Nattalia Lea

Nattalia Lea wants to be known not only as a survivor — of childhood poverty and abuse, and multiple career reinventions — but as someone who always believed in herself and her power “to change my life.”

“I’m known as that Energizer Bunny; I keep going and going,” says the 66-year-old who self-published her memoir, Lady with an Iron Ring, last year.

The book examines her careers — engineer, freelance writer, filmmaker/writer/producer, author and, in 2020 she hopes, an international return to engineering.

She grew up in Vancouver, in a home marked by domestic violence where she often went to bed hungry. Both her grandmother and mother married older men in arranged Chinese marriages.

Lea’s father died when she was 13. She worked two jobs while going to school.

“I had a very strong belief growing up; I did not want to end up like my mother.”

A “science fair nerd,” Lea entered the University of British Columbia in 1975 — International Women’s Year — becoming its first female graduate in bioresource engineering.

At graduation, with no role models or mentors and “burned out,” Lea worked as an office temp.

In 1979, “I got on the train to Calgary with no job, one suit and one pair of dress shoes, and went door to door with my resume.”

She applied at 300 companies and started with an engineering consulting firm. Over her 25-year engineering career, Lea was terminated 12 times, sometimes when a contract ended (while men had theirs extended), through several oil crises, and sometimes without cause (after being promoted).

She raised two children and reinvented herself as a journalist, filmmaker and entrepreneur.

This year, Lea hopes her book becomes a movie or TV series, and wants to learn, teach and mentor others.

She admits “airing dirty laundry” was hard but important for her and every working woman from the 1960s and ’70s.

“Every time you complained, you were accused of being crazy. Yet I am grateful for every moment I got to work as an engineer.”