The importance of seeing people two steps ahead, and how this influenced my decision to share my work journal publicly.

More and more, I’ve been feeling a need to see people ‘two steps ahead’ of me, career-wise. I see people at the height of their careers all the time, but how does one actually get there? What could things look like as I forge my own path?

I first began thinking about this in March 2025, when my residential hall, Lisa Bellear House (LBH), ran its International Women’s Day event. The theme came up again later in the year at a Melbourne Fashion Week (M/FW) roundtable discussion, which was what inspired me to start sharing my struggles publicly.

Lisa Bellear House: Charting A Path

(Lisa Bellear House, my residential hall, is the first University of Melbourne building to be named after a First Nations person—Lisa Bellear, Goenpul woman of the Noonuccal people of Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Queensland.)

The 2025 International Women’s Day event had a panel of LBH residents (former and current) share their experiences navigating work, university, and their overall direction.

It was incredible to see people who wanted to create structural change the same way I do, but were a couple steps ahead of me, instead of role models at the peak of their careers.

The fact that they weren’t so far out of reach made it much, much easier to see myself in their shoes and figure out the next steps that I should take. (Especially at this age, in university, where my life could look completely different even a year from now.)

I need to be able to see people at different stages of their careers—two, five, ten, twenty years ahead—in order to find how I’d forge my own path. Along the way, it’s soothing to see that the road to creating impact is winding and full of surprises, which reminds me of this quote by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Melbourne Fashion Week: Shared Struggles

During Melbourne Fashion Week (M/FW) in October, I attended a roundtable discussion about Investing In Melbourne’s Artisanal Future, hosted by Alida Milani (Fashion Industry Consultant, AMME), with Dayana Adones (from MTK Australia) and Grace Marafioti (What the F*** is Fashion Tech Blog and Founder of Gaia Custom).

One of our activities about Melbourne’s artisanal future involved resources—what kind of support would Melbourne’s artisans benefit from?—and our feedback caused us to realise that we were likely facing similar issues in our work.

Then it was pointed out that media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Instagram, could not only share our stories, but help connect those working towards the same goal. Or, at least, we’d be able to compare notes on our experiences of parallel problems.

With our roundtable host Grace Marafioti’s encouragement—she shared her experience with her blog, What The F*** Is Fashion Tech—I started writing.

Side note: What I love about M/FW is that it’s much more accessible to the wider community than other Fashion Weeks, which I hear can be very industry-heavy or invite-only. There’s a time and a place for that, but for the purposes of informing my own practice, I needed to hear a range of community voices, and M/FW provided the perfect platform to do so.

Why I Started Writing Publicly

It all plays on the idea of giving forward to my community by sharing my learnings. I’ve gained so much from the people around me, my predecessors, my mentors, and I used to feel bad about seemingly being unable to give back.

So I asked Dr Katherine Firth (head of Lisa Bellear House) about this. She reframed things as ‘giving forward’ instead of simply ‘giving back’. Maybe I can’t directly give back to the people who have guided me, but I can certainly share what I’ve learnt publicly (as I am doing now), and mentor those who are earlier on in their journey (although that’s a story for another time).

Since then, I’ve done both. Publicly documenting my struggles and how I found solutions will, hopefully, help those on parallel paths. It could give those who are earlier on an idea of what their own futures could look like—what to expect and what to be wary of—and gives me a space to elucidate what I’ve learnt for my own future reference.