Starting Over at 36: Why I Chose eBay Reselling After Years of Caring for My Dad

I was twenty-two when my dad had three strokes.

The left side of his brain died. He became bedridden, and I became his full-time carer.

I did that for nearly six years, and then he passed away.

I'm thirty-six now.

I live in a stone cottage in rural Scotland, I don't drive, and I sell second-hand clothes on eBay.

A few people have asked how I ended up doing this, so here it is.

And if you're sat there, at whatever age you are, thinking everybody else got a head start, everyone knows what they're doing with their life and you're lost with no clue, stay with me.

Because this is the story of starting over in your 30s, from someone who's doing it right now.

Twenty-Two and Suddenly a Carer

I'd just started figuring out what my life was going to be.

And then my dad came home from work, started trying to light his cigarette with his pen, and that was that.

Three strokes. One after the other.

He was bedridden after that, and he needed somebody with him to take care of him 24 hours a day.

I want to describe what that's actually like, because I think people hear "carer" and picture somebody popping in to help with the shopping, make a drink and sort some food.

It's every day.

It's getting up in the night.

It's personal care, the stuff nobody talks about, for your own dad, when you're in your very early twenties with no training and no idea what you're doing.

It's medication timings. Lots of medication.

It's hospital appointments.

It's chasing people on the phone who don't ring you back.

It's learning to lift somebody safely so you don't hurt them.

And it's the thing underneath all of it, which is grief.

Because you're grieving somebody who is still in the room with you.

The person who raised me, my best friend, was still there, and also wasn't there in his entirety anymore. I had to reconcile with that.

Nearly six years.

And here's what I want to say, and I mean this completely.

I would have done it again. He was my dad.

But I'd be lying if I said it didn't cost me a lot of myself.

Watching Everyone Else Move On

While that was happening, everybody I knew was off living.

They were getting their first jobs, learning to drive, getting their freedom.

They were going away at the weekend, meeting people, going to concerts.

They were building the thing you're supposed to build in your twenties. The foundations.

And I wasn't.

I was in that house.

There's a thing that happens where you look up one day and realise everyone's moved several steps down a road you never got on.

When Caring Ends

And then he passed away.

I'd love to tell you that was the end of the hard part.

It wasn't.

For all those years, your entire day has been structured around one person. Every hour has a purpose.

And then, overnight, there's no structure, no purpose, no routine, and no him.

It's all gone.

What came out of that for me was severe OCD, agoraphobia and PTSD.

What OCD Actually Is

I want to talk about the OCD properly, because I think it's one of the most misunderstood illnesses there is.

If what you picture is somebody who likes their tins lined up, washes their hands a lot or straightens a picture on the wall, that's not it.

That's a joke people make. "Oh, I'm so OCD about my desk." They mean they like it tidy.

That is not what this is.

OCD is like having something living inside you.

Something that second-guesses every single choice you make.

That polices your thoughts.

That puts images and ideas in your head that you would never, ever choose, and then demands you prove you're not a monster for having had them.

And every time you try to prove it, the proof isn't good enough, so you do it again. And again.

All day. Every day. From the second you wake up.

My OCD themes

• False memory OCD: the illness convinces you that you've done something terrible that you have no memory of doing, and you spend hours trying to work out whether a memory is real

• Pure O: it happens inside your head with no visible compulsions, so nobody around you can see any of it

• Harm OCD

• Responsibility OCD: the conviction that you're responsible for anything bad that might happen to anyone

• Contamination OCD

Everybody's themes are different. And they shift. You can lose one and pick another one up. It's not static.

The World Health Organisation lists OCD among the most debilitating illnesses in the world.

Not because of how it looks from the outside, because from the outside it often looks like nothing. For the most part, it's an invisible illness.

It's because of what it does to a person's day, every day, relentlessly.

And the agoraphobia

Alongside the OCD came agoraphobia, which meant leaving the house became something I couldn't do.

The two feed each other, because the less you go out, the more impossible going out becomes.

I ended up with the crisis team. I ended up in therapy. I ended up on very high medication.

And I was in hell. I don't have a better word for it.

Managing, not beating it

There's no cure for OCD.

There's medication that helps. There's exposure therapy (ERP) and other treatments, and they do work for a lot of people.

But mine is wrapped up in trauma and PTSD. It's not a standalone thing I can treat on its own. It's grown into everything that happened, and that makes it much harder to break through.

So I'm not going to tell you I beat it.

I didn't. I manage it.

Some weeks well, some weeks badly. I do my best with it.

That's the honest answer.

Moving to a Cottage in Rural Scotland

So we moved to Scotland.

A 180-year-old stone cottage, about an acre of land, miles from anywhere, right by the sea.

I'll be honest with you, part of that was running away.

But part of it was that I genuinely couldn't build a new life standing in the place where the old one happened.

The other thing I came out of those years with was a hundred pounds in weight.

When you're caring for somebody full time, you don't eat properly and you don't move.

I got very into emotional eating. You eat whatever's quick, whenever you get five minutes, whatever makes you feel better for a split second. And you don't leave the house.

It goes on without you really clocking it.

I'm slowly losing it now. Slowly. I'm not going to make a big thing of it. It's just part of the picture.

The Candle Business I Had to Give Up

I had to build something anyway.

I knew I wanted a tangible, physical business alongside the online things my mum and I were building.

And I thought that was going to be candles.

I genuinely loved it. I loved making them. It was working. I'd built a YouTube following of 14,000 people.

And the OCD made it intolerable.

Contamination OCD, responsibility OCD, and a product that goes into somebody else's home.

That they set fire to.

That they breathe in.

That might be near their kids.

Every single batch became an interrogation. And with false memory OCD on top, I couldn't trust my own memory of having checked.

It was making me unwell. So I stopped.

And that was a loss. I'd built something I loved, and I had to put it down because my brain wouldn't let me keep it.

Why eBay Reselling Works for Me

And then I found reselling.

Here's why it works, and this is the bit I think might actually be useful to somebody.

With eBay, the worst thing that can happen is I refund somebody's order.

That's it. That's the worst-case scenario of my entire business.

Nobody gets hurt. There's no batch I could have got wrong. Nothing I sell can harm anybody.

If I make a mistake, I give them their money back, and it's over.

For somebody with OCD, I cannot overstate what that means.

It's the first business I've ever had where the stakes are low enough that I can actually work. Where the illness has nothing to grab hold of.

And the rest of it fits too.

I can't drive. It doesn't matter. I buy wholesale and on Vinted, and Royal Mail collects my parcels.

Where the business is now

• 160 sales passed recently, and I'm still very much a beginner

• About £7.50 average profit per item, and I'm trying to get it to £10

• Womenswear mostly, heading into menswear too

• Working towards my first 1,000 listings, and if the numbers work, I go to 2,000

Alongside it there are my digital products, my novels and this blog, which I love and which isn't going anywhere.

I'm not telling you this is going to work.

It might go absolutely up the creek without a paddle.

But at least I'll have tried.

I'd rather try it in front of you and have it not work than not try at all.

If You Feel Behind in Life

The reason I'm telling you all this isn't really about me.

It's because I know there are people reading who feel behind in their life.

Everybody else is getting married. Having kids. Buying houses. Running businesses that are five years ahead of yours.

I should have done this by now. I've missed it. It's too late for me.

You haven't missed it.

Where you are right now does not have to be your life. It just doesn't.

You can start again, and it doesn't matter what age you are when you do it.

I'm thirty-six, and I'm starting from scratch in beautiful rural Scotland.

It doesn't matter what anybody else is doing, because you're not on their path. You're on yours.

Whatever has happened in your life has no bearing on anybody else's, and theirs has none on yours.

It's not a race. There's no prize at the end. Honestly, there isn't.

Nobody is handing out anything at the finish line for having got there in the right order.

We just have to do the best we can with the cards we were dealt. And trust, actually trust, that we'll end up where we're meant to be.

So if you're feeling behind, stop it. Right now.

You are exactly where you're supposed to be.

A Little Note About My Images ♡

You'll notice that the images across my blog are a mixture of my own photography and AI-generated images.

I'm a one-woman band running this little corner of the internet, without a team of photographers, designers or editors behind me. Living with OCD also means I can be particularly careful about things like copyright and image permissions, so I sometimes use AI to help bring my ideas to life without those additional worries.

Where possible, I love sharing my own photographs, especially glimpses of my cottage, garden and everyday life here in Scotland. Other times, I'll use AI-generated imagery to illustrate an idea or provide a little creative inspiration.

I believe in being transparent, so I wanted you to know that you'll find a mixture of both throughout my website. The words, experiences, opinions and ideas are my own.

Thank you for supporting my little one-woman blog! ❤️