Finding Myself in the Ocean
The last month I spent on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. The experience was once in a lifetime. Even if the opportunity arises again, there will never be a first time underway again. When the opportunity arose at my job, I hesitated briefly — what would I miss in January? Why would I say no? Of course I’d go.
Three and a half weeks later, I embarked for four and a half weeks on the open seas. Before this, the most time I had spent on the water had been three hours whale watching as a kid with my grandpa. A day into this adventure, I recognized the daunting tunnel before me. It wasn’t just the sloshing ship — every step aboard the ship felt like stepping off a treadmill after running breakneck — it was the length of time spent away from the known world. A lot of people worried how I would handle being unplugged from social media. That didn’t faze me as much as what else was there to do. I was here for work, and literally that’s all there was to do. I could delete Instagram tomorrow and survive. I still could live life — decide when I wanted to eat, walk outside, touch living plants, take photographs, send a text message to any friend, call any person I felt like.
On the ship, I was assigned a berthing rack that gave me a clean 18 inches between my face and the top of the rock with a man sleeping below and above me as well as 15 other crewmen stowed in the surrounding 15’ by 15’ paddock. I could not sit up in bed. I barely turned on lights lest I wake my dozing roommates. The ship had pre-determined meal times. Outside those hours, free space was... the library crowded with enlistees similarly waiting to check their email, the hangar bay alive with roving forklifts and aircrew maneuvering between behemoth jets and helicopters, and infinite passageways that turned dark at 1700 (that’s 5 pm to you).
I did not feel the sun again for eight days when I participated in a FOD walk - where you look for foreign object debris (FOD) that could ruin a jet’s takeoff. The only other way I saw the sun (though I could not feel it) was in the “seaside gym,” which I soon incorporated into my daily routine as a respite from the backdrop of airtight doors and ladder wells. This sounds idyllic until you realize your entire life is a repetition of the same old, same old for 31 straight days and no escape.
Setting off, I had been mildly anxious how I would respond to this situation. Professionally, it was a jet launcher to better things. Personally, it didn’t threaten me as much as it intrigued me. Thirty days off the grid? Of course I could do it, but what would I find out about myself?
For the better part of my adult life, I have sought adventure and self-growth. In corresponding with a friend while underway, my friend called me an “experience junkie.” I laughed, but it’s absolutely true. One of my favorite quotes is, “Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.”
The first time I went abroad, I went alone. This is akin to the “finding yourself” trope of millennial-hood. When I returned, I said I hadn’t found myself because I hadn’t been looking for myself. Always the individualist, I maintained I didn’t need to find myself. This offended a few friends who claimed that at some point in their cultured, well traveled lives, they had “found themselves” and took issue that I would flounce their apparent self-actualizations.
I have also always prided myself on self-awareness. Even if I can’t help it, I am at least aware of my motivations or of my implicit wonts when I do certain things while I often question whether others have this self-panorama. Only as I have begun to approach the end of my twenties have I begun to wonder whether there may actually be a “find yourself” adventure out there. Maybe there is something more to me that I am unaware of.
The closest I came to this epiphany was, arguably and ironically, my second day in Copenhagen, the first city I traveled to abroad. High on espresso and trumping through Christianshavn in my long brown coat and black Frye boots, I felt I had embodied the life I sought since childhood. I used to dream of China’s Great Wall, Egypt’s monolithic pyramids, and Paris’s lazy Seine. If I was here, then I could go anywhere. I had achieved what I most wanted.
In more recent times, this enlightenment escapes me when people ask what I want to do with my life, what motivates me, do I want kids, what do I want in a future partner? I feel simultaneously sure in myself — a healthy, mature adult — and omnisciently confused about my inner drives and desires. Romance has possibly left me feeling the most off kilter, but that neglects moving cities, graduating from a PhD program, and finding a job, all of which demanded similar answers to which I never identified a ready response. I will not lie, the last 18 months of my life have felt like a windfall where a multitude of events and persons beg, “Who am I?” Where do I want to live? What do I want to do with my life? Who will I marry? Will I marry? Why am I so type A? Temporary solace, if not complacency, may be found in knowing almost everyone else struggles with these same challenges — no one really knows what they’re doing. Right? Right. But you think I would feel I would stumble just slightly closer.
And it is not for lack of trying. Over the years, I have invariably placed myself in many situations where I should inevitably and ultimately find myself, but I always come up empty-handed, or rather as the same person.
I have tried drugs, I have experimented sexually, I have traveled to Cuba and Qatar among other distant destinations. I have traveled alone, I have gone with friends, I have visited tarot readers, I have read the Bible. I have had many, many - but maybe not enough - long conversations with friends about this, drunk and sober. I have told people how I really feel about them. I have practiced baring my heart — or at least transcribing what I think is etched on its strings. How am I to ever know?
When I went to South Africa in November, it was my first trip abroad and alone in almost two years. So much had changed since the last time. In Portugal in 2017, I was halfway through my PhD program, single and never in love, the world my oyster. In November, I was a doctor, had experienced several heartbreaks, and had been possibly forced into a career decision and relocation that I didn’t mind and maybe loved, but who was I to know if I felt like the decision had been made in haste? I don’t want to say I went to find myself, and it was not definitely not my motivation on the June afternoon when I bought the $700 ticket to Johannesburg, but I privately harbored I would discover something new about myself while climbing Table Mountain or traversing the African savannahs. But what was there to discover? What creek in the cavern of my soul had I not sipped from yet?
I returned the same person with my only defensible thesis that to travel alone is to make decisions in a bubble. Suddenly you get to choose where you want to stay, where you want to go, where you want to eat, when you go to bed, what you tell people about yourself. But even these are restrained by some lesser things like hunger, tiredness, and a predisposition to cheapness. Then again, those very traits are what accumulate into a soul. But in my bubble, under my self-imposed microscope, I found no new fractures or breakthroughs. Just sheer joy at travel and independence. But I’ve known that about myself for half my life!
When the chance to live on a carrier for a month materialized, I instantly saw both the career benefit and the gaping new rollercoaster. If I did this, what would I find? Who would I be really when stripped from civilization — with no social media, no one, a rigid life schedule, and barrenness my only distraction? (I am not lying; carrier life is very barren.)
After three days of acclimation, I defaulted to the same frustrations and ecstasies I have always recognized. I wanted more to do — tasks to accomplish, people to see, places to exercise. I wanted stimulation. Some would argue this was a colossal effort to resist unearthing myself — I just missed mortal and earthly distractions. But maybe overstimulation is me. My feelings didn’t subside. I had no seismic shift in personality or desires. In fact, I felt more drawn to wanderlust and being untethered from people because you can never actually have them, but this discovery I had excavated several times before.
Maybe the grand myth that there is a higher purpose — or at least person — within is not inherent and some people just are. But is that not more confusing and lending itself to more treasure hunts? How will I ever know that I am not repressed or fighting against myself to find myself? I told myself not to let this essay go off the rails in a meta way, which I am dangerously on that precipice, but the summit is this (and it is not climactic or celestial, though people paint it that way): you can just be.
Perhaps this is anticlimactic, and maybe that’s the root of confusion. Angels need not appear. There is nothing to find beyond what was already and always there.
Of course, this entire missive was written from a stationary bicycle in the carrier’s seaside gym staring at the rhythmic ocean blue. That says something for solitude and asceticism — or at least endorphins.
If you enjoyed this, then you may also enjoy: