‘I DARED TO CHANGE MY LIFE & FEEL ALIVE AGAIN’
What suits you at one age, may not work at another, but it takes a brave person to do something about it. Lucy Kellaway reveals how she transformed every aspect of her life and discovered a new, happier version of herself
How making changes can improve your future
When I was a mere young thing of 55, my life looked like this: I lived in a big family house in north London with a man I’d been married to for 25 years. Every day, I would cycle to the offices of the Financial Times, where I’d been a journalist for 30 years. In the evenings, I would cook for my four nearly grown-up children and for my increasingly frail father who lived nearby.
Fast-forward six years. I live in a modern wooden house in east London with my youngest son.
My father is dead; my marriage is over. I am no longer a newspaper columnist. I am a schoolteacher in a Hackney comprehensive; the oldest person in my staffroom by at least two decades. My new life might not suit most people, and it certainly wouldn’t have suited a younger version of me. But, for 61-year-old me, it is the best possible life I can imagine.
If you’d known me in my ‘before’ era, you might have said my life was better-than-great – enviable, even.
My job was prestigious; I wrote about whatever I liked and had a loyal base of readers who said nice things about my work (alongside the few who would leave comments every week saying, ‘I can’t believe anyone gets paid to write this bilge’). Our big home was always filled with children and close friends. What more could a woman want?
Yet by the time I reached my mid-50s, I became aware that something was wrong. It seems trite to say that I wasn’t happy.
Happiness is an odd thing – the more you search for it, the harder it is to find. And it comes and goes. What I was, more than unhappy, was absent – I was merely going through the motions of my life. My husband, David, and I were not actively miserable but had, through so many years of focusing on the demands of careers and children, grown too far apart to glue ourselves back together again. Still, we kept going, while living in separate parts of the house. I had been brought up to think that once you had children, you owed it to them to stick it out. So that, I suppose, is what we were doing.
At the same time, I was profoundly stuck at work. Writing no longer gave me the pleasure it once had and thinking up ideas for my columns began to feel like getting blood out of a stone. Yet I didn’t feel able to quit. The FT had been my security blanket for decades, so without ever asking myself if I could do things differently, I ploughed on. Repeat, repeat, repeat…
When change came, it was from the least expected quarter: a property website. I’d always loved to look at them, and one day, my younger daughter showed me a picture of a modern house she’d seen for sale online. I looked at the picture of the triangular-shaped wooden building on her computer screen and made an appointment to see it, just for fun.
All fun vanished the minute I stepped over the threshold – I was smitten. I knew I had to live there. I felt that inside this open space, with its bright orange worktop and goldfish pond outside, the staleness would vanish. I would, in some obscure way, be reborn – cooler, happier, all-round better.
Later, with much trepidation, I asked my husband how he would feel if we sold the house – and split
I would, in some obscure way, be reborn – cooler, happier, all-round better
up. He was briefly taken aback, but he agreed. And so, in August 2016, two pantechnicons pulled up outside our house in Highbury. I cried bitter tears on the steps of our old family house, only to dry them in fickle excitement, arriving less than an hour later at my new one. As I unpacked my things on to the orange counter, reeling at what I’d just done, I thought that was the end of the life changes. But in fact, it was just the beginning.
INSPIRED TO TEACH
Less than a year after I moved, my father, who had been unwell for years, died. Lots of people say that when their parents die, they face their own mortality. But Dad’s death had the opposite effect on me. I was both grief-stricken and liberated at the same time. It didn’t make me feel that I could die at any minute; it made me feel almost immortal. If Dad could live until 90 with so much wrong with him, how much longer might I live for?
I decided I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. If I had decades left, surely it wasn’t too late to retrain in something different. But doing what? I realised that what I wanted from a job in my late-50s was entirely different from what I’d wanted 30 years earlier. Then, I’d been after fun and glamour; I wanted to show off and see my name in the paper. Over time, these things had worn away to nothing. Now,
I wanted to be useful. I wanted to do more than write sarky newspaper columns. I wanted to do something that was of real value to other people.
And so, like a needle returning to its groove, I decided I would become useful by retraining as a teacher. My oldest daughter had been teaching for five years and my mum had been a much-loved English teacher at the school I’d gone to. When she’d died 10 years earlier, I’d briefly flirted with the idea of taking on her baton and becoming a teacher myself. Back then, I was 47 years old, which, I decided, was simply too old. I didn’t dare do anything so radical and I was still too attached to the status that came with my journalistic career.
Ten years on, having lost both parents, I no longer thought I was too old. And I did dare – because I’d realised something interesting and unexpected: the older you get, the lower the stakes become. I had already proved myself at something, so, if teaching was a disaster, at least I’d tried.
As I warmed to the idea and talked to everyone I met about it, they all either said, ‘How brave’ (by which they meant I’d lost my senses) or,
‘I’d love to do something like that, too.’
So, I decided to set up a charity, Now Teach, to encourage people like me to become teachers. One former journalist, who had become a teacher in middle age, emailed to tell me it was ‘an act of
I wanted to do something that was of real value to other people
astonishing hubris’. She’d found it relentless, had quit, and warned that I should think again before playing the Pied Piper.
At the time, I shrugged it off. I thought I’d be able to hack it. Alas, in those early days, I was rubbish. In my first year as a trainee teacher, when I felt like I was failing, my mind returned constantly to that woman’s warning.
I had traded a job I was good at and respected in for one where I was a floundering novice; so incompetent I could not control the class. Once, I held a detention that got so out of hand, a detainee said, ‘I feel sorry for you, Miss.’ To be pitied by an 11-year-old felt hard indeed.
Now, four years in, I’ve largely forgotten the horrors of those early days. Teacher training is rather like childbirth – I have a distant memory of it being unpleasant, but I know that wasn’t the point.
The point is that I feel alive again.
I love being surrounded by boisterous people at the beginning of their lives. If I went into teaching wanting to be useful, then I have what I wanted and much more. Even on the most chaotic days, my students know something that they didn’t know when they came into my classroom. That feels good. I also feel proud of the ageing Now Teachers (500 or so), most of whom have forgiven me for the pain
I put them through, and feel the joy that I do about changing their lives at the 11th hour.
QUITE A CHANGE
Deciding to end a marriage and becoming a teacher were both huge decisions, but there was another more trivial change I made at the same time; giving up hair dye and going grey. I had thought about doing it for a decade; I hated the artificial brown and the grey roots that showed after a fortnight. But still, I went on – I didn’t want to look old.
A few months after I decided to teach, a friend said I must continue with the brown dye because I had started dating, and ‘no man wants to date a woman with grey hair’. This made me so cross that I went to the hairdresser’s on a whim, had most of my hair cut off, and had white streaks put through it.
My friend was right: I instantly looked 10 years older. But I didn’t care. My new self doesn’t need to do what others are doing. My new self doesn’t see any virtue
To be pitied by an 11-year-old felt hard indeed
in looking young. If being in my 60s means doing new things and pleasing myself for the first time ever, then where is the harm in looking like I’m in my 60s? And if a man doesn’t want to go out with me because he doesn’t like my hair, I wouldn’t like him either.
So, this is the new version of me: I have grey hair, I dress to please myself, live in a modern house, work with young people all day, and I’m starting again professionally and romantically. On my 60th birthday in 2019, I looked around the garden at my new millennial friends and I realised that these changes, though enormous to me, are also superficial. The biggest things in my life (my children and all my old friends who were talking to my new ones) haven’t changed a jot.
There is something else that hasn’t changed either: me. I’d thought that in reinventing my life I’d somehow reinvent myself, but I was wrong. I asked a friend if she thought I’m a different person now. In a heartbeat came the answer: ‘No, you are just as annoying as you always were!’ But I can live with that. I might be the same in myself, but what I do these days is so different. And that’s quite enough change to be getting along with.
Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband And My Hair (Ebury) by Lucy Kellaway is out 1 July; nowteach.org.uk