Every word and lesson I want to close out 2018 with seems suspended somewhere between this hotel room’s bay window, where I sit snuggled amidst a mountain of pillows, and the snow flurries that dance just beyond my perch on the sixth floor. What do I say when this life I’m living, after ten years, still feels absolutely unreal? After thousands of nights in hotels, handfuls of missed Christmases and a plethora of birthdays celebrated in foreign countries with my crew instead of family or close friends, I still can’t believe I’m paid to explore, interact, and adventure.
This is literally the craziest and coolest experience that I never had an inkling that I would love. I often feel undeserving; wondering how all this happened. I find all the words that I could say falling short to the simple reality that God has been so good to me. That I am grateful. That for some reason I get to do this with my life. Right now. And that is simply beautiful.
“Your life is goals,” I’m told frequently. To this, I don’t know how to respond. Thank you?
Yes. It was a goal of mine to travel the world, explore, adventure. It’s true that I hoped to live by the beach. I wanted to learn to kiteboard and surf. I dreamed of living differently than I did, but had only a vague idea of what that would look like. When I wake up to these days, cash my paychecks, and step onto a private jet, I feel humbled that Divine Guidance filled in— and painted outside of— every single line of my incomplete, color-by-number, much too boxed-in dreams. But, please don’t make your goal a life like mine. Make it your goal to find meaning and impart meaning in the world. Make it your goal to do more than you ever thought imaginable.
It’s hard for me to synthesize what I feel, writing this in Russia, of all places. It’s hard for me to fathom how, this same time last year, I was in Bora Bora. It’s hard for me to communicate how this job is my entire world and yet not everything that I want.
I wanted to be in love. I wanted that adventure, and I wanted it so badly. I don’t believe one has to make a choice between career and relationships, but I could never do enough right to make that relationship work. I was fighting hard for one direction while another direction was almost effortless. And so I chose, because I knew more than I can ever say. Maybe it’s true when they say, “You know. You know.” Life is meant to be good, there are more men to date, and there is something else out there for me. So, although I didn’t expect this to be where I would land at 33 in 2019, I do have a peace in this place— whatever this place really is.
Opportunities are exploding right and left with my career and dreams. Granted, this hasn’t come without a hustle and intention on my part, but I’m in a flow and rhythm. It’s not time for me to let that go yet. For the first time in my life, I’m not a financially struggling flight attendant, but support myself with an income level like those high-powered advertising execs that I once so badly wanted to be. And it just so happens that I also get to see the world in the process. I’m seriously fucking blessed.
That’s how I feel going into 2019.
Flight Attendant Life just seems to love me and all that being said, I can’t help but love it too.
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