Unstuck the “video” podcast

Friendships change in your forties and nobody warns you. We revisit a fallout of our own — the time Lisa announced she was moving to Gibraltar because she was lonely — and use it to look at what happens when circles shrink and priorities shift. We talk quality versus quantity, the childhood experiences that shape how comfortable we are alone, and the coping styles that surface when friendships wobble. Plus the question worth sitting with: what keeps loneliness in place?

We disagree properly in this one. Lisa reckons older women are more visible now than they've ever been. Tanya, having left a senior NHS role to start again from scratch, feels distinctly less so. Somewhere in between, we get into middle-ageism, perimenopause, and the shift from being valued for how you look to finding meaning in what you contribute. We also introduce our SOS model — submit, opt out, or storm in — and what it looks like to respond as a lifeguard instead.

Lisa stopped dyeing her hair at 48, and it turned out to be about considerably more than hair. In this episode, she describes the reactions — the friends who cheered, the strangers who assumed she was decades older, the time she was mistaken for Tanya's mother, the seat someone offered her on the bus. We get into the double standard that lets men be "distinguished" while women are quietly reclassified, and why we'd rather frame this as a choice than a rule.

We're starting where most people start: stuck. In this first episode, we explain what Unstuck is, why we're doing it now, and what pushed us here — including Tanya burning out and walking away from the NHS after years in forensic services. We talk about the conversations we keep having with friends in our forties, about menopause and grief and career changes and the quiet pressure on women to hold it all together.