Well, it seems it took longer for me to find the spare time
than I expected. Nine months have passed since my last post, and they have been
action-packed! I will attempt to catch you up.
Within a few weeks of arriving in Shawnigan Lake, I started
to have misgivings about the situation. Even before I took the post, I was
rather hesitant about the 9 month commitment. Generally, I max out on an
experience after 3 or 4 months, and it had been my intention for this year to
have a series of shorter adventures rather than one extended one (post-Alaska).
Still, at the time that I made the decision to go out there and give it a shot,
I had what seemed like good and compelling reasons to do so.
It was hard to tell at first if my discomfort in Canada was
simply the result of typical growing pains. The more I do this, the more I
detect a pattern that the first third to half of a new adventure is largely an
adjustment phase. I don’t always open up to new people, particularly new groups of people, right off the bat. I
like to sit back and observe for a while. And because people and friendship and
community are so important to me, this habit tends to make that first segment
of an experience rather lonely and frustrating at times.
After a few weeks of soul-searching, existential angsting,
and sinking into an ever-deeper pit of inactivity and apathy towards the work I
was doing, with far too much free time on my hands, I finally resolved to tell
Tim I had changed my mind and that instead of staying through June, I ended up
leaving after only 2 months, towards the end of November.
Tim was, as always, a princely man, and extremely
understanding and cool about the whole thing. I felt a bit guilty about
abandoning my students, who were all great kids, though they all had miles to
go before being easy or ideal pupils, and Sonia, who is a truly great teacher
and human being, but it became clear that the cons outweighed the pros for me
to stay there, and I needed to find a situation that was better for me.
Of course, reaching that decision still left me with the
very weighty question—what to do instead? I openly admit, I am outrageously
blessed to have the problems I do. There I was, with complete and ultimate
freedom. There are many things I am interested in and I’m so sure of myself and
good at interviews and such, that it is more or less my belief that I could do anything if I set my mind to it. I’m
done with school, I’ve paid off my loans, I still have some money in the bank
from my work in Alaska. I have no expenses or responsibilities to meet. So,
with all that freedom and possibility comes the problem: it is entirely up to
me to decide WHAT I want to do. If I can’t find a way to be happy, it’s pretty
much entirely my own fault. So what is it, Shana? What is it you most want to
be doing right now? Where do you want to live? Where do you want to work?
What’s essential? What’s a time-sensitive priority?
****
The answer? I want to
go sailing. I want to go work on a tallship and learn some new, hands-on,
semi-practical life skills. I want to see if my “someday” fantasy of having a
little sailboat of my own on/with which to live and travel and visit friends is
something I would actually enjoy in real life, because if not, I should
probably replace it with another life goal. After I get a taste for life on the
high seas, and have one more thing on the resume that I can pursue for
intermittent employment in the future, and get through the winter somewhere
mostly warm and sunny, THEN I will be ready to try acting.
I have loved acting since I was a little kid. The theater is
a place I have consistently felt happy, comfortable, and surrounded by a loving
community that makes sense to me. It is a great place for me to practically
engage my skill and passion for psychologically dissecting and attempting to
understand other people. It is a thrill for me to be onstage. I know it is a
nearly impossible field in which to achieve “success” or even to earn a
consistent living wage. I have few illusions on the subject. But I think I
would be doing myself a disservice to never even try. And I might as well try
sooner rather than later, before inertia sets in or I get caught up with other
projects.
So that became my intended trajectory. Boat then acting.
Read on to see how it’s going.
