TRAVEL
Globetrotters Writer Spotlight — Janna Barrett
Sharing adventures from land, air, and sea
Hi, Globetrotters! My name is Janna, I’m 36, and am based in Washington, D.C. I’m a U.S. citizen, but I’ve lived and worked all over the globe, so I consider it all one big place that I’m from.
I work as a Flight Attendant. Before this, I was in graphic design. This included designing newspapers aboard cruise ships for several years. I’m so proud to say that I’ve worked on land, air, and sea!
I come from all over. I lived in the Bay Area of California until middle school, at which point, my family moved to East Tennessee. (Any U.S. citizen understands that’s a massive cultural and geographic difference.) When I reached adulthood, I started bouncing around like a pinball.
I earned a degree in graphic design, focusing on typography in every project, and then started my career doing page layout at a newspaper in Knoxville. In my mid-twenties, I began moving for various job opportunities that would help me grow as a designer, but it was partly from a deep desire to find the place I “belonged.”
I moved to Atlanta to study web design and do typesetting, studied font design in Paris, moved to Chicago to work on book covers, then got a job doing newspaper design and print production with the cruise line.
After a couple of years at sea, I moved to New York City to do multilingual typesetting. (Basically, layout of translated documents.) Through that career move, I discovered a new passion for languages and writing systems as a whole; not just the Latin alphabet (which we use for English).
However, I also realized how greatly I missed every single day being a combination of exactly the same and completely different, as it had been when I worked in travel.
It also dawned on me that one of my favorite aspects of my job onboard had actually been when people interrupted my work to talk about literally anything — either the port we were in that day, or foods they ate back home, holidays they celebrated, traditions they’d grown up with. I had developed an eye for the beauty of people, not just of the dynamic landscape.
Interacting with different cultures and backgrounds became my priority. I wanted a position that would allow me to do precisely that, full-time. It only made sense to either pursue a job as a flight attendant, or to go back to the ship. Aviation didn’t want me then, but maritime had saved my spot, so I returned to the cruise line.
Almost a year later, I walked into my floating office on the afternoon of March 13, 2020, only to learn that COVID had left us all unemployed. It was 7 months before I found remote work again as a multilingual typesetter. I did that for a little more than a year, until receiving an offer to work as a flight attendant.
Why the career shift?
I realized I’d come to love diversity more than design—and a change of scenery more than any particular scene.
I love to travel because I appreciate learning about the world, culture, and people through exploration. I also need to continually experience new things — whether that’s people, places, languages, foods, or music. Constant change around something that always stays the same is the ideal balance for me. This can show up in many ways, but for now, travel is the way I choose.
I never felt satisfied living in the same place and doing the same thing every single day—but I couldn’t articulate why. I needed some forms of stimulation, intensity, variety, and diversity. My remote work in translation offered all those things, but it didn’t provide much opportunity for the multicultural human interaction I had come to adore.
Travel felt like the best way to bring together everything I wanted and needed. A combination of stability and variety is my sweet spot, and I realized that where I “belonged” was as part of a crew. I finally found the people from the same place as me: Everywhere at once.
My number one travel activity is either trying new coffees, or buying newspapers for my language collection. (For someone with a background in multilingual typography, collecting foreign newspapers in languages that I can’t read makes total sense.)
The best places I’ve been are the ships and planes themselves. Hands down. Anytime someone asks me about my favorite destinations, this is my honest response. A lot of people don’t seem to understand it, so I’ll typically mention some cities I’ve enjoyed for various reasons. Every place has different qualities to appreciate, though. How could I possibly pick a favorite?
It’s the vessels taking me on these adventures that have the most interesting stories and cultures to me. They’re full of an eclectic mix of passengers and crew, with a hundred different stories and reasons for being there, which all overlap for that one brief period. And the mixture of personalities is different every time, resulting in a consistently different experience. That duality is fascinating to me.
In my spare time, I like to write about my experiences in an attempt to understand myself better. I also enjoy drawing accompanying artwork, running, listening to podcasts, reading about language, playing piano, and catching up with friends. I mostly stick around D.C. on my days off, but my flight benefits do come in handy for visiting friends all over the place!
My top travel tip is to expect things to go wrong. If you want everything to be perfect and predictable, then why are you traveling?! Adventure doesn’t care about your plans. It’s there precisely to challenge and invigorate you.
Something is bound to go at least a little haywire, but that doesn’t have to mean your day (or trip) is ruined. Keep smiling, stay positive, and be flexible. Your attitude and perspective are what make or break any experience. Besides, any story worth telling has some kind of plot twist—and once the travel is over, all you’re left with is the story. Don’t you want it to be an interesting one?
If I could live somewhere else, I’d live in the International Space Station. How cool would that be?! Not forever, but for a chapter. I’d absolutely do it.
My favorite way to travel is internationally. I can’t pick a preferred mode of transportation; I appreciate and enjoy all forms of transit. I also can’t say whether I’d prefer going solo, or being with crew members, friends, or family, because the experience is different with each. What I do know is that being abroad lights up my brain.
Even if I’ve been to that city or country before, there are so many new ways of experiencing the world through something as simple as everyday life. I adore making a few more of those discoveries each time.
Three lessons I’ve learned from traveling are:
- Know how you’re going to buy stuff. Tell your bank you’re going somewhere new, or use a specific account (like Revolut) just for making foreign transactions. Get some local currency in manageable bills, because not everywhere accepts electronic payment. Have a conversion app on your phone. Know the conventions for tipping wherever you are. Carry currency in multiple places (on your person and in your room). Money is important.
- If you forget or lose something, there’s always a workaround. The creativity of resourcefulness is part of what I enjoy about travel. If I realize I left something behind, or need something new, I look for what’s around me and try to figure out how I can make it work. If nothing else, you can always ask someone for help, even if you don’t speak the language. Some things are universally understood.
- See setbacks as opportunities! So things didn’t go according to plan. Maybe you cross paths with someone you wouldn’t have met otherwise. Talk to them. They might have something interesting to teach you.
Or maybe your luggage got lost. Now you get to start from scratch and figure out where the locals shop, and how they dress, and why. Congratulations, your cultural perspective just expanded!
Or maybe your flight got delayed, so you buy a book at the airport that changes your life. You can always make problems work in your favor.
Exploration is the underlying thread to my life story thus far. I’m excited to start sharing some of my adventures with you!
Janna Barrett is a flight attendant, writer, and lettering artist based in Washington, D.C. She creates to explore her passions for people, place, and emotional expression. See her artwork here. 🍌
