Bon Voyage

I'm setting sail tomorrow and it's been emotional

Dear Friends,

I hope that 2023 has been treating you well. My year so far has been a mix of travel delays and cancelations and fixing minor boat issues. Tomorrow, though, I am finally setting sail for Bahamas where I will be for a few months. (With, hopefully, some interludes visiting the States.) The trip should take three to five days, depending on the weather and how long we decide to stay in parts of Florida along the way. I still need to ‘provision’ (grocery shop) and do some other last minute errands in South Carolina.

But my girls, my friends, my people. Reality is setting in and as excited as I am, I am also terrified. I already miss my friends so much, I am worried that I will be lonely (even though four other people are sailing down with me) and I am worried that I will not be able to learn to do all of the things that I need to do to live on a boat successfully. I am not sure if I like living on a boat. Selling the boat doesn’t scare me. Losing money is upsetting and less than ideal, of course. But I can come to terms with losing thousands of dollars on a bad bet. I just don’t know what else I would do.

I have a great number of friends, I feel incredibly lucky to have so many wonderful and meaningful friendships in my 30s. I am very fortunate in that way, I know many people my age don’t have the community that I do. But my community is spread out, my best friends live in Manhattan and Texas and Brooklyn and Kansas and California and there isn’t really a place that it makes sense for me to go. I work as a writer and writing about living in New York seems overdone and uninteresting. I would be loathe to move to Austin, TX as a divorcee because that just feels so cliche. I made a big bet and the gravity of that is settling in.

And so why did I do it? Why did I buy an expensive boat and move on to it without sailing experience and without having stayed on a boat for more than five or six nights at a time before?

Often our greatest weaknesses are also our greatest strengths. One of mine is that I make decisions and commit very quickly. I don’t do things halfway and I think through them quickly. Often, this has ended very well for me but when it ends poorly it ends disastrously. And so I did bought a boat the same way I’ve done everything else in my entire life. I came up with the idea and acted quickly. I did not know where I wanted to live so I chose to live everywhere and nowhere at once. I like the ocean and the beach and the outdoors. I do not like smelly or simple things and boats are often smelly and either very simple or very complicated depending on if they’re broken or not. (Something is almost always broken on a boat.) I did not have a perfect option so I picked the most adventurous one. We’ll see if I like adventures.

I apologize that this essay is one of my more aimless ones. I’m feeling sort of aimless and misdirected and terrified right now but I’m also excited to see if I can create a new, happy, exciting, wonderful life for myself. Maybe on the sea and maybe somewhere else.

All my love,

Hannah

PS: this is a bit silly but I’ve written about my history of depression and recent struggle with mental illness and the two things that have helped me the most are making the bed and doing skincare. It’s difficult for me to feel good when I feel bad about my face. When in doubt, exfoliate I suppose.

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