Me, the Sea and My Life Now

At the end of my last post, I was still living aboard Perdida with Mike.  We had lost our very beloved fourteen year old dog Happy and mourned his loss as though we had lost a child.  Things were beginning to unravel below the surface but our stubborn plan to sail to Hawaii was still on course. 

The story doesn't have a very happy ending so far as answered dreams are concerned.  We never sailed off to Hawaii.   I never got to sit in a tropical lagoon in Perdida's cockpit watching the sun set.  I was never able to use any of the skills or knowledge I learned in the countless seminars and classes I'd attended.  I never felt the freedom of being out in the ocean, no land in site, standing at the helm with sea air blowing through my hair as I had imagined it with such excitement since as far back I can remember.  I had foolishly assumed this journey was to lead me to my life's purpose.  The pull to the sea was so strong, how could it not be destined?  How could something I'd never felt such joyful anticipation for completely abandon me.  I still don't really understand what happened.  Perdida has been gone now for four years and I still deeply mourn her loss.  Mike left for Hawaii around the same time we sold Perdida.  He sailed her from Catalina with a couple friends to her new owner on the mainland.  Watching her leave the harbor and disappear over the horizon hurt so badly I couldn't stand.  My heart was breaking into a million pieces.  Even while I write this, the pain returns, my eyes are welling up with tears and the computer screen is becoming harder to see.  I always look out into the harbor to see her beautiful, distinctive teal colored hull, wondering if her new owners would take her here for a cruise but I have never seen her.  I suppose I'll never see her or Mike again.

Sometimes I miss Mike deeply.  I love my husband dearly but I know that I will never again share something so life altering, as what Mike and I shared, with anyone else.  The hundreds of photographs we took along our journey are sitting on my hard drive and will probably remain unviewed for the rest of my life.  As I took those pictures I remember thinking "Maybe we can make a documentary about our journey".  Maybe someday my daughter will look at the photos after I'm gone and wonder about them. 

How could I be as close with anyone again?  Mike and I were together for eight years, most of which was spent researching sailboats together, dinners out or at bars spent excitedly talking about nothing but our "plan", going to countless classes and seminars together, buying our dream boat together, going through rough times while learning about our new boat together, packing up our lives and driving across the country to start our new life and so so much more....together.  I learned at Christmas that Mike had gotten married.  It knocked me off my feet, crushing me for about three days.  The same thought kept running through my mind and even quietly sobbed through my tears "Mike....what happened...what happened to us?".   All I could think about was the day we first met.  The excitement that had begun that day and had completely sustained me (while also torturing me) for eight years was completely dead.  No one else on this planet could possibly understand what this felt like but Mike.

 Mike's wedding as well as the onset of Fibromyalgia have completely closed the door on what feels like three quarters (or more) of my self.  I tell my friends and family that I feel like a shell of who I once was but I don't think they really understand.  How could they.  I never could have imagined what this felt like.

My living room window looks out upon the Pacific ocean.  I watch the sea intently every day; calm and blue, then white with wind-driven froth, choppy in a breeze, constantly changing before my eyes.  I can look upon it as a spectator but I cannot participate.  The first affliction that prevented my vision from becoming reality, Panic Disorder, is still there, only lying dormant, waiting until I'm on the sea again.  My second affliction, Fibromyalgia, seems to make the first or any other deterrent seem irrelevant.

Me and the Sea

The following is a piece I started writing in 2002.  I've posted it now as a (very long) prologue to my next post:

From as early as I can remember, the sea has played a huge part in my life.  As soon as we were able to hold up our heads, my younger brother and I spent every spring, summer and autumn on our parents 36’ Colonial - "Valhalla", a beautiful wooden 1960’s cabin cruiser.  In the late winter and spring we “helped” our parents’ as it took many full, tiring weekends for them to prepare Valhalla for launching.  My father would replace rotted planks and caulk, repair the diesel engine and an endless list of other tasks.  My mother scraped, sanded and painted the hull and interior from stem to stern, she sewed curtains, cushions & sheets for the bunks.  My brother and I made friends with the other children in the boatyard and we all ran among the dirt piles and chased after hermit crabs in the mud. 

When Valhalla was finally afloat, we spent summers and autumns in various anchorages in New Jersey's Raritan Bay or cruising up the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, Fire Island, Block Island, Cape May and so many other places.  We were all in love with the sea and my father who is of Norwegian descent, claimed it was in our blood.  Sometimes during storms, my brother and I would crouch snuggled together in a corner of the salon, scared and begging our father to turn the boat around.  But he and my mother would reassure us that we were safe, and we knew deep down that we were.  Some of my fondest memories are of sitting on Valhalla's fly bridge, my father standing at the helm, gripping the classic wooden spoked wheel with a grin ear to ear, his dark brown hair blowing in the wind and his eyes tightly squinted in the sun.  As we climbed up waves and surfed down them my father would yell "WOOO HOOO" as though he were a child on an amusement park ride.  I took for granted his ability to fix anything that went wrong or broke down and to steer Valhalla through storms and fog without a hitch.  As a child, he seemed part magician part Superman.  I would lean my head against the rail with such contentment and become hypnotized by the brown foamy water gurgling by the hull (this was during the 1970's before they realized that dumping raw sewage from NY City into the harbor and bay was not such a great idea). 

The smells and sounds of Valhalla gave me such comfort.  During winter, while snuggled in my bed unable to sleep, I'd try my hardest to recreate the sounds of the water swishing past the hull as my brother and I heard it from our bunks in the bow of Valhalla.

In 1984 my father was forced to sell Valhalla due to engine problems that were too expensive to fix.  My brother and I had gotten to the age where we were getting involved with school activities and sports and had begun to take Valhalla for granted.  We didn’t really understand what we were losing until she was gone.  Valhalla had always been there.  She had been a part of our lives, almost a family member.  I remember crying alone after my father told us she had been sold.  He sold her for $500 because her engines didn’t work, and with the advent of fiberglass, no one wanted to do the work involved with owning a wooden boat. She was probably bought for scrap but my father never told me and I'm glad he didn't.   Losing her was a very sad day for our family.  We had made so many memories within her bulkheads.

For 5 years our family was boatless.  We tried going to the beach in the summer to be near the ocean we missed, but somehow it wasn’t the same.  Looking out at the sea from the shore was entirely different from floating atop it.  In 1989 my father was able to purchase an older, used 27’ Bayliner express cruiser.  The joy was back!  It was as though we were picking up from where we left off.  My parents planned trips and again, my brother and I cruised the places of our childhood, now as young teenagers.  As time went on, my parents sold the Bayliner and bought a 36’ Regal express cruiser.  By this time, my brother and I were in college.  Our lives were beginning to take their own paths, but we never passed up the opportunity for a family cruise or just a weekend in Horseshoe Cove.  My family was so happy together on the sea.

I adored my parents’ boat and being out on the sea, but from a young age, I remember staring longingly at the boats in the bay heeled over on their sides with white sails billowing in the wind.  When my brother and I were very young, an older, single man lived on a beautiful wooden sailboat in the dock next to ours.  We became friends and when he invited us aboard, the oil lamps, round brass port holes, gimbaled stove and shiny varnished teak struck me as one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.  I knew nothing of sailing at the time, but hoped  I would learn one day.  I was fascinated by how fast the wind-driven hulls glided through the water without an engine and as I got older and more concerned with the environment, I loved the idea that they were utilizing a natural resource rather than polluting the air and water.  I had never even been on a sailboat while under sail but their pure elegance drew me in.  I imagined being out in the open ocean, no land in site, sails flying and salt spray on my face.  I began to feel a deep urge to travel the world's oceans on a sailboat.

My life continued to take it’s own course.  Immediately after college, I got married and my husband Rob and I moved to Highlands, NJ a small fishing town on the New Jersey Shore.  I loved living by the ocean, and took every opportunity to walk on the beach after work or on weekends.  My little dog Happy also loved romping in the waves and sand on a hot day and chasing the sea birds.  My husband knew of my dream and thought it might be a good idea, but maybe when we retired.  I was disappointed, but figured I would learn as much as I could about sailing in the meantime and maybe get the chance to crew on someone else’s sail boat.  After all, my older brother had just purchased a 37’ Endeavor sloop.  Rob and I went to Sail Expo in Atlantic City each January and drooled over the shiny new sailboats, but the dream of sailing into the sunset was a long long way down the road.  Rob was more focused on his career.  I continued to work at my crappy low  paying job, all the while wondering what I was really meant to do in life. 

My marriage, for many different reasons, didn’t work out.  Rob and I split up in August of 1999…our 3^rd anniversary.  It was the most painful thing I had ever endured.  I was plagued by extreme anxiety, depression and insomnia.  I lost weight and started wondering what about life made it worth living.  I moved back in with my parents and my dream all but disappeared beneath a shroud of apathy and darkness.  My only priority was making it through each day without drinking too much or eating too little.  The thought that I could even drive to work and back each day seemed an almost insurmountable task.

As time went on, my deep wounds began to heal and scar over.  With the help of medication, my anxiety attacks and depression lessened.  I began to look farther into the future than just that day.  Slowly as I felt my emotional state stabilizing, my sailing dream peaked its way from underneath the shroud and started to occupy more of my conscience again.  It was still a far off dream though.  I could never afford even an old beat up boat, and I didn’t want to do it alone anyway.  I told myself to be patient, that someday, my dream may manifest itself.

Then I met Mike.  On the first day we met, through a mutual friend, I mentioned something about wanting to sail around the world.  His eyes lit up and he yelled “ME TOO!”.  We started dating and as time went on, our plan began to take shape.  We would buy a boat, spend a year or so learning to sail it, then take off for Hawaii.  It was ambitious and a bit foolish in retrospect, but we were on a mission.  I had never felt such a purpose in life.  We took sailing lessons and read every book and magazine we could get our hands on.  We went to SailExpo and attended as many seminars as we could fit into our schedule.  My excitement was at a level I had never felt before.  It seemed as though every decision we made revolved around our plan.  It was all we ever talked about.  It was all I thought about.

We searched the boat classifieds and looked at a couple of “wrecks” when we finally saw Perdida, a 35’ 1972 Allied Seabreeze Yawl, for sale on the Internet.  She was absolutely beautiful.  Touted as a sturdy off-shore cruiser and a classic, we were anxious to see her.  When we finally traveled to Port Washington, NY on Long Island to see her, we fell in love at first site.  She was a bit over our price range, but she was structurally sound and had been kept in pretty good shape especially for her 30 years.  It was possible that she may have been one of the beautiful sailboats I had admired as a child in the 1970's.  She was one year older than I was.

It was January, and we put a deposit down on her.  I had never been so excited.  I couldn’t sleep at nigh,t barely able to believe that my dream, our dream, was actually happening.  Images of Mike and I anchored in tropical anchorage’s around the world flashed through my head like a slide show on high speed.   I continued to read all I could.  I wanted to be an expert on everything.  I made lists of repairs we would need to make and researched on the Internet how others had gone about doing them.  We joined the Allied Seabreeze Owners Association and took advantage of the organization's vast knowledge of Seabreezes.  I read many books about the cruising lifestyle and some of the stories intimidated and even scared me.  I knew that there would be some really bad and scary times, after all, I had experienced some pretty scary times out on the sea, and although they paled in comparison to some of the stories I read, I was confident that I had a solid basic understanding of the sea from which to build upon.  If I were going to be afraid of the ocean, I would certainly have known it by now.  We began buying some of the equipment we would need.  Especially charts of the Long Island Sound, NY for sailing Perdida down to her new home in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey.

I’m not sure when the transition actually took place.  I can’t remember it happening at a distinct time, all I know is that the reasons for my sleeplessness changed from excitement to overwhelming panic.  I started having vivid nightmares about violent storms at sea and survival situations.  I thought in my head “this must be what everyone goes through when they are faced with a change in lifestyle,  I’m just having normal anxiety.  It should go away in time.”  The nightmares got worse not better.  I would wake up sweating and shaking in fear.  I couldn’t go back to sleep.  As time went on, the anxiety level increased during my waking hours as well.  I found that I couldn’t think about anything else.  I imagined every catastrophe that could possibly happen on a sailboat.  The peaceful images of us anchored in a tropical lagoon were gone.  They were replaced with images of a sinking boat, 40 foot breaking waves, the mast snapping off and worse, Mike being knocked unconscious and falling overboard.  I began to question myself like I never had before. "Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this.  This was too intense.  I’m too much of a mental case, after all, I’ve suffered with Major Depression since childhood."  My excitement and faith in myself all but disappeared.

Soon my anxiety began to seep its way into other aspects of my life.  I was having a hard time at social gatherings.  I felt inadequate and never knew what to say to anyone.  Conversation was such a struggle that I began to fear holiday and family times.  I made excuses for missing dinners and gatherings and self-medicated with lots and lots of chardonay.

We sailed Perdida down from Port Washington in April of 2002.  My father and I took the train to NYC then the Long Island Rail Road to Port Washington where Perdida, our new boat, was docked.  I was definitely in a state of panic, but my father was there and that made me feel slightly more at ease.   The night before we set sail, I had a full blown panic attack on our newly purchased dream boat.  I shook and cried uncontrollably.  I felt like my life was completely out of my control. Why was this happening to me?   I couldn’t stop crying and shaking.  My heart felt as though it would pound out of my chest, and even the sight or mention of food made me nauseated.  Mike tried to comfort me, but he didn’t know what to do or how to help me.  I can’t remember ever feeling so terrified.  I didn't know at the time, but that horrible out of control feeling was about to become the thing that would rule my life for the next few years.

What was happening to me?  Why was my brain so out of control?  How could I go from being so excited and confident to shaking and terrified?  Even being on my parents' boat, something that had always been so comforting, was giving me anxiety.  I was becoming deathly afraid of the one thing I had always loved and taken comfort in - the sea.  How could this be happening? 

I began seeing my therapist again after not having gone for over a year.  I was put on a different type of anti-depressant, one that had shown positive results in those experiencing anxiety.  I was also given  Ativan, a sedative, for the severe attacks.  We explored my problems in therapy.  There were many times I just wanted to give up the dream…give up the boat.  It was just too painful, too torturous.  Somehow, weekend after weekend; I summoned the strength to go out on the boat even though it was like a horrible form of torture.  I took the tranquilizers and talked myself out of most of the bad attacks, but some took a hold of me and I just couldn’t shake them loose. 

One afternoon Mike and I were getting ready to back Perdida out of the slip to go out for a day of sailing.  He was at the helm and I was on the bow to throw off the dock lines.  Suddenly, I was hit with such a severe sense of panic that I became paralyzed.  My vision became so blurred, I could barely see.  I was so light headed, I thought I would pass out.  It’s hard to explain what was going through my mind.  The only words that come to mind are primal panic.  Panic so strong that I thought I was going to die any moment.  I have heard that when a person is in a life threatening situation, their "life flashes before their eyes", if you'll excuse the cliche.  Although I have never realistically been in a life threatening situation, I imagine what I felt was similar.  Images of death and catastrophe flashed through my mind and I could hardly breathe.  My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking violently.  Mike was yelling to me from the helm but I couldn’t move.  “What are you doing ?” he yelled repeatedly.  Finally he re-tied the stern lines, shut off the engine and walked up to the bow.  I was still clutching the bow line tightly in my hand.  He tried to take it out of my hand but I held it tighter.  I was scared to death to let it go.  Why?  Well…..that’s the question I have never been able to answer.  I spent the next few months trying to figure it out.  An explanation alluded me, and still does.  Obviously it had something to do with my fears about sailing or the ocean, but what exactly?  Why now?

I continued to force myself to go to the marina almost every weekend.  Every time we left the dock or even talked about leaving the dock, the anxiety kicked in.  I tried to make excuses for why we shouldn’t go out.  Mike was very supportive and tried gently to force me to confront my fears.  As the summer went on, my fears ebbed and flowed like the tide but were always there under the surface if not right out in front.  As we experienced more things, my fears became less irrational sometimes, but they were always there, holding me back as though I were lashed to a tree.

After having her transported by truck, Mike and I are now living and cruising on Perdida in Southern California and planning our Hawaii trip in April or May of this year.  I still haven’t given up the dream, although it has been the hardest thing I've ever lived through (yes, even harder than the divorce).  I am still dealing with the disappointment I feel towards myself and the feeling that I’ve let us both down.  I have been very humbled.  How could I have been so arrogant to think that all of my dreams would happen without hard work and even pain and suffering?  The real lesson here is that when something is really important maybe it shouldn’t come easily.  By working hard for something or someone, only then does it become a real part of who you are.  The suffering is the real gift if you can learn to accept it as such.  It is the everyday journey you take in life that defines you as a person, not your final destination.

Slowly and Painfully, Realizing My Altered Existance

As I wait day after day for my doctor to call, I'm realizing that this is it.  This is my life now.  Maybe there are some pills I can take every day for the rest of my life that may subdue my symptoms but I will never be the same.  I've missed so many opportunities that I thought I would have had years to realize. Of course someday I would become unable to do things that required physical ability, if I were lucky enough to live that long, but I'm thirty-seven.  I thought I would have had more time, but that was really very naive I suppose.

Four nights a week my husband, who is a boat captain, skippers a water taxi in the harbor.  When my daughter and I visit, he often takes us for a short ride to find seals or sometimes even dolphins right outside the harbor.  Last time it was just after sunset as we motored back into the harbor.  The lights of Avalon were coming on but the mountains were still silhouetted by an ever fading purple sky.  It was painfully beautiful.  The breeze blew across my face and through my hair and my daughters fine wisps of hair danced like tiny feathers.  I started to cry silently as I realized how much I missed Perdida.  She was the 35' Allied Seabreeze yawl (and the obvious inspiration for my screen name) that my significant other and I lived on for almost four years.  I could almost see her elegant lines and teal colored hull tied up to a mooring in the harbor as I had seen her so many times before.  Tears ran down my face.  I remembered sitting in the cockpit on an evening just like that one with a glass of wine in my hand, the boat rocking gently and my feeling so lucky, that I pondered my situation almost in disbelief. 

My parents always had a boat while I was growing up.   As a child, I suffered from undiagnosed & untreated depression. The rocking of the boat and the smell of the sea air were my anti-depressants and psychotherapy I suppose.  My father had been in the Navy and then lived on boats, worked on boats, helped build boats and just loved everything about boats.  He jokingly called himself a viking, not for his love of pillaging and plundering of course, but for the sea and his Norwegian heritage.  The first boat I remember our family having was a 37' wood-hulled cabin cruiser fittingly named Valhalla, which was the name of almost every other boat my parents owned.  As a little girl I felt so safe on the boat with my dad and mom.  Sleeping in the v-bunks with my younger brother at night, our stuffed animal-filled nets swinging against the wooden bulkhead was true bliss.  Anytime I was sad or troubled, I closed my eyes and brought myself back to that v-bunk. I tried to recreate the sound of the water swishing and gurgling past as the bow split through the water, the wooden hull the only thing separating my body from the sea.  I even tried to feel the gentle motion of the wooden boat. To own my own boat and go on great sea adventures was my great aspiration from childhood and on to adulthood.   I was partial to sailing boats though, or at least I thought I was.  I had never actually sailed on a sailboat. 

By the time I'd graduated college and joined the rat race I'd read almost every cruising book I could get my hands on.  From Francis Chichester's account of the first solo Around the World race, to "Managing 12 volts", I'd read and studied them all.  I lived in New Jersey but worked for a software development company in Mid-town Manhattan.  I had a one hour train ride each way and I used my time wisely by reading. One particular moment stands out in my mind for some reason.  I was reading Beth Leonard's "Cruising Handbook" on the train ride home, when I looked out the window to see the graffiti covered brick walls of one of the many factory building that lined the tracks.  In my heart I thought "I'm really gonna do this! I'm gonna sail outa here!".  A shiver of fear or anticipation ran through me that I'd never felt before.

In addition to all my reading, we had taken lessons, gotten our American Sailing Association Certifications, and Chart Navigation Certifications.  My significant other and I went to SailExpo every year in Atlantic City, attended all the seminars and took serious notes.  We really felt that we were ready for the next big step.

After a couple years of preparing we bought a boat.  Perdida.  She was more than we wanted to spend, but we fell in love with her instantly.  She was a classic beauty.  The day we took ownership I had a paralysing panic attack.  This, a time of total confusion and terror like I had never felt, was merely a glimpse into my near future, when I would be absolutely tortured by anxiety and panic for the next two years.  But that time in my life could fill a book by itself, so I won't start that story here. 

After two years of sailing Perdida in NJ and NY waters, we had Perdida's masts unstepped and loaded her on a huge truck to be shipped across the country to Newport Beach, California.  The plan was, from there, to sail her to Hawaii which we figured conservatively to be a twenty-two day sail in open ocean  After a couple years of living on Perdida in Avalon and Two Harbors and never being on the same page about anything, we broke up.  He's living in Hawaii now and I'm still here on Catalina.  It's another story I won't digress into now.

I wanted to tell my story that led up until now to try and convey the great amount of energy and self that was spent on this endeavor.  I wanted to emphasize how much of my being was completely consumed in order to achieve this purpose.  My boat meant everything to me and had become a part of me.  I realized one day that I had subconsciously anthropomorphised her into a creature that I lived inside and that protected me and loved me.  The day I watched her sail out of the harbor without me, broke my heart into so many pieces that I cannot put them back together. I cannot let go.  Perdida represented my future, and now I feel I have none.

Now I know that my chance has passed.  I could  never sail a boat now, I can barely walk up a flight of stairs.  I'm still coming to terms with the profundity of this disease, mourning the life I could have had but is now impossible.  My life has lost a dimension.  Every day is spent in my apartment with my daughter and my husband if he's not working.  I can go out once a day if I'm up to it and walk as far as the pier before I start feeling too weak.  Then it's back home to lay on the couch dripping with sweat, short of breath and hurting everywhere, to recover from my adventure.  The occasional phone call or winter hotel guest to check in, just makes me have to move when all I really want to do is lay down and sleep.  I've been repeating this dreary routine every day for the last six months, which feels like years.  I could never hold down a "real" job.  I really don't think I could do it.

I found out today that my doctor won't be back in the office until the 14th.  So nice of her to return my two calls and note before she left.