The things that resonated with you this year

The Shift’s ten most popular pieces of 2024 (paywall-free til the end of December) and what I learnt from my viral post

Earlier this week when I was scanning my stats to see which of my pieces had been most resonant with readers this year (yes, this is how I get my kicks. I’m a data nerd, what can I tell you?) I discovered a few not especially surprising truths.

1. Women are angry. They are very angry. Furious. Incandescent. As you will see from the list below.

2. By the same token, we are ready to embrace change - in love, in life, in work, in selfhood - and we are learning that selfish is not a dirty word. Think about it. Self-ish. What’s bad about that?

3. Finally finally finally midlife women’s concerns are becoming part of mainstream conversation and, as I suspected they would, millennial women are grabbing the menopause mantle and running with it. See this menopause series, Night Sweats, that ran on The Cut earlier this month. I mean could you imagine it even a couple of years ago? To be absolutely honest, I can’t imagine even having suggested it on The Pool. Whether that says more about me, the team, society or all three is a debate for another time.

Which brings me to 4 - and that is this: in rereading The Shift’s top post of the year I have discovered… I am not as well as I thought I was. I don’t say this lightly. Let me explain. My biggest post by a landslide was The Picture That Prompted A Life Change, published in June, it has been read 62,000 times (for context, my posts average 10-15,000) and is still going. Six months in, barely a day passes where I don’t get a comment or a message from someone who’s stumbled across it and is nodding (or howling) in recognition.

The piece, if you haven’t read it (which I get is unlikely because you’re here) is a mea culpa; a self-admonishment of the obsessively busy busy busy workaholic I was for most of my life, and what it cost me. Clue: a lot. My health and my sanity. Repeatedly. I wrote it as someone who, I thought, was through the other side. Not cured, exactly because I don’t believe you’re ever cured from any addiction, be it drink, drugs or work. But self-aware, certainly. On the busy wagon.

Then I reread it this morning and realised that I still recognised some of the ticks I claimed to have kicked into touch; rapidly followed by this excellent post by Chelsea Bieker about how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can get in the way of telling our stories. In it she talks about how we use busy-ness (every time I type busy-ness, predictive text tries to change it to business which tells you all you need to know…) to get in the way of doing what we say we want to do. Of one client Bieker says, she was “Undeniably busy. Undeniably important. Undeniably needed.”

Uh-oh, how undeniably recognisable is that? We are never over busy-busy-busy, at best we are in recovery from it.

Even after everything I’ve learnt, I am still covertly (or not) more than a bit preoccupied with my own busy-ness and I am letting that get in the way of what I really should be doing. Of what I actually deep inside want to do but, let’s be honest, am probably a bit scared of: writing the damn book.

So take this as a(nother) mea culpa. That photo did change my life. Every word of my number one piece of 2024 is true, but it will only stay true if I keep calling myself out on my own BS. If I stop hiding behind busy-busy-busy. And then get out of my own way.

Anyway!

All of this is to say, I have had a crazy wonderful year here on Substack. Since last January, my subscribers have tripled most likely because of the aforementioned piece (hello! And thank you) and my paying subscribers have doubled (and an even bigger thank you to you, I can only continue to be here because of you). It’s just as well because, in truth, the podcast climate has been a bit ikky this year. When I started The Shift podcast back in late 2020, nobody wanted to talk to or about middle-aged women. (I know because established media institutions and publishers told me so.) Now, of course, it’s a different story. Celebrities have jumped on the bandwagon (let’s see how many of them are still here in a year’s time…) and where celebrities go, advertisers follow. Not listeners. Advertisers. And in podcast land, where it’s free to listen 99.9% of the time, it’s advertisers not listeners who keep the lights on.

So, if The Shift is thriving, which it continues to do, it’s because of you, here, week in week out, showing your appreciation. So thank you. Thank you so much for being here. For commenting, liking and sharing, for telling your friends about the podcast and the newsletter. For getting involved. As a present to you, my 16,000+ shifters, here are the top ten pieces of 2024, every single one paywall free till the end of the year.

(And if you feel like upgrading your subscription as a gift to self (and me) you know what to do.)

Happy holidays

Sxx

#10

Books to deliver a little hope this Christmas

#9

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them”

#8

"There's a tipping point for women where the anger penny drops, and they think, WTF?!"

#7

Notes to my ten years younger self

#6

It's time to write ourselves a new story

#5

Five years of watching the conversation around menopause change

#4

When do you stop being two people?

#3

All* of my friends are ending their marriages

#2

"Women of a certain age" are full of rage and sick of everyone's shit

#1 (by a mile)