When you start your first contract you’re so nervous. you’re the girl standing on the dock, clutching her luggage and looking frantically around her for someone to tell you what to do or where to go, you’re the one lost in the airport holding on for dear life to the piece of paper that tells you where you’re supposed to meet your shuttle. You’re the woman sitting silent and on edge in the hotel lobby watching the crew members around you reconnect and start to babble about the places they’ve been and the ships they’ve worked in the years they’ve been with the line….and you wonder if you can do this, if you’ve made the right choice picking up everything, packing up everything and running away to join the circus….<\/p>\n
And then suddenly, before you can turn around twice, you aren’t that girl anymore. You sit in the hotel lobby and realize that you’re the one chatting with old co-workers (“man, you made the Grand Voyage team?! How long has it been since you’ve done a normal run?”) while the new girl sits next to you, terrified and alone – and you wonder when that stopped being you, when you stopped being scared.<\/p>\n
You wonder when you started to stop feeling alone, and started to feel like you belonged…<\/p>\n
I’m not sure when I became an old-hand at this, I’m not sure when I stopped being that girl in the lobby that no one knew, and started being the one that people called out to…but I know this: despite the fact that this job has emotional complications that are sometimes worse to navigate than a gale force 9 storm, despite the fact that I leave a lot of things unresolved at home every time I get on a plane and jet off to my next destination – I know this still feels right…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you start your first contract you’re so nervous. you’re the girl standing on the dock, clutching her luggage and looking frantically around her for someone to tell you what to do or where to go, you’re the one lost … Continue reading