Success Isn’t What I Thought It Was

Someone said to me the other day, right in front of my boss, “There’s a whole story behind you.”
They said it lightly, almost as a throwaway comment, but it landed with weight.
I smiled, said something polite, but inside I thought, if only you knew.

Because there is. There’s a whole story.
And it didn’t start with success. It started with survival.

The Girl in the Daihatsu

When I got my first sales job in Australia, all I could afford was a battered old 1992 Daihatsu Charade. The air-con was broken, the driver’s door handle had snapped clean off, and every morning I had to crawl across from the passenger side just to start the engine.

It’s funny now, looking back. All those years as a gymnast at school, representing Northern Ireland, were finally paying off. I had perfected the art of climbing, stretching and balancing my way into that driver’s seat like it was a routine on the uneven bars.

I’d sit there, sweating through the Queensland heat, praying the car would start before anyone saw me.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as resilience. I just thought of it as getting by. But really, that’s what resilience looks like, doing what needs to be done, no matter how ridiculous it feels.

I was on a student visa then, allowed to work only sixteen hours a week, and everything felt precarious. I was trying to build a new life in a country that didn’t yet feel like mine.

What people don’t always see is that I had walked away from a good job, a company car, my family, and everything I had ever known to pursue a dream. Because if we don’t act upon them, then we just never know where we might end up. It wasn’t easy, far from it, but something inside me knew I had to try.

To stay, I needed to retrain. To retrain, I needed to work. To work, I needed that little Daihatsu to keep going, even when I felt like breaking down myself.

I was clinging to this fragile thread of possibility, permanent residency, stability, belonging.

The Flights and the Grief

In 2010, when I got the call that my sister had passed away suddenly, everything stopped. I booked the first available flights and began the long journey home to Belfast, travelling with Thai Airways.

The route was Coffs Harbour to Sydney, Sydney to Bangkok, Bangkok to London, and finally London to Belfast.

By the time I reached London, I was running on adrenaline and heartbreak. The moment I heard the familiar English accents around me, the grief I had been holding back came crashing in. I was trying to hold it together, but tears kept slipping down my face.

The man at the British Midland counter noticed. He didn’t ask questions. He simply picked up the phone and called someone over. A few minutes later, another staff member appeared and quietly said, “Come with me.”

They took me to the British Midland lounge, away from the noise and chaos of the terminal. It was calm there, almost silent. I remember sitting in one of those oversized chairs, clutching a cup of tea, staring out the window at the runway lights. For a few brief moments, I could breathe. It was the first act of kindness I had felt since I got the news, and I’ll never forget it.

The Visa and the Gate

After the funeral, it was time to return to Australia. I arrived at Heathrow Airport, emotionally drained, and handed over my passport at the check-in desk.

The woman behind the counter frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “There’s no visa on your file.”

I froze. At first, I thought she must have made a mistake. I explained that I had been living in Australia for eighteen months and that I had a visa before I left. But she was already calling for her supervisor.

Then came the words I’ll never forget: “Please come with me.”

They took my passport and led me through a side door to a small, windowless room, the kind you see on those border control TV programmes. Beige walls, hard plastic chairs, a humming vending machine. The air felt heavy with other people’s fear.

I sat there for hours, surrounded by strangers, feeling like a criminal when I had done nothing wrong. I had just buried my sister. I had said goodbye to my family. And now I thought I was going to lose the only life I had left.

Every tick of the clock felt louder. I kept checking the time, convinced I would miss my flight. The panic sat in my throat like a stone.

Then, finally, an official appeared. He called my name, asked me to follow him to another counter, and told me they had spoken with Australian Immigration. They were going to let me board the flight on a temporary tourist visa, but I would have to report to the Migration Office in Sydney as soon as I landed.

I barely remember running through the terminal, dragging my carry-on case, my heart racing. I reached the departure board and saw it. Gate 13.

Gate 13. Unlucky for some, but that day, it was my lifeline.

When I landed in Sydney, I did exactly what they said. The next morning, I went straight to the Migration Office. The waiting room was packed, but I told them I couldn’t come back because I lived more than five hours away. So I sat there. For nearly four hours, I waited until someone finally called my name.

He was kind, calm, reassuring. He told me I had a case officer, something I hadn’t even known before. That information changed everything. Two weeks later, after constant phone calls and relentless persistence, my visa was granted.

I had made it by the skin of my teeth. And I promised myself I would never again take stability for granted.

The Quiet Village

After all that chaos, living in Sawtell, a sleepy coastal village just outside Coffs Harbour, felt like a deep breath. For the first six months, I loved it. The beaches, the quiet, the neighbours who waved as you walked by.

But after a while, the silence started to feel too loud. I missed the energy of the city, the bright lights, the art, the culture, the noise and yes, the shops. I missed being surrounded by people chasing things.

Sawtell was beautiful, but I realised I wasn’t built for smallness. I needed movement, connection, purpose. That was the beginning of understanding that success isn’t just about peace. Sometimes it’s about knowing when to outgrow a season.

The People and the Pain

There was a time when I tried to fill the emptiness with company. I joined a support group, thinking it would help me find my footing. For a while, it did. But as the months went on, the cracks appeared.

People I thought were friends weren’t. I had a boyfriend then, and when I ended things for my own sanity, a so-called friend took him in. That betrayal stung more than the breakup. It was the realisation that I had been surrounding myself with the wrong kind of people, the kind who smiled to your face but chipped away at your peace.

Someone once told me that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I saw myself in that. So I walked away.

I joined a gym. A run club. I started to rebuild, piece by piece, the version of myself I had been neglecting. I made new friends, good people who didn’t need my backstory to understand me. One of them, a colleague in Sydney, became a quiet constant, always checking in, reminding me that kindness still existed.

It was a hard time, but every time I flew home to Belfast for a few weeks, I would come back to Australia with a strange sense of gratitude. No matter how messy it got, I knew I was lucky to be building a life here.

The Redefinition

So when that customer said, “There’s a whole story behind you,” they were right. There is. But it’s not a story of easy wins or overnight success. It’s a story of holding things together when no one’s looking. Of making impossible choices. Of falling apart, then rebuilding stronger.

Success isn’t the car you drive or the job title you hold. It’s the courage to keep showing up, in a new country, with a broken visa, a broken heart and still finding a way forward.

It’s learning to trust yourself when the world feels unsteady. It’s walking away from people who don’t clap for you. It’s surviving the airport waiting rooms and the quiet villages and the heartbreaks you never saw coming.

These days, I drive a beautiful car that I bought new two years ago. I don’t have to climb across the seat anymore, though if I ever needed to, I still could.

And even now, life still tests me. In 2022, I was made redundant, blindsided by it, really. One day I had security, the next it was gone. I took a job I hated just to survive, because sometimes you do what you must to keep going. Later, I took another role that challenged me in ways I didn’t expect. It pushed me, stretched me, taught me what I was capable of.

And today, four weeks into a new role covering all of Queensland and New Zealand for a healthcare company, I can finally pull from every part of my story, the visa struggles, the heartbreaks, the resilience, the constant reinvention.

I know people who are multi-millionaires. I know people who struggle to make ends meet. And I know people from every place in between. Life is still life, no matter who we are, we all face challenges. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to be gracious and to have acceptance. We really are all the same, just trying to make sense of this crazy journey called life.

Maybe success isn’t about arriving anywhere at all. Maybe it’s about who you become on the way there.

These days, I measure it differently. In peace. In purpose. In knowing I built this life from the ground up, and that every version of me, even the one crawling across that old Daihatsu, helped get me here.

She had no idea that she was already successful.
She just hadn’t realised it yet!!!