One Year as a Flight Attendant

About two weeks ago, I hit my one year anniversary as a flight attendant!

Let’s talk about it.

Can you imagine wanting to go to work?

I know! That’s a crazy thought, isn’t it?

In all seriousness, I hope that many people do look forward to going to work. Towards the end of my career as a psychologist, it had been years since I looked forward to going to work. For many years, work vacillated between being tolerable on a good day, and frustrating on a bad day. During the last two years as a psychologist, it was rarely tolerable, and generally I was miserable. I dreaded work.

Now that I’m a flight attendant, I generally don’t mind going to work. Often, I really look forward to it! Sometimes I get shifts that I don’t like (redeyes, or lots of legs in a day), but even on those days, I don’t usually dread it. I feel mildly annoyed, and then I go to work, and it’s fine.

I’m so much happier now in this new career! I’m so much more relaxed.

There have been a few times that I miss being a psychologist. Once, I saw one of my old patients running around with classmates at a park. The year prior, the child had struggled to attend school and struggled to make friends. We worked really hard to get them into a school program that would work for them and to keep trying to make friends. I was so proud to see them out and about and acting like a child! In that moment, I remembered the joy of celebrating with my patients when they did hard things. I missed celebrating with kids and teens when they followed recommendations and did things they didn’t think they were capable of.

There have also been a few times when either a conversation related to medicine or mental health took place, or I was doing Continuing Education, and I felt a little bit of regret or loss remembering how good I was at being a psychologist. I was really good at it. There is some regret associated with knowing that there is so much mental health need, and I can help, but I’m choosing not to.

There are also times when I suddenly think, “Have I made a terrible mistake???” because of finances. At first being a flight attendant was financially scary because I went from saving over half my income to making <1/3rd of my previous income. It’s scary going from saving mode to barely making ends meet. Except, in reality I was not barely making ends meet, it just felt like I was barely making ends meet because I was making very little money, so Saign had to pay a larger portion of the bills. Saign was making enough that we were still able to save into our HSAs, our Roths, and our 401ks (though I did not max out the 401k like I normally would). I had to keep reminding myself that we were okay, and even with a drastic reduction in savings rate, we were still saving more than most people. And then, a couple months ago, Saign had to stop working due to a shoulder injury. He had surgery in February, but still can’t work right now (in April). We have Emergency Savings for situations just like this, but it feels really, really icky using our Emergency Savings (in reality, we’ve only touched a couple thousand of it and that was so that he could max out his 401k, so seriously, we’re okay). But it feels scary. So sometimes I get a gross feeling in the pit of my stomach and worry I’m doing things wrong.

But…I’m so happy.

This job makes me happy. If I don’t work for long enough, I start getting antsy to get back to work.

It’s amazing!

Aaaaandddd. This job fits our future goals. Saign and I love travel. We’d love a future where we can spend a few months overseas and then a few months back in the US. Unless one of us got an online job, this would be really hard. (Mostly because even if we saved enough money to live off of so that we didn’t have to work, paying for health insurance in the US is cost prohibitive). The work rules with my company are such that we could come back and forth in and out of the US like we want to. I could fly back to the US to work if needed, and I could take a month off and still keep health insurance. This fits our future goals.

So…it’s been a wonderful year! Despite sometimes feeling regret or worry, I’m so so happy that I made the switch! I was recently listening to a podcast where a career coach pointed out that you should make a career switch if you know that if you stay at your current job, there’s a 100% chance that you’ll be unhappy. Maybe the new job will not make you happy either, but you’ve got nothing to lose if you’re already unhappy and confident that you’ll continue to be unhappy! I’m so glad I took this advice before I’d even heard it! Cheers to The Great Resignation! Cheers to one year as a flight attendant!