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“I wanted to wake up one day, a different person who had their shit together…”

Have you ever felt like you were lagging behind in life or your career? If your answer’s yes, you’re not alone. Many women dream of starting their own businesses or thriving in creative careers but often hold back due to fears and pressure from society. 

In this episode of Financial Feminist, we explore the journey of the “late-bloomer” with Laura Belgray, founder of Talking Shrimp, co-creator of The Copy Cure, and author of National Bestseller, “Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F’ing Worst,” and discuss her unconventional choices and the wisdom she’s gained along the way.

Changing directions

After being fired by her biggest client at the age of 40 — Laura made the pivot into the online world and learned first-hand the importance of not judging your success by society’s predefined rules or timelines.

“I have accepted that I’m never going to move at the same pace as other people, and it’s not surprising to me that I found success, the kind of success I was looking for at age 50 and wrote my first book at age 53.”

Escaping comparison 

It can be all too easy to fall into the comparison trap, especially in the age of social media, where it seems everyone is thriving, except for you. Laura highlights the importance of avoiding comparisons with others’ paths. She encourages listeners to ask themselves how they’d feel about their own accomplishments if they didn’t know what anyone else was doing.

If you’re only feeling behind because you’re looking at where other people are or are claiming to be, to put things into perspective.

“Nobody is where they’re supposed to be, or everybody is where they are supposed to be.”

Standing out and being yourself

The irony of becoming an adult is that when you’re growing up, all you want to do is fit in. When you become an adult, you have to start finding ways to stand out. 

Laura and Tori discuss how Laura’s childhood and being bullied in 6th grade made her afraid to be who she was and, how she’s been recovering from being afraid her whole life.  

“And when I’m afraid, afraid to put anything out there and afraid to say something that might make people mad, I remember life is not 6th grade. In 6th grade, somebody disliking you can ruin your life, but when you’re an adult, fitting in is the kiss of death. Standing out and being yourself is the key to everything.”

On being a “late-bloomer”

When asked if being a late-bloomer can be a superpower, Laura shares that a powerful aspect of being a late-bloomer is that it gives other people in similar situations hope and inspiration. And that those who get to where they’re going too fast, can sometimes “crash and burn.”

“I would hate to be looking back on some moment of my life saying, that is, that was the best I’ll ever be. I like the idea that I haven’t hit my pinnacle yet..that maybe the best is yet to come.”

Laura and Tori talk more about making unconventional choices and embracing your unique path on this week’s episode of Financial Feminist.

Laura’s Links:

Website

Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F’ing Worst

Instagram

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Transcript:

Laura Belgray:

We were talking about this idea of not being where you want to be or where you think you’re supposed to be. And she said she was at a huge conference, I think she said thousands of people and the person on stage said, “Who here, who in this room feels like they’re not yet where they are supposed to be, where they thought they’d be,” and every single hand went up. And so knowing that we all feel that way, I think puts it in perspective. It reminds me that nobody is where they’re supposed to be or everybody is where they’re supposed to be.

Tori Dunlap:

Hi, financial feminists. Hello. Welcome to the show. I am always excited to see you. If you’re an oldie but a goodie, welcome back, if you’re new to the show, hi. My name is Tori. I run Her First $100K, which is the company that produces this podcast. I’m a New York Times bestselling author of a book of the same name called Financial Feminist. And I am a money expert that teaches you how to save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses, feel financially confident. And this show talks about how money affects women differently and how we can fight the patriarchy by getting fucking rich. That’s our motto here. I have a great episode for you today. First of all, a few housekeeping things. One of the easiest things you can do to support the show is to share it and subscribe. And if you’re listening on Spotify right now, you can go and drop some comments, drop some questions in the little interactive feature at the bottom of the episode.

You can also leave us voicemails either with your thoughts about the show, some questions that you’d like us to answer in an upcoming episode. It’s at speakpipe.com/financialfeministpodcast. We also have it linked down below, and you may have noticed a slightly different cover in your feed for a few of the recent episodes. We’ve been releasing these short actionable episodes as part of a miniseries called Financial Foundations that has been brought to you by our friends over at State Farm. So anytime is a great time to sharpen your financial tools, but fall with back to school energy and holidays around the corner is an especially great time. So if you’re in the like, where do I start financially, sort of phase, check out Financial Foundations in the same place you get this show. Okay, today’s episode and guest, first of all, we saw the pitch come through with her book title and we were immediately intrigued.

But you had expect nothing less from a writer and a creative. It was worked on networks like Nickelodeon, NBC, Bravo, HBO, TBS, and so many more. Laura Belgray is the founder of Talking Shrimp, co-creator of the Copy Cure and author of National Bestseller, wait for it, Tough Titties. The book’s called, Tough Titties, On Living Your Best Life When You’re the Fucking Worst, an award-winning copywriter expert. She helps entrepreneurs find the perfect words to express and sell what they do in a way that gets them paid to be themselves. Through her work with hundreds of clients, including former Financial Feminist guest and digital marketing icon, Amy Porterfield. Hi Amy. She’s seen firsthand that putting you into your copy and all through your business is pure magic for getting people to love you up, share your ideas and happily click your buy button.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt behind in life. A part of Laura’s story is that she considers herself a true late bloomer. She was not really finding what she called her career groove until she was 48. I mentioned it in the episode and this is truly one of the most common sentiments I hear from our audience, the feeling of always being behind. Laura dives truly into what it means to be a late bloomer and how that can sometimes be the best thing that can happen to you. And how she was determined to find work that truly fulfilled her as a creative and how to make money doing it. So let’s go ahead and get into it. And now a word from our sponsors.

Laura Belgray:

What I did with her was write her a whole bunch of podcast intros and outros. So back when… For years and years, up until maybe just two years ago, the intro to her podcast, you are listening to Online Marketing Made Easy, marketing so easy you’ll think you’re cheating or something like that. It’s mine, one of many that I created for her and she used it for many years.

Tori Dunlap:

I love it. Yeah, she’s a friend of mine. She’s come on the show as well.

Laura Belgray:

She’s the best.

Tori Dunlap:

I have told her this she’s one of the people I watched for a really long time to build my own business and now we’re like friends and colleagues, which is crazy.

Laura Belgray:

So great. I love Amy. She flew into New York for 15 hours. That’s it, for my book launch party, which was the nicest surprise. I didn’t think she was going to make it.

Tori Dunlap:

That’s really kind. I love that. We love women supporting women.

Laura Belgray:

We do.

Tori Dunlap:

My favorite thing. I’m so excited to chat with you, your book called Tough Titties. It’s about navigating the confusing world of self-help culture that is simultaneously telling us to hustle and care a lot, but also not give a fuck. So what was your first experience with self-help culture and what do you think self-help culture gets wrong the most?

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, okay, so tough today isn’t just about that, but that is peppered throughout, I will say, and especially because I am so steeped in the world of self-help culture, being in the online space for some reason, online business and self-help seem to go hand in hand. There are no entrepreneurs who don’t also spout off self-help-isms. So it’s all around me and in the books everybody talks about, et cetera. My first foray into that world was in, I’m going to say 2008. That’s exactly when was when a friend of mine pulled me into this self-help group that I cannot legally call a cult. But let’s say was cult-ish. And I got in big trouble when I said that, but my friends would say, because I was in it for a year and a half and my friends outside of it would call it the cult.

And when I reported that to the leaders of the not legally a cult, they would say, “Well, you should lose those friends. Those are not friends of yours if they think this is a cult.” And what made it a cult, it was a group that met once a week in the basement of an Armenian church near the Midtown Tunnel. It smelled like urinal cakes and from the bathroom. And that part of it was sort of benign. People would stand up whenever they felt the calling to stand up and talk and go to the front of the room and say, “My life is going great.” Or they would say, “I’m having this problem.” If they said, “My life is going great,” the leaders, which was a couple would s
ay to them, “Hold on a second, because you say your life is going great, but you don’t seem great.

You seem like you are doing great or you are not really here right now. You’re doing being here and you’re over top of yourself.” And if you disagreed with them, then they’d say, “Well, that’s you not listening. You are disagreeing without listening. And it’s also you being incomplete with your mother or incomplete with your father.” And they just had these answers that kept you in a loop of like you weren’t able to disagree and people parroted their language. There was a whole language there. You weren’t just feeling great, you were well in yourself or you weren’t just upset, you were dialing and upset. God knows why I stayed in it so long. Well, I know why I stayed in it so long, and I talk about this in the book, but I was waiting for it to work. I kept waiting for it to kick in. I signed up for all their workshops, which sounded great.

Tori Dunlap:

The sunk cost fallacy.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, sunk cost fallacy and also just the promises of it. I wanted to wake up one day a different person who had their shit together, who had unlocked the secret to myself to being the best version of me. Someone who always channeled my most talented creative self, came up with incredible ideas, had the discipline to sit down and write and would make tens of millions of dollars doing that. I just was hoping that all of that would come out of going to this group that I would get those results. And it didn’t really happen. They would say, “This weekend workshop starts working as soon as you sign up for it.” So I would sign up for the art of being wealthy and wait for it to kick in kind of like an edible and it didn’t.

Tori Dunlap:

Your main gig as a writer, can you talk more about your background coming into that world and then was this, maybe I can say cult and you can’t, was this cult contributing to your challenge to be, quote, unquote, successful in my career as a writer?

Laura Belgray:

I don’t know if it contributed to it. It didn’t get me any further in it. So I joined the not a cult-

Tori Dunlap:

Sure.

Laura Belgray:

… when I was at a stuck point in my career. I had been in what it started out as a dream job for many years, and it was a wonderful job. It was writing promos for TV for networks that I love for classic TV shows. And then I also segued into writing stuff for Bravo and Fandango and other networks and brands and it was fabulous, but I had started to get a little antsy. Like, “I should be doing something bigger. I want to write in my voice, but I don’t know what.” And instead of the voice of a network, I want to write something that’s lasting, that has an impact that people love and share and talk about for years. But what would that be?

I didn’t have an idea for a screenplay or for a novel or anything like that. I just stayed in that job. I outstayed my welcome, let’s say that. So that’s when I joined. I joined this group when I was feeling in a real creative rut, and the person who brought me in seemed to be doing so well in her life and had this awesome speaking career and all these things that… She had made all these things happen. So that’s what I was hoping would happen for me. And then in 2010, I got let go by my biggest TV client, which was basically, I called them my client, but it was basically my work home that I had worked at this company for years and years and actually went into the office most days, not until noon or one, but that was my style. So they didn’t really fire me, but let me know that my big fat contract, which was a six figure contract, was not going to be renewed.

They didn’t really need me anymore is what they said. And I had very luckily gotten into the online world about a year before in around 2009 through my friend Marie Forleo, who I had met years before in hip hop class at Crunch. And I had hated her at first. I was like, “Who’s that annoyingly hot girl in the front who hits all the moves perfectly?” And then we started talking one day. I was like, “Dammit. Now I have to be nice to her because she’s really nice. I have to not hate her.” And we started walking home together. She started teaching hip hop classes there and I would go to them and I was her front room mafia, as she calls me. And she was also not just a hip hop teacher, but also a life coach and was developing an online business. She already had one going.

And she would bring in a yellow legal pad to her classes. And before she started the class, she’d say to the class, she’d say, “I’m not just a hip hop teacher, I’m also a coach and I have a free newsletter.” This was back when people would hear free newsletter and say, “Oh my gosh, you have to get on it.” And she would pass her pad around and everyone would sign their name and their email. And it was like an analog opt-in at the time. I didn’t know why she was doing it, but before I was let go from my biggest client, I was already getting work from other clients, like smaller side gigs, and decided to create a website to host my reel so I didn’t have to send out CDs or DVDs anymore or VHS tapes even to these people. And I showed my website to Marie and she was like, “All right, what are you going to put as your opt-in?”

And I was like, “Wait, my what in?” She was like, “Yeah, you have to have an opt-in.” She took out another yellow legal pad, which she liked to write on and diagrammed how I was going to sign up for this thing called AWeber and then have a freebie that I gave out in a confirmation email and automate a whole system. And for once in my whole life, I actually followed her instructions and put an opt-in on my website. And she also said, “You’re going to have a blog, right? Where’s the blog?” And I was like, “Well, it’s 2009. Isn’t it too late to have a blog?” She’s like, “Oh my God, no, you have to have a blog. You must have a blog. You must have an email list. That’s where the gold is.” And she’s like, “Especially you, you’d like to write.” So I set up a blog, I set up an opt-in and started gathering email addresses.

So when I was let go by my biggest client, I had already been hired by a few private clients, people who saw me speak at Marie’s first live event. I spoke on Five Secrets [inaudible 00:13:37], and they had said to me like, “Oh, I’m a realtor. Can you help me with my web copy? Can I hire you to help me with my about page, et cetera?” And I started taking those people I knew that, yeah, sure I could help them. I knew I could write better than most people could in a conversational way, and most people could not write conversationally. And I had that ability, even though I had no idea about writing direct response, high converting copy or anything like that. I wrote branding copy normally. So I had a few private clients, and when I got let go, I wrote an email and said, “I am available for hire.”

I was like, “How am I going to make up all this money?” And so I put myself out there to my small email list and said, “I’m available for hire. I have these services.” And I put up a services page, and that’s how my online business really started. And it was built over the years of one-on-one clients hiring me to help them with their w
ebsite copy, their email copy, their sales pages or marketing copy, all that kind of stuff. And eventually I segued entirely into the online space, mostly because it paid better. And my TV clients were starting to say like, “Wow, you’re asking a lot for a day rate. That’s more than I make.” And there was a real ceiling there, whereas people in the online space were just like, “Well, if you’re charging that much, you must be worth it.” And so they paid it.

And that was a major pivot for me into a nice, I would say, small pond at the time where I could be a bigger fish and become really known in the business, what I would call online or business famous, which is the ultimate kind of famous to me. You can go to the grocery store looking like utter shit and nobody caress, but people know who you are and will pay your rates. That’s how that all happened, how I ended up here. Eventually I discontinued, retired my one-on-one services because I was tired of them. I didn’t like seeing clients on my calendar, even though I love the work I did with them. So like, oh, God, I just want blank space on my calendar. I want to make a living writing emails. That was it. That was my fantasy. And so I found a way to do that, to get paid for writing emails, which was write emails to my list more consistently and sell something in them. So that’s how that all happened.

Tori Dunlap:

Your work, did it match up with your odd dream of being a workaholic?

Laura Belgray:

So when you refer to my dream of being a workaholic, that is something I always fantasized about. I didn’t understand why everyone complained about being a workaholic or saw that as a condition to be healed or remedied because I was like, “Why would you want to fix something that makes you motivated to work because I never felt motivated to work?” All I wanted was to feel so excited about my work, so motivated and obsessed with it that time would pass, the sky would grow dark, and I wouldn’t even look up until then and realize what time it was. I would forget to eat, forget to pee.

And so once I finally ended up doing this, writing emails that I enjoyed writing and then sending them out and making money from them, I’ve realized that I operate on a binary system. The binary is either lazy or obsessed. So becoming obsessed with my work was the holy grail. To me that’s how you get paid to be you, of having that feeling of people saying to you, “Do you ever stop working, take a break,” and you don’t want to. I guess that’s called being a workaholic, and it’s what I always wanted, and I feel like I have achieved that in many ways.

Tori Dunlap:

I was on a friend’s podcast way back in 2019 called Ikigai. He’s a consultant for Ikigai. And what is this concept in your own words, you talk about it in your book as you were searching for work that really lit you up. Can you first define it and then tell us how you came to find it in your work with Nickelodeon?

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, I’m forgetting the Venn diagram, but is this that intersection of doing what you love, doing what you’re good at, and providing value, doing something that is needed, required by other people so that they will pay for it. And so my version of that was, well, really my fantasy of it was that I would get paid to watch TV, but nobody wants to pay you to watch TV. So I was like, “I’m good at watching TV and I love watching TV,” so unfortunately that doesn’t provide value to somebody. But then when I found writing promos for TV, I discovered this job because a friend of mine had it, and I had lunch with him when I was in a job that I hated, and he said, “I have a new job writing promos for VH1.” I said, “What are promos?” And he said, “Well, I watch a bunch of TV and then I write the short little spots during the commercials that are for the show or for the networks that are advertising those.”

I was like, “Wait, you watch a bunch of TV and then write short little things about it?” And it’s like, “Yeah, essentially,” it’s like, “Oh my God, that’s a job? I have to have that job.” That was Ikigai and something that I’ve always been looking for, getting paid to do something I love and that I’m good at. And when I got that job and started that job, I was obsessed with it as I always wanted to be. I hauled home, I spent all day watching every episode of whatever show I was assigned and then hauled a whole bunch of tapes home with me and a duffle bag swung over my shoulder. I felt like a soldier coming home from war, like a heroic walking home with these, and I felt so dedicated to what I was doing. That to me was work nirvana, which is something that I always wanted.

Tori Dunlap:

Was that pursuit of work nirvana because I think about this in my own life a lot of I love what I do and there’s also moments where I just do not like it. It’s really hard to just have any sort of job, even if it is the quote, unquote dream job. And we’ve had many conversations on the show about how really there’s a fallacy of dream jobs. So how do you find the work that you love and that you’re good at and that has purpose and all of these things while also understanding there’s some days that you’re just going to hate it?

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, I think that you do have to accept that nothing is going to be a complete dream across the board because there are parts of my job that I just don’t want to do. And sometimes those drag me down and make me feel like, “Oh, no, I’m not living my dream.” Because I have these parts of the job that I don’t feel like doing, and it can’t all be only the stuff I want to do, although, I could probably pay somebody to do all the things I don’t want to do. No, not all of them. There are some that still require me, still require my presence.

Tori Dunlap:

Right.

Laura Belgray:

And I always come back to just accepting that I’m not failing at living my dream and doing something I love just because there are parts of it that I don’t like. And I also know that we go through seasons even when we find something that feels like, “I would do this for the rest of my life. I can do this until I croak and never want to give it up. Even if I won the Powerball and had $150 million, never had to work a day in my life, I would still keep doing this.” That comes and goes, and there are times when you’ll be on that high for a while and then a day will come where you’re just not feeling it and you’re like, “Oh, no.”

And I think it’s important not to panic that in those seasons or moments when you feel like you’ve fallen out of love with what you do. If it lasts way too long while you’re in it, then maybe it is time to shift and do something else. I think there are also times when it lasts a while because you’re avoiding it or you’re like, “I’m going to take a break.” And that’s not always refreshing. That is not always a renewing thing. Sometimes it can solidify, congeal that feeling of not liking what you do when you step away from it for too long. Sometimes vacation makes me not want to go back to work.

Tori Dunlap:

Did you ever stru
ggle between being someone who is obviously creative but also having to make money?

Laura Belgray:

No, I don’t think so. I think the only time I struggled with that was when I was first looking for a job in my first year out of college and back then, because I’m old, I had to look through the classifieds in the newspaper and I would circle things, anything that said creative, all I wanted was a creative job. And those always turned out to be… The details would say, “Must be a self-starter,” and I’d be like, “Nope.” Or must be detail oriented. Nope. And I found that anything that said creative industry turned out to be either printer sales or phone sex. And so I began to despair. I was like, “Well, maybe I would try phone sex. That sounds like not so bad.” A friend of mine got into it and she really liked it. It’s like, [inaudible 00:23:19].

Tori Dunlap:

There you go.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah. Then she segued into stripping. I was like, “No, that’s not for me.” But I did begin to despair at that time that there was no creative job that I could enter at that age at that with no experience or anything like that, and start getting paid money. And there was for sure always the myth of the starving artist or the poor writer, people who are dead broke until they make it big. And so I did believe that for a while. But once I started taking jobs and getting work, I found that it was possible to be creative. There were ways to be creative and get paid for it, paid the way I want it to be. I have found that it takes a miracle to get paid the kind of money I want, and I still haven’t found it.

Because I want a whole God damn lot of money. When I talk about $150 million, that’s what I want. I would really like that very much. And so I think that the only reasonable pathway to that kind of money is selling an app or running a hedge fund, really running a hedge fund. And I still haven’t figured out what a hedge fund is, so that’s not going to happen.

Tori Dunlap:

I want to talk about this idea of late bloomers, and I put that in quotes because I think we’re becoming more and more comfortable with this idea that maybe we don’t know ourselves enough at 17, 18, 19 to plan our entire lives. Can you share a little bit about what pivoting looked like for you and how someone can navigate that in their own life?

Laura Belgray:

Well, for me, the major pivot that I made was that one when I was around 40 and when I was fired and segued into the online space. But I always had in mind that I would probably pivot one day, that I still hadn’t found my true calling and would find it eventually, partly because both my parents pivoted later in life. So my dad, he was an engineer for the airlines, industrial engineer, which apparently required tallying theft of those mini liquor bottles on planes. I’m not sure what else he did, but he pivoted from that to being a psychotherapist when he was in his 40s. And my mom after when I was probably around 10, she was close, no, maybe older.

She was in her forties also, and she had gotten her degree in music and had worked in the recording industry before I was born, and then wasn’t really sure what to do with that. She was teaching music and took one of those courses in finding your next career, your next chapter, what you’re meant to do. My dad made her read, What Color Is Your Parachute? Which she made everyone read, and she found that she loved Children’s book publishing and became an intern in her 40s in the publishing industry. To me, that is so brave and bold.

Tori Dunlap:

That is so brave.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah. To be an intern, to be the person getting people’s coffee, although she was used to that just having been a woman in any industry, but it’s humbling.

Tori Dunlap:

Yeah. Yeah. It was unpromotable tasks.

Laura Belgray:

And so it had to be pretty humbling. And I always took inspiration from both of their fairly late in life, especially for back then, pivots into other industries. And the message to me was, you’ll find a different career later in your life. Somewhere in midlife, you will end up doing something different. Nothing you’re doing is written in stone, and especially not what you think you’re going to do when you are in college or get out of college. So I wasn’t afraid to switch careers, and I’ve always just been a late person taking my time in everything in life, whether it is career and finding myself in that or marriage, at the time, it was fairly late.

I got married at 37 and didn’t have kids at all, so I had kids at never. And so whether it’s that, those milestones in life or just when I’m with a bunch of friends at dinner and everyone’s getting up from the table, I’m always the last one putting on my stuff and grabbing it all, and everyone’s waiting for me outside, I’m just a slow person. So I’ve accepted that I’m never going to move at the same pace as other people, and it’s not surprising to me that I found the kind of success I was looking for at age 50 and wrote my first book at age… I mean, my first book is out for a couple of weeks now and I’m 53, and that is by all standards, pretty much a late bloomer trajectory.

Tori Dunlap:

Which is still fucking incredible, especially in this 24/7 go, go, go kind of hustle culture, how do you accept that if you’re someone who is like, “I’m not where I want to be,” what advice would you give to your younger self? And then how do you navigate that pivot? If somebody’s listening and they’re like whatever age and they’re like, “I’m not where I want to be,” how do you find the acceptance and also patience and path to getting where you’re supposed to be?

Laura Belgray:

Yeah. Well, for one thing, stop looking at where other people are or where they say you are supposed to be. My friend Susie Moore said something recently. It was a quote on her Instagram. It was something to the effect of how would you feel about what you’ve done in life if you didn’t know what anyone else was doing? And I think the answer is probably a whole lot better, and it’s a really good point. And I think about it all the time. I think about it anytime I feel behind like, “Oh, I’m only feeling behind because I’m looking at where other people are or are claiming to be.” And so I think that’s really important to think about, “Well, I’m late or I’m behind according to whom.” Behind is totally relative, and I think it’s possible that you are right where you are supposed to be.

Also, I found comforting the idea that, and I just heard this in a podcast interview I was doing with my friend Terry Cole, we were talking about this idea of not being where you want to be or where you think you’re supposed to be. And she said she was at a huge conference, I think she said thousands of people, and the person on stage said, “Who here, who in this room feels like they’re not yet w
here they are supposed to be, where they thought they’d be,” and every single hand went up. And so knowing that we all feel that way, I think puts it in perspective. It reminds me that nobody is where they’re supposed to be or everybody is where they’re supposed to be.

Tori Dunlap:

I just asked on my book tour, every single stop, “Raise your hand if you feel financially behind?” Every hand in the room, literally every single hand at every single city I was in.

Laura Belgray:

That’s amazing. And I’m sure, right, some of those people are unimaginably wealthy in the eyes of other people.

Tori Dunlap:

Or the amount of 20 year olds who reach out to me and they’re like, “I feel like I’m behind.” And I’m like, “Oh, I love that ambition in you. Don’t let that die. And also, you’re doing fine.” If you asked me when I was 20, I probably felt the same way because I am so ambitious. I probably felt that.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, I felt that all along. I felt the clock ticking all the time also because we have these markers, there are all these lists of 25 under 25 and 30 under 30, and the new museum had a show called Younger Than Jesus. And I was like, “Okay, so if you’re over 33, you don’t get to be in this show no matter how stellar your art is.”

Tori Dunlap:

As a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, I apologize very profusely. I’m contributing to the problem. But no, I agree. They actually have started doing, I believe, a Forbes 50 Over 50. I think that started last year or 60 Over 60, one of those. 40 Over 40.

Laura Belgray:

50 Over 50. I got everyone I knew to nominate me because I was over 50.

Tori Dunlap:

I love it.

Laura Belgray:

I think you had to be more [inaudible 00:31:58].

Tori Dunlap:

It took me a couple years to get it. Speaking of our ages and trying to navigate all of that, you have this quote where you say the key to any type of success that you value is to remind yourself that you’re no longer in sixth grade. Talk to me about that.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, so sixth grade was really traumatic for me. That’s my trauma. Everything I do that’s bad or messed up, I consider a trauma response to sixth grade. So if I don’t clean my dishes, it’s because of sixth grade because of someone in the book who the chapter is called Deb Fishbone Likes This, and it’s about me hate following my sixth grade bully on social media and what she did to me in sixth grade, which is, it might not even sound that horrifying. She stole my best friend and kicked me out of my friend group, and I was no longer invited to pizza Wednesdays or to play Ms. Pacman at [inaudible 00:33:07] or to go buy leg warmers.

Tori Dunlap:

Oh, when you’re 11, that’s the end of world.

Laura Belgray:

It’s horrible. It is the end of the world. It ruins your life for the year. And so I’ve been recovering from that pretty much all my life. And when I am afraid to put anything out there, anything creative and afraid to say something that might make people mad or people might not like, I have to remember life is not sixth grade. That in sixth grade, yes, somebody disliking you can ruin your life and blow up your world. When you’re an adult, fitting in is the kiss of death and standing out, the reason somebody might not like you in sixth grade, is the key to everything, standing out and being yourself. And it is a nice big middle finger to the bullies who ruined your life for being so you and have probably turned out to be incredibly unremarkable and basic.

Tori Dunlap:

Do I still Google my elementary school bully about once a year, just see what’s going on? Yes, I do.

Laura Belgray:

Is that person in the 30 Under 30 list of anything?

Tori Dunlap:

Nope. They are not Laura. They are not.

Laura Belgray:

I didn’t think so.

Tori Dunlap:

I not going to gloat, but they are not.

Laura Belgray:

Gloat away. Please gloat.

Tori Dunlap:

Do you feel like being behind or being a late bloomer is a superpower? There’s probably this new level of appreciation you must have for something that your younger self maybe didn’t?

Laura Belgray:

Well, I think that one powerful aspect of it is that it gives other people hope. You can be a beacon to all those people who feel like they’re behind and doing life wrong and aren’t where they are supposed to be or where they think they’re supposed to be. And I really enjoy that. I love hearing from people who say, “Oh my gosh, you give me hope. I still have time, or I’m older than you, but now I know I can still do it. It’s not a race.” And so I think in that sense it is a superpower. And also those who move really fast and go up and up and up, they often peak. They either crash and burn and get really sick of what they’re doing and have had that taste of early success, and then everything’s downhill from there, which kind of sucks.

And I would hate to be looking back on some moment of my life saying that was the best I’ll ever be. I like the idea that I haven’t hit my pinnacle yet, and maybe I never will, that I will keep going up in my own way. Maybe it’s a little up and down, a little sideways here and there that maybe the best is yet to come. And so I think it is a superpower in that sense. You’re here for the long haul and you don’t burn out and have to look back at that peak. The way that uncle at Thanksgiving is always talking about the touchdown he scored in his high school games.

Tori Dunlap:

Always.

Laura Belgray:

Which is so sad.

Tori Dunlap:

[inaudible 00:36:13] Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. That’s who I think of. It’s always talking about high school football. You mentioned already in this interview, but you have not had children and it sounds like an intentional choice for you. We’ve had a few guests who’ve talk
ed about the choice to remain childless. Can you talk about that process, especially since you’ve mentioned you’ve only really became comfortable with the idea of not having kids when you were around 40?

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, so I’m very happy with that choice, and I was on the fence for a long time all through my very obvious baby making years where people would look at me and say, “Are you having kids? Do you have kids?” Partly because there was so much pressure from people who would say, “Well, you should have them. It is the only kind of true love you’ll ever know. You won’t know true love until you’ve had kids, or it’s the most important job in the world, and no job will ever be important the way this is, or it’s fulfilling and you won’t be fulfilled as a woman or as a person. It’s the purpose of life is to create new life.” And so that’s a little bit of pressure. And then also all around me, I think right around the time I had met the one who is my husband now, when I was around 32, I think that is when the media started exploding with baby fever.

It came down with a serious case of baby fever and every cover of every magazine with somebody pregnant and caressing their big naked belly or just covering their boobs and letting that show to me more, and I forget who else. And there was Bump Watch and Celebrity Tots, all kinds of features that put all the pressure on you to have a baby and showed that that was what’s cool. And I would Google, because I had no examples to look at, I would Google older celebrity women without kids and all different versions of that looking for somebody who told me, “You can decide not to have kids and you will still live a happy life as a woman.” And all that came up was Oprah. Oprah didn’t have kids. Those articles would say Oprah has it all except kids. So that wasn’t a good example. And then Dame Helen Mirren, and she is the one person who said, I think she was asked in an interview, “What’s the secret to your happiness?”

And she said, “Oh, I don’t have children.” And so I just clung to that. But there were not enough examples, and it made it really hard to… I was always looking for them like, “Oh, your aunt doesn’t have kids, is she happy?” I was always looking for examples of women who are older and happy without having them. So it was really tough to finally come to a clear conclusion, say, “I don’t want kids.” I was waiting to want them. And of course, people would say, “Well, don’t wait until you’re ready because you’re never ready.” It’s like, “Well, great. That’s not helpful either.” And then my husband and I, we had gotten married maybe a year or two before that, and I was really having a hard time in our first couple of years of marriage with this question, “Do I want kids?” Because the pressure was on and it would already be a geriatric pregnancy.

This is very much a TikTok situation. And then we sat down, we were sitting at the kitchen table one night, and I said to my husband, Steven, was like, “Would you really truly be okay if we didn’t have kids?” And he just said, “Yeah,” just so clearly and without any hesitation. And I felt like, “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s go for it. Let’s go for not going for it.” And ever since then, I have felt so free, and I actively love not having kids. Everyone says, “Oh, you don’t know true joy unless you’ve had kids.” And I wake up with a sense of joy every morning at not having kids. My day is my own, and I love it.

Tori Dunlap:

I think it’s so important that we talk about the people who have kids who love them, who have kids, and that was a challenge. And also the people who are like, “Yep, I don’t have them. It’s great.”

Laura Belgray:

Yeah.

Tori Dunlap:

We have to hear all of it. And yeah, I agree. I think the narrative has been you’re missing out if you don’t have children. And I think for some people, maybe that’s their reality, but for a lot of other folks, that’s not true.

Laura Belgray:

Yeah, I mean, for sure. Of course, you’re missing out on an experience whether good or bad, and it might be great. It might be that in a parallel universe, I have kids and I’m the world’s greatest mom, and they bring me so much joy and I love everything about it, but I’m happy with this life. And so yes, yes, you’re missing out, and maybe that’s okay. You don’t have to have every experience.

Tori Dunlap:

Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for all of your insight. Where can people find you and Tough Titties?

Laura Belgray:

They can find meat talkingshrimp.com, and I’ve got a lot of freebies there that they will want. And then also Tough Titties you can findat toughtittiesbook.com. Don’t go to toughtitties.com, go to toughtittiesbook.com, and that’s where you’ll find it. And come over to toughtittiesbook.com and get yourself a copy of Tough Titties. And then on Instagram, which is my most comfortable platform, come find me at @laurabelgray.

Tori Dunlap:

I love it. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Laura Belgray:

Thank you so much, Tori. This was great.

Tori Dunlap:

Thank you as always to Laura for joining us. You can find her book Tough Titties wherever you get your books, and you can find more about her at once in our show notes. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting the show. I hope you have a great fucking week, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields, Associate Producer, Tamisha Grant. Marketing and administration by Karina Patel, Sophia Cohen, Kahlil Dumas, Elizabeth McCumber, Beth Bowen, Amanda Leffew, Masha Bachmetyeva, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sumaya Mulla-Carillo, and Harvey Carlson. Research by Ariel Johnson, audio engineering by Elizabeth Path. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.