Being scared isn't really much fun, but is having fun the point?

I'm about four days away from casting off on a prawn trawler with a crew of 5 burly fishermen and a whole lot of intended hard labour. I imagine it will be the hardest thing I have ever done in my fickle suburbanian life.

By throwing myself into this am I being brave and smart or am I being stupid? Am I setting myself up for a fall, or am I trying to kill myself and, thus, making myself stronger? I look at my hands now. They have no callouses. My digits are boney and slightly fidgety. Will they learn to hold their own? I cough. Am I too weak?

I'll be honest, men scare me. Especially burly, hardened older men with short tempers and work to do. I have a huge fear of my past experiences being the proverbial bunny in the headlights with some burly man in the background screaming at me to do something. I was raised by women. I grew up with piano lessons, ballet school and cups of tea on Sundays with my mother. I'm known to be sensitive. I watched 'Love Actually'.

Enter long term unemployment. Apparently, it is makes you not only contemplate mad things, but sign up for them as well. Like John Lennon and John F. Kennedy's respective assasins, the literary character I identify most closely with is Holden Caulfield from 'Catcher in the Rye'. However, my favourite book is 'Old man and the Sea' by Earnest Hemmingway. Although I maybe AM Holden Caulfield, I aspire to BE a young fisherman. I want the reality of ocean and the here and now and harsh and blissful circumstance to be the only things that govern me. I just don't want to break my own heart and scare myself out of it, returning home to port a helping pup.

I dream of the romance of the ocean occasionally, but most of the time am absolutely terrified by the prospect of hard men with expectant and dissaproving looks on their faces and a cruel and unrelenting ocean world.

In short, "Cheer up Emo boy, your in the navy now!".