Welcome to The Shift

Whether you're entering midlife, slap bang in the middle of it or out the other side, come on in

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Can you believe The Shift is over a year old? How did that happen? As some of you know, I’ve decided to celebrate that milestone by making the move to Substack where, I hope, we can really make this community grow. If you’re already here and signed up - thank you! I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your support. If you’ve just somehow landed here by accident, well, I hope you’ll soon feel you’ve come to the right place.

Anyway, I thought I’d start by telling you a bit about how The Shift came to be.

After many years editing women's magazines (Cosmo, Red, Company, Just Seventeen (RIP)), I sat back and looked around one day, and thought "WTF?!" I mean, seriously. Where had all the older women gone? And by older, I don't mean "older", I just mean not 25. Or 30. You could count the number of us getting airtime on one hand. And d'you want to know why? Patriarchy, obv. But also, advertisers. Because the people who book advertising – white, male, usually under 35 – can't get their head around the "value" of women they don't want to... well, you get the picture.

So I decided to do something about it…. 

Towards the end of 2020 I launched The Shift with Sam Baker, a podcast where I talk to a wide range of women in midlife and way beyond about life, love, work, sex, identity, money, health, shoes, representation, vanishing eyebrows, reinvention… whatever they feel like chatting about. I started it because I wanted to hear these women’s voices, their experiences, their WISDOM. And, it turns out, so did millions of others.

Because a ‘shift’ occurs when you hit 40ish (could be later, could be earlier, everyone’s different) and it’s arguably the greatest, most interesting, most wisdom-filled time in a woman’s life. The problem is, no one wants to talk about it, let alone visualise what this point in a woman’s life looks like. It’s a time of change, it’s a time of evolution, it’s a time of chucking out all the crap that’s been holding you back.

So, yes, The Shift was born out of my own experience of turning 46 and hitting the peri-maelstrom without a clue what was happening to me. (And I say that as someone who worked in women’s magazines for the first 25 years of their professional life, so what hope was there for anyone without a health editor on tap?!) I lost my way, I lost my identity, I lost my waistline, for a long time I lost myself. But when the (brain) fog cleared, I realised life on the other side is unexpectedly liberating and I wanted to shout about it. 

So here I am, shouting!

I want to provide a safe space where we can talk about the things that matter. That’s why The Shift is now here on Substack. I have always longed for a space where we can talk and share ideas; a place where we can chat about all the things that concern us – from the constant battle to care for ageing parents while doing a million other things to feeling like a bad feminist for just about everything to the best books we’ve read lately to the total impossibility of finding a decent pair of jeans if you have the hips of an adult woman to the BS “rules” society tries to force on women so we don’t dare to step out of our box.

So, that’s what you’re going to get right here.

If you’ve already upgrade to paid, thank you SO much. Seeing so many of you coming over from our old home over the past few days has really made it all worthwhile.

If you haven’t, take a look around. About a third of the posts are free to read so you can get a feel for what The Shift is all about. If you like what you see, why not take a punt?

After a lifetime of being told “askers don’t get”!  – I have to admit, asking for money to support a creative project like this still gives me the ick. And I realise it might be new for you, too. But I have always thought it’s important to pay creatives for the work they do. And between this newsletter and the podcast, The Shift takes up pretty much all the hours in my day.

Of course, if you can’t afford to support this Substack and the work I do here, The Shift with Sam Baker podcast is free to listen to (though any extra bits will live here, exclusively for members) and free subscribers will get at least one free post a month.

Also, if you love my work and want to show your appreciation as a one-off, you can always just buy me a coffee.

If you’d asked me three years ago, when I decided to teach myself how to make a podcast and recorded six episodes using a dodgy mic and Garageband, I could never have believed The Shift would be where it is now: three million podcast listens and rising fast and over 20,000 newsletter subscribers. I always believed podcasts + newsletters had the potential to = the new magazine, but this is still a real pinch-me moment. (Yes, pinch-me moments do still happen at 56!)

I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved so far and am excited for what comes next. I really hope you are, too.

Sx

P.S. Here’s a picture of Sausage the no-tail-cat, “helping” me work.