Ferry Lessons

Isle of Skye, Scotland

I’m standing on a ferry outside of the rental car and we are midway across the loch. As we approach the shoreline, all the other passengers begin climbing back into their vehicles including my mom, older, and youngest sister. I hesitate—trying to enjoy the salty air a few moments longer—and make eye contact with one of the men running the ferry. He’s much older than me, probably around his mid-sixties, and is leaning nonchalantly along one of the rails at the ferry’s edge.

“I’m the only one left—I should probably get back in too…” I begin, but as the words leave my mouth they end up sounding more like a question.

“Not necessarily,” he answers and winks. I pause, tilt my head, and wait for my mom to motion at me before hopping in the back seat.

~~~

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I think about this interaction way more than I’d like to admit--probably every month if I’m being totally honest. His ‘Who’s to say what’s right for you, lass’ sentiment (intended or not) has stuck with me. (Okay, I added the lass, but everything sounds better with a Scottish accent doesn’t it?) It is very possible I imagined the man and that interaction didn’t even happened at all.

Nevertheless, at the time of our girl’s trip, I was three months into my new job at an insurance company and after three months, one thing was clear: I hated my job. But it took until after our trip to Scotland, plus another six months or so to quit that job, switch gears, and change directions. This landed me in a teaching position where I hit the ground running mid-year and never looked back.

Flash forward three years and I have quit my job. Again.

I’ve struggled with a little bit of guilt for leaving teaching, as I’m sure others who have left the profession will tell you. And I will get into the intricacies of my decision to leave at a later date.

But suffice to say that the decision stemmed from the feeling that something was off or didn’t fit. This feeling filled me up so much that it began to leak into the very language I was using. When trying to describe my frustration to my dad, he told me I repeated the word “stuck” at least three or four times in a five-minute conversation.

That was it; I was feeling “stuck.” But it wasn’t like once I named the feeling it went away.

In fact, this word “stuck” crept up on me again and again until finally it appeared in the form of a podcast aptly named: “Getting Unstuck” by Hidden Brain on NPR. My sister sent it to me after another phone call where I complained and complained about how unhappy I was and how I didn’t know how to “fix it.”

A lot of people get “stuck” in jobs, relationships, locations. And there are a myriad of factors keeping them stationary…family ties, socioeconomic factors, mental health issues to name a few. But one of my favorite takeaways from the podcast (that you should listen to in its entirety if you have a long drive or load of laundry that needs folding) is that in order to achieve the life you want, it’s important to fail early and fail often.

When you’re younger you tend to think of failure as “not cutting it” or “being weak” in some way or another. And you tell yourself “by the time I’m (insert adult-ish age here) I’ll have it all figured out.” And it takes time and distance for you to realize...younger me was stupid. And extremely unrealistic. She thought entirely in an “either you’re this or you’re that” mentality and it was very limiting in terms of achieving her goals.

These days, even though I’ve evolved my thinking somewhat, I’m still frequently struck with that feeling of everyone else getting back inside the car. I quit my full-time job (with full benefits) to pursue two separate passions, simultaneously no less. While a lot of my friends/family members my age are coupling up, settling down, and starting families. And I’m not sure whether to join them or stay where I am.

But then I remember that feeling of being on that ferry in Scotland and think: what’s the worst that could happen? I get a little wet? We hit a wave and I am flipped overboard (highly unlikely), or I get a view that everyone who already got back in the car missed?

Yeah, I’ll take those odds.