Where we are can be a long way from where we started - Women's Agenda

Where we are can be a long way from where we started

I just got a board position at 100 Story Building, an amazing social enterprise in Melbourne’s inner west helping children from the poorest backgrounds to improve their literacy skills through creative story telling. I’m so thrilled, honoured and as a result I am now being haunted by old feelings of self-doubt that visit me in the middle of the night now and then.

That’s because people like me don’t become board directors.

I’ve been wearing a special mask that I keep in a jar at the side of the door called the Eleanor Rigby. I’ve worked long and hard to craft that face. Because for most of my life I had felt that at any moment, somebody would find out where I came from.

I was born with a deformed arm, filled with huge cysts and spent a lot of my life in and out of hospital having operations. After moving to London from the North of England, my parents divorced and I lived in poverty with my father and younger brother in the middle of the renowned Holly Street Estate in Hackney.

Girls like me were just happy to finish school, let alone go to university (which I didn’t) or find a job in an office in the West End (which I did by finding it in a local classifieds ad in the paper). When I started that job, I lived on the 20th floor of an eastend tower block and swapped my shiny shell suit for a pastel pink power suit each morning. I was terrified that somebody might discover that I wasn’t educated or deserving. On the flip-side, I found it so hard coming home in the urine-filled lift up to our flat, I felt I was rubbing my new success in people faces, so I totally denied there was any. It was like a double-life.

Sometimes it still is.

Early in my career I was dubbed the ‘ice queen’ and when I heard about it, I was hurt but I also began to believe my own story. I tried to look older than I was. I didn’t want anybody to realise that I wasn’t old enough to be working yet and didn’t have a degree or a clue what I was doing. But I continued to work hard, say yes to everything and made real progress, running the department by the time I was 18.

As time has passed, so has the distance between where I am now and where I came from. Along that journey, I’ve realised I should be measuring the distance I’ve travelled as my success metric, and not compare myself to others who have far surpassed my seemingly meagre achievements in comparison. Because to deny it, would be to diminish the effort it took to get here. Because I’ve really walked a long way and I keep on walking. Because where I came from continues to drive me forward, giving me the strength and the desire to strive. To always find something better.

These days, I’m making a living out of helping people discover their super-powers and build awesome products and businesses. That’s because I know that everyone has a story and that it has shaped them and will continue to do so. By taking the time and making the effort to find out, you can make some great relationships and hopefully help people find their path.

All that said, I am still often conflicted. For how can I write a piece about where I came from and hide the hardest part. Those thoughts that haunt me in the middle of the night will never leave me. It is only in my dreams that I can see my brother again, who took his own life age 32 from the 20th floor of another tower block where he lived with his wife and two beautiful children.

All the more reason to strive for something better, try things, say yes.

And maybe, get the chance to help a kid like me.

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