Starting Over at 43: Leaving London to Become a Full-Time Artist
My flat is currently full of boxes.
By the time you read this, most of my belongings will be in storage, someone else will soon be living in my home, and I’ll be getting ready to board a plane to Japan with one big suitcase and no permanent address for the foreseeable future.
After 22 years, I’m leaving London.
Even writing that feels so strange! I moved here in my early twenties, and London has been my home for almost my entire adult life.
I built a career here, bought a flat, made friends, and became a photographer.
And now, at 43, I’m starting over.
The plan for now is to rent out my flat, use the income to give myself a little financial support, and try to build a life around the thing I actually want to be doing:
making art – plus creating content around that, such as continuing to write blog posts, making videos, sharing what I learn and, hopefully, eventually building a sustainable income from it.
I don’t know yet whether it will work, which is incredibly scary and thrilling at the same time.
How I Ended Up Here
Photography wasn’t my original career:
For many years, I worked as a translator, and photography was just a hobby that I pursued alongside my job.
Gradually, taking photos took up more and more space in my life: I kept learning and experimenting, entered competitions, exhibited work, and eventually started thinking of myself not simply as someone who enjoyed photography, but as an artist.
At the same time, the career I had relied on for years started becoming less reliable:
Translation work dramatically declined due to AI, and what once felt like a safe way of funding my creative life no longer feels safe at all.
For a while, I kept trying to solve that problem while keeping the basic structure of my life intact:
I tried to develop a strategy to earn more from photography by growing my website, selling more ebooks, and making more YouTube videos.
However, eventually, another question started to become more interesting:
What if I changed the structure of my life instead – by starting over completely?
An Artist Residency in Japan
By this point, I’d already made another big decision: I wanted to rent out my flat and spend some time travelling.
This decision made sense to me: Renting out my flat would give me a steady income while I was away, and travelling would give me the freedom to live more cheaply, experience new places and find fresh inspiration for my art.
And then, there was something else:
Last year, I had applied for an artist residency in Japan, and had been accepted to spend three months there working on my photography and developing a new series.
At some point I realised that the residency didn’t have to be a temporary break from my life in London – it could actually be the beginning of the next one.
There was something almost symbolic about it: after 22 years in London, I would pack up my home, hand over the keys, get on a plane and begin my new life abroad not simply as a traveller, but as an artist in residence – what a perfect place to start.
Becoming an Artist Again
For the past few years, my creative identity has become quite specific: somehow, I’ve ended up specialising in the rather niche world of self-portrait photography.
Now, I do love self-portraiture, and I won’t be abandoning it in the near future.
However, I’ve recently felt an urge to widen my creative horizons a bit:
I want to return to street photography, which I used to love, and I definitely want to shoot much more film.
I also really want to experiment with mixed media, alternative processes, and making composites.
I even want to draw again occasionally – something I haven’t done in years because of some persistent injuries that have thankfully mostly settled now.
Essentially, I want to stop worrying quite so much about what kind of photographer I am and become curious about being an artist.
Japan feels like an excellent place to begin:
I have some ideas for the work I want to create there, but I’m deliberately trying not to decide what the exact outcome of the next three months has to be.
What I do know:
I want to walk around with a camera and just see what happens… and I want to run strange experiments and follow ideas simply because I’m curious about them.
Starting Over in Your 40s
I think there is a particular strangeness (but an incredible sense of breaking free!) to starting over in your 40s.
In your twenties, uncertainty seems almost expected:
You’re allowed to move somewhere without knowing whether you’ll stay; it’s normal to test careers and abandon them, or to have very little money and no exact plan.
In turn, in your forties, there is an assumption that your life should have settled into some kind of final shape.
Well, this is definitely not the case for me:
At 43, most of my belongings are in a storage unit. I don’t know exactly where I’ll live next year, and I’m trying to turn something I love into a way to earn my living.
There are definitely moments when I wonder whether this is sensible, but I also know that the alternative for me felt like stagnation.
In fact, I’ve wanted a big change for a long time:
There is something so energising about uprooting your life, even when you don’t yet know what the next phase will look like.
After feeling a bit stuck career- and art-wise, I now have some fresh energy. I’m excited for the unknown, the experiences I’ll have, and the people I’ll meet.
I Don’t Know If This Will Work Out
I would love to update this post a year from now and tell you that everything worked out amazingly:
That my art flourished, my creative business grew, and that becoming a full-time artist at 43 turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
Maybe I’ll be able to say all of that, maybe I won’t, but I can tell you this already:
Making such a big decision and setting things in motion feels incredibly freeing.
So if you’re reading this because you’re considering starting over in your 40s, changing careers, moving somewhere new, or returning to something creative you abandoned years ago, I can only say, go for it.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that your choice will pay off – but there is no guarantee attached to the safer choice, either!
And sometimes, simply choosing a new direction can bring back an energy and sense of possibility you didn’t even realise you had lost.
For me, that new direction starts in five days…next stop: Japan.