Everyone has that one friend who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. You know the sort who would tell a room full of adults aged 10 that they were going to be a musician – and have the talent to back it up.
Well, I was that person. I knew from the age of 12 that I wanted to be a journalist. Before I knew what a journalist was, I wanted to be one. I wanted to interview people and ask nosy questions. I wanted to be working on a “story” and be onto the next thing the week after. I wanted to pitch. I wanted to open a magazine or newspaper and see my name in the byline.
My dad would bring home a copy of Time Out magazine in his briefcase every Thursday and we’d thumb through it with such ferocity that the pages were ripped within an hour. On a Sunday, my mum would buy The Sunday Times and I’d watch the rapture with which she read AA Gill’s review. I started reading it too, and I was hooked.
I did my first internship aged 16 for the Barnet Times. Over the next few years, I spent time in newsrooms, fashion cupboards, glossy magazines, and (unglossy) post rooms. I did hours of transcriptions and made a lot of tea. As tends to be the case for us precocious little sods, eventually I made it.
By the age of 22, I had my first job as a staff writer on a women’s magazine. And you know what? Despite the eye-wateringly hard graft, it was everything I dreamed it would be and then some. I never looked back.
I spent 15 years climbing that ladder: I wrote for newspapers, I went on radio and TV. I travelled to Los Angeles for a story. One of my articles even got optioned by Amazon Film Studios and I wrote a screenplay. I ended as deputy editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
As time passed, things changed. I left journalism and took a new, exciting opportunity in branded content and for the first time in my adult life, I was earning real money. I met a man, had a baby.
Then, at the tail end of my maternity leave in 2024, I was made redundant and, because my career was so inextricably linked to my personality and entire sense of self, it felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world. I was 39.
For over a decade, I had let my career be the thing that defined me. It was just easier that way. If I didn’t want to talk about how sh** my love life was, about my mum getting Parkinson’s or my dad ending up in hospital with a heart attack, about my niggling fear I was never quite as successful or creative as my peers – then I could talk about whatever cool thing I was doing at work and it was all ok.
Until suddenly, I couldn’t, and it wasn’t.
Because, without even really realising it, I had let my career plans be the scaffold for all the plans I had for my life. If, for example, I’d reasoned, I was an Editor in Chief by the time I was 45 (still something I planned and yearned for), then surely I’d be able to afford my dream house and dream life with the dream holidays? It wasn’t just my immediate life that was suddenly on hold – but the future I’d been working towards since my early twenties.
At the start of 2025, I came back to work on a fixed-term contract which came to an end a few months ago. I also fell pregnant again (not really in the plan for then but we were delighted nonetheless) making securing another permanent role about 80,000 times more challenging.
I turned 40 and went from someone who planned two career steps ahead to someone who has no idea what I want to be. For the first time ever, I have no plan for what comes next, and, whilst terrifying, it’s also liberating.
Look, hitting 40, having a young baby, nursery fees, a mortgage and no career plans is certainly no picnic. But it’s also forcing me to think about things I have genuinely never let myself think about before. Like… what job suits the life I live now – instead of how can I bend my life around the job I have? Do I want to work in an office five days a week? Can I even manage that with childcare costs?
Both of my parents worked insane hours for my entire childhood, and their work ethic is still something I massively respect and take with me into everything I do.
But having a young child, another one on the way, and ageing parents with complicated health issues has fundamentally changed my outlook on life, and made me reflect on where my time really is best spent.
I still want a fulfilling career but I’ve found myself reflecting on the nature of what that work should be. Perhaps – the little voice in my head has started saying – the original plan was not the best plan after all.
Having some space to take stock of the industry I’ve been on the inside of, looking out for so long, has been healthy. The mid-career emergency stop I didn’t know I needed. The minute I started telling people – peers, strangers in my local coffee shop, colleagues – what had happened and how it made me feel, I realised so many Millennial and Gen X women just like me, those raised in the ‘You can have it all’ era of the late 80s, have also found themselves on uncertain career terrain. I am certainly not alone.
With AI throwing entire industries and careers into disarray and downsizing and restructuring part of working life in 2025, it’s not just me processing a mid-life career reckoning. A slightly painful but necessary way of having to figure out a new and more sustainable way of working and of proving to everyone – mainly to yourself – how adaptable we really are.
I’m off to have my second baby in a few weeks with absolutely no clue what I’ll do when I need to return to work. And, I have made my peace with that. For a type A planner, this has taken months of reckoning, late-night panics, tears, job interviews, tantrums and meticulously thought-out lists of “to dos”, but if this year has taught me anything, it’s that it’s actually ok to have no plan at all.
To play the hand you are dealt rather than endlessly trying to strategise about your next move (and that of every other player around you). This is an acknowledgement for anyone that needs to hear it, that having a plan – whilst comforting – can also trip you up and leave you doubly bereft if it fails, then if you never had one to begin with.
So here’s to 2026, no plans, no expectations. And you know what? Sounds pretty good to me.
