A reminder to celebrate all of life's chapters

Sometimes I think about my life before the UK and I have to admit that until recently, I let that version of me become invisible.

When you move to a new country, people meet you as you are now. They don’t usually know who you were before. They don’t know the career you built, the experience you gained, the things you achieved, or the life you lived before stepping onto a plane and starting again and sometimes, after a while, you begin to forget that life ever existed.

When I came to the UK at the end of 2017 it was with ten years of experience in my pocket living and working in Asia Pacific in entertainment and hospitality. When I arrived in Thailand in 2007, I started from scratch and over a decade I made a name for myself. However coming to the UK meant reinventing who I was and choosing a new path that would allow me to prosper in a different environment. I decided to do an MBA to help me transition as I saw it as a way to invest in myself and hopefully create a path into a more corporate life.

The MBA experience was amazing; however I wrongly assumed that after completing the degree, finding a new career would be easier. I spent the next year struggling to find a job and when I say struggling, I mean really struggling. Applying. Waiting. Hearing nothing. Getting rejected. Questioning myself. Wondering what I was doing wrong. It was a tough period and it gave my confidence a real blow. I felt like I was starting from zero.

Eventually, I landed a corporate role in a new industry but I took a major pay cut to get my foot in the door. Worse, by that point, I had spent so long fighting just to get an opportunity that I had started to question the value of everything I had done before. Maybe people didn’t value my previous experience. Maybe they looked at it differently because it happened somewhere else. Maybe they thought it wasn’t relevant or serious enough. Maybe they looked down on it. Slowly, without even consciously deciding to, I started keeping that part of my life quiet.

Funnily enough, it has been my latest chapter (era) of becoming a mom that has given me the confidence to bring that piece of me back to life. Since becoming a mom all of the doubts and insecurities I developed in my struggle to rebuild in the UK have been pushed aside. Part of it is that during my maternity leave I have realised that life is so much bigger than work. What I do for work is a part of who I am, but only a fraction. Every version of me that existed before matters. My professional life, my family life, my social life, it all matters and makes me who I am. If anything I should be more grateful for all of the life I have lived! My story didn’t start when I arrived in the UK, it was simply the next page.

So here I am sharing this brief tale for the person who has just moved countries or is starting a new chapter of life, professional or personal, your experience counts, all of it. Celebrate it.