Ashley Langham knew her life needed to change long before she knew what would replace it. Over the next several years, she changed countries, careers and the way she worked, picking up clues along the way.
When I asked Ashley Langham whether the plans she made while starting over generally worked out, she didn't have to think about it for long.
“I would say they were falling apart, more so than they were working out.”
By that point in our conversation, I had already heard about Australia, London, Paris, finance, marketing, copywriting, tarot, yoga, a spiritual retreat center and a startup job that lasted all of two months. So…yeah. Falling apart sounded about right.
What interested me was that Ashley hadn't started with a plan to build the life she has now.
Today, she describes herself as a mystic mentor, strategist and psychic healer. Her work through Thoughtful Thorough brings together spirituality, healing and some of the strategy and narrative work she learned along the way.
But you can't draw a straight line from the woman working in finance to the woman doing this work now.
When we talk about starting over, we can make it sound like the first step is figuring out what you want to do next. Ashley's story went in almost the opposite order.
She knew something needed to change before she knew what came next
Ashley was 26 when she moved from London to Australia.
She had recently ended a significant relationship and landed what she considered her dream job at a company she'd previously interned for. Work was going well. She was earning good money.
She was also deeply unhappy.
Ashley had dealt with depression and anxiety since she was young, and by the time she was living in Australia, she was struggling with her mental health, her relationships and her sense of who she was outside of being someone who achieved.
"I knew I was a high achiever. I knew I could do well in school. I knew I was doing well at work," she told me.
But knowing those things wasn't the same as knowing herself.
Eventually she returned to London, where she'd built a life over the better part of seven years. She had friends there. A flat. She knew the train system. It was familiar.
She also had a visa connected to her job.
That detail matters.
There is a version of starting-over stories where someone realizes she's unhappy, quits the job and heads confidently toward her new life. In Ashley's case, changing her work could also mean losing her ability to stay in the country she'd made home.
Then came 2020.
Ashley was unhappy with her work environment and says she'd spent years pushing herself, trying to prove herself and operating in what she now describes as a constant state of hypervigilance. After experiencing recurring panic attacks, she went on medical leave for three months.
She didn't return to that role.
She found another job and moved to Paris.
Then the new plan fell apart too
The Paris job was at a startup.
It lasted about two months before the company went under and was eventually sold.
"The levels of having to pivot for the last 10 years is shocking," Ashley said when she told me this.
This is where I started getting really interested in all the little things that happened between one version of her life and the next.
Ashley still didn't know exactly what she was building. She did know there were things she wanted to explore.
She was already reading tarot for other people. Spirituality mattered to her. She liked writing and creating content. Marketing was interesting to her.
So she started there.
Ashley taught herself enough French to read and translate material so she could create English-language marketing for French organizations. She took marketing courses and started finding her own clients.
That work eventually expanded into helping startups figure out their narrative, brand, mission and purpose. Many of her clients were women and women of color, and Ashley noticed that some of those conversations were going beyond marketing.
She became a yoga teacher and went deeper into her spiritual practice. She trained in other healing modalities. She worked at a spiritual retreat center. Time in Tulum exposed her to a wellness community that also showed her things she didn't want to recreate in her own work.
She wasn't sitting there in finance knowing that this was where she was headed. A lot happened in between, and each thing seemed to give her a little more information about what she wanted and what she didn't.
Starting over didn't mean starting from zero
This is something I keep noticing when women talk about wanting to change careers.
"Starting over" can make it sound like you're standing at zero with nothing but a vague desire to do something different.
But Ashley wasn't starting with nothing.
She knew how to write. She understood structured corporate environments. She could think strategically, research and learn. Then she added marketing and copywriting. Client work gave her more experience. Her spiritual practices and training added another layer.
Some of it came forward with her. Some of it helped her figure out what she didn't want.
Even her corporate experience still shows up in the business she runs now.
Sometimes a little too much.
Ashley told me that she'll go to Pilates during the day and catch herself thinking she has to make up the time later.
Then she remembers:
"I don't have to make up the time. I work for myself."
She laughed when she explained it.
I make myself my own employee.
I loved that because you can completely change the structure of your work and still bring all your old rules about work right along with you.
So how did she actually find work?
This is the question I always want answered.
It's interesting to hear that someone left her career, moved abroad and eventually built a completely different kind of business.
I also want to know who was paying her while all of this figuring-it-out was happening.
Ashley didn't have one source for finding paid work.
Earlier in her transition, job boards helped her find marketing and consulting opportunities. She specifically mentioned Indeed and LinkedIn, although she doesn't consider LinkedIn as useful for her work today.
Networking brought clients. So did referrals and word of mouth. Some came through social media.
And the type of work mattered. Her spiritual clients have tended to come through referrals and word of mouth, while marketing and narrative consulting relied more heavily on networking and job boards.
Her website has created opportunities too. Tate Modern found Ashley through her site and hired her to read tarot at events in London. She's also used Entertainers Worldwide to find paid event opportunities.
Today her work includes a three-month virtual mentorship, Reiki, tarot readings and teaching, yoga work, event work and other content projects. She described these as different streams of income.
We didn't get into specific income numbers. I was more interested in understanding where the work came from in the first place, because "I started my own business" can make everything between the decision and the business disappear.
In Ashley's case, there was a lot happening in between.
Finding a client on a job board. Getting referred by someone you've worked with before. Taking a project that uses an old skill while developing a new one. Building a website that eventually leads to an opportunity you couldn't have planned for.
None of those things make for a particularly dramatic reinvention story. But they're the details I want to know because that's the part someone else can actually see herself figuring out.
Some experiments only need to teach you something
Not everything Ashley tried became part of her current life.
Her experience in marketing showed her parts of the industry she didn't want to participate in. Her time in Tulum exposed her to parts of Western spirituality she found troubling, including what she saw as spiritual bypassing and appropriation.
Then there was the spiritual retreat center.
Ashley was hired to do copywriting and marketing for the organization. About six months into the job, she says she realized she was working for what she considered a cult.
Yes. A cult.
She stayed another six months while working remotely, earning a salary and looking for something else.
You can be really curious about something and then get close enough to realize, oh, I don't actually want this. Or realize there's one part of the work you love and a whole lot of it you don't.
That doesn't make trying it a waste of time.
It gave Ashley more information.
The next version can change again
Ashley has continued changing her business.
This year, she pulled back from the copywriting and marketing work she'd been doing for startups and founders. She shifted more of her attention toward personal branding, mentorship and healing, eventually bringing those pieces together in a three-month program.
It took her years to become comfortable even using words like psychic and healer to describe herself.
So it would be easy to end her story here and say that after all those years of searching, Ashley finally figured out what she was supposed to be doing.
Except she never said that.
Her business is still evolving. So is the way she thinks about work. And even after making some pretty significant changes to her life, control is something she admits she still struggles with.
Even Paris didn't happen on the timeline she expected.
When Ashley moved there in 2020, she believed she'd be back in 2021. Instead, it took roughly four more years and several more changes before she returned to France.
The life she imagined wasn't necessarily wrong. Her timeline was.
What if you don't know what you want to do next?
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Ashley what she would say to a woman who knows she wants something to change but has absolutely no idea what that change is supposed to look like.
“Follow that thread,” she said.
She wasn't talking about blowing up your life tomorrow. In fact, she said almost the opposite. Pick something small. Pay attention to what keeps pulling at you. See what happens when you follow it.
I keep coming back to that phrase.
I like the idea of following a thread because it doesn't require you to know where it's going. You just have to be curious enough to see what happens if you keep pulling at it.
Ashley couldn't have known that learning marketing would eventually overlap with narrative work, or that narrative work would overlap with the spiritual work she'd already been exploring. She couldn't have planned for a startup to disappear after two months or for Tate Modern to find her website.
She definitely couldn't have planned for the cult.
She had to keep responding to what happened next.
And maybe that's part of why not knowing what you want can feel so frustrating. We're trying to answer a question that we might not have enough information to answer yet.
You might take a class and find something you want to keep exploring. Or actually do the work and realize you hate half of it. An old skill you assumed wouldn't matter anymore could turn out to be surprisingly useful. You could move to Paris thinking you know what happens next and find out two months later that you absolutely do not.
All of it gives you more information than you had before.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Ashley what she's choosing now that she couldn't have imagined choosing ten years ago.
“I'm choosing myself,” she said.
It doesn't make the previous ten years look any neater.
I don't think they need to.
You can watch the full conversation with Ashley here:
Connect with Ashley
Website: thoughtfulthorough.com
Instagram: @thoughtfullythoroughanl
Threads: @thoughtfullythoroughanl
Ashley Langham is the founder of Thoughtful Thorough, where her work brings together strategy, spirituality and healing. Watch her full conversation with Elle Mills on What She Did Next, an Out of Edits interview series about what happens after women decide something needs to change.
