I don’t know how much longer I can take this; he had me juggling teacups all day! Teacups! With tea in ‘em! – The Last Unicorn
It’s so easy to forget what it was like at the beginning. When you were green and optimistic and still thought that there was some way you could please everyone on every ship. Before you acquired that slight patina of jade that makes you able to actually survive out here without going complete insane (well, we are completely insane, but in a good way!). You forget what it was like to deal with the taskmasters and the stripes before you knew how they worked, and the billion little unspoken rules that keep the ship running, but you don’t know they exist until you accidently break one and someone looks at you like you have three heads for not knowing what you did wrong.
Juggling teacups with tea in them indeed.
Then you see someone come on board who could be you, three years ago. You before you had the spine to stand up and say ‘excuse me, I know what I’m doing’, you before you learned the ins and outs of the job so well that you can do it in your sleep, and have as a result become a lousy teacher because it’s so instinctive it’s hard to break it down into steps. You before you realized that the officers are people, who are entitled to have bad days and good days and that everything that is said on board is not personal. And you kick yourself for not being as patient as you should be, because it’s a vicious cycle, and you train the way you were trained – and since you were thrown in at the deep end and told to swim, you don’t really know how to be a life raft for someone else. But you try your best…because you remember, vaguely and all fuzzy around the edges, but you do remember.
You remember how easy it is to lose yourself in this life, to either hermit away completely or to become someone you don’t want to be just to keep some kind of balance. You remember how hard that fight sometimes is. You remember that you too, have anchor lines, and what it feels like when one of those is threatened even only in your mind.
The sea days are long, and they stretch a miles in front of you with no sign of ending, and all you really want to do is wake up one morning and find yourself at home, planning a weekend trip off the island to go shopping and drink overly expensive coffee and look at shoes you can’t afford with your best friend. But every morning you wake up and you are here, with the teacups, and you remind yourself that yes, you do actually like it here, but that doesn’t mean that the sea days aren’t long.
What was it that ridiculously clichéd song from the 90s said? Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind, the race is long, and in the end – it’s only with yourself.