I’d sweated through my interview suit before I even got there.
It was the spring I was about to graduate college, and I’d landed the interview of my dreams—a documentary film company in Los Angeles. The catch? I had to drive there from Santa Barbara, which meant navigating a spiderweb of LA freeways in my pickup truck, armed with handwritten directions and a stack of Thomas Guides on the bench seat beside me.
For those born after GPS, a Thomas Guide was a spiral-bound book of maps so thick you could use it as a doorstop. You had to know roughly where you were, flip to the right page, find the right grid square, and trace your route with a finger. Preferably while not driving.
I drove on and on, watching for my exit. And watching. And watching.
Had I passed it? Was I even on the right freeway? The interview clock was ticking and the panic rising so much my palms were slipping on the wheel. I couldn’t drive and study the maps at the same time, so I finally pulled off somewhere—anywhere—and found a gas station.
Three customers ahead of me. I stood there with sweat dripping down my chest, barely holding back tears. When I finally reached the attendant, he must have seen how close I was to losing it, because despite being busy, he flipped through page after page of the Thomas Guide until he found my location.
I’d passed my exit long ago.
I ended up being more than two hours late for that interview. Shocker, I didn’t get the job.
But here’s what’s stayed with me for decades. The moment that man found me on the map, something shifted. I was still hopelessly late. Still going to blow my interview. But I’d finally stopped moving long enough to get my bearings. And once I had them, I could move forward—even into a disastrous interview—without panic.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Not because I’m lost on a freeway, but because I spent five years in a version of that same feeling.
Since Covid shut down the Pacific in 2020, Colin and I have moved more times than I can count—selling homes, bouncing between family, living out of backpacks in Airbnbs from California to Crete. It’s not the going places that’s been hard. It’s never being still long enough to get my bearings.
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe yours doesn’t look like perpetual couch surfing. Maybe it looks like a week so full of other people’s needs that you can’t remember the last time you asked yourself what you actually want. Or a year of transitions where the ground kept shifting before you could settle into any of it. Or just the low hum of being so busy, for so long, that you’ve stopped noticing you don’t know which direction you’re heading anymore.
That’s what I mean by lost on the freeway. Not the dramatic kind of lost. The kind where you’re still driving, still functioning, still showing up—but if someone asked where you were headed, you’d have to think about it way too long.
The last couple months in Cherbourg have been a grind—the unglamorous, uncelebrated kind. Purchasing, labeling, and stowing. Organizing food, tools, and spare parts. Learning systems. Filling tanks.
None of it was exciting. All of it was necessary. Because unlike the five years before it, every task had an end. We weren’t spinning our wheels anymore. We were doing the work we needed to pull off the freeway.
And it let something finally shift quietly in the background. One morning last week, I sat on the settee with my writing in my lap. Colin had just woken up, made coffee, and was handing me the bonus cup he squeezes from the extra grinds after his drip brew. I looked into his eyes and smiled.
The surprise was that smiling in the morning was something I couldn’t remember doing in a long while. There was nothing pressing on the agenda. No exhausting task to dread. Just hope for the day. We started talking about breaking out the dominoes.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no breakthrough. Just quiet. And for the first time in years, I knew exactly where I was. I was home.
It’s no accident that the novel I’ve been writing turns on exactly this same feeling. The frantic wheel-spinning when you don’t know where you are and have to get somewhere anyway. This month I finished the first draft of A Course to Steer and am letting the manuscript rest for a couple of weeks to gain fresh eyes for the revisions, while I dive into researching 1840s Canton for the novel that comes after.
Meanwhile, Colin and I are finally ready to cast off the dock lines for our first real sail on Pristine for a four-week trial run.
So where are we going first? Wherever the wind takes us.
A few months ago, that sentence would have terrified me. Today it fills me with joy. Because we finally stopped long enough to get our bearings. And when you know where you are, you can go anywhere—even if you don’t know exactly where that is yet.
Though between you and me, we’re starting to have a pretty good idea.
Fair winds,
Cheyenne
P.S. When was the last time you stopped long enough to get your bearings? And what did you find when you did? Let me know in the comments. My favorite part of writing these letters is reading your stories.
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