Don’t get me wrong – even when you love what you do, you still need downtime to relax and recharge. Some days, I’ll definitely get up and really not feel up to creating content. Sometimes I wake up and just want to put a tracksuit on and not do anything – not have to be that chatty, pristine girl that people expect me to be. Which is fine! So, I definitely take days off – 100 per cent.
On a perfect day off, I could sleep in forever. Yes, it’s changed a bit now since moving out of the city centre and getting into a healthier lifestyle, but I can sleep in till around ten or eleven o’clock if I need to! And then I get up, have breakfast and watch TV. I usually go to the gym on my days off as well, because I really enjoy exercise at the moment. It’s become a key part of my weekly routine and helps me with everything, mentally and physically. But apart from that, I’ll just be sitting on the sofa wearing no make-up whatsoever and watching a film – that’s how I really enjoy my days off! I just chill at home, have a bath – baths are just my favourite thing in the world.
In the evening Tommy and I would go on a date: our favourite thing is to go to the cinema and watch a horror film – we’re horror-film obsessed. Afterwards, we’d go to dinner; he loves burgers, so we might go to a burger place, or a Pizza Express – anywhere, though we’re both normally trying to eat healthy! That’s a perfect little evening for us – we don’t dress up. I don’t wear make-up. And we just have the nicest time. To grab a really posh, fancy dinner and get dressed up – that’s not our style at all. We just love a really chilled evening.
At the weekends, whenever we’ve got free time together, Tommy and I will find something to do that will get us out of the house rather than staying in. We love going on walks – on a Saturday we sometimes go to a park near us for a walk and to see the deer. We love going to the Trafford Centre and just wandering round there, and at Halloween, we’ll always go to different Halloween parks – we’re always really active.
On a Sunday, if I’m cooking, I’ll make a Sunday roast. I went through a stage in lockdown of making Sunday roast every single weekend! I’m not that good at cooking, as a lot of people know, but I’ve definitely tried to get better. So far I’ve mastered a roast, but I need to practise a few more recipes because we don’t really eat in that much. If we’re eating in, it’s normally meal preps – because Tommy’s always eating clean for his boxing – so we don’t cook those from scratch.
If ever people were wondering who the Molly-Mae is that nobody sees … the answer is it’s the Molly-Mae that you do see, because of my YouTube! I’m so honest on there and it’s such an insight into how I live my life. That’s why, at the party to celebrate my current role with PLT, at least three girls came up to me and said the same thing: ‘We know that you’d rather be on the sofa with the candles lit watching Harry Potter. We love that we get to have you just one night.’
It was just really sweet. Because I thought, Oh my God, my followers actually know me so well! Although, that party was one I had no problem sacrificing my Harry Potter and PJs for. The whole night was an amazing celebration and one I will always remember.
It’s just that, at the end of the day, when everything is spotless and I’ve got a nice cup of tea, that truly is my happiest time of day! I’ll usually drink peppermint tea – I drink it by the gallon when it gets to the colder months. I actually only really drink tea when the seasons change, so that’s another reason why my favourite time of the year is autumn. I’ll have loads of baths and curl up in nice blankets. That’s just when I am at my happiest, that time of year. But whatever the season, I’m in my element when I’ve got the candles on at home and a nice film on the TV and I’ve had a long bath.
The small things really do give me pleasure – even getting a nice cold bottle of water from the fridge can make me so happy.
What I do is not a traditional nine-to-five where you go to work, you switch on, and you come out of work and switch off – and I know a lot of jobs aren’t like that either, these days. I’m almost constantly switched on because my phone is my job and it’s by my side every second. It might sound ridiculous, but it’s how I work, it’s how I communicate with my followers – it’s like my office! And of course with my family four hours away, it’s my way of keeping in touch, too.
Zoe and I, in particular, are always on FaceTime with each other – but my friends always laugh about those FaceTime calls because it can just be ‘Hi’, ‘Hi’, ‘You alright?’ We check in with each other and then hang up again! So it might seem short and a bit meaningless, but I like it. I don’t always want to be on my phone when I don’t have to be. Sometimes when I get a text, I think, Oh, I’ll reply to that later … I can’t be bothered to be on my phone right now!
All that means I do have a habit of being on my phone too much, like a lot of people. Tommy and I actually had a really nice time not so long ago which reminded me of that. We went to Bath for a couple of days and unintentionally I just didn’t go on my phone for, really, the first time ever. I had brought all these nice outfits and make-up, but we literally just slobbed out and I wore the same tracksuit and no make-up for three days. I went a bit MIA, and it was lovely.
On another trip, Tommy and I went camping up a mountain in the Lake District with Zoe and her boyfriend – they’re both in the army and do things like that all the time, so I rang her to say, ‘I really want to do that, too!’ Tommy was excited to come as well.
I wanted to do something a bit challenging in that way – sleeping in a tent on the side of a mountain! – because I grew up doing things like that. Not a lot of people know that side of me. I feel like a lot of the time people look at me and just see a girly girl, but as you know now, I grew up going on walking holidays. I’d hate people thinking that I’m this prim and proper girl who wants to have everything done for me. I’m much more hands-on than that. I don’t need those fancy holidays in five-star hotels. I don’t need a big fancy apartment. I like the nice things in life – but I don’t need them. And sometimes I enjoy getting away from it all up a mountain!
It was completely different to my usual holidays. We walked really far and pitched our tents out in the open. Which was a little bit scary at times, because at night it was pitch-black on the mountain and you could literally hear a pin drop … or a stranger’s footsteps. It was just after we’d said we were going to sleep when I heard footsteps in the grass, so distinctively. Oh God! I thought. But I just told myself, No, no you’re hearing things, just ignore it. Still, the next day, I asked, ‘Did anyone else hear footsteps around eleven o’clock?’ And we all had … Everyone said, ‘I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare anybody.’ I think it must have been a sheep we heard because it was just not possible for anybody else to be up there – we were in the middle of nowhere and didn’t see a soul the whole time.
I also didn’t have signal literally from the minute I got up the mountain to the second I came down the next day. At first I wasn’t keen on being cut off, because obviously, I’m a control freak with my socials, and that stressed me out. But the camping itself was really nice. It was something so different for me and Tommy. Being in the army, my sister and her boyfriend are both super good with compasses and maps, and we felt very safe in their hands. We would never have been able to do it by ourselves – it was proper wilderness camping, and we didn’t have the first clue where to start with anything, even setting up the tents! That was all them, so we can’t take credit for that. But it was a really good experience.
Straight after that trip, I thought, I won’t be in a rush to sleep on a mountain again anytime soon. But now, looking back, I think, actually, I probably would like to do that again. It was so nice to do something a bit different, a really, really nice escape. I love that camping was something I used to hate when I did it growing up, but now I choose to do something like that.
So, I think doing things like that – just taking the time to not go on my phone too much or to have a couple of days off Instagram and not worry about it – is so important. As I’ve said, you do need to build momentum online, especially when you’re starting out and trying to actually build some in the first place! But once you’ve built that relationship with your followers, it doesn’t disappear overnight – and that’s what I’m trying to remember as my days get busier.
And it’s not just about getting away. At the end of the day, when we get to bed, Tommy and I will always pop on a film and make sure to put our phones down. That’s something that we love doing at night – finding a new horror film (I’ll skip Harry Potter for once!) and watching that together, totally unplugged.