Coming To Terms with Being Middling at Middle Age

Over my holiday, I read my friend and Sunday Times bestselling author Emma Gannon’s new manual for life, The Success Myth, cover to cover. You might have read one of Emma’s other books including The Multi-Hyphen Method, her novel Olive or her Substack, The Hyphen, or listened to her long running podcast, Ctrl Alt Delete podcast. The woman is a phenomenon and I very much enjoyed her new book, particularly the takeaways at the end of each chapter which I have been using to help me prioritise some of the plans and ideas I have for my near-future. I nodded along at so much and where I had slightly different feelings, I appreciated the insight from a different vantage point. Generally, Emma’s words and conclusions supported my understanding that most aspects of success are a state of mind. 

For a really very long time, like so many of us, I conflated success with perfection (being the best) and validation from others. I cared about being perceived as successful, not actually the feeling of being so (who cares if it looks good?). In order to get to a place where success is something I feel rather than communicate, I’ve had to lower my standards and engage far more in my experience of doing the multiple roles I do than winning at them. I’ve also had to get over myself. A lot.

I have always wanted to be a writer, but in the grand scheme of publishing and journalism, it’s not like I’ve been a sellout star over the past two decades of concerted effort. While I’m not saying I haven’t achieved wonderful things, amongst editors and publishers, my byline isn’t exactly all that. Unlike Emma and many of my other journalistic and literary friends, I haven’t won any awards, nor have I penned any bestsellers under my own name. I’ve never had a column in a national publication and people certainly don’t utter my name in the same breath as the ‘voices of our generation’. I say this all with no false modesty, it’s just accurate to say that I’m not being chased down every other week to add my comment next to other luminaries or speak at a literary event. Twenty-five-year-old me would be gutted about all of this and there will always be a voice in my head saying that the absence of accolades and recognition is because I’m just not good enough. Maybe that is true, but it’s also kind of irrelevant.

What I know for sure is that my writing has been meaningful to some people. I have connected deeply on a private level with hundreds of readers over the years and thousands of you open my emails every week. I make a living from my writing and legitimately love every day at my desk, even the hard ones. I’ve had a lot of private success through the books I’ve ghost-written and plenty of validation from editors at some of our biggest publishing houses, so it’s also not like I’m operating entirely in my own fantasy world (unlike when I’m singing karaoke at 2am and become worryingly convinced of my musicality, for example). My career is far from over, so perhaps being a safe pair of hands and a sharp tool will one day translate to splashy success. But likely not. Aged thirty-nine, I’m absolutely fine with that and all I hope is that I continue to get the opportunity to do what I love, keep a roof over my head and that my words cut through to readers that need them. I am able to convey my thoughts in prose and that is special enough. I don’t need to be the most fêted writer in town, I’m absolutely fine in the pack. Today I feel it’s alright to be middling, because I get everything I need out of it, even if that’s not quite everything I might have once wanted. I wish I had know this when I started out and focused my ambitious energy in the right direction.

When I really consider it, I have been middlingly successful at nearly everything I’ve turned my hand to, at least publicly. After ten years of ‘gramming, I’m still a micro-influencer, well shy of the 100k initial tastemaker gold standard. Lots of my peers who started in the game well after me have overtaken me in terms of followers, commercial projects and the status of the brands they work with. The top drawer labels I worked with when I was ‘Katherine at’ (insert any of the publications I worked for) have never worked commercially with the more recent ‘Katherine at’ (home, mostly). I also have a lot of close friends who have been much more successful at grid life than me, not least my bestie. Again, I didn’t always take this as well, but I’ve given up on those feelings too, because comparison is just such a sad drag. I know first-hand what forcing yourself to make content you don’t care about or believe in can do to your happiness and I’d prefer to be less successful visibly in the social media whirl than trying to score points against an algorithm. I’m still incredibly motivated, but it’s not driven from a place of deficiency, much more it’s an excited curiosity about what I could one day do and be.

To be entirely fair to myself, I’ve never been mainstream in terms of my style or my personality, so I can hardly expect to be winning the digital popularity contest. I wang on about a bunch of unsexy things like vaginas and sometimes hating my boyfriend rather than cultivating an easily digestible digital avatar. And for some of the brands that used to work with me when I was younger, I get why we don’t collaborate anymore. I’m a nearly-wed West London mum of two about to turn 40, who wears either a lot of quilting or fully see-thru dresses, which is both confusing and not exactly the target market for lots of labels. Last time I got married, Versace lent me a dress for my engagement party, and I spent years on the list in New York, Paris and London for most of the luxury catwalks. But I left my magazine career and that was the cost. The benefit has far outweighed that, in terms of my contentment and happiness. In careers, things change and I am exponentially a better writer, happier in myself and more financially and emotionally secure than when I was deemed more important professionally. Sure, it stung when the Gannis stopped inviting me to parties, but you have to get a grip. I’m where I should be—in my niche, taking pictures and writing about things I care about, speaking to people who care what I have to say and living an authentically marmite life at each turn. That’s not for every reader just as it’s not for every brand. There’s no offence to be taken.

Finally, I suppose there’s my role in the family. Clearly, I’m not winning any prizes for motherhood as anyone who has ever read any of my work will know. Lord, I have struggled with so many aspects of the wifey life. I give my family every last drop I have available to them, it just often seems my tank is too shallow. I need time off or I stop being the best person to look after them; I need fulfilment outside of family life or I unravel and snap. I’m definitely more fun than I once was and having two young boys has made me less uptight. But I’m no natural. I also hate the choring and bristle at the emotional load so much so that I can’t stop myself from complaining about it. I could (I have) felt terrible about all of this, but what’s the f’ing point? I’m not going to send myself into an insecurity spiral because of my shortcomings, far better to accept where you’re at and give yourself grace for the good you at least try to bring to the dinner table. I also think: let’s see how it all comes out in the wash. My mum was hardly a model parent, yet both my brother and I are obsessed with her. Maybe that will be my story in 20 years’ time.

There are things I dream about being more successful at: managing my anxiety, creating more housing security for my family (which yes, means earning more money, but that’s not necessarily connected to public success) and keeping hold of my possessions (i.e.: not leaving them on the district line). But having my name in lights? That shit is a trap, because those bulbs are always going to dim, then what?

Overall, I do very much feel that I have ‘made it’ even though on paper, I suppose I haven’t hit my KPIs. If you add up all the middlings, it makes a bespoke buffet of something which feels holistically valuable in my eyes and that makes me feel successful (and incredibly grateful) every day. I feel this way even though I still don’t have the things that I had once believed were necessary for success. Like a house or a bestseller or a hot by-line. Or a large Loewe handbag collection (still holding out for this one). I think one of the biggest keys to my shift in attitude has been the many failures, fuck ups and heartbreaks of my life. Divorce before 30, being made redundant, not being particularly well acknowledged within my industry, rejected at times by my kids, feeling like a lonely loser… I mean if I chose to lean into any of these, I could very easily be convinced that I’m a failure. It’s like there’s an upside-down narrative stalking all of us every day and obviously in my moments of weakness (PMT), I indulge it. We can all be savagely hard on ourselves and as someone who works in criticism, it can be difficult not to exact that same brutality on myself. But it’s not ‘true’. Even if other people might note my middling status, it doesn’t make it ‘true’. It’s just another storyline in the matrix, which mostly I choose not to peruse.

I may not have everything that I want, but I am the woman I always dreamt of being at the middle of my life. I’m not even going to get into the things I appreciate about myself, but they are many, varied and layered. When I say I feel like a 10, it’s not because I think I’m the most beautiful or clever or witty or ‘successful’ (lol). That’s all a sham. I’m a 10 because I have shaped my standards around my strengths and accepted myself and my limitations along every avenue and metric across my life. If success is in the eye of the beholder, choose the version that suits you and your life as it is, and the rest will figure itself out. I’ll always be go-getting, but I’ll never talk myself down on that journey. If I die tomorrow, I’d leave with no regrets outside of the people I’m leaving behind. Young people need to know that success is a palette of achievement and acceptance and that raw ambition for fame, riches and adulation rarely ends in contentment that you feel internally. True success just looks so different to how we’re brought up to believe it will. I’m enough already and I’ll bet my bottom dollar that you are too.