What do you do when the castle walls are breached?
My day-to-day work truly pushes me to be dauntless, and that’s one of the things I love about my job traveling. It challenges me to build working relationships with people I normally wouldn’t and go places I might not have explored on my own. Honestly, sometimes when I hear the name of a new city or the name of a particular client, I feel a small surge of panic and wonder if I’ll be okay. But then I remember this blog, and I remember the people who support me, and I mentally put the Dauntless Princess crown back on. That’s who I really am. Whether I’m okay or not, I’ll at least be brave about facing whatever challenge comes up.
Living and working at my Champaign, IL apartment community required a daily dose of bravery! I had to keep a sharp eye out for shady characters, double-check all my locks, and lend my phone to kids whose moms didn’t come home from work til late. I’ve seen a lot in the past two years, but residents were given to behaviors that even shocked me.
Here’s one example. When apartments have community laundry machines, some resident will inevitably forget their laundry in the washing machine. It’ll sit there and sour horribly. Most of the time, when the next resident comes along and finds old wet clothes in the washing machine they need to use, they’ll do one of several things: leave them there, pull them out and pile them on the washer, throw them on the floor, or donate them to Goodwill. At this community in Champaign, residents would take the wet clothes out and pour liquid bleach all over them to ruin them… and then leave them in the laundry room so their owner could find them. A micro-example, but perfectly shows how aggression was a little escalated.
I truly believe there’s a line between bravery and the stupidity of putting yourself in a needlessly dangerous situation. As the days went on, I realized I may be treading on that line. It’s always hard in these situations to be objective though – so I questioned myself. Was I being reasonable? Was this place objectively dangerous for me?
The answer came in the office one day when I answered the phone and there was a sobbing lady on the other end. “They kicked all the doors in,” she said. “They took everything, all my TVs, everything-” and then went on to curse the apartment management. I guided her through the rest of the call, but when she hung up I knew I’d crossed the line from bravely staying to reckless staying. If it could happen to her at 3:00 in the afternoon, it could happen to me, too. It was time to fly inside as of fight. I decided to wrap up the project because my job involves things like walking vacant apartments and I was concerned about walking into a building during an armed home invasion.
Three days and three hotels later I hopped on a plane to beautiful Atlanta and here I’ll stay until…? Perhaps until my trip to Boston coming up in late October! It’s up in the air right now. The latest I’ll go out again is November 1st. Until then, if I don’t travel for any short work jobs, I’m content to be enjoying the fall season and all the good things it brings from home, my parents’ country castle: where there is no wall, but there are no breaches, either.
~ The Dauntless Princess ~
P.S. About the photo: I don’t usually stop on the side of a highway to snap pictures, but as I drove from Champaign to the O’Hare airport, the sunset over the Illinois cornfields was just too beautiful – I couldn’t resist! Later in the evening, the sun looked like a giant red ball through the clouds and haze. It was a treat of a sunset as I drove.