“Red light, Reinvention”

By Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon, n.d.

When I first arrived in Australia, I thought that all I was bringing — my degrees, my lived experiences, my dreams — would be received. I was deceived.

One day, stuck at a red light in traffic, the radio played a program about what migrant adult women from the sociologist called the Global South are expected to sacrifice when they move, their careers.

The words hit me in my heart. I felt a wave of energy getting stuck. As the traffic idled, so did a part of me.

That red light was no longer just a pause in traffic. It was a lake reflecting stillness and suspended feeling. Scattered were a few pieces of frozenness holding in time fear, where becoming was not a verb in motion. It was a noun.

As the traffic idled, so did a part of me.

Soon, I realised people only saw their past, their bias, their projection. My accent and my way of being spoke louder than my qualifications. My past became invisible.

I had to be redrawn, redefined, and at times, painfully restored. The Unknown, the Unfamiliar, and the Uncertainty were in the way of the Known, and yet, they became the only way to the Known.

I applied for jobs for which I was overqualified. I rewrote my CV a hundred times. I went through interviews where I had to explain my value in a language of the I, where I come from the We. The I, couldn’t quite carry my soul. I felt like a translation of myself.

Building something new from fragments was the choice over adapting. Bringing my roots, carrying invisible skills, embodying a new soil without burying in the liminal space.

The red light no longer feels like a stop sign. It’s a pause. It is a moment to contemplate the threat by threat the weaving of belonging, and alchemise that becoming is a process where reinvention is possible.