I spent part of this week reading about Scotland's Tartan Army.
If you're not a soccer (or football, calm down) fan, stay with me. This isn't really about soccer.
The Tartan Army are the supporters of the Scottish national soccer team. They're famous for travelling in huge numbers, wearing kilts, singing loudly and generally turning every city they visit into a Scottish street party. They've been doing this for decades. Right now, with the World Cup underway, they're at it again.
Here's the interesting part.
Scotland aren't exactly known for dominating world football. They've had their moments, but consistent, trophy-winning dominance is not their brand.
Yet their supporters are arguably more famous than the team itself.
That got me thinking.
Most of us assume people rally around success. We assume the crowd follows the winner. We assume that what draws people together is a result worth celebrating.
The Tartan Army proves people rally around belonging.
For years they've built a reputation as the supporters everyone wants to host. They organise their own travel. They raise money for local charities in the cities they visit. They look after each other on the road. They actively protect the culture they've created — there's a genuine pride in being known as the good ones, the generous ones, the ones who leave a place better than they found it.
Wherever they go, they leave behind stories, friendships and goodwill.
The football is almost secondary.
The real achievement is what they've built together — an identity, a reputation, a community with its own values and its own standards. Something that exists independently of whether the team wins or loses on Saturday.
And I think there's something in that for women in midlife.
I was on a call earlier this week with someone I'd never met before — a woman in her early fifties who'd left a corporate role she'd held for fifteen years and was three months into building something of her own. She wasn't sure it was going to work. She said that out loud, which I respected. But she was doing it anyway.
And I thought: I keep meeting this woman. Different name, different industry, different city. But the same moment.
Because from the outside, what many of us are doing right now can look a bit chaotic.
One woman is starting a business.
Another is changing careers.
Someone else is navigating redundancy.
Someone is writing a book.
Someone is finally pursuing the thing she's been thinking about for twenty years.
None of us seem to be following the same roadmap, but when I zoom out, I see something else. I see thousands of women quietly refusing to believe their most interesting years are behind them. I see women backing themselves. Having a go. Building things before they know exactly how they'll work and starting before they're fully ready.
What's interesting is that most of us aren't doing this because we've figured it out. We're doing it because we've run out of patience for waiting until we do. There's a difference. Figured-it-out energy is confident and linear. Run-out-of-patience energy is scrappier, more honest, and (I'd argue) more durable. You can't talk someone out of it the same way you can talk them out of enthusiasm.
It doesn't always look organised, it often looks like controlled chaos from the inside and quiet determination from the outside, depending on who's watching. But maybe movements never look organised from the inside.
The Tartan Army didn't become famous because they had a perfect strategy or a marketing plan or a mission statement.
They became famous because enough people decided they were part of something and behaved accordingly. Consistently. Over a long period of time. Without waiting to see if the team was going to deliver first.
Maybe that's what we're building too. Not a trend. Not a demographic. Not a wellness movement or a self-help category. A generation of women deciding that midlife isn't where ambition ends, it's where a different kind of ambition begins.
There's a word for this kind of collective forward motion without a single agreed destination: vanguardism — not in the political sense, but the original one. Being at the front of something before the thing has a name.
I know something about that.
I found myself defining Midrising after I was retrenched last year. I coined the term as I started to feel a complete shift within myself — not a crisis, something bigger and more exciting than that. I built an entire framework around the thesis of it. And it spat me out into where I am now: building a SaaS technology company at 50, forever changed by the very process of going through it.
That's what Midrising is. Not a brand. An awakening. The complete Gen X fuck-off vibes, colliding beautifully with who you actually are on the other side of it.
And when I look across LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram, TikTok — I see it everywhere. Women doing it in droves. All in their own way. And yet banding together, backing each other, just like the Tartan Army.
That's a beautiful thing to belong to.
What movement do you think we're building without even realising it?
Start steady. Then decide.
— Gill.
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