{"id":1454,"date":"2012-06-28T11:42:45","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T19:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=1454"},"modified":"2012-06-28T11:42:45","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T19:42:45","slug":"shards-of-self-at-sea-06222012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=1454","title":{"rendered":"Shards of Self \u2013 At Sea \u2013 [06\/22\/2012]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That is a picture of a person I don\u2019t know…<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s easy to forget what it was like to be the new girl…<\/p>\n

We have an interesting circumstance onboard at the moment, in that a large portion of the entertainment department is completely new, not just to this particular ship, but to ships in general. Of the new Party Band members at least half (if not more) of them are brand new, and the same stands true with the new cast that just came on board and is currently struggling through the hell that is cast changeover. For someone who\u2019s become really used to working with what we call \u2018the vets\u2019, it\u2019s an interesting experience to see so many people who well…are basically you<\/em> two and a half years ago. In this business \u2013as with so many others- you become an \u2018old war-horse\u2019 surprisingly quickly.<\/p>\n

I was talking to one of the new musicians this afternoon, and in the course of the conversation I asked him what he thought of the circus so far (because that\u2019s still what it feels like sometimes, a three ring circus). His answer was oddly thought-provoking:<\/p>\n

The hardest thing for me has been to hang on to who I am in the middle of all of it<\/em><\/p>\n

Hang on to who you are. It truly is very easy to lose yourself out here. You become so suspended with from normal reality that it\u2019s very easy to forget what you were before you came. I often force myself to think about how much ships have changed me, in some ways they\u2019ve forced me to grow up quickly, and in others they\u2019ve done quite the opposite. They present you with a real world Pleasure Island, where you can do whatever you want…but, just like Pleasure Island …if you give someone enough rope they run the risk of making a jackass of themselves.<\/p>\n

When you hit the wall out here, you have a tendency to hit it alone. Or so I used to think, before I met certain people who have, despite everything, steadfastly refused to abandon me.<\/p>\n

But there is always the question of losing who you are. When I first came to ships I was remarkably tame. That isn\u2019t to say I\u2019m exactly a wild child now (quite the opposite in fact), but I\u2019m also not who I once was. It\u2019s the first contract that hits you the hardest, before you find your footing and find something or someone to hold onto to prevent being swept away into the melodramatic sea of red wine, cheap beer and constantly breaking and healing hearts. You can drown in that mixture quite easily. I left for my first contract a girl who could make one amaretto and coke last an entire night, I came home a woman who could drink my friends under the table and still call for another round.<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s easy to lose yourself.<\/p>\n

The thing is, that wears off. You get tired of Pleasure Island eventually, and you steady out again. These days I don\u2019t go out anymore, I hardly drink, I don\u2019t even go to crew parties unless I have close friends that I know I can dance with. Instead, I work very carefully to keep a small island of \u201cme\u201d that\u2019s separate from everything else. Like the tiny corner of the attic that you find as a child, that you build your own little secret corner in, or like the tree-house shack in the backyard \u2013 you find a space that\u2019s just yours and you keep your treasures there. When you\u2019re a child those treasures are storybooks, and dentist\u2019s rings and best friend lockets. When you\u2019re out here, it\u2019s different things that you treasure. That\u2019s where I keep my pictures of my family, my embroidery, my time in my own head, in my own heart.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve seen it go bad too. I\u2019ve seen people get lost. I\u2019ve seen people go what I think of as the \u2018Fame\u2019 route…and I give it that name because of a very specific line in a song from the musical<\/p>\n

You get through one day at a time
\nYou find a way of staying numb
\nYou don\u2019t look at in the mirror
\nTo see what you\u2019ve become<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That is a picture of a person I don\u2019t know… Sometimes it\u2019s easy to forget what it was like to be the new girl… We have an interesting circumstance onboard at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alaska","category-below-the-waterline","category-reflections-below-the-waterline"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}