretending that my viral note means I have ‘made it’, whatever that means anyway. I am still very much figuring this out, still learning, still building and I will continue to share that journey with you in the hopes that it will be useful.

But for the first time, I can actually see the shape of what might be possible. Not for someone else. Not for the creators I used to watch and think, ‘that must be nice’. But for little old me, in her leggings, going to bed at half eight at night.

And that feeling, the feeling of being hopeful that this might just work out, is worth more than any subscriber count.

The bit I really want you to hear.

If you’ve ever watched someone else’s overnight success and quietly decided that kind of thing doesn’t happen to people like you, I want you to change that thought.

It might not happen overnight. The truth is it rarely does. But it doesn’t mean it can’t happen fast. Once you get to the point of actually knowing what you want to say and having the nerve to say it. Sometimes the shift, once it comes, comes quickly.

So please, if you take one thing from this, let it be this: stop comparing your beginning to someone else’s moment. You are not behind. You are not too late. You are not missing some gift that other people have and you don’t. You are just, maybe, still in the part of the story that happens quietly, before anyone else is watching. That part matters. That part is not wasted time. That part is where you find out who you actually are when you write, before the world starts paying attention.

This isn’t just a Substack thing, either. It doesn’t matter which platform you’re on, or which one you’re thinking about starting on. The pattern is the same everywhere. The people who eventually have a moment are the ones who kept showing up long enough, and honestly enough, to have something worth having a moment over.

I promise you, if it can happen to an ordinary mum from just outside Brighton who cries a little with relief every time someone cancels plans, it can happen to you too.

I think about the version of me watching other people’s success from the sidelines, a couple of years ago, and I wish I could go back and tell her something. Not that it would be easy, because it wasn’t. Not that it would happen quickly, because for me it didn’t. Just that it was actually possible, for her, specifically, and that the waiting and the trying and the posting into what feels like silence isn’t a sign that it’s not going to happen. It’s just the part of the story that happens before anyone else is watching.

If you’re in that part right now, I see you. Keep going.

If you’re ready to start your own version of this

I’ve put together a proper, honest, step by step guide to setting up your own Substack including the actual tech side of things with screenshots of my actual settings and the emails I send out. Plus the deeper part that matters even more… finding your pillars, your voice, and the courage to stop filtering yourself before you hit publish. It’s for paid subscribers, because it’s the most complete thing I’ve made for you yet and I wanted to give it the time and care it deserved.

But remember, you don’t need two years. You just need to start telling the truth, on purpose, in a voice that’s actually yours.

XO, Lindsay

I am basically financially f***ed and I’m giving myself a year to fix it.

That’s one year, to sort my past, present and future finances.

Now, I know from my DMs that there are a lot of us that have landed in midlife with no financial security for one reason or another, so although sharing all of this feels deeply uncomfortable, I hope that by telling you about the mess I am in and how I plan to get out of it, it might help you too because, despite what we were led to believe, no one is coming to save is.

And actually, if I’m honest, I don’t want to be saved by anyone other than me.

I have a daughter who is watching everything I do and I want her to see that her financial success does not depend on marrying well or selling her soul in a corporate career she hates.

So my plan is to bring you with me and be completely honest about what works and what doesn’t and everything I learn along the way, so that hopefully by this time next year, I’ll have cleared my debt, won’t be constantly worried about money, and I’ll at least have a plan for my future financial security.

To be clear, when I say I have debt, I am talking about shamefully big numbers, which I am going to have to get a little bit braver before I say them out loud, but next week, I will be putting my big girl pants on and sharing exactly where I am starting from.

I have watched so many videos of people talking about how they’ve made a tonne of money online but I have never seen anyone like me doing it. A woman in her 40s, closer to retirement than college with kids in tow and literally no back up.

The thing is that women our age can’t afford to make mistakes and don’t have the luxury of time to waste. But, I refuse to believe that we are too old or too late to figure this out and change our financial futures.

So, my plan is to try it all. UGC, brand collabs, Substack, digital products, maybe even TikTok Shop and I will share everything with you along the way so that you can exactly what’s involved, what the potential is, and hopefully see what might be possible for you too.

Because one thing I have come to realise is that there are a lot of us realising that there must be a better way, that we can build something of our own and that maybe we were always meant to save ourselves.

But, I do have one rule… I am not hustling and I am not putting my life on hold while I do this.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working hard and I love being busy, but I also love time off when I choose it, hanging out with my kids and slow mornings reading my book (or my latest Substack obsession) and I don’t want any of that to stop. The truth is that none of us know what is around the corner, I already feel as though my life was on hold as I navigated the messy waters of divorce, I’m not doing that again.

So, how do I actually plan to build this, without falling back into the trap I’ve been in before?

The truth is, I am no stranger to making money.

I built a gutter cleaning company from nothing to turning over close to half a million pounds, in just a few years. From the outside, that looked like success. From the inside, I was working every single hour of the day, feeding my infant daughter with one hand and sending emails with the other.

On paper it should have worked but it didn’t survive the financial fall out of my divorce and although I put everything I had into trying to save it, it collapsed, leaving me with nothing but debt and a story to tell.

Looking back, I should have never have kept the business going for as long as I did, but the truth is that I was scared of what people would think and I think I had attached a lot of my identity to being a business owner.

Not once did I stop and ask myself what actually mattered to me.

I genuinely think that if I had taken the time to figure out who I was outside of all the roles I had played, the wife, the mother, the business owner, I would have saved myself a lot of money and got to this place much, much sooner.

But, as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing isn’t it.

And maybe I wasn’t ready for this life and way of earning that I am building now.

Because I do know now how I want my days to look and feel, which is why I can say, I’m giving myself this year to fix my finances, but I am doing it in a way that feels good.

For me, that means taking the time to write over here and create content over there, building a community and a space I want to hang out in while actually earning money from it.

And the crazy thing is, I have noticed that the more I lean into that, into who I genuinely am, the more I can see it starting to work.

I am that story that you hear about with one note that has brought me in more than 2000 subscribers in a few weeks and that one reel that has doubled my audience.

The note that has brought me in 2470 new subscribers

I did make close to £5k last month just from creating little videos on my phone, from home.

But, this isn’t a ‘how I made 6 figures on substack’ post. I’m not there (yet), but it is, at least to me, proof that I can do this. That I can build something and change my life, while still having the time to live it.

Because that’s the dream right, and if we’re honest, it’s why most of us are here. Still writing, still posting, still creating, even on the days when it feels like no one is listening.

So, I think that’s my plan. Make a lot of money but still live my life. Easy right?!

The rest of this article is for my paid subscribers, and if you decide to upgrade you’ll unlock:

• Exactly where I’m starting from with my debt, so my repayment plan, and the budgeting method I’m using now because my income isn’t a fixed salary. Next week, I’ll be breaking down the exact figures - eeekk!

• A full breakdown of every way I’m trying to earn money this year. UGC, brand collabs, Substack, digital products, TikTok Shop. I’m sharing what I actually know about each one, my real experience and numbers so far, plus the first 5 steps I’d take with each if I were starting any of these ways of earning from zero today

• Plus the one thing I’m not willing to compromise on, no matter how tight the budget gets

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I want to talk about the feeling we’re most ashamed of.

Not sadness. Not anxiety. Not even anger, which most of us have at least made some peace with by now. I mean the one we’ll barely admit to ourselves, let alone anyone else. Jealousy.

Think about it. We’ll happily tell a friend we’re sad, or anxious, or completely overwhelmed. We’ll say we’re exhausted, or lonely, or grieving something we can’t quite name. All of that is socially acceptable. All of that gets a sympathetic nod and a cup of tea. But jealous? That one we bury. We feel it, and almost in the same breath, we feel ashamed of feeling it. We tell ourselves we’re being petty, or ungrateful, or a bad friend, and we push it down as fast as we possibly can before anyone, including ourselves, notices it was there.

We’ve spent so much of our lives performing. Performing fine. Performing grateful. Performing happy for other people, even when something inside us is quietly falling apart. And jealousy might be the one feeling we’re least willing to let crack that performance, because admitting to it feels like admitting we’re not as content, as evolved, as good, as we’ve been telling everyone, including ourselves, that we are.

I think about how many times I’ve felt that familiar twist watching someone else’s life unfold, a promotion, a holiday, a relationship that looked easy, a body that looked confident in a swimsuit, and immediately reached for a socially acceptable version of the feeling instead of the real one. “I’m so happy for her.” “Good for them.” Said with a smile that doesn’t quite reach anywhere real, while something tight and uncomfortable sits in my chest for the rest of the day.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe, especially in this second half of life. Jealousy isn’t a character flaw. It’s information. And if you let it, it might be one of the clearest, most reliable signposts you have towards the life you actually want.

Why we get it so wrong

Most of us were taught, without anyone ever saying it directly, that jealousy is shameful. Good women are happy for other people. Good women don’t want what someone else has. Good women certainly don’t say out loud that they wish they had what their friend, their sister, or that woman from school they haven’t spoken to in fifteen years but still follow on Instagram, seems to have.

So the moment jealousy shows up, most of us do one of two things with it, and neither one is particularly kind to ourselves.

We either swallow it whole. We smile a bit too widely, congratulate too enthusiastically, and privately spend the rest of the day quietly interrogating ourselves for feeling anything other than pure joy on someone else’s behalf. We add it to the pile of feelings we’re apparently not allowed to have, right alongside anger and desire and any opinion that might inconvenience someone else.

Or, and I think this is the more common path, we let it curdle into something much uglier. We start picking the person apart. We decide they don’t really deserve it. It must have come easily to them. There’s probably something else going on behind the scenes that makes it less impressive than it looks. We find the flaw, the caveat, the reason it doesn’t really count. That’s resentment, and it is jealousy left to rot in the sun, because nobody ever taught us what else to do with it.

Both responses do exactly the same damaging thing. They keep us from ever actually looking at the feeling itself, at what it’s made of and where it’s actually pointing. And that, I think, is the real loss. Because underneath almost every flash of jealousy is a genuinely useful piece of information about you, sitting there patiently, waiting for you to stop flinching away long enough to read it properly.

Below, I’ll walk you through exactly what that information is actually telling you, plus the five-step exercise I use myself every time jealousy shows up, to turn it from something I feel ashamed of into a genuine roadmap for what I want next.

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We spent hours wandering through streets where the houses are whitewashed and the shutters are painted the same blue as the sea below them, where the tavernas spill out onto the harbour in the evenings and the smell of grilled fish and lemon drifts down every street after dark. My kids spent their days jumping over waves in water so clear you could see straight to the bottom, eating too much watermelon, and staying up giggling long past any sensible bedtime. I drank coffee under clear blue skies every morning, ate more feta than I probably should admit to, and fell asleep each night feeling full in every sense of the word.

And the whole time, I kept thinking that seven years ago, this life was unimaginable.

Seven years ago, my marriage had just ended. And to be completely honest, I had no idea how I was going to survive.

Nothing about my life then reflected me. Not the way I parented, not the way I earned my money, not even the way I spent my time. My days felt like they belonged to someone else. I was playing a role in a life I hadn’t truly chosen, one that I’d slipped into without realising how far I’d drifted from myself.

Then that all ended with my marriage.

But here’s the thing no one tells you about divorce.

It’s actually an incredible opportunity.

Now, don’t get me wrong, none of us chooses divorce. It’s brutal. It knocks the wind out of you. It strips away so much of what you thought you could rely on. But buried in the rubble, there is a gift. A pause. A chance to ask yourself the question most of us avoid for years.

Is the life I’m living the one I actually want?

For me, the answer was no.

I lived in a house where I didn’t feel safe. I ran a business I hated. I’d lost all meaningful connection with the people who mattered most to me. I was constantly in survival mode, counting down the hours until bedtime, then lying awake with my mind spinning.

I didn’t know who I’d become. Not because I was bad or broken, but because I had built my life around all the wrong things. Around keeping the peace. Around someone else’s moods. Around responsibilities I’d never agreed to carry but somehow ended up holding anyway.

Fast forward to now, and my life feels unrecognisable.

I’ve just come back from taking my youngest two to Crete, the fifth trip abroad I’ve managed with them since the divorce. I regularly spend time connecting with my family and friends. I spend slow, unhurried time with my children, sleepovers in my room with my little ones, games nights and healthy debates about life with my eldest when he’s home from uni.

I say yes to opportunities that excite me and no to anything that feels out of alignment.

Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying any of this is easy. I still have a long way to go to truly sort out my financial situation, I still have days where I feel completely overwhelmed by everything there is to do and the fact that I am the only one to do it and I still have moments of sadness that life didn’t work out the way I thought it would.

But, the truth is that I wake up every day genuinely looking forward to what’s ahead and I never could have imagined that just a few years ago.

In short, I live a life I love.

And I tell you this, not to boast, but because I want you to know, with every part of me, that this is possible for you too.

For you, the woman reading this in those dark, raw early days. The woman sitting on her kitchen floor wondering how she will ever find a way out. The woman whose world has just crumbled, who can’t yet see that there is more to life than this pain.

I want you to know that there is hope.

But here’s the truth, it doesn’t just happen.

It starts with a decision.

A decision to choose yourself.

When I look back, the turning point for me wasn’t the day I moved out, or the day the divorce papers were signed, or even the first time I felt a flicker of happiness again. It was the day I decided that I was worth more than the life I had been living.

That was the day I stopped waiting for someone to come and rescue me. The day I stopped hoping my ex would change. The day I realised no one was going to hand me a better life, I was going to have to create it for myself.

And from that point, every choice I made was with one question in mind:

Does this take me closer to the woman I want to be, or further away from her?

That meant:

Getting to know myself again, beyond the labels of “wife” and “mum.”

Letting go of old habits and patterns that kept me stuck.

Saying goodbye to friendships that weren’t healthy, even when it hurt.

Learning to take up space without apologising for it.

And actually investing in myself, both financially and with my time.

It wasn’t easy. Some days, it felt like I was starting from scratch. I didn’t have a roadmap. I didn’t always have the confidence. And there were plenty of times I doubted whether I could actually pull it off.

But here’s what I’ve learned, your life will always rise to meet the standard you set for yourself.

If you keep choosing the same things, you’ll keep getting the same results.

So I chose differently. Over and over again, even when it felt uncomfortable. in fact, especially when it felt uncomfortable.

And slowly, things began to shift. I stopped pouring my energy into people and situations that drained me. I found new ways to make money doing work that I actually enjoyed and that left me with time to live my life. I built friendships that felt safe and inspiring. I made time for joy, even when it seemed impractical.

And somewhere along the way, my life began to feel like mine again.

I wish I could go back and tell the version of me from seven years ago that this was coming. That the ache she felt wasn’t permanent. That the choices she was making, the tiny ones that didn’t feel like much at the time, were laying the foundation for a life she would one day love.

But since I can’t do that, I’m telling you instead.

If you’re in that place right now, raw, scared, unsure how you’ll make it through, I want you to know this, the next chapter is still yours to write.

You don’t have to have it all figured out today. You just have to start with one decision.

Choose you.

Choose to get to know who you are now, outside of the relationship that ended.

Decide to explore what actually makes you happy, even if you have no idea right now what that looks like.

Practice rewiring the old, limiting beliefs that tell you it’s too late, or too hard, or that you’re not enough.

And if you do that, well I promise you, the next chapter can be anything you want it to be.

It won’t happen overnight. It will take courage and patience and more self-compassion than you’ve probably ever given yourself before. But one day, you might find yourself somewhere you once thought was out of reach, sitting on a sun-warmed terrace with the Aegean stretched out below you, looking around at a life that feels so far from where you started, and thinking to yourself.

“I can’t believe this is my life now.”

XO, Lindsay

My recurring revenue has nearly tripled.

And I haven’t filmed a single reel, chased a single trend, or wondered once if the algorithm hates me.

All of this has left me wondering, maybe this is the greatest midlife side hustle there is right now?

I am not suggesting I can retire on it. But it is not an insignificant amount of money, especially when it’s been made with a genuinely minimal amount of time invested, because the last six weeks have not exactly been quiet ones for me. I’ve been navigating the end of the school year for my two kids (IYKYK), my eldest coming home from uni for a week, the start of the school summer holidays, and two weeks in Crete where I have barely looked at my phone. I haven’t had to record myself. I haven’t had to wonder if today is the day the algorithm decides I don’t exist. And I haven’t had to try and work out what on earth is trending this week so I can jump on it before it’s over.

With all that said, I should probably tell you that I am now, quite unbelievably, at the grand old age of 45, a full time content creator, and as unpredictable as the world of Instagram can be, I genuinely love that shit. I plan to keep doing this for a long time to come, so this isn’t a “thank God I found another way” kind of an article. But I do know that for a lot of women our age, the idea of talking to camera, posting about our lives, or putting anything at all on Instagram or TikTok is absolutely not the one. Frankly, it feels a bit like showing off, and as a generation who were taught that self promotion of any kind was more than a little bit vulgar, there are a lot of us out there who know we need to do something, but really don’t want that something to involve a ring light.

Which is exactly where Substack is different, and exactly why I think it might be the thing midlife women have been waiting for without quite knowing it.

And, it is having its moment at precisely the same time we’re having ours.

Possibly a different definition of the word moment, but the timing is still remarkable. Write a little. Connect with others. Get paid. It ticks every single one of our Eat, Pray, Love fantasies, and if it actually works out, there is genuinely nothing stopping you doing it from Italy. I’m not even joking.

We were taught not to want this. That’s exactly why it’s working.

I keep coming back to the same thought: what Substack actually needs is women with stories. Women with experience. Because while pretty much anyone can fill a thirty second reel with something that sounds authentic without ever having lived it, that simply cannot be faked across eighteen hundred words. So whatever awful thing you’ve lived through, or whatever life you’ve spent years quietly building, that is where the gold actually is. You can write about it, find your people, and build a little something on the side or a much bigger something out front. And right now, it really is that simple.

We are in a genuinely golden window for this platform, which is a large part of how I’ve managed to grow as fast as I have. People, women especially, are turning up in their droves wanting to connect, to read, to learn, and they are more than happy to pay for the privilege. Think the hazy days of Instagram circa 2014, or TikTok circa 2021. Now is the moment to get in on it, and the platform clearly knows it, because it keeps rolling out new features, all of them designed to keep readers actually engaged, rather than the other platforms, which are ultimately built to keep you scrolling past everyone, including you.

And I genuinely don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of the monetisation potential yet. Only the other week, a brand who wanted to work with me on some Instagram content asked, almost as an aside, whether I had a Substack, and what my numbers looked like.

Think of it this way… you’re an accomplished home baker. You start sending out a weekly newsletter with your best bakes. You could very quickly grow a few thousand subscribers, and even before you think about paid subscriptions, you could start negotiating brand deals around the ingredients you mention or the equipment you use. You could start a baking club. You could build a course and sell it at the bottom of every recipe. And unlike every other platform we’ve poured years into, you would actually own those people. You wouldn’t be building something on rented land.

If you already have an audience somewhere else, even better. Bring them over. Let them go deeper, or get more access than anyone else gets. Keep it free, and use it to promote your physical product, your coaching, or your digital course instead.

Every single day, I hear from women who, after years of putting everyone else first, are finally starting to consider what they actually want from their own lives. Women who are burnt out from juggling a career and kids and everyone’s needs but their own. And when I look at the world today, I see a genuinely huge number of ways to make a change, with content creation right up there as one of the best things we can do for ourselves, purely because of the doors it opens. But I also understand that it is not everyone’s thing, and I hate the thought that because of that, women stay trapped in lives they’ve outgrown, or spend years quietly recovering from divorces that left them with nothing, when it really doesn’t have to be that way.

So when I actually sit and think about it, this really feels like the perfect solution.

How many of us have had the thought, or said out loud at a dinner party after one too many glasses of wine, that there’s a book in all of us, while secretly only ever thinking about the one that we’d love to write? That always felt like a wild, faraway dream, reserved for a lucky and frankly quite dedicated few. Whereas this, well, I don’t love the word ‘easy’, but as someone who has gone from 62 subscribers to nearly 4,000, and from nothing to a genuine second income, in a matter of weeks, I can tell you honestly that it is not that hard right now.

What’s actually in this for you

I’m going to break down, properly, exactly what I did, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the handful of things I’d do differently if I were starting again from nothing today. But if there’s one thing I want you to take from everything above this line, it’s this: see what’s possible for you. Look at my numbers and know there is nothing remotely special about me. If you started today, in eight weeks’ time, you could be exactly here too.

So if nothing else, have a think about it. Jot down the things you obsess over. The things people always end up asking you for advice on. The things you always seem to end up debating with your friends. Because maybe those are the start of a few words that might just change your life. And really, what do you actually have to lose.

What actually worked (and I promise it wasn’t a masterplan)

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If you’re in the second half, you’re very welcome here.

This is the first part in my series, The Second Half.

As many of us begin to realise that we have spent years becoming the version of ourselves that everyone else needed, we are beginning to realise that actually we have needs too. That we deserve to feel the love that we give to everyone else. And that that love, starts with us.

We are at a point in life where we are able to look behind with enough perspective to see that the life we built may not be the one we wanted, but able to look ahead and see that there is enough time left to change things.

There has never been a better time in history for women of our age to build something of our own and a life that we don’t want to run away from.

But it starts with getting to know ourselves outside of the roles we have played, showing ourselves the love we have shown everyone else and learning to hear the whispers of the voice we haven’t listened to in so long.

The reason I can write on this with such certainty is because this is the journey that I have been on myself.

As the dust settled on the end of my marriage a few years ago and I began to rebuild from the rubble of what was my life, I began to realise that nothing about the way I lived or the business I had built reflected who I was or what I wanted my life to look like.

The problem was, I had spent so long hiding myself, making myself smaller to be more agreeable and living a life designed by someone else that I had no idea who I was underneath that.

In the years that have followed I have come to treat myself as my biggest love story. Spending time with myself to learn what I like. Asking questions to figure out what I want. And learning to hear my own voice and show up in the world as the authentic version of myself.

There has been a lot of shedding of old versions of me and letting go of relationships that were keeping me stuck.

All of which has led me to this place of designing a life that brings me peace and joy and is lived exactly as I choose and building a business as a creator and writer, which allows me to earn well and gives me complete freedom.

None of this has happened over night and there are still big parts (hello the financial mess I got into while figuring all this out) that are a work in progress, but sometimes we just need someone who’s a little bit further a long than where we are, to show us the way forward.

This series is designed to be that for you.

Every month, I will give you a question to reflect on and an exercise to help you figure out who you are now and learn to love that version of you, so that you can decide how you want to live your second half.

So, if you’re ready, let’s begin.

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I’d seen people online talking about earning money for making content but as I understood it, you had to have an audience, and often a fairly decent one, in order to make money as a content creator.

How wrong I was.

Before I explain what UGC is and how exactly it started making me money. I want to address something that I never really hear people talking about, which relates specifically to women our age.

We are a generation who were told to get up off the sofa and get outside. The concept of building a business from the couch, literally goes against everything we were taught about work.

To be accused of being a poser was possibly the biggest insult you could throw our way. To set a camera up and film ourselves requires silencing that voice every single time.

We grew up believing that self promotion and showing off was a little vulgar and something that people with no talent did. You can see why it’s hard for us to see this as ok.

What I have come to realise, is that unless we can change these thoughts and move passed this mindset, we are dismissing a world of opportunities before even really understanding what they are and stoically battling on with our ‘respectable’, but frankly much harder, path all because it’s ‘a bit cringe’ to make videos of yourself.

But, let me tell you a little secret…

…the more ‘cringe’ you think other people are for doing it, the more you would probably, actually love to give it a go yourself.

You know? It’s often the things that we judge that are sign posts to the things we want but aren’t ready to admit yet.

And honestly, find me someone who wouldn’t want to earn a good living doing something a little bit creative, working their own hours, all from home. Plus, let’s be honest, it never gets old being sent stuff for free… As well as being paid for making the content, I have been sent clothes, a fancy toothbrush and artwork and so much more and I haven’t bought skincare or supplements in nearly a year!

But, let’s address the bug question. What exactly is UGC and how do you get paid for it?

UGC, which stands for User Generated Content, is just that. It is content made by users of the products or services of a brand. Which, is probably something you do already, without even realising. That restaurant that you went to and posted a picture of saying how much you loved it, that’s UGC. The collagen brand that you told your friends about, that is essentially UGC. The only difference is when you are working as a UGC creator, you are being paid to talk about the brand.

It works like this…

A brand sends your their product, and usually a brief telling you any points that they would like included in the video. You think of a creating that content that feels authentic and natural to you. Film the content, send it to the brand to approve. They love it, pay you the agreed fee and use then for their socials or paid ads. You never have to post it to yours, which is why it makes no difference whether you have 12 followers or 12,000. The brand are paying you for your ability to make a video for them, not for access to your audience.

And here’s the really good bit. Brands are crying out for women over 40 to make content for them.

Think about it… there are loads of 20somethings doing this and a lot less women of our age. But we are the audience that they want to sell to and if you’re buying skin care, do you want to see it demonstrated by a 26 year old with no crows feet or by a women who’s face looks like your own?

So, how did I get into it and start making money?

I first heard of UGC a little over a year ago. As is often the way, I stumbled across some beautiful young women talking about all the money they’d made and how UGC had allowed them to travel the world for free, while making a fortune and whilst it certainly seemed like they were living the dream, their life could not have been more different from mine.

As I watched them filming from their beautiful homes, and gorgeous beaches, I looked around to try and find just one clean corner of my house, and thought that this was probably a way of earning that was reserved for the young and beautiful.

So, I didn’t do anything. I filed the idea under, ‘something I am too old to do’ and carried on desperately trying to find a way of earning that didn’t involve selling my soul again.

Then, as you’ll know if you’ve been around here for a little while, things got pretty desperate. I was honestly in the worst financial position I have ever been in and frankly I was running out of ideas. I literally had nothing to lose.

But, I’ll be honest, I had no idea where to start. So I figured it out one step at a time and, the most incredible thing happened.

Within my first month, I’d made over £500, which is admittedly not life changing. But it was enough to pay for flights to France with my kids that summer, and at the time, that felt like the biggest win of my year.

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The reason behind this is that I really wanted to be able to just switch off and enjoy some time on holiday with my kids, something I have never really been able to do before.

To give you some context, I have had a variety of businesses over the years but the one that saw me through my marriage ending and the start of my life as a single parent family was a gutter cleaning company.

Yep, you did read that right. I gave 8 years of my life to gutters. What I couldn’t tell you about downpipes or offset bends, probably isn’t worth knowing!

It’s funny really because it was at a time when most women my age were starting Etsy shops or craft businesses, something pretty and creative with a beautiful Instagram account to match. And meanwhile I was dealing with teams of men, van problems and working out how to access the gutters over a conservatory (which is harder than you’d think!).

It wasn’t glamorous but for a while, it paid my bills. Sadly it didn’t survive the financial battering I took during my divorce, although that is a story for another time, but what it did do was get me very used to dealing with and generating large amounts of money. At one point we were turning over close to half a million pounds a year and I really believe that seeing that amount of money flow through your account, even if you don’t get to keep it, unlocks a part of your brain to see what’s possible.

So, that coupled with a slightly unhealthy amount of delusion and spending far too much time watching other creators talk about their £10k months, set me off on this path to see if I could do that too.

So, did I hit it?

Well, the short answer is no. But I wasn’t a million miles off.

Let me break it down for you, stream by stream, to the penny and with that, I can tell you what worked, what didn’t and how I would approach it differently next time.

Let’s get into it:

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This was not the life I thought I would be living at this age.

Ten years ago, I was married to a high earner. He took care of our finances and I took care of our children. He paid into a private pension and the future was mapped out, secure. That is, until it wasn’t.

To anyone watching, my marriage looked like a love story. But behind closed doors, I had made myself smaller for years to keep the peace. I said yes when I meant no, swallowed down my feelings with a whisper of “it’s ok, I don’t mind.” I didn’t even realise how much of myself I had lost until it was over.

Our marriage ended very suddenly and before I really even had time to realise what was happening, there were solicitors involved and we were battling it out in court. All I wanted was to buy him out of our house. All he wanted was for me to sell it and move out. And the only thing I had to bargain with was the pension pot that just a few moments ago I was being told would take care of us into old age. He was enraged at the idea that I was entitled to a share in what he now viewed to be entirely his. And as the months passed and the legal costs spiralled, I did what I had to do to draw things to a close and gave up my share in his pension.

And so here we are. 44, no pension and no real plan.

I did manage to buy him out of our family home, only to have to sell it a short while later to try and save my business. But it was too much. The business failed, any money I had is gone and now I rent my home, with my children, and have nothing but debt to my name.

I started posting about this recently on my social media and now my DMs are flooded with other women in very similar situations. So many of us have given up careers to have children and with it any financial security of our own.

With nearly two thirds of 60-64 year old women having absolutely no private pension wealth and even those that have managed to accumulate something, on approaching retirement age the average private pension of a woman is between £81,000 and £88,000, while for a man it is around £155,000.

This is a ticking time bomb that no one seems to be talking about.

But I see something bigger here. We are a generation of women who fell through the gap.

We grew up watching traditional roles being modelled for us; dads with careers, mums mostly at home. We were told we could do anything, but yet our worth was still somehow tied to finding a good partner, becoming a wife, having kids. So we decided we’d just do it all. And we did.

But the world has changed since we were sold that dream. The economy got rocky, costs went up, but salaries didn’t, especially for us. And we have started to see that it actually isn’t possible to have a career and kids without killing ourselves trying.

Meanwhile, our parents are living their best lives with paid-off houses and pensions.

More and more marriages are ending, and with it our access to pension pots that were meant to be shared and any financial security we thought we had.

And here we are in our 40s and 50s, looking around wondering what happened. Feeling too old to start over but too young to just carry on as we are.

Perhaps we should feel desperate, but I actually feel full of hope. Because somewhere along the way, something shifted. I stopped waiting for permission.

The chapter where worrying about what people might think is out, and giving things a go is very much in.

Each new thing I try seems to uncover a little bit more of me and reconnects me to the fearless teenage girl I once was. And I can’t lie, I’ve missed her.

At 17, I had dreams that felt possible and a voice I wasn’t afraid to use but somewhere along the way, I lost her.

Reclaiming my teenage self doesn’t mean going backwards. It means giving her the love she deserved back then. It means whispering in her ear that financial security doesn’t come with a husband, it comes with building something of your own. It means knowing that, despite what society would have us believe, we’re not too late and we’re not too old.

And that’s why I am shouting about this. Because we shouldn’t feel ashamed of where we find ourselves or nervous about what is ahead. We are the only generation to have had an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. We straddle two worlds.

And as we see the old systems failing us, we are pivoting and rebuilding. Learning to create income and wealth in ways that our mothers and grandmothers could not even conceive of. We are taking risks and learning to create lives and ways of earning that work for us, not against us.

There has never been a better time for women to take control of our futures.

So whilst it’s true we seem to have fallen through a gap somewhere and missed out on buying into the system that a patriarchal society have fully benefited from, the truth is it’s an old system. And maybe it was never meant for us anyway.

And do you know what? I honestly believe that this is our time, that women of our age will change the way our daughters see what is possible and that we will succeed because we literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

My stomach turned over and I felt a, now too familiar, sense of panic wash over me.

I told my kids to wait at the checkout while I ran outside of the supermarket to get some phone signal. Finally connected by the internet gods, I managed to move a little money over from one of the ‘spaces’ I had put it into in my bank account.

This was a habit I got into last year.

And the truth is, it came about because there wasn’t enough money.

There wasn’t enough to pay our bills and buy us food and I had to prioritise feeding my children, which often meant letting bills bounce and being sure to move any money I did have into a ‘space’ where it couldn’t be taken out by a direct debit I wasn’t expecting.

If I’m honest, I have spent more of my adult life worried about money, than I haven’t.

I was a single mum at just 24, and looking back now, I can see I was nowhere near in a financial position to have a baby.

With that said though, I am pretty resourceful, have a really good work ethic and a fair amount of delusional optimism, so I have always made it work… just about.

But this time last year was the worst it had been.

I was a few years out of my divorce, having sold my house and used the money to try and bail out my failing business.

It did not work.

The business failed anyway, leaving me with nothing but debt to my name.

I’d been working as a divorce coach for about a year, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I desperately needed to find a way of earning money but everything I considered, every job ad I looked at, left me with the same questions.

How can I earn the amount I need to support us, when I’m barely employable and how can I fit a full time job into the hours my children are at school?

Little did I know that I was about to discover something that would change everything.

But before I get to that, a little context is probably helpful.

I have three children. The oldest, Ethan, is 20, he’s the one who made me a mama way back in my early 20s. A happy accident that changed the course of my life and became my reason for everything.

My little ones are ‘shared’ with my ex husband. Monty, who’s 11, and Betsy, who’s 8. And I say ‘shared’ in inverted commas because they are with him every other weekend during term time. During the holidays, that arrangement stops and he has them for 6 nights. In the summer, that’s 16 nights. Split across 3 separate occasions. I’ll spare you the exact calculations, but I’m sure you can do the maths, the care of our children is not really shared.

Every school run is me. Every packed lunch is me. Every club, every play date, every day off sick…yep, all me.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that I don’t miss any of their childhoods, when I know so many women who have to give up half.

But, what it does mean is that the hours I can work are limited. Very limited.

So back to that eternal looping conversation in my own mind.

How on earth could I earn the salary of two people with working hours of barely one.

And there was another problem.

I haven’t had an employed job since my eldest was 2.

That’s 18 years of working for myself. Whilst I know a little about a lot and possess a fair amount of entrepreneurial spirit, I don’t think I am very employable. At least not in a role that would provide the salary I need.

And I know I am not alone in this problem.

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So. Pull up a chair. This might take a minute.

My name is Lindsay. I’m very nearly 45. I’m divorced. I don’t have a pension. I have debt and I don’t own my home. I live in rented accommodation with my kids and our cats, Enid and Eric.

From the outside, my marriage looked like a love story. And for a while, I think I genuinely believed it was. I was a single mum to my eldest when I met my ex husband. He was charming and successful and told me all my har days were behind me. It was a whirlwind and we were married within a year of meeting and expecting my second son not long after that. A few years later, our daughter followed.

He earned the money. I raised the kids. I had given up my career as a personal trainer and even though nobody ever sat down and said those words out loud, that was the deal.

It just happened the way it happens for a lot of women. Gradually, and then all at once. And over the years, slowly, quietly, I made myself smaller. I stopped having opinions about things that mattered and less of a say in our lives. I kept the peace because keeping the peace felt like the only job I had left, and I was determined to be good at it.

Then the marriage ended. Suddenly. And everything that had been invisible became very, very visible.

Solicitors. Court. A nastiness that I never imagined having to endure. But what is it they say, you never really know someone until you divorce them. I’ve never heard a truer statement.

I wanted to buy our house from him but he wanted to sell it. Although we were married, nothing was in my name, so I had very little say in anything. The only bargaining chip I had was his pension pot, which he was furious to know I had a claim to. As the legal costs spiralled and the months dragged on I did the only thing I could do to make it stop and I gave it up. I signed away my share of the pension and he agreed to let me buy the house from him. Finally I was able to breath again.

But the damage had been done. The business I had at the time had taken such a hit during our divorce proceedings that all I could do was sell the house in order to try and rescue it.

The business failed anyway and then money was gone. All of it. The house, the pension, the savings, the safety net I didn’t even know I’d been standing on until it was pulled out from under me.

So that’s where I am. About to turn forty-five. Renting. No assets, no safety net, no pension and no one coming to save me.

After the divorce, I trained as a divorce coach. It made sense at the time. I’d been through something brutal and I wanted to help other women going through it too. I started posting on Instagram and the audience grew quickly, faster than I expected. People connected with what I was saying. But something felt off. I didn’t enjoy coaching and felt as though I was constantly being dragged back into my own divorce story. But, what it did do was open my eyes to what is possible online, for me to be brave enough to say that the part I did love was creating content.

I spent years not saying what I wanted, always feeling like there had to be a better reason than because I want to or because I enjoy it.

But that’s the simple truth of it. I love making content. I love writing. And I love the freedom it brings me.

So I’ve let go of the idea that I’m too old or it’s too late and that’s what I’m doing now.

Building a creative business, trying to change my financial situation and hopefully showing other women that they can do the same.

I really think that we are the generation that fell through the gap and no one is really talking about it.

We grew up watching traditional roles being modelled for us; dads with careers, mums mostly at home. We were told we could do anything, but yet our worth was still somehow tied to finding a good partner, becoming a wife, having kids. So we decided we’d just do it all. And we did.

But the world has changed since we were sold that dream. The economy got rocky, costs went up, but salaries didn’t, especially for us. And we have started to see that it actually isn’t possible to have a career and kids without killing ourselves trying.

Meanwhile, our parents are living their best lives with paid-off houses and pensions.

More and more marriages are ending, and with it our access to pension pots that were meant to be shared and any financial security we thought we had.

And here we are in our 40s and 50s, looking around wondering what happened. Feeling too old to start over but too young to just carry on as we are.

But it’s not true and there has never been a better time for us to build something of our own and take control of our own financial destiny.

I believe that with every ounce of my being.

I spent years believing that my success would only ever come with a husband and once, not that long ago, that was true for women. The thing we need to realise, is it’s not true now.

There are a whole generation of women coming up behind us, born with smart phones and fluent in social media, who are building businesses that allow them to actually enjoy their lives, and they don’t have even a fraction of the experience we have. The only difference is, they’re not waiting for permission.

But, I get it, it’s scary putting ourselves out there. Being seen, feeling judged. I was terrified of failing publicly when I’d already failed so spectacularly in private.

The chapter where worrying about what people might think is out, and giving things a go is very much in.

Each new thing I try seems to uncover a little bit more of me and reconnects me to the fearless teenage girl I once was. And I can’t lie, I’ve missed her.

At 17, I had dreams that felt possible and a voice I wasn’t afraid to use but somewhere along the way, I lost her.

Reclaiming my teenage self doesn’t mean going backwards. It means giving her the love she deserved back then. It means whispering in her ear that financial security doesn’t come with a husband, it comes with building something of your own. It means knowing that, despite what society would have us believe, we’re not too late and we’re not too old.

And that’s why I am shouting about this. Because we shouldn’t feel ashamed of where we find ourselves or nervous about what is ahead. We are the only generation to have had an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. We straddle two worlds.

And as we see the old systems failing us, we are pivoting and rebuilding. Learning to create income and wealth in ways that our mothers and grandmothers could not even conceive of. We are taking risks and learning to create lives and ways of earning that work for us, not against us.

There has never been a better time for women to take control of our futures.

So whilst it’s true we seem to have fallen through a gap somewhere and missed out on buying into the system that a patriarchal society have fully benefited from, the truth is it’s an old system. And maybe it was never meant for us anyway.

And do you know what? I honestly believe that this is our time, that women of our age will change the way our daughters see what is possible and that we will succeed because we literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

And that’s what this Substack is.

This is me documenting the rebuild as it happens. The real version. Not the curated highlights, not the “look how far I’ve come” montage but how I’m piecing together an income from UGC, brand deals, content creation, and this little corner of the internet where I write things that are too long for Instagram. I’m not going to pretend the numbers are pretty, because right now they’re not. But they’re real, and I think real is what’s been missing from a lot of these conversations about women and money and starting over.

This is the full picture. Every penny in, every penny out, every awkward conversation with myself about money I should have been having ten years ago. I don’t know exactly how this year is going to go. I don’t know if I’ll hit the targets I’m setting for myself. But I know I’m not going to do it quietly, because quiet is what got me here in the first place.

If you’re reading this and any of it sounds familiar, if you’re in the gap too, if you’re rebuilding something from not very much and wondering whether it’s too late, I want you to know something.

It’s not too late. We’re not too old. And nobody is coming to save us, which, once you sit with it for a minute, turns out to be the most freeing thing in the world.

In other words, welcome to my midlife crisis. I’m so glad you’re here.

XO, Lindsay

Just to be clear, I didn’t have a strategy. This growth didn’t come about because I planned it that way. I am just a divorced woman in my 40s who finally stopped performing and started telling the truth and now, I can see clearly, why that is exactly what worked.

I need to tell you something before we go any further.

I am not a growth expert. I don’t have a marketing degree. I didn’t follow a 47-step launch plan or hire a social media manager or invest money in ads.

But, in the last few weeks, I have grown my audience by more than 60,000 across platforms, and just over 1100 of those have been here on Substack.

Thirty days ago, I had 62 Substack subscribers. Sixty-two.

Today, as I’m writing this, that number is 1,166.

Like so many of us on here, I was writing into the void, wondering if that number would ever go up.

The one day, one note, changed everything.

At first I kept refreshing the page because I didn’t quite believe it. I’d be making dinner and have to open the app and just... stare at it. Like it might correct itself. Sorry, love, we made a mistake. Back to 62 you go.

But it hasn’t corrected itself. In fact, that number just keeps going up each day. And I think I owe you - especially if you’re one of those 1,166 - an honest account of what happened. Not a case study. Not a “here’s my content strategy” post. Just the truth about what changed, because what changed wasn’t a tactic.

What changed was me.

But before we get to that, let me back up a little.

7 years ago, my marriage ended. The marriage that looked like a love story from the outside - and sometimes from the inside too, if I’m being fair, which I’m trying to be. But it ended and with it went the future I thought was mine.

2 years ago, the business I’d spent 8 years building went bust. Not “I pivoted.” Not “I wound it down gracefully.” Bust.

What has followed since then, if I’m honest, has been a gradual stripping of who I thought I was, in order to figure out who I actually am.

And along the way, I realised I was done living a life for those watching or caring worrying what other people thought. And slowly, but surely, I have found the courage to step towards the life, and business, that I want.

Not something that makes sense on paper, or seems like the sensible option or has some deep purpose. Just spending my days building something for me.

So that’s how I found myself here. Forty-four. Divorced. Starting from scratch in the best possible way.

With a fire in my belly and a dream in my heart.

Being brave enough to say I want to earn a living in a way that feels creative and free and actually allows to live my life at the same time.

So for the last year, I have been building a content creator business, starting out with UGC, which I will tell anyone that listens is the easiest way into making money from content as you don’t need an audience or any experience and there’s a big demand for women over 35.

Within 6 months I went from earning £500 to just under £5000, and I will be breaking down exactly how I did in next week’s newsletter, so make sure you’re subscribed to get the details and if you can’t wait till then, I put together a roadmap for getting started in 21 days, which you will find HERE.

Anyway, back to my Substack journey.

I created my account almost exactly a year ago, thinking it would be a place to tell the stories of my divorce that I hadn’t told anywhere else. I posted a few times, got a few subscribers and then quickly realised, I didn’t want to keep talking about my divorce. And so ghosted my own account.

Then a few weeks ago, I had the urge to get back over here.

I was approached by the Features Editor for the i Paper, who asked to commission me to write an article for them based on a reel that went viral on my Instagram. Of course I jumped at the chance, and as I basked in the glory of being able to call myself a paid writer, I realised just how much I had missed tap tapping on my keyboard and the painful, but oh so satisfying, process of birthing the written word.

So I wrote.

But, it felt like I was shouting into a void.

I’d open my laptop, stare at the blank page, write three paragraphs of something that felt like it could be anyone’s story, and then close it. Post it a week later. Watch it get 11 views. Feel stupid for trying.

You know the feeling? Where you’re putting yourself out there but you’re not actually putting yourself out there? You’re performing vulnerability without being vulnerable. You’re writing about starting over while still pretending everything’s fine.

That was me.

And then something shifted.

I can’t sell you a neat turning point, because it wasn’t neat. But I can tell you what I did differently - the actual moves, in order, that took me from 62 to 1166. And more importantly, I can tell you why they worked when nothing before had.

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But, I have never actually been able to take time off.

I have bust a gut to be able to take them away and each time I have had to work because my way of earning has always been directly linked to ‘office hours’ or trading my time for money.

But this year, I want to change that.

And that’s the whole reason I’m writing this. This isn’t about a grand business pivot, or “building generational wealth”. I just want to sit on a sun lounger somewhere hot and actually be present with my kids. I want to say yes to watching them jump in the pool and join them to eat their body weight in ice cream, rather than using it as a distraction while I open up my laptop. I want 10 days where none of us are thinking about money, or school, or what comes next.

But the reality is this: it’s July 2026, and I need to earn £10,000 before August 1st to make it happen and keep everything else afloat.

So I’m going to try. Publicly. And I am sharing exactly how I plan to do it, plus all the numbers here.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I don’t do vague. I think the internet is drowning in “I made six figures!” content from people who won’t tell you what they actually did. I find that useless. So this article is the opposite. Every income stream. Every pound. Every plan. What’s already done and what I’m still scrambling to figure out.

Before I break down the plan, here’s the context. Because the plan only makes sense if you understand the starting point.

I’m 44. Divorced. Three children. My business went into liquidation at the end of 2024. During the divorce, I gave up my share of my ex husband’s pension because the legal battle was costing me more than the pension was worth. I needed it to stop. I now rent. I have debt. And there is no safety net.

What I do have is this: A great UGC portfolio and body of work behind me. 51,000 followers on Instagram. A Substack that’s growing, thanks to a viral note that hit 52,000 impressions and brought in 452 new subscribers. An article in the i Paper that just went live. And the kind of stubbornness that comes from having no other option.

Right, let’s get into it. This is my £10k plan:

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Since my marriage ended and my business went bust, I have spent a long time really asking myself how I actually want my life to be.

Not how it should be. Not how I was told it would be. Not how other people think I’d be best living. But how I actually want to wake up and live each day. And that includes how I earn my living.

Somewhere along the way, I think a lot of us stopped asking ourselves that question. We got so caught up in surviving, paying the bills, raising the kids, keeping all the plates spinning, that we forgot we were allowed to want more than just getting through the week.

The truth is, I want to make really good money. Not because I want fancy handbags and designer things, although if you do, then go for it. But because I have lived under financial stress and it impacts everything. I want to enjoy my life and the time I have with my children. Plus honestly, I don’t have a choice... no one’s coming to save me and I have three children to provide for.

And I’m tired of pretending that wanting financial security is greedy or shallow. It’s not. It’s freedom. It’s choices. It’s being able to say yes to the things that matter and no to the things that don’t.

But I am so over the hustle and sacrificing myself. I want to earn a living in a way that I actually enjoy. In a way that leaves me with time to actually live.

I spent my 30s hustling. Building a business that looked successful on paper. Half a million turnover, a team, a fleet of vans. But it took everything from me. It gave me no joy, only stress, and the bigger it grew the more it demanded. I never took a day off, I worked holidays and birthdays. I gave birth on a Thursday and was back at my desk by Friday. I said “just one more email” to my kids more times than I can count. And when it eventually went bust, it had chewed me up and spat me out.

So I know what it feels like to do it the “right” way and still end up with nothing. To sacrifice your health, your time, your presence with your kids, and have it all fall apart anyway.

I’m not doing that again.

I see too many of us wishing away the weekdays and waiting for the weekend. Counting down the years until retirement when we finally get to enjoy our lives. That’s not the life I want.

I want to actually be here. Present. Enjoying my kids while they still want to hang out with me. Having the energy to do things that light me up. Building something that feels like mine.

I’ve spent years watching people claim to make great money online and if I’m honest, I thought it was probably BS. Or if not complete lies, then just something that was reserved for the lucky few. The ones who got themselves on Instagram before it became a constant fight for attention or who sold digital products before AI changed the game.

In short, I have spent a long time feeling like I was too late to the party.

But, the more I have looked at it, the more I have realised that’s actually not the case. We live in a world where anything is now possible and there are so many ways to earn a living online, that don’t require you to sell your soul to do so.

The truth is, we’re not too late. Or too old. So why aren’t more of us running full force at the opportunities that are there?

I think about this a lot.

There has never been more opportunity for women to create something of their own, to start a business or a side hustle or earn money in a way that allows more balance with living. The internet has changed everything. You can build an audience from your kitchen table. You can sell products while you sleep. You can create income streams that don’t require trading every hour of your life for money.

And I now know this to be true, because I’ve started. And in less than a year, I am earning a full time living completely online.

I’m certainly not mega rich (yet), but I can now see how I could be.

I see now why the generation coming up behind us are going all in on building something online, because it opens the door to so much opportunity.

But yet, so many of us are still stuck.

Is it because we don’t know what those opportunities are? Or where to even start?

Is it because we’ve been burned before, told that hard work pays off, only to find ourselves exhausted and empty handed?

Or is it because we’ve grown up thinking we shouldn’t be seen? That wanting more is selfish? That women our age should just be grateful for what we have?

I think it might be a little bit of all of those things.

But the reality is, if we don’t try, we will never get to live the life that is quietly whispering for us.

Maybe the next chapter requires something different. Maybe it requires us to be seen. To take up space. To bet on ourselves even when it feels terrifying.

I don’t have it all figured out. I’m very much working it out as I go. But I do know that going back, trading my time for money, isn’t an option any more. I have had my eyes opened. I see now that there is a much better way.

So I’m trying, very publicly. I’m building something that’s mine. Something that fits around my life instead of consuming it. Something that might just change everything.

And if you’re in this chapter too, trying to figure out your plan B, I’m really glad you found me.

So, here’s what I’m actually doing about it. The very first step I took to making money online, which is now allowing me to explore other avenues.

What I’m going to tell you is something that goes against pretty much all the advice you’ll read about building a creative business online.

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Me. A paid writer. At 44.

I don’t have a journalism degree. I’ve never worked in media. I’m not ‘connected’ in some way.

I just told my story. Out loud. On the internet.

And apparently, that was enough.

I didn’t start here

When I started my Instagram account back in 2024, I was planning to be a divorce coach. Which I did do, for a while.

My account grew quite quickly. But looking back, I was always keeping myself slightly removed from my own story. I talked about divorce as something that happened in my past. Like I’d figured it all out. Like I was the expert helping others through something I’d already neatly completed.

But the truth is I was still in the mess. I just didn’t want anyone to know.

I quickly realised I didn’t like coaching but I still didn’t really know what I did want to do.

I didn’t want people to see that I was still figuring it out in real time. That I didn’t have all the answers.

I started to fall in love with making content, but I felt ridiculous saying that’s what I wanted to do. There’s no way I could do that at 44. Could I?

The reality was that I was really struggling financially. Like the, use your bank card and pray it goes through, kind of struggling. But I still felt like I needed to look like I had my shit together.

I didn’t want anyone to know that some days I wasn’t sure what I was doing or whether any of it would work.

And if I’m honest, I cringed every time I posted. Especially when people I knew started finding me and following me.

There’s something uniquely uncomfortable about being seen by people from your real life when you’re sharing things you’ve never said out loud before. I would imagine them thinking ‘who does she think she is’ and ‘look at her playing the victim’. It was almost enough to make me stop. But something inside me kept going.

And here’s what I’ve learned… the cringe doesn’t go away. You just stop letting it make the decisions.

The shift

For a long time, I thought my story was about divorce. That was the thing I’d been through. The thing I thought I could help people with. And if I’m honest, it felt safe to talk about, because it wasn’t what I was really going through.

But something changed recently.

Maybe it’s the fact that I am approaching my 45th birthday. Maybe it’s that I realised life is too short not to live it how I want to. Or maybe I just got tired of pretending I had it all figured out.

Either way, I started telling my real story.

The post that changed everything

A few weeks ago, I posted a reel that just said the truth:

I’m 44. Divorced. No pension and I don’t own my home.

In case you’re wondering what the plan is. This. This is my plan.

I thought my existing audience would relate to it. I had no idea what would actually happen.

That post brought in over 20,000 new followers on Instagram. 15,000 on TikTok. 30,000 on Facebook.

And an email from a features editor asking to commission me as a writer.

Doors seem to be opening for me because I finally stopped keeping myself at arm’s length from my own life and just learned to do one thing.

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I am 44 years old. My marriage ended in divorce. The sensible, solid business that I built over 8 years, not only sucked the joy out of my soul and left me completely burnt out, but it ended up gong bust.

All of which has left me approaching 45 with no pension, still renting and a tonne of debt.

I recently posted about this being my situation and by the response it got, it would seem that I am not alone in my current position.

And that got me thinking.

If you’re an older millennial or a younger Gen X, don’t you feel as though we have somehow been missed out.

A lot of us grew up seeing more traditional roles modelled for us. Our dads had careers, probably weren’t around that much, and our mums mostly looked after us and the home, maybe worked but more likely at a job rather than a career.

We went to school, were taught to be good girls but more and more we’re seeing that there’s all this opportunity. The Spice Girls brought us girl power and we’re told that women can do everything that men can do now. Girls are going to university and mapping out careers. But yet, even thought it’s said less, our value is still tied in finding a good guy, becoming a wife and having kids, so now the expectation becomes that we do both. And that’s what we’re sold. The fairy tail is no longer meeting a prince and being taken care of, it’s having the career and the family, the babies and the body, being the man and the woman.

And we do.

But then the economy gets rocky, the cost of everything goes up but salaries, not so much, especially for us because we don’t get paid the same as men do. Then along comes the internet and everything changes except no one told us.

Marriages start to end, we realise it actually isn’t possible to have a career and kids without killing ourselves trying and suddenly the future doesn’t look how we thought it would.

So there are our parents living out their best lives with houses that they bought for basically nothing that are paid off and now worth a fortune, they’ve got pensions, savings, and occasionally like to comment that if we just worked harder, didn’t spend our money on fancy coffees, then we could have had this too.

Then along come Gen Z, who are basically born with a smart phone in their hand and fluent in social media. But they don’t see it as cringe to show up on there, they see the opportunity, they see that the rules have changed and they start cleaning up. So whilst the cost of everything is still going up, they are finding ways of earning money that doesn’t require a degree or student debt and not only means that they can afford this life, but they also have the time to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, here we are somehow having landed in our 40s or 50s, looking around us wondering what on earth happened. This is not what we were promised.

So if you’re here too, feeling like you missed the memo somehow, then yeah, I get it.

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I think it’s safe to say I am fully in my midlife crisis era.

And I have got to be honest — I am so unbelievably here for it.

When I look back on me as a new mum in my 20s, or even me as a not-so-new mum in my 30s, I was so uncertain about who I was that it’s no wonder I was so easily moulded into whatever version of me someone else wanted me to be.

And the crazy thing is that now I see so clearly that version of me — the one trying so desperately to fit in — goes all the way back to my teens. Completely changing who I was in an effort to belong.

But here I am now, never more myself than in this very moment.

And the strangest thing has happened.

The relationships I have left in my life feel more genuine than they ever have. Yes, I’ve lost some people along the way, but in doing so, I’ve come to realise they were never really my people in the first place.

So I wonder… what happens to us as women that means it takes until our 40s to stop caring what other people think? To be brave enough to live in a way that makes us happy, and not for the benefit of those watching?

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The house was too quiet. Too tidy. Too still.

Their little empty beds made me want to cry.

I’d sit on the sofa, not knowing what to do with myself, half-watching TV, half-scrolling, waiting for them to get home so I could step back into the only identity I knew, being their mum.

And then one day, it hit me.

I did not want to get to the end of my life and realise I only lived half of it.

That thought scared me more than the silence.

So I made a decision. I was going to learn to enjoy my own company. Not distract myself from the loneliness by manically over planning and over filling my time but actually enjoy being alone.

If I’m honest, I really didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to. I’d spent my entire adult life either with a partner, with my kids, or wishing I was. I’d never just... been with me.

So I started small.

I took myself on a sunrise walk. Then a solo cinema trip. Then a solo coffee date with a book and my phone on Do Not Disturb.

At first, it felt incredibly awkward, kind of indulgent in an uncomfortable way and if I’m honest, a little bit sad.

But slowly, something shifted. I began to realise that nobody is paying any attention to what I’m doing and I mean that in a really positive way. While I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop feeling as though everyone is looking at me, probably thinking I’m a loser, they most certainly are not. Most people are too wrapped up in what they’re doing to notice and anyone that does has probably only realised that you’re on your own because, if they’re honest, they wish they were brave enough to do the same thing or they’re being hassled by a gaggle of kids and would give anything for the chance to drink their coffee while it’s actually hot!

Anyway, if I’m honest, it took a while but those moments became little pockets of peace. Then joy. Then something I actually looked forward to. And as I became more comfortable doing things solo, I became more adventurous with the things I chose to do.

Now, when the kids are away, I still miss them. But I also look forward to my own company. To doing exactly what I want, trying new things and discovering new places, without explaining or compromising or waiting until someone wants to come with me.

If you’re navigating that strange, aching space between alone and lonely, I urge you to start dating yourself, because the relationship you have with yourself is the most important one there is and it’s beautiful if you take the time to nurture it.

Being alone is a skill. And it’s one you can get really, really good at and really, really enjoy.

I’ve put together a little guide of all the things that I found useful and things that I’ve tried, to help you get started.

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