![]() ![]() In my first days there, my supervisor joked that if you shake the world, all the best people end up at the bottom the remainder of my time there proved how right she was. It turned out that the best thing about McMurdo was, in fact, those very people I had been afraid of. Not knowing who ‘herself’ was, I took this with a grain of salt, but it was an encouraging answer nonetheless. She responded that, speaking purely from her own experience, she had never felt more comfortable being herself than when she was at McMurdo. When I was shortlisted for the placement, the person handling the admin briefed me about the process and asked me if I had any further questions, and I raised this concern. I don’t know how to deflect the ire of people who’ve taken a set against me – and, for whatever reason, I tend to rub people in the States the wrong way. Sure, the continent wants to kill you, and every way of getting to and around it comes with risk of serious accident, but the only thing I was actually afraid of was finding myself in a stressful social situation and not having any recourse to escape. Whether it was school or work, a recurring motif in my life is that I do not do well in a big box full of Americans, and that is, almost literally, exactly what McMurdo is. My biggest anxiety about going to McMurdo was the human factor. I may not have used my sketchbook as much as I thought I would, with regard to locations, but I did fill a few pages with one of my favourite pastimes back in The World: people sketching. ![]()
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