How I Created a Beautiful Life (From Scratch)

A personal story of heartbreak, reinvention, and building a life of beauty from the ground up.

“People often assume I was born into comfort. In truth, I built my life from the ground up—and this is the story I’ve never fully told… until now.”

One of the assumptions I see often about myself is that I was born into wealth, or at least a very comfortable life. It’s mostly on platforms like TikTok where audiences don’t know me very well, and it always makes me laugh because it couldn’t be further from the truth. In this post I wanted to be real and honest about my life — it’s something that a lot of people are curious about.

In 2020 my life took a complete shift as the relationship I was in for ten years was suddenly over. I knew it had been coming for a while — we had discussed splitting a year or so prior, but agreed to keep going. Now, as the pandemic was in full swing, I decided we should have this conversation again, and to my surprise it was met with agreement. In fact, my boyfriend announced that he had met someone else.

This was a surprising revelation for me — not only did I have to deal with the sadness of losing someone I was very close with, and my partner of ten years, I also was feeling betrayed, as well as scared about what the future now held for me.

In society we hear about ‘trad wives’ all the time — women who enjoy taking a traditional role in the household to support their families. You could say that I was the male, gay version of a trad wife, whatever that may be. During my ten-year relationship I supported my partner by ‘keeping house’ whilst he made the money and supported our lifestyle. Now I was faced with the daunting realisation that I was going to be single, with a ten-year gap in my CV, and the prospect of starting over from scratch.

This is not to say I’d done absolutely nothing during our time together. We travelled often and renovated our homes — I’d documented all of this on my Instagram account and had gained a following of 20,000 sharing my travels, interiors, style, food, and life.

When the pandemic first started at the beginning of 2020, I felt like everyone was looking for comfort. I myself was searching for it — nothing on TV was soothing me — I was craving elegant, beautiful content, of people in their homes. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I thought that perhaps I should create it myself — and so my YouTube channel was born.

Luckily, relative success came relatively quickly. In September 2020 I was able to move into my own apartment in Edinburgh and pay the rent and my lifestyle expenses from my YouTube revenue. I was by no means rich, but this was now a full-time job for me. With that ten-year employment gap, my YouTube career was bringing in far more than I could ever have imagined.

The first few years were really difficult for me. It’s something I’ve never talked about on my channel, but I struggled intensely with living on my own and dealing with life after being with someone for so long. Even though my ex and I had fallen out of love, we really loved each other for all of those years and he was my best friend. The day I dropped him off at the airport for his new life in South Africa was probably the saddest of my life. The entire journey there I couldn’t speak. The pain was real.

I am someone who doesn’t like dwelling on sadness. I know that I can talk myself out of a bad mood, a sadness, an irritation — and so I knew that I had to climb out of this loneliness and build my life from scratch. If not only for myself, I now had 100,000 subscribers waiting for my weekly YouTube vlogs about beautiful and elegant living.

On reflection, my YouTube channel absolutely saved me. It gave me a career when I thought there was no hope. It gave me a community of people who always have my back, week after week, and it gave me the push to keep building. The thing about having a YouTube channel is that it is relentless — if you don’t post week after week, your audience will move on, and your revenue will wither. You have to constantly show up and perform.

In the last two years my life has settled into happy contentment. I have got used to living on my own — in fact, I quite prefer it. I’ve worked hard from very little and I feel like now everything is coming together. I have a beautiful home and a beautiful life — I’ve learnt endless lessons over the last five years, ones that I would have been too scared to take on, but was forced to. I am thankful for it all. It’s a cliché but so true — everything is a lesson, and it’s only when you look back that you realise it was for good.

My purpose for sharing this part of my life was because I feel it is something a lot of people wanted to know. There was always a sense of mystery about my past — I was never hiding it — but I’ve only just felt like I can share it with a happy ending. Although it’s not an ending... just the very beginning.