Life Abroad
The path I
never planned.
For a long time, I believed a nursing degree had already drawn the map of my life. Then the road changed—and taught me that the parts of ourselves we value most can travel with us into places we never expected.
I trained as a nurse in the Philippines, and for a while, I thought that told me exactly where my life was meant to go.
There was comfort in having a clear path. You study, qualify and begin the work you prepared for. The road may be difficult, but at least you can see its direction.
Then life took me somewhere else.
I found myself living and working abroad, building a life outside nursing practice. One year became several. Before I realised it, more than a decade had passed along a path I had never imagined taking.
For a long time, a quiet question followed me: if I was no longer working as a nurse, had I left an important part of myself behind?
What stays with us
It took time to understand that nursing had given me more than a profession. It had taught me how to remain calm when someone else was afraid. It had shown me how to listen carefully, notice what is not being said and keep going when a day becomes difficult.
Those things did not disappear when my job title changed. They travelled with me. They found new ways to become useful.
Perhaps our experience is not a room we leave behind. Perhaps it is something we carry into every room that comes next.
That realisation changed the way I looked at the years that had passed. What once felt like a detour began to feel like an education of a different kind.
A different question
I stopped asking whether I had followed the correct plan and began asking what this unexpected road had taught me.
It taught me that identity can be larger than one role. It taught me that beginning again does not erase what came before. And it taught me that the path we never chose can still lead us towards something meaningful.
The Gleen Collection grew from questions like these. Not from having every answer, but from wanting to share what I was learning—the honest stories, practical lessons and small discoveries that might help someone else see another possibility.
If your own life has moved away from the plan you once held, perhaps you have not lost your way. Perhaps you are still gathering what you will need for the next part of the journey.
You do not have to understand the whole road today.
Sometimes it is enough to notice that the horizon is still there.