What Starting Over at 30 Taught Me About Life

Now, before I begin, I know there will be hordes of readers collectively rolling their eyes at the title of this post. Thirty is not old. Your life is not over at 30. In fact, I would argue quite passionately now that the opposite is true.

But when you are 30 and starting your life again from scratch, none of that feels particularly reassuring.

Thirty is a funny age. By then, many of the people you grew up with are no longer at the beginning of their adult lives. They are well into them. The careers they started after university have been gathering momentum for almost a decade. They have job titles that sound important, pensions, promotions and some idea of where they might be heading next. They are getting engaged and married. They are buying houses. Some are beginning to have children.

There is a sense that everybody has got going.

And there I was, at 30, doing almost exactly the opposite.

I had just walked away from a relationship that had lasted for ten years, almost my entire adult life. I had no real career history to speak of, no impressive CV to dust off and send around, and no great plan for what came next. I wasn’t leaving one established life for another. There was no exciting new job waiting for me, no new relationship, no carefully prepared escape route.

I was simply leaving.

I remember looking at the lives of people around me and feeling as though they had spent their twenties laying bricks, one on top of another, and now they were beginning to see the shape of the life they had built.

I felt as though I had just knocked mine down.

What I couldn’t possibly have known then was that starting again at 30 would become one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Starting from scratch sounds somewhat romantic when you know how the story ends. At the time, there was nothing particularly romantic about it.

When my boyfriend and I decided to part ways, I had been living in Edinburgh for just three months. I didn’t have any friends there yet and we were only just emerging from a long, harsh winter. It was a bleak time in most respects, but of all the uncertainties I remember from those months, there is one feeling that has stayed with me more clearly than any other.

Nowhere in the world felt like home.

I don’t say that for dramatic effect. I mean it quite literally. My hometown had always been somewhere I wanted to escape from, and I knew I couldn’t go back there and build the life I wanted. Edinburgh was new and, if I’m being completely truthful, I had already decided it wasn’t really my vibe. It felt far away. It was cold. It rained endlessly. Everywhere else on the map suddenly seemed impossibly big.

If you have ever felt homeless in the world, you will understand how frightening that feeling can be. Not homelessness in the literal sense, of course, but that peculiar feeling of looking at the entire world and not being able to point to a single place and think: that’s where I belong.

I wasn’t earning much money either. I had managed to document parts of my life on Instagram and gather around 25,000 followers, it certainly wasn’t a career. It wasn’t paying the bills.

But strangely, that little corner of the internet was also where I saw my greatest hope.

I have always had an ability to spot light at the end of a dark tunnel, even when there is only the faintest glimmer of it. Twenty-five thousand followers wasn’t an enormous audience, but the people who were there were loyal. They talked to me. They listened. They came back. I knew there was something in that.

I just had to work out what to do with it.

This was also the beginning of lockdown. Like everybody else, I suddenly had a great deal of time at home, and I remember searching YouTube for things I actually wanted to watch. I wanted something beautiful and comforting. I wanted to learn things, but I didn’t want to be lectured. I wanted the feeling of sitting down with somebody who knew something useful and was happy to share it with me.

I couldn’t quite find it.

And somewhere in that frustration, I began to wonder whether I could make it myself.

I had been sharing ideas about interiors, entertaining and creating a beautiful home on Instagram for years. Perhaps I could take those same subjects and make longer videos about them. Nothing preachy. Nothing that suggested you needed a particular income, house or way of living to participate. I wanted to make videos that felt soothing and encouraging, where anybody could watch and take away one little idea that might make their own life feel nicer.

So I made a video about afternoon tea.

I was enormously nervous. If you watch it now, you can see it. I knew nothing about making YouTube videos. I didn’t have some grand strategy behind it. But I did know about afternoon tea.

More importantly, I knew how to welcome people.

I knew how to put something on a table with care. I knew how to make someone walking through the door feel that their arrival mattered. I knew that hospitality had very little to do with how grand your house was or how much money you had spent, and everything to do with the feeling you created for another person.

That was what I talked about.

And, rather wonderfully, people watched.

What happened next was, by any reasonable measure, incredibly lucky.

My YouTube channel grew quickly. I was in the right place, at the right time, with an idea that people happened to be looking for. I know that isn’t the usual experience and I would never pretend otherwise.

But if you have been reading or watching me for a while, you will probably have heard me say that I try to live with the belief that something wonderful is always about to happen. It might be the greatest guiding light of my life.

Back then, I needed that belief more than ever.

Because although the channel took off quickly, my life didn’t magically transform with it. YouTube revenue takes time to build and I was starting with quite literally no money. What might now look like a rather lovely overnight success story was, in reality, followed by about three years of working incredibly hard before I felt properly on my feet.

What made those years easier was the extraordinary encouragement I received from the people watching. I know I talk about my audience often, but my gratitude for them is completely genuine. At a time when so much of my life felt uncertain, thousands of people I had never met were telling me to keep going.

And so I did.

I think this is where we sometimes misunderstand the idea of starting again. We imagine there will be a moment when the new life arrives and the uncertainty disappears. There wasn’t one for me. My new life was built slowly, while I was already living it.

One decision. One video. One opportunity. One new person. One small bit of confidence at a time.

When we try to imagine our future, we can only really build it from the things we already know. The people we have met. The places we have been. The opportunities we know exist. We take all the pieces currently scattered around us and try to arrange them into some picture of what our life might become.

The problem is that so many of the pieces haven’t arrived yet.

At 30, I couldn’t have imagined most of what would fill the next six years of my life because much of it simply didn’t exist for me yet. There were people I hadn’t met, places I hadn’t been, opportunities I didn’t know existed and parts of myself I hadn’t discovered.

That is what I would want anybody starting again to remember.

The emptiness in front of you can feel frightening because you mistake what you cannot see for nothing being there.

They are not the same thing.

You have absolutely no idea what might walk into your life next year. You don’t know who you will meet, where you will go, what you will discover you are good at, or which seemingly insignificant decision will quietly send your life in a completely different direction.

And yes, sometimes things happen because we work very hard for them. Sometimes they happen because we are brave enough to make a change. And sometimes, as I discovered with YouTube, we simply get lucky.

But we have to leave some room in our lives for luck to find us.

There is one final thing I understand now that I didn’t understand then.

I wasn’t actually starting from scratch.

I may not have had much money or a conventional career behind me. I may have been single and unsure where in the world I belonged. But I wasn’t starting with nothing.

I was starting with 30 years of life.

I knew myself better than I had at 20. I knew what I was good at. I was beginning to understand what mattered to me and, perhaps just as importantly, what didn’t. I knew what it felt like to stay in something because it was familiar, and I had discovered that I was brave enough to leave when it no longer felt right.

None of those things appeared on a CV or in my bank account, but they turned out to be rather useful.

I think this is what I would say to anybody who finds themselves starting again, at 30 or at any other age. Please don’t confuse an uncertain future with a hopeless one.

You cannot see most of what is coming.

You haven’t met all the people who will love you yet. You haven’t visited all the places that will make you feel at home. You haven’t had all your best ideas. There are things you will become good at that you haven’t even tried. There are ordinary days ahead of you on which something will happen that changes the course of everything.

Six years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the life I have now.

And perhaps the nicest thing I have learned from all of this is that I have no idea what my life will look like six years from now either.

This time, I find that rather exciting.

Nicolas x