Hey diary… this one is more for me than anything but you are all welcome to read on if you’d like. Forgive me if it sounds like gibberish…
I am alone on the boat again. I already know myself and know that I would never want to live alone on a boat. I am sure that I hate this. Since my best friend has left I find there is an emotional depression beginning to creep into my soul. I have to be strong and keep my spirit afloat.
See… aside from the immediate problem of dealing with monkey and my friend leaving… I have found something else I am struggling thru. A social problem that is difficult to explain…
I have been living on the boat for more than a year now.. and sailing for almost a year now. My whole world has been reduced to this 40 feet and the ocean for so long I think maybe I have begun to actually lose some social ability.
I might have to babble a bit to get this out… forgive me…
So when you live on a boat your world changes. It is actually often a very socially isolated existence. You get cut off from the world you once knew… the world you used to be fluent in.. could function in…. You no longer chat with the person at the Tim Horton’s counter near your home every morning when you stop in for coffee. You no longer say hi once a week to the cashier you know at the local store, or the gas station attendant every friday… or whatever lose social contacts you have been accustomed to.
You are usually alone on the boat with only your crew mate around for company. You no longer watch television.. you don’t see television commercials anymore… you do not get the bombardment of news noise everyday. You do not know what the latest movie is anymore… you do not know what is going on in society anymore… you are separated. Now I know some of you are thinking this is a good thing, you’d love to be cut off from all that claptrap, and it is actually kind of nice… but… there is a secret hidden cost that has caught up with me.
This claptrap creates, however inadvertently, a social glue that enables you to socially engage with other people in your society, it is a common link. Somehow all this noise blends together in all of you to create a common social paradigm, a frame of reference that you all have in common. It smooths social interactions.
I have lost this. I do not have a common social paradigm with my other cruisers here. We all come from such diverse and very different backgrounds, we have all had such varied histories, and we do not have common social media to bind us together anymore. We come from countries all over the world.
I have found that my own deterioration of social skills has snuck up on me. In the last year I did not even realize that my ability to function socially has been eroding.
To understand… if you have seen my YouTube videos and have been following along for a while now you know that I had been trapped on this boat with a monkey for almost 9 months. For 9 months I seldom had anybody to talk to. I am a really chatty intelligent and bright friendly girl but I had only an inarticulate dumb dumb monkey on board for company.
Women are designed to be more social than this. I once heard it said that women have an average of thirteen thousand words a day they need to get out while the average man has only 1200 words he uses sparingly. Everyday when I wanted to talk.. chat.. share… use up my daily supply of words I was met by a man who would shoot me down… argue the opposite of everything I said.. tear me apart… and it started to close me up. I became highly depressed under the burden of social isolation imposed on me by this sailing lifestyle and the monkey I had as a crew mate. It was crippling me… eating me… wearing me down.
Being able to text with friends and people back home became my lifeline… my only link to a life back in society…. but it is a tenuous link at best. It is brief and cryptic words of simple design and minimal understanding sent out into the ether in hopes of a faint echo in return… it is a poor substitute for actual social interaction.
Eventually I got rid of the angry monkey and all the testosterone that came with it, off the boat foul energy you are no longer welcome.
Then came along another woman. WildChild became an all girl boat. The island of my universe became amazingly peaceful and gentle and kind. The feminine spirit of kindness and cooperation became the rule. Emotional sensitivity was a most basic understanding between us two women in every social interaction. The peacefulness of our social environment washed the boat as clearly as did the nasty waves.
The defenses that we all build up when crowded together in cities melted away from my social repotoire. I did not have to deal with mean people anymore. I did not have to tolerate anger and masculine aggression anymore. I was no longer exposed to anger or the spirit of male interrogation anymore.
The emotional sting of aggressive words and energy was completely melted away from my world on the boat. For the last three months WildChild has been an incredibly emotionally gentle kind and safe haven. Elena is a very kind soul much like me. Our mutual kindness and respect became the new normal.
Three months without men around. Sure there were other boats in some of the anchorages, and all of them had men aboard… but they seldom interacted with our world. And forgive me here for my forthrightness… but most cruisers are old people… the average age is 60. So us two young ladies have very little in common with the old men around us.
Now I know that I am already a very soft and emotionally sensitive kind of girl. My soft and mushy spirit bleeds for the slightest emotional injury. I cry so very easily. My compassion has long ago evolved into a deep empathy of spiritual connection when in my youth I figured out that we are all bonded together with a common thread of humanity.
Living in isolation on WildChild for the last 3 months with a similar emotionally sensitive girl… has not thickened my skin, by the contrary, it has probably thinned my skin.
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So… since landing here in Luperon I have found myself suddenly as a part of a community. POOF…! I freely admit that there is a wonderful group of cruisers here… a fabulous cruiser community well supported by the very kind ex-pats living ashore. I have never seen such a welcoming community before and if I were to sing their praises for an hour it still would not be doing them justice. Please do not take this next part as any kind of condemnation of any of the other cruisers here… it is not about them… this is about me.
I was looking for some people to maybe play poker with me for fun. I have a poker set on WildChild and if you can get 4 or 5 people together to play it can be really fun. I get my intellectual stimulation for the day enjoying the mathematical algorithms that unfold with the odds of probability and watching inside the minds of the other players and it can be enormously fun. Add a bunch of sailors and a bottle of rum and the cool stories start to flow.
So when I learned that another cruiser here wanted to start up a Thursday night poker game I was so very excited. I thought I had found something fun to do. A social weekly event to get me off the boat and out of social isolation. I could make new friends… get to know people… and have fun. I had mistakenly thought it would be a really fun time as it had been in my past in all the other poker games I had participated in.
My own expectations had set me up for a miserable social failure.
The game was dominated by aggressive masculine energy. It was very socially rough or insensitive and… I don’t know how to describe it… like… grrr…. or roar… It was the worst poker experience I have ever had. The dealer wanted it to be played by very strict tournament rules. It was designed as an aggressive play to win and get the money game.
I never play poker to take money from my friends.
They had very strict rules about what you are allowed to say and how you have to put your chips down. Very fast and impatient playing style that was highly intolerant of social story telling. The men all smoked heavily and sat stonily quiet as they concentrated upon victory. When ever I took too long to play my turn or broke a rule I was quickly and loudly corrected with an aggressive masculine energy I had not been exposed to for the last 3 months.
It shocked me to be honest. I could not imagine why human beings would enjoy that… why would anybody want such an unfriendly aggressive energy to flourish was simply beyond me. Pretty quickly the error of my schema settled upon my spirit and I was being crushed with disappointment. I dumped all my chips into a losing hand just to get out of there.
I came home to the boat that night and just tried to shake it off. I had thought of it as more of an anomaly of the particular character of the dealer hosting the game than representative of the social energy of the community as a whole. I guess now I know that I do not want to play that poker game with those people.
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A few days later… (a few days ago now)… I was in town with my neighbour friend Pearl to join her free art in the park class for the local kids. I was excited to try and improve my non-existent art skills and to help her out if she needed it. The art class was an amazing success and I was very proud of Pearl for just generally being awesome.
After the art class I walked Grace (a cruiser daughter back to where her parents were waiting) and hung out with them for a while. They are a lovely family on board a sailboat called Kraken so I call them the Kraken family. Don and Lisa with their 2 kids Grace and Cameron. Although my spirit was still a little low they were wonderful and kind people to spend time with.
After that I made my way to Wendy’s bar to meet up with Pearl (as I was her dinghy ride home). It was evening by then maybe around 8 or 9 pm…?
I was sitting quietly at the end of the table lost in thought as the few other cruisers were chatting when Alex decided to come sit across from me and fix me.
Now for some context here… and please forgive me again for this brief and unfair single sided narrative… I had met Alex a few days ago. He is a single hander (sails alone) an american man about 50 years old. He had shared with me previously that he was a philosophy major so I had made the assumption from his vocabulary and conduct that he was another intelligent and educated soul for me to talk to. I just liked him.
When Alex sat across from me to talk to me I was at first delighted. I thought he was a cool guy and last time was enjoyable to talk to.
The encounter went very wrong… and I did not understand why or what had happened. I was again shocked by aggressive masculine energy. He had been drinking some (but not drunk) and for some reason I cannot fathom… he decided to be nice to me and fix me to be more like him.. to help me you understand.
Although the minutia of the details of the words is irrelevant for the context of this monologue the spirit of the energy is my very point. I could not comprehend why he felt it necessary to fix me and the way he phrased things came across very poorly. I was quick taken aback by his approach as I had previously (wrongly) assumed him to be an intelligent guy.
Essentially he wants to change my culture.. to help me conform to his culture (American) and the dominant culture among the 50% American cruisers around.
This narrow mindedness, although extremely typical of Americans, single minded certainty of paradigm, surprised me coming from him. I tried to listen and understand but what I found was rather repugnant.
See in Canada… in my culture.. where I come from… being polite is of the utmost importance. Tolerance and understanding for people different than I am is the very foundation of my society. Open mindedness towards those who are different is a keystone. Listening and learning from “the other” who is different is the soil where mutual respect can be born.
In my culture I would never ever approach someone to tell them that their culture, their way of being, is wrong. It would simply be unthinkable to attack someone else’s culture as being wrong simply because it differs from mine. I would never be so rude as to approach that person with loud words or direct aggression to fix them.
But… Alex’s culture differs from mine. He is American. He was arrogant in his certainty of right-ness. His way of perceiving things was obviously correct and my way (different than his) was obviously wrong. And so he set about “helping” me by fixing me. I was absolutely flabbergasted with shock and so very unsure of how to respond. My cultural rules dictated that I must respond gently and with kindness but he followed no such rules.
He was like a bull in a china shop and there was no stopping him. I squirmed under the interrogation until I manged to find a moment of silence to think. How could I communicate to this (I assumed) other educated intelligent human being. Clear communication being the quest of the ages for understanding and a complex art form of diplomacy I thought long and hard for words that might land well in this mans soul.
Finally I spoke gently and with loving kindness and gave him my carefully prepared sentence. My gift of wisdom for him to un-package and enjoy… I shared my gift..
“… you know…. certainty is the first casualty of post-modernism..”
and it exploded like a bomb… he immediately reacted without much thoughtfulness and hurled accusations of …
“… wow that was very passive aggressive of you..” and went forth to tear me apart for my words.
Again I just reeled from this onslaught of masculine aggression and misunderstanding.
I told Pearl I just want to go now please… she understood and we left.
I cried that night… and I cried again the next morning.
I cannot handle that… I have lost my social skills.. lost my fluency to deal with the ignorant and the rude like a home schooled child.
Now I have been hiding on the boat for the last few days licking my wounds. I am afraid to venture forth into any group of men that might also possess that aggressive masculine spirit. Not because men are horrible… but because I have lost immunity to them.
I cannot even bring myself to face Alex again. I fear that I may have been mistaken about other people here too. My words would have landed much better on an intelligent person and I would never have dropped them on Alex if I knew how poorly educated he actually was in matters of philosophy.
My own social naivety is such a crippling blind spot for me… my own thin skin makes me vulnerable to other people… it is so easy for them to hurt me.. to make me cry… and I do not want to cry…. I do not want them to have the power to hurt me…
This energy never comes from other women though… it is only men that have this hurtfulness to their words. It is men being men I guess. Maybe because I was trapped aboard WildChild for so long with an insensitive hurtful man I have a particular extra vulnerability…? I do not know…
But I do know that I am still reeling from the bad social encounter… and I am so very unsure what to do about it..? I am very fearful of future male aggression being directed my way. I am a delicate flower and very emotionally sensitive and I know it. I do not know how to be a flower in a forest of thorns.
It is not the thorns fault for being thorns.
I need to be more careful… more protected.
There are many wonderful and amazing people here… I suppose I need to be more selective about whom I associate with.
Be more quiet and withdrawn like Elena is.
Maybe I need to stay hidden…
Until I figure this out… I hide from the world in the loneliness of my isolation.. sigh… and that sucks too…
Cheers….
From Captain Lexi the depressed….