I kept thinking I would be able to wrap this contract up in a tidy bow once I got back to land. That I would step off the ship and go on a solo adventure to Scotland, and then somehow process my year long sea faring experience into a digestible nugget of insight about life. But damn if that hasn’t happened. I should know by now that nothing ever gets tied up in a tidy bow. This is when the greeks would send down Helios on a chariot to carry me away so that I never have to face the consequences of my actions.

The “Senioritis” post may have had a few of you worried that I might jump ship before the end, but I held on. I was deep in some feelings in August, feelings of comparison and inadequacy and frustration. That month was rough. The charter was annoying to say the least, and my feelings at the time were valid, but it’s amazing how, just a few months later, looking back at that post I feel very little relation to where I was then. I had to let it all go in an instant and move back to who I am on my own. We did stop at some excellent ports while we crossed from Athens to the UK. My favorites were Catania, Barcelona, Palma, Lisbon and Bilbao. Once the charter ended, our cast replacements arrived and we spent one more week onboard for “handover” where we did our final show and watched the new cast do their first. I visited Amsterdam for the first time, a humiliating thing to do on a ship because the dutch DO NOT want cruise ships in their harbor. A protest group chained themselves to a lock in the river and nearly kept us from the port. I remember wishing I’d been standing with them.

On August 30th I handed over my crew ID, stepped off the gangway in Portsmouth UK, hauled my giant suitcases to Heathrow, stored one, and then spent 10 days on a London/Scotland holiday to reacquaint myself with freedom. I stayed with a friend in London for the first three nights and I kept dreaming that I had to go back to the ship. Like maybe I was just having an overnight and I had to be back onboard by 2pm the next day. It wasn’t until I was on the train to Edinburgh that that feeling began to fade. After two nights at an apartment on The Royal Mile, I got behind the wheel of a rental car and drove (ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE) up into the highlands and finally began to feel free. Scotland is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and for those of us with Scottish heritage, a place of legend. Although, if you are an American with Scottish ancestry, I do not recommend mentioning that to locals at the pub in Edinburgh, they don’t like that. I was conceived on the train from London to Edinburgh 40 years ago, which is one reason I decided to take the journey. That particular story went over better for some reason.

After an overnight in Inverness and a very chilly morning dip in Loch Ness, I came back to Edinburgh for one night and stayed at a 5 star hotel called Prestonfield House which is the fanciest thing I’ve ever done. I felt like I was in Downton Abbey. A few more days of hotels and airports and baggage claims and taxis and then suddenly I found myself standing in front of my brownstone on a perfect sunny September day in Brooklyn. My cat remembered me and my apartment wasn’t in as much disarray as I feared it might be. It took me a few weeks to get everything put away where it belongs. The gigs in NYC are drying up because the economy is shit. Costs are up, profits are down, budgets are being slashed, and as we’ve seen time and again, art always gets cut first. I’m not panicked, I have a little time to figure out how to survive. I’ve actually managed to scrounge up enough work to keep buying groceries without dipping into savings.

But what’s next? I turned down the offer to go back onboard. After two back to back contracts, I qualified for a raise, but I just couldn’t do it. I’m not saying I never will but definitely not now. They wanted me back in January for a seven month contract. That’s too long and I’m not supposed to be a sailor for life. But what am I supposed to be? I’m back at a crossroads. It’s actually less of a crossroads and more of a pathway that’s hidden from me. I got worried the other day because I thought “Oh no, I can’t see the path!”. But then I remembered that I’ve never been able to see the path, it’s always been hidden. I just keep taking steps and somehow as soon as my foot comes down, the path is beneath it. I don’t know where it’s going, but as long as I’m moving it’s there.

As the title of this blog may insinuate, I do not know what the ending is. I started this writing experiment to document my time onboard, but I’m not onboard anymore and I don’t really want to stop writing. I’ve given up some of the things that held me down in the past so I could make room for what’s to come. But I don’t know what comes next so right now, as I write this from a cafe in Brooklyn enjoying an oat latte and a plant based BLT, I am languishing in the in between. At 39 years old, I can’t help but feel time slipping away from me. I have never so desperately wished the sky would crack open and a voice filled with authority would boom down and tell me what to do, or at least give me a deadline for that play I’ve been thinking about writing.

I read a lot of novels about greek myths this year. I’ve always felt compelled by them, as many have. I once did a burlesque act as Persephone and my favorite new musical in the last 10 years is Hadestown. The novels I read this year included Ariadne, Elektra and Atalanta by Jennifer Saint and Circe by Madeline Miller. Of these I found the latter to be the most relateable. In this interpretation, Circe is an immortal sorceress/goddess/nymph who is exiled by her family to live a life of solitude alone on an island. I identified intimately to her descriptions of loneliness. She lives for thousands of years and is never able to master loneliness. When she does find love, she uses magic to transform herself into a mortal so she doesn’t have to watch her love grow old and die. I’ve always been ashamed to admit to being lonely as though it is a weakness of character, and although I haven’t quite lived for thousands of years, I’ve been feeling especially isolated lately. I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow, but today I feel like maybe I would give it all up, all my ambition, all my freedom, all my dreams, and trade it for the comfort of love and partnership.

But that’s not how it works is it? There is no chariot coming to whisk me away, no booming voice from the sky with directions about what to do next. There’s no one to give me a deadline to finish that creative project that keeps rattling around my brain and there certainly isn’t a man or woman who will fall in love with me and magically make all my insecurities go away. It’s just me and the people I choose to share myself with. That friend who told me to stop wasting the precious time I have, the producer who believes in me and keeps hiring me, the collaborator who wants to work with me no matter what we’re working on, my parents who know me to my core. This community, while sometimes out of sight, is never out of mind, even when I forget they’re there. There may not always be a deus ex machina, but there is always a chorus to fill in the gaps.

This blog is no longer at sea in a literal sense, but I will keep sailing forward none the less.