So It Goes, Part 1: From England to the USA

I’m six days into a personal hiatus from the job market, yet I can already feel the weight of sixteen years in retail lifting away. The decision was one I should have made years ago. When a hint of burnout was already present. But the prospect of international relocations, stable income, and new challenges was always too alluring. This year, after turning 40 and losing my mother within the first three months of 2026, I finally took action.

Going into retail was a means to an end. It was 2010. I’d graduated from university with a degree in fashion journalism and had secured an internship with the illustrious design magazine, Wallpaper*. The internship started as a month-long placement as the Travel Assistant. My role, to book flights and accommodation for the magazine’s staff and coordinate articles with freelance writers. While there, I networked with other staff and managed to transfer at the end of my internship to Editorial Assistant at the magazine’s City Guide series. Here, duties shifted to fact-checking and drafting copy for inclusion in updated guides being compiled at the time.

There were two big downsides to these otherwise prized early opportunities: no pay (I classify £10 a day in expenses as no pay), and limited interactions with people away from the computer screen.

I’d recently moved in with my girlfriend at the time and was in desperate need of income; rent was due, tensions were high. So I decided to explore retail. For a reason that escapes me now, I considered the prospect of working in a luxury boutique aspirational. In hindsight, I find that naiveté a perfect encapsulation of what it was like to be living in London in my early 20s; hungry to be in the circles of wealth and luxury, but never actually being wealthy. Aside from my lack of funds, it felt like retail would provide the social interactions I was lacking in my editorial position. It seemed a good direction. I rolled the dice and started looking.

It was fortuitous that the first application I submitted received a response within a day asking for an interview. I’d never heard of the company before, but now it’s widely known for its expensive hand soap. It’s name: Aēsop. At the time, the brand had recently opened its third store in London and was looking for Sales Associates to join their team. I landed the position and ended up with the brand for eleven-and-a-half years, working up through several leadership roles in London and eventually the US. It was a fantastic time, being part of a growing brand with a tight-knit team. Where else would I have consumed large quantities of cheese and red wine over candlelight during staff meetings?

During my first year with the company, I met one of the founders of a men’s grooming and lifestyle website while working a shift. One of the biggest opportunities that retail provides is networking; you have to be comfortable marketing yourself. I wasn’t so modest that I avoided the opportunity to pitch myself as a contributor for the site. I’d been writing a personal blog (who else had a Blogspot?) for over a year. I guided him to this body of work so he could look it over and decide whether I was up to the task. A week later, he brought me on to cover press events in London. As a full-time retail employee with a steady paycheck, I found a way to balance my “real” job with writing on the side, which wasn’t paying enough on its own to live on.

All in all, I wrote for the website for five years, moving from contributor to Lifestyle Editor, then Editor-at-Large; all while maintaining my full-time job in retail. The reason for the coexisting roles? While the writing paid a little, it never fully supported the life I’d built in London. Instead, it provided additional spending money and the chance to socialize with colleagues at press events across the city. Nothing motivated me more than a free night out with a gift thrown in.

Sadly, the partnership ended on bad terms. My editor discovered I was starting development of my own website and promptly locked me out of the CMS without any communication. The sudden ejection from my role was coupled with the removal of my name from all my old articles. This back catalog became the work of a fictitious writer the site used to post articles, giving the illusion of a broader contributor headcount. Just like that, all the years of content under my name were gone.

That experience remains a core life lesson that any blossoming freelance writer should heed: Protect your work and invest time building your portfolio early on. I did not do these things. Even now, with other freelance work under my belt from over the years, I’ve yet to build a solid portfolio. More on that later.

Outside of writing lifestyle content, I’d not seen success when I tried to write fiction. There was a commitment here that was a challenge to approach. To sit with a piece of writing over an extended period was a contrast to each short article I used to knock out in a few hours. I’d written a few thousand words of fiction here and there. But my train of thought drifted; I didn’t know what the story was trying to communicate. That became a fixation that I couldn’t overcome. As a kid, my primary school’s creative writing lesson was my favorite. Being given free rein to create a story without any limitations or audience was a liberating outlet. At that age, your story only needed to be a few pages of a composition book. As an adult, the time required for writing stories was at odds with the quick, proven income generated by online content. I didn’t know then, but skills I’d find indispensable in all forms of my writing later in life had already taken root. I just needed to realize it.

Writing and retail coexisted for years before my shifting personal philosophies began to conflict with the luxury-focused content I was being commissioned to write for other sites. So, when Aēsop offered me an opportunity to take on a regional position and move to the US, I jumped at the chance. I’d just turned 30 and was ready for new horizons. I decided to commit to solely building a long-term career in retail and left writing behind as I departed the UK.

And so it was for several years. I poured my energy into the new role, traveling between Texas, Florida, New York and Tennessee, coaching and developing managers, leading store openings, and spearheading brand expansion in new markets. All very grand in the business sense. Along the way, I also got married, bought a house, and settled into my new life in the US. It was a busy time.

Then COVID arrived.

So It Goes is a personal reflection on the path that led to leaving the job market to reset, recalibrate, and revisit writing’s place in my life. Follow for upcoming parts.