Most people have one defining moment that tests everything they are. I have had a few. Two tours in Iraq as Military Police taught me early that the body can endure far more than the mind thinks it can and that leadership is not about being fearless. It is about being terrified and moving anyway. That lesson followed me out of uniform and into the most demanding industry I could find: nuclear energy. Sixteen years later, it would be tested again in a way I never saw coming.
By the time offshore wind entered my world through the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, my body had already been through the kind of battles that do not make the news. Cancer. Both shoulders replaced. Both hips replaced. Surgeries I have stopped counting. I rebuilt myself each time, not because I am resilient, but because stopping was never a real option. The work mattered. The people depending on me mattered. You do not just walk away from that.
Then came the GWO certification, Global Wind Organization sea survival and helicopter underwater escape training. If you do not know what that means, let me paint the picture: you are strapped into a simulated helicopter cabin, flipped upside down into the water, and you have to find your way out before your body decides to panic and drown you. Then you do it again. Then you do it in the dark. This is the training required before they will let you set foot offshore, before you earn the right to do the work. I showed up. I trained alongside people half my age. And I passed.
What came next was going out on the vessel itself, into the Atlantic, in real sea conditions, to the offshore substations rising out of the water like industrial machines. Nothing prepares you for standing on the deck of a vessel in open ocean, watching the structure you are about to board sway in the swells, knowing the water beneath you does not care about your resume or your certifications or your track record. It just is. And you either go, or you do not.
I went.
I have thought a lot about why that experience hit differently than anything else in my career. I think it is this: nuclear gave me discipline. The military gave me grit and mission focus. But offshore wind put my reconstructed body, everything the surgeons and I had rebuilt together over years, into an environment that simply does not accommodate weakness. The ocean does not give you modifications. You either have what it takes on that day, or you do not go.
I had what it took and I am not saying that to prove confidence. I am saying it because there were moments in those hospitals, in those recovery rooms, when I genuinely wondered if I would ever be standing somewhere like that again, wind off the Atlantic, 50 pounds of safety gear on, doing something that mattered. Those moments in recovery felt like an answer to every question I had asked during the hardest nights.
My why not is not a single decision or a single moment. It is a decision I had to choose, again and again, every time the body said no and the mission said yes.
Lauren Thew
