The quiet, invisible weight of living a life that looks charmed from the outside while you quietly hold it all together from the inside. That is where Hayley Harlock and I found each other, somewhere around 2018, sliding into each other’s DMs because we were both building something for a community that most people hadn’t even recognized as a community yet.
Hayley is the founder of The Flipside Life, known as TFSL, a community that supports, connects, and champions physician families at every stage of training and practice. She started it in 2019, which means she was building before the research existed, before the accounts multiplied on social media, before medical education programs started asking whether the partners might also need something. She just knew. And she built anyway.
This conversation covers a lot of ground. We go back to the pandemic, when Hayley jumped on Instagram Stories with almost no social media presence and said, essentially, “If you’re a partner of a physician, come find me on Zoom.” People came. And kept coming. For over three years, she ran weekly evening connect calls, and I was in those rooms. I watched her welcome strangers into safety in a way I have never quite seen replicated.
We also talk about the truly unhinged thing we did together in the summer of 2020. Eight children between us. No budget. Two months. One virtual conference for physician spouses, the Better Together Project, that somehow drew over 150 attendees from Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. We did not die. We are still proud of ourselves.
But the conversation I keep coming back to is the one about mentorship. What it means to be just a little further down the road than someone else. Not to have figured it all out, not to perform certainty, but to turn around and say, “I see you. Here is what I know.” That is what Hayley does. It is what I try to do. And it is exactly what so many physician spouses have never had.
If you are still looking for your people, this episode is for you. And so is Hayley.
What You’ll Learn
- [00:00 – 03:00] The origin story of The Flipside Life and where the name actually came from
- [04:00 – 08:30] How the pandemic connect calls started and why 150+ people kept showing up
- [12:00 – 15:00] The Better Together Project: a virtual conference, two months, no budget, eight kids at home
- [16:00 – 20:00] Why mentorship is still missing for physician spouses, and what it actually looks like
- [23:00 – 27:00] What Hayley says to the woman who still hasn’t found her people
- [28:00 – 30:00] The partner orientation program that’s finally happening inside medical education
Resources Mentioned
Your Next Steps
- Download the Life After Survival Mode Guide
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Spotify
