The video is called The Strangest Part of Living Alone Isn’t Loneliness. For weeks I’d been making lighter videos. Humorous videos. Videos about dating, bras, the absurd realities of being a woman over fifty and starting over. Those videos took off in ways I hadn’t expected. One reached over 30,000 views. Another gathered thousands within days. The comments poured in and, because I reply to every single one, I found myself spending hours every day in conversation with strangers. Wonderful conversations, mostly. Honest conversations. But conversations all the same.

Then I sat down to make a video about something entirely different. Something quieter. Something I’d been thinking about ever since hearing a phrase on the radio that I didn’t even have time to listen to properly. The headline alone lodged itself somewhere in my mind: “Are you brave enough to bear witness to your own life, alone?” At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure why it affected me. Now I think I understand.

My video idea began as a reflection on living alone. Or at least I thought it did. What emerged instead was something about witnesses. About the small moments of life that nobody else sees. The beautiful sunset. The first ripe tomato. The ridiculous sheep. The tiny moments that seem insignificant until you realise there’s nobody standing beside you to turn to and say: “Did you see that?”

I discovered, while writing, that this wasn’t really a video about loneliness at all. It was a video about shared noticing. And perhaps more surprisingly, about the absence of it. Not all the time, just in the moment. The strange thing was that every time I thought I’d finished the script, I found myself returning to the same idea. Not sadness. Not regret. Just a quiet absence. The missing second pair of eyes. The missing witness.

And the more I sat with the subject, the more it seemed to reach beyond partners, relationships and even solitude itself. For much of my time in France, I wasn’t actually alone. I had children. There were little shadows following me around. Somebody noticing the first strawberries. Somebody bursting into a room with information that absolutely could not wait another thirty seconds. There was presence. Witnessing. Life shared in all its ordinary forms. Perhaps what I was really noticing now was not the absence of a partner but the absence of everyday witnesses just in those tiny moments.

And somewhere during the process of making the video, I started feeling unexpectedly low. Not in a way that suggested anything was wrong. Just flat. Heavy. As though I’d been carrying around a feeling without realising it.

My first instinct was to wonder what that meant. Was the cheerful version of me somehow avoiding uncomfortable truths? Was I discovering something hidden underneath my usual optimism? The more I thought about it, the less convinced I became.

Maybe the simpler explanation was the correct one. I’d spent days immersed in a subject that had no punchline. No resolution. No release. Humour has a way of tying things up neatly. You identify something absurd. Everyone laughs. The tension evaporates. Reflection doesn’t work like that. Reflection often just points at something and says: “There it is.” And then leaves it sitting there.

Perhaps that’s why I felt unsettled. Not because I had uncovered some terrible truth about my life. But because I’d spent days sitting beside a truth I’d normally walk straight past. The truth that a life can be deeply satisfying and still contain absences. That gratitude and longing can coexist. That freedom and responsibility arrive holding hands. That solitude can be beautiful and occasionally ache at exactly the same time.

I think we often imagine that adulthood involves arriving at a single answer. A single feeling. A single truth. But increasingly it seems to me that most of life is learning to hold several truths at once. To love a life and still miss parts of what once was. To choose solitude and still occasionally wish someone else had seen the sunset. To be perfectly capable of witnessing your own life and yet still feel the very human desire to share the moment.

And perhaps that’s where that radio question returns. Are you brave enough to bear witness to your own life, alone? I don’t know if I have an answer. I suspect it’s not a question you answer once. I suspect it’s a question you keep answering. In gardens. In kitchens. In quiet moments. In front of lilac bushes. And perhaps, every now and then, in the making of a YouTube video that leaves you feeling unexpectedly thoughtful long after you’ve pressed “publish”.

But none of it was the hardest part.

The hardest part was allowing myself to be visible again after spending years quietly reducing the amount of space I occupied in the world.

I don’t think I understood that fully at the time. I told myself I was “just starting a YouTube channel.” What I was actually doing was re-entering visibility. Not as a younger version of myself. Not as someone polished or particularly strategic. But as I was now. Older… softer in some ways… more certain in others. Definitely less willing to perform a version of life that no longer fitted me!

And strangely, I think people recognised that immediately.

Not because I had expertise. There are countless people online who know far more than I do about cameras, algorithms, editing and growth strategies.

But perhaps because there is something unexpectedly moving about watching someone begin before they feel fully ready. To take that jump into the darkness. Especially later in life, when we’ve often been taught that visibility belongs mainly to the young folk.

There is a particular kind of invisibility that can settle around women as we age. Not always cruelly. Sometimes almost politely, as though the world assumes we have already become who we were going to become. They assume that all of our important decisions have already been made. That our “becoming” is over.

And I think many women quietly absorb that idea without even realising it.

I probably did too.

Until one day I pressed “publish” anyway.

What surprised me most was not the fear beforehand, but the humbling tenderness that arrived afterwards.

Messages from women starting over after divorce.
After burnout.
After children leaving home.
After illness.
After careers that consumed too much of them.
After years spent caring for everyone except themselves.

Women saying “I thought it was too late for me to begin anything.”

I don’t think the channel became meaningful because I had answers. I think it became meaningful because I was visibly “in process”. Still learning. Still uncertain. Still becoming something I could not yet fully describe.

And perhaps that is what many of us long for permission to do - not to totally reinvent ourselves, not to become extraordinary, but quite simply to remain unfinished. To allow life to continue unfolding after the age when society quietly expects us to settle into a permanent version of ourselves.

Starting publicly at this stage of life has taught me that people are far less interested in perfection than they are in recognition. We want to recognise ourselves somewhere.

Our exhaustion.
Our hope.
Our uncertainty.
Our desire for a different pace.
Our suspicion that another kind of life may still be possible.

Maybe that is why beginning later can carry a strange kind of power because by this age, many of us are no longer trying quite so hard to impress. But what remains is often something far more human. Not quite so polished perhaps but more real. More true.

And truth, it seems, travels surprisingly well.

It’s something a little slower than both.

My YouTube channel holds the experience of life as it unfolds … the garden, the animals, the process of starting again, and what it feels like to live this way in real time.

And my Patreon is a more immediate, ongoing space. It’s where life is shared as it is happening, without needing to be shaped into anything final.

This space is different again.

Here, I write after the fact.

After a theme has unfolded over time… after a series of experiences has settled… after I’ve had enough distance to begin to understand what something might actually mean.

Not everything needs to be explained immediately, and not everything belongs to the moment it happens.

Some things only become clear when you step back far enough to see the shape of them.

That is what this space is for.

Reflections that come later, when life has already moved on a little… and when meaning begins to form on its own, without being chased.

If you’re here, you don’t need to keep up with anything.

You can simply arrive when something speaks to you.

— Alison

I started this Substack as a quieter space alongside my channel Take 30 Plants. Somewhere to write things that don’t always fit into videos, or that arrive more like reflections than stories meant to be filmed.

I live alone on a small permaculture farm in rural France, and most of what I write here will come from that daily life — the garden, the kitchen, the animals, and the changing seasons — but also from the inner landscape that comes with choosing a life off-script.

This isn’t a place of advice or answers. It’s more a place of noticing.

About independence. About ageing. About what it means to stop disappearing quietly and start living in a way that feels like your own again.

If you’re here, you probably already understand that in some way.

Take what’s useful, leave the rest, and go at your own pace.

— Alison