taking flight in a new city
In reality, life as a flight attendant when you're first taking flight has a heavy case of turbulence.
Becoming a flight attendant is an adventure in ways you can't even begin to imagine. Obviously, it includes travel, far off places and a fancy jet to get you there. But in reality the life as a flight attendant when you're first starting out is what most people wouldn't expect from your pictures of taking a stroll New York City in the snow or the bluest blue ocean in the Caribbean or perhaps a quick stop in London.
In reality, I am hunting down catering in the snow, in New York City; I was fighting a fever & cold in the warmest water in the ocean; and as for London, I had ten hours on the ground from wheels down to wheels up and barely had time to realize that the people around me had adorable accents. All the while, I am hanging out with the one and only, me myself and I; all by myself in true Celine Dion fashion.
Being a flight attendant has given me the opportunity to get extraordinarily well at doing things my own way, on my own time and with no one to impress other than myself--and let me tell you, I'm a hard one to impress, so I really have to step up to the plate some days. I get to do errands with a cup of local coffee in hand listening to the hustle bustle of people in their daily life. Sometimes I take myself on a date night to pizza and a glass of red wine or some days its UberEats in bed with cup of tea. I spend layovers reading books, watching Netflix, going to local coffee shops and ever so occasionally I venture out of my cozy hotel to the local sites--preferred method of transport is a train, occasionally while in tropical conditions a boat that makes you wonder if it can get you from point a to point b.
When you're a flight attendant it means you're usually gone every holiday weekend, every birthday, any event that you had your heart set on and you're rarely with the people that make those days better than any other days--and never, ever,
count on a day off actually being a day off, because overtime is real when you add in the human factors of aviation, weather delays, cancellations and don't even get me started on maintenance issues. It means that making plans is a thing of pure and utter shooting star rareness.
Being a flight attendant has me away from home 95% of the time. I've moved three times in a year and a half all within ten miles of three different major airports all of which terminals felt more like home than any of my apartments. Being gone from home so often in new places means being the permanent new person for six months at a time, because apparently being home twenty three days out of one hundred and eighty isn't completely conducive to creating a life, who knew? But the plus side of not having a home life is that you have a life on the road that means you have friends in every city and the list of cites that you have friends in is always growing.
The reality of being a flight attendant is that you have perks and obstacles just like an ordinary job. But unlike any other job, it's completely extraordinary in it's lack of ordinariness. The magic in this job is that the ordinary troubles you face, the things that you feel like you miss out on, they are incomparable to having the clouds at your fingertips and seeing the sky as not a limit but a world of possibility.
