Who do you think you are?

The day before I boarded the ship, I was in the lobby of a hotel in Punta Arenas, doing what I do in hotel lobbies: eavesdropping.

Two older men were talking nearby. They had the easy confidence of people who have covered a lot of ground and are comfortable telling you about it. One leaned towards the other and asked, with what I can only describe as a little challenge in his tone, “Is this your last continent?”

Something in me tightened immediately.

What followed was the full performance. Continents visited, compared, ranked. “Asia is my favourite continent,” delivered with the certainty of a verdict. In my journal that night I wrote: You’re not my people, please stop talking. And then, because I am usually honest with myself in that notebook, I wrote this too: I can’t believe I’m setting sail to Antarctica tomorrow. Who do I think I am?

Looking at it now, I was asking the same question, just in a different way.

His version was outward-facing. Who are you to have this? What have you done to earn it? Prove your credentials. Mine was internal, but not unrelated. More anxious than performative. The familiar sense that something is too big for me, too much, that I am reaching for an experience that belongs to someone else. Someone bolder. More certain.

I have been asking that question for a while, really. Since I handed in my notice in November 2024.

Part of what irritated me so much in that hotel lobby was not only the conversation itself. It was the mindset underneath it. The flattening of experience into comparison. The urge to turn a place into proof. I do not want to play location bingo with other people, and I do not want to do it with myself either.

Five days later, I was in a sea kayak in Flandres Bay, in a quiet so complete all I could hear was my own breathing and my paddle breaking the surface of the water.

The plan had changed, then changed again. The expedition leader and the captain had tucked us into a sheltered bay out of the weather. Not on the original itinerary. A gift the place offered instead. Two sleeping humpback whales were drifting nearby. We drifted too. No one spoke. I cried.

We were close enough that when they exhaled, I felt it on my face. A warm mist, animal and enormous. And then the smell. Krill breath. The actual breath of a whale smells exactly like what it is: a creature that has been eating the ocean.

The water was so still it looked like glass. So many shades of blue I did not have names for. In places, the surface had a slightly different viscosity, oily, more resistant. I learned later that this is the signature of whale poo. I want to include that detail because it feels strangely important. The extraordinary and the mundane, sharing the same bay.

You cannot turn a moment like that into a performance. You are either there or you are not. You cannot rank it. You cannot improve it by having been to six continents beforehand. It just happens. And then it is part of you.

Later that day, back on the ship, I did the polar plunge.

I had promised myself I would. I had said it out loud to enough people that backing out would have required a different kind of performance. By the time they were strapping the belt onto me, I did not want to do it anymore. By the time I reached the bottom step, I had fully changed my mind.

The cold was instant. Proper shock. The water was saltier than I expected. I kicked my legs, surfaced, and that was that. A classic case of the anticipation being worse than the reality. Though only just.

I had left an almond milk cappuccino in my locker. I drank it while drying off and popping my dressing gown back on, then went straight to the hot tub, where my kayaking buddy was also recovering. Sunshine, steam, calm conversation. I was completely done after that.

No regrets. No desire to repeat it.

I have been thinking about that small cry ever since.

Part of it was fear, obviously. Part of it was that I did not want to do it. But I think what got me most was the anticipation. The threshold moment. The build-up in which your mind gets louder and louder and the thing in front of you starts to feel too big, and you start to feel too small.

That cry was not really about the water. It was about the moment before the water. The last chance to back out. The point at which I had stopped pretending to be ready and was just being honest. And then I did it anyway.

Not because I suddenly felt transformed. Mostly because the count started and I jumped. And once I was in, it was cold and shocking and over quickly.

Who do I think I am?

It can sound like judgement. It can sound like self-doubt. It can sound like a quiet attempt to put yourself back in your place before anyone else gets the chance. But between the hotel lobby, the krill breath, the glass water, the whale poo, the bottom step, and the almond milk cappuccino in the locker, the question shifted for me.

I do not need to have earned Antarctica through prior continents, adequate credentials, or a particular kind of courage. I am allowed to have gone. I am allowed to be the kind of person who goes to Antarctica. I am allowed to have cried at the bottom step and jumped anyway.