Who's Dream Are You Chasing?

For thirty years I thought I was building a career. In truth, I was building a case for my own worth. I joined the police because it looked impressive. I moved to Canada and became a ski instructor because it sounded like a life people would envy. I climbed the corporate ladder in the oil industry, started my own wellness business, earned my Class 1 HGV licence, and ended up in motorsport, each step chosen not for what it gave me but for what it would say about me. I wanted the praise, the accolades, and the look on people’s faces when I told them what I did. And I got them. But every title I collected was another layer of an illusion I was selling myself: that if I achieved enough, I’d finally feel enough.

Somewhere along the way, I even began reciting scripts that weren’t mine. In the new age arena I found a fresh set of lines to repeat about purpose and passion and finding my calling, and I said them with conviction, long before I’d stopped to ask whether I meant them. It took me three decades to see that I wasn’t following my passion. I was following approval, and I had never once asked what I wanted. This is the story I sold myself, and I suspect it’s one many of us are still telling.

In the police, I became one of the first women in my force to carry a firearm, and I thought that would finally prove I belonged. Instead it made me a target. The bullying, the exclusion, and the constant need to be twice as good for half the respect wore me down until depression and severe anxiety took hold, and eventually I lost it all. The cruellest part is that I blamed myself. I swallowed every cutting word and carried it as truth, because I still believed I had to earn my place, so a hostile environment became evidence of my own failings. It took years to see that the problem was never me. The organisation was autocratic, unforgiving, and quietly crushing to the soul, a machine of rules and regulations I neither believed in nor wanted to enforce. It was built to serve the public, yet it failed that public every day, and almost no one inside could see it. And I spent my days facing the very worst of human behaviour, which changed me and altered the way I saw humanity itself.

So I ran, and I ran towards something that sounded impressive. I moved to Canada to work as a ski instructor, telling myself it was an adventure, when really it was another bid for approval. I was low, and I still believed that if I did something awesome enough, people would finally love me. Then I fell and broke my leg, and the whole thing ended in a moment. I came home with nothing: no job, no home, no direction, and an injury to match. I had climbed the ladder in the police, not by rank but by achievement, and now I had fallen right to the bottom of it. I didn’t see it as an accident or bad luck. I saw it as more concrete evidence of what I had always secretly believed, that I was useless and incapable of achieving anything, and that I would never be enough. Looking back, it wasn’t failure at all. It was a life built on proving myself, finally running out of road.

So I started again, at the bottom of the ladder, in sales. I told myself it was a fresh start, but it was the same old game. I worked harder than anyone, earned three promotions, doubled my salary, and ranked in the top 1% of employees in under twelve months, and I felt almost nothing. Depression still haunted me, and the fear of failure was right on my heels, so every win only raised the stakes on the next one. There was no passion in it. I was chasing a bank balance, trying to buy back everything I’d lost in my fall from grace, as though enough money could repair a story I’d already decided was proof of my failure. I was surrounded by people I had nothing in common with, working flat out to build someone else’s dream while taking a small cut for my own life. On paper it looked like a comeback. Inside, it felt like another performance, and the person it was meant to impress was still me.

Then a brain haemorrhage threw me into the new age arena, and it felt like stepping into a different world. After the reality I’d existed in, this one was soft, bright, and full of promise, something close to a Walt Disney film made suddenly real and tangible. I grabbed it with both hands and questioned nothing. I raced to learn everything I could, then opened my own business and began teaching others what I had only just been taught. But despite every promise, nothing changed for me. I still felt dead inside, and I knew, without knowing why, that something was terribly wrong with what I was telling the world. It wasn’t helping me, and I couldn’t see how it was helping anyone else. In the end it felt almost demonic, like I was preaching yet another script I had never once questioned myself. When I finally dared to question it, I woke up. Not to something brighter, but to the reality we actually live in, and I was one of very few people talking about it. So I did what I knew how to do. I hid from my own voice and threw myself back into the rat race.

Then came the lorry. I was told I would never make it as a new pass, so of course I chased it. I earned my Class 1 and went on to drive an 11-car transporter, one of the hardest jobs a HGV driver can take on, and I nailed it, not to prove anything to myself but to prove it to the world. From there I moved into motorsport, driving trucks for teams and training as a tyre technician, drawn once again by the story behind the success: the wow factor, the achievement, the chance to go where very few women dare to go. From the outside, it sparkled. On the inside, the reality was fifteen to twenty-four hour days that were treated as normal, a daily rate that worked out at barely minimum wage once you counted the hours, and a world where the male ego ruled and little thanks ever came. It’s a job that tells everyone you’ve made it, but to live it is to sacrifice your own soul so that someone with money can play at life. Not only was I a slave to the system, I was a slave to those more fortunate, working myself to the bone for a life that was never mine.

To the outside world, I have an interesting story. People comment on my personality, on how brave, driven, and fearless I must be, and they mistake my career choices for who I am. They see the uniform, the mountains, the trucks, the titles, and they assume the person underneath is as impressive as the résumé. What they can’t see is what built it. Beneath every role was a conditioned child and a set of limiting beliefs that had never once been questioned, quietly running the show.

Not once did I stop and ask myself what I wanted from this life. The question didn’t occur to me, because the answer had already been written. Ordinary wasn’t an option. My childhood had taught me that ordinary was dangerous, that being unremarkable meant being overlooked, and being overlooked meant being unsafe. So I had to be exceptional, again and again, in places where nobody expected me to succeed. Each career was chosen for the reaction it would earn: the raised eyebrow, the “wow,” the look that said you must be something special. I wasn’t following a calling. I was collecting evidence that I was worth keeping.

And the world applauded. That’s the cruel trick of it. Success looks the same whether it’s built on passion or on pain, so the praise kept coming, and every compliment confirmed the story I was telling. The glamorous photographs, the impressive job titles, the confident smile on the way into the room: all of it was a costume, and I wore it so convincingly that I fooled everyone, myself most of all. Behind it, I was exhausted, depressed, and driven by a fear I couldn’t name, pushing myself harder and further in the hope that one more achievement would finally quiet the voice that said I wasn’t enough. It never did. It never could. What looked like ambition was really a form of self-torture, dressed in career titles and finished with a fake smile.

This is what I’d ask you to consider. When you look at the people you admire, the ones who seem to have it all together, what are you really seeing? A person, or a performance? And when you look at your own life, the job, the goals, the picture you present to the world, how much of it is yours, and how much is a costume you’ve worn so long you’ve forgotten it isn’t skin? Because the prison I lived in had no walls, no locks, and no guards. It was invisible, built entirely in my mind from beliefs I never chose, and then I turned those beliefs into a career, an identity, and a life, a reality that looked like freedom and served everyone except me. We don’t wait for someone to lock us in. We design the cell ourselves, brick by invisible brick, and furnish it with titles and achievements until we call it home. The first moment of freedom comes when you realise the door was never locked, and that the only thing keeping it shut was the story you were telling yourself.