~Trying to learn from what’s behind you,
And never knowing what’s in store
It makes each day a constant battle, just to stay between the shores~
Since I started this blog, I’ve made constant mention to the fact that world of a ship is totally different from the world most people know. But what I haven’t mentioned is the lingering sensation of duality.
When I leave on a contract, I bid goodbye to my shore-side life as completely as I can. Even on runs like this, when I come home once a week – I’m still “gone”. Yet, that life, that version of me, still goes on. Those ties – the important ones – still exist. You live a strange sensation of two lives. Situations you have to deal with shore-side don’t disappear, they don’t go on hold, and so you find yourself desperately trying to juggle two sides of your identity until those situations resolve. Which they always do, eventually, until the next thing comes along – such is life.
But when you’re only home four to six months out of the year, you find a lot of those ties drop away, severed without even realizing they were in danger of being cut. They just disappear, snapped from the pressure of distance, of time, of the expectations placed on you by Head Office, of expectations placed on you by yourself, any number of things. Sometimes, as much as it hurts, and as painful as it is, you have to sever those ties of your own free will – likely on a temporary basis, likely to be retied again at some point in the near future, but still.
The really, really important ones though, those ones stay. Through hell and high water, those ones stay. Those are your guiding lines, the ones attached to you that keep you on the straight and narrow, keep you in the center of the river channel, and keep you from stranding yourself on the banks.
Without those ties, you hit the wall. You run up on the bank and you find yourself with no one to turn to. There is such a thing as being a bit too free, a bit too footloose, a bit too unconnected. I’ve seen people go down that route, even in the short year I’ve been with the company, and it’s not pretty. It’s not something you want. I was told once that some people come to ships for the wrong reasons, they come because they’re running from something – and for a while it’s fantastic, no one judges you, no one controls you, and in some ways you have to deal with very little – but the flipside of that is that, if you’re not careful, when you hit rough water, you’re on your own…
These days I’m the reverse version of “Brandy”, I’m the one looking at people and shaking my head and saying “no harbor is my home”, I have very few ties left, but the ones that I have – the ones that I have are important. Really important. And whenever something happens to put one of those ties at risk, it’s hard to describe how terrible it feels.
It’s true that my life is not perfect – no one’s is. Every day that I lie out in the Alaskan sun with a book in my lap and music in my ears (which in and of itself is a rarity – because well Alaska? Sun? Not normally compatible), is balanced out by a day that the chartered guests have me pulling out my hair…but still, no matter what the weather, I’m grateful, every day, for those guiding lines that keep me balanced between the shores.
And I hope that all of you know who are you.