Most people would look at Bella Nicole 4 years ago and think, “damn, that is one successful woman.” They’d be right if their only measure of success was how much money she’d made while climbing the corporate ladder. She’s got a Bachelor’s degree in economics, and had spent a decade working towards an executive position that offered the kind of lifestyle— not to mention stability— that most people only dream of. At the peak of her corporate career, Bella Nicole was a Senior Director at a Cloud Infrastructure company based in Boston. She was managing a team, making $185,000 annually, and was completely miserable.
Says Bella, “I worked really hard for 10 years, navigating on my own how to get promoted and be compensated fairly. I basically went from being an entry level analyst to a senior director and all I received in the end was complete disillusionment.”
Bella’s breaking point wasn’t triggered by any one bad day, but from the slow realization that her corporate existence was pretty shallow. Bella once was forced to lay off a talented employee due to no other reason than office politics and says that was a lightbulb moment for her.
A lightbulb moment that caused Bella to think that maybe it was time for a part of her life that she kept secret from her colleagues to take a larger role. Bella has always been, in her words, a “very sexually curious person,” and had already been attending and performing at sex parties for years, as well as enjoying some success on OnlyFans. Says Bella, “I had this whole other life. I remember one night, I made plans with friends and it was my turn to choose a spot, so I went on Yelp to look for a lounge or strip club we hadn’t been to yet.”
What she found was an exclusive club that required membership in order to attend. Bella watched a promotional video on their site, and found herself drawn in watching a scene of a handful of beautiful people having sex on a table for an audience. Something clicked, and then clicked again when she found out that these people were being paid to do a job.
Says Bella, “When I found out it was a paid role, I was shocked that I could earn more than I made in 2 weeks as an entry level analyst for a few hours of, what I would later realise, was complete ecstasy.”
And thus, a content creator was born. Bella began performing at sex parties and sharing adult content online behind paywalled platforms, OnlyFans being one of them.
However, balancing her secret side-hustle and her corporate position soon became… a bit much.
Bella describes the moment she realized it was time to step away from corporate. “I was distracted making content while also being on a Teams call (thankfully off camera). I’d always been reliable and ‘on top of it’ at work, and for the first time I was asked a really technical question that I truly didn’t know how to answer. I had apparently just stopped listening because I was trying to find the right angle for a set of nudes instead and I could tell my boss wasn’t thrilled I couldn’t give a solid response. It really forced me to stop and think about why I felt this level of shame for not being able to answer a question.”
As so many of us do, Bella sought a second opinion on what she suspected to be her truth.
“I talked to my ex boyfriend about it that night and he basically said I was at a point where I either needed to focus completely on my job to continue to succeed, or I could put all my efforts into OF and take that leap. I was still terrified given how much of my life I had put into climbing the corporate ladder, but when he put it like that, I knew I couldn’t half-ass two things any longer, and had to whole-ass just one.”
Was she nervous? You bet your boots! “My mind was filled with so many concerns- what if it doesn’t work out, what if my current success on OF is just a fluke, what if I’ve ruined everything I worked so hard for- but deep down, I really felt at peace and started drafting my two weeks notice that night,” says Bella.
In retrospect, Bella believes that her corporate years pointed to a symptom of a larger crisis. Says Bella, “The biggest fallacy to a higher paying corporate job is that once you are hitting your salary goal, you think you’ll finally have the money to do fun things after work, buy something that will make you happy, go on nicer and longer vacations, etc. But money still can’t buy you the time to do or enjoy those things, and the higher up the ladder you get, the more hours you spend working.”
Despite Bella’s sizable $185,000 salary, she realized that she didn’t actually have any time to enjoy spending that salary. All of her days were anxiety riddled from “urgent” deadlines and neverending work that kept taking over the time that was supposed to be hers. Says Bella, “One of the main reasons why I burned out in my corporate job was that always present, false sense of urgency. Obviously it’s important to respect deadlines, but the pressure to complete a deliverable in an unreasonable amount of time became so intense that I started to question why it felt like I was about to perform open heart surgery– not put a powerpoint together for a B2B tech activation.”
The millennial hustle programming runs deep, and even once Bella stepped away from her C-suite-adjacent role, she still needed time to adjust. According to Bella, she needed some significant time to sort of “deprogram” herself while she adjusted to her life’s new rhythm.
Says Bella, “It took me maybe three to six months to really deprogram myself. I would have these moments where I’d think, ‘you’re not being productive enough, you need to be heads down working or you’re being lazy.’ It took me a while to realise that being productive actually had little to do with being buried in busy work.”
It took Bella some time to adjust to the newfound freedom she had over her time, but being a full-time creator is a real job, and it can be very easy to fall back into the trap of feeling like you have to be working every moment. Bella’s had to intentionally adjust the way she mentally approaches the work she does on OnlyFans. Says Bella, “While being an OF creator is a full time job and can be demanding, I have control over the “deliverable” and can dictate how I approach and work on it. Most importantly, I can also be honest with myself about what I’m creating and why- ironically it still doesn’t feel anywhere near as ridiculous as the urgency from the corporate world.” She also has more time to engage with the life she loves. When asked how she avoids burnout, she says, “Staying active, healthy and having the time to pursue my own hobbies does wonders for my mental health and helps me avoid burnout. I wasn’t able to do any of these things previously.”
To say that Bella Nicole is a completely different person now is putting it mildly! She’s so much happier, feels more of a sense of personal fulfillment, and is just all around a better person. Says Bella, “I’m a better person as an OF creator compared to how I used to be as a corporate exec. Constantly feeling stressed and overworked as a corporate exec meant that I’d usually come home drained, a bit overstimulated and not in a great mood. I missed a lot of dinners and events for my family and friends because I had to unexpectedly work instead. I sometimes felt resentful and that my time was taken for granted at work, and it turned me into a version of myself that I wasn’t proud of.”
Bella’s OnlyFans success has let her become the person that she really wanted to be all along, and she’s doing what she can to make sure and spread the love. “The more money I make, the more I ask myself how I can use this money to better the lives of others. I see GoFundMe’s where the goal is equivalent to what I can earn in a few days. Why would I not want to contribute? I’m beyond grateful to be able to have this opportunity to do so, and that genuinely makes me happier than any promotion ever would.”
The transition from corporate to OnlyFans wasn’t solely about finances. It was about realizing that she could play a pivotal role in helping triage a society that has been so caught up in the hustle that it’s forgotten how to connect. Says Bella, “Honestly, it’s a loneliness business. It’s barely about sex. It’s about companionship and figuring out how to find a connection in a world that feels really sad and lonely right now.”
When asked what advice she has for other corporate execs looking for a change, Bella said, “I would just start by finding ways to recover your time, because in the end that’s all anyone is really trying to do. And maybe that means playing it safe and keeping your current job, but truly putting in an effort to be more intentional with how you spend your time after work is a good start; and something I wish I did earlier. It doesn’t even have to be something productive, even 30 minutes not spent doom scrolling is a step in the right direction to change your perspective on how you spent your day.”
Her corporate job may have given her a $185K salary, but OnlyFans has given her something corporate never could: freedom.
“I haven’t heard that awful Teams message notification sound, haven’t had a single ‘fire drill’ on a weekend, or read ‘just circling back’ in an email in over a year! I felt like I’d ‘turned off’ a lot about what makes me human while I was pursuing a higher salary and bigger job titles. Now I actually get to figure out what makes me happy, and I know that I’ve made others happy as well!”
When asked if she’d ever go back, Bella Nicole had one thing to say, “If someone offered me a million dollars to go back, I’d still say no. I happily disengaged from it, and I’m truly grateful I was able to choose this path.”
