I Knew It. I Did It Anyway.

Part One

There I was, at a table full of wins.

My team had just swept the biggest awards of the night at one of the PR industry's most celebrated events. The kind of evening where you feel, for a moment, like you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

Then the SVP from the agency — the one I had interviewed with months earlier, the one whose offer I had already declined — leaned over from the next table and pulled me aside. The offer was still mine, she said. Call her next week.

I should have smiled, said thank you, and gone back to my team.

Let me back up.

The interview process had been fairly typical of the time. A phone interview, a flight to their office with a day of conversations and a writing test. And then — silence. When the offer finally came, they wanted an answer by the next morning. After they took weeks to make the offer, I was being asked to make a decision that included relocating my life, in just a few hours.

Something felt off. I said no.

And honestly? I felt great. I booked a last-minute weekend trip with my best friend. I celebrated the decision. My gut had spoken, and I listened.

Then came that awards dinner and that tap on my shoulder.

My ego picked up the phone on Monday morning. My gut didn't stand a chance.

I knew within a month that I had made a mistake.

The first sign was almost comical in hindsight: my boss, whose office was directly across the hall from mine, would call me on the phone when she wanted to speak with me. I could hear her voice through our open doors. We were maybe twenty feet apart.

The second sign was less funny. She noticed I had been going out for lunch every day — a thirty-minute walk to the park across the street or just around the block for some air — and suggested I eat at my desk instead. Billable hours.

I started calling in sick for migraines. I've never had a migraine in my life.

I want to be clear: this was a good company. People built real careers there. My experience was my experience — it doesn't define the place or the people who thrived in it. But it was not the right place for me, and somewhere underneath the ego boost of being recruited back, I had already known that.

Here's where the story takes a turn, but first, the backstory.

When I was 14 years old, my parents took me to the Virgin Islands. I saw a cruise ship for the first time — back when they were fewer and smaller and somehow more magical. I went home to my local library and wrote letters to every cruise line I could find, asking what jobs existed on board and how a 14-year-old might one day get one.

No one wrote back.

Years later, a job posting appeared on the board at Mizzou's journalism school: editor aboard Royal Viking cruise ships. I saved it. In my senior year, I wrote to them to see if that job still existed. I didn't hear anything until a month before graduation and they offered me the job. I would have to be on the ship three weeks before I finished classes. There's no way I could leave before I completed my hard-earned degree. Besides, I had already accepted an offer with a really great Fortune 50 company. I had to decline.

The dream went back on the shelf. Life moved on — and I moved with it. Until the misery of that agency job made me pick up the phone and call my contact at Mizzou's career center. If anything came across her desk involving travel, I told her, think of me.

Later that week, she called back. That cruise line needed an editor.

I boarded the Royal Viking Sun three weeks later, sailing around the world as a writer and editor.

Sometimes that really bad move turns into the one you always wanted. This time, when I made the call, it wasn't my ego on the line. And apparently, the universe had been waiting for me to figure that out.