From There To Here
Fabiola Campbell · 70 min
Fabiola Campbell's journey from confidently arriving in Australia with an Australian passport to confronting the 'death of the superwoman' reveals how migration can silently strip away identity — and how reclaiming every hidden part of yourself becomes an act of radical courage.
Fabiola Campbell arrived in Australia with an Australian passport, convinced she was coming home. Within ten minutes at the airport, a security officer's reaction to her accent shattered that belief. She wasn't Australian enough. What followed was the slow disappearance of the woman she had been in Venezuela: bold, articulate, funny, fluent in Spanish. Without her language, her credentials from back home meant nothing. Her accent became the one thing she could not hide, the marker that immediately told strangers she was a migrant. For years, she tried to erase it.
But Fabiola's shame did not come from Australians rejecting her. It came from somewhere deeper. Looking back at her childhood in Venezuela, she recognised that she had internalised colonial thinking, ranking European migrants as worthy and Latin American migrants as less. When she became a migrant herself in an Anglo-Saxon country, she applied that same lens to herself. Learning about intersectionality and systemic barriers helped her understand that her struggles were not personal failures. But understanding the system was not enough. She had to shift from seeing herself as deficient to recognising her own strengths. Finding role models who looked and sounded like her made possibility feel real.
Fabiola reclaimed the boldness of her younger self, but integrated it with the empathy and compassion she learned through migration. She developed the DARE method: detect what you are feeling, acknowledge it without judgment, then decide whether you need to reclaim a hidden part of yourself or take responsibility for evolving. Her advice to newly arrived migrant women is to trust time, own every part of who you are, and show up with authenticity. When you own who you are, nobody can use it against you.
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