*Spanish for ‘What did you say?”

By now if you’ve been reading this series I hope you have an understanding that some types of anxiety are like permanent fixtures in your life. I’d like you to consider that for some people, anxiety is simply part of their internal operating system, sort of like Windows on a computer. It’s hardwired into the machine and unless you are really savvy, everything you do on the computer is filtered through that system.

Photos from our trip to La Paz in 2012.

Ever notice that there are times when your computer slows down and starts to do odd things? It takes a long time to open a new page, it gets stuck loading your Facebook feed, you get the Google ‘Aw Snap’ message? That’s usually because there is something running in the background that you are unaware of, something that is using a lot of the computer’s resources that keeps it from functioning optimally. When that happens, your computer can begin to be frustrating.

Anxiety is just like that. When there is a chronic, underlying issue that takes up a lot of psychological or physical resources, anxiety tends to interfere with optimal functioning even more and those ‘background applications’ make anxiety worse. This ‘background application’ could be chronic pain, or a health issue. It could be a set of belief systems that contribute to your internal anxious thinking.  It could be chronic job stress or an inability to focus and pay attention (such as in Attention Deficit Disorder, which is a real thing).  For me, the background program that sucks up a lot of my resources, creates stress, and therefore makes my anxiety more difficult is my considerable hearing loss.

Remember that anxiety exists in the system of your entire being: the mind, the body, the spirit. It works like ‘trickle down economics’ is supposed to but doesn’t: If one part of the system is in a state of tension, it causes tension in the other parts of the system. And what happens when there is chronic tension? Amy G. Dala sits up and takes notice. (Remember, we are really simplifying here.) Pretty much anything that makes a person feel more vulnerable in the world is food for anxiety.

Hearing loss is the invisible disability. Invisible to others, that is, because I guarantee you that people who have it don’t ever forget it’s there. Consider the following conversation, which I am making up but which is also completely plausible. The place: a gathering of cruisers where we are the new people. There’s a lot of background noise and many conversations going on at the same time.

Cruiser to me, talking over the noise: How was your passage?
Me: Massage? Yes, that would be great! Do you know someone?
Cruiser: No, PASSAGE? Were there any storms?
Me: Warm? Yes, I find it downright hot here. I imagine we’ll get used to that, but the humidity is killing me.
Cruiser: OK. (trying another tack and moving away just a bit) How long do you plan to cruise?
Me: Oh, this bruise? That’s just where I knocked my arm against the corner in the galley during a bit of a rough patch. It looks worse than it is. Just part of living on a boat.
Cruiser: I think I hear my mother calling. See you later.

Ah, it would be funnier if it weren’t also true. Emily Litella, anyone?

What that cruiser might think she is witnessing is a daft woman who can’t seem to answer simple questions or follow a conversation. Maybe she is thinking, “What’s wrong with this woman? Isn’t she listening to me?” What’s really happening is that I will be focusing almost all of my internal resources on hearing and understanding what she is saying. Because of the background noise, I will be watching her lips and trying to read them. On the whole, I will just be attempting to fit in like a normal person. And that will take a great deal of my energy.

I’m very good at telling people that I don’t hear well, but I cannot always count on others to speak up or look at me when they talk. Why should they have to remember to treat me any differently than they treat others? Always having to ask for that gets to be its own level of exhausting. The constant straining to hear and understand, the constant decoding of words and matching sounds to known language,  is a background program that runs continuously until I take my hearing aids out at night. Blessed relief. You know what’s a good day for me? A good day is being alone at my house with no one to listen to. I can completely relax. You can see how that would begin to interfere with all kinds of things. 

What does all this have to do with Spanish? Just this. It’s already hard enough for me to decode language that is my native tongue. Many times, by the time I’ve figured out what the person is saying to me, they’ve already moved on in their own mind to the next thing. Ever notice that when you have to ask someone to repeat a joke it’s not as much fun for them the second time around? It’s just not worth asking. There’s that fleeting look of irritation that is completely unconscious in people, but I notice it. It makes me feel bad for having to ask. If it seems unimportant, I’ll just pretend I understood and move on.

If someone is speaking words that have no template in my brain because they are literally foreign to me,  it’s going to be that much harder for me to figure out what they are saying. You know what? I’m not looking forward to that.  To me, it just feels like one more way that I’m going to be depending on Mike: he has preternaturally, disgustingly good hearing. He can hear a owl hoot from across town. Do you know when the last time was I heard an owl hoot without trying? I forgot. That’s how long.

So the continual psychic drain of personal issues that are chronically running in the background of your being contributes to tension in the body, and that sends the message that all is not well. Amy G. Dala sits up and takes notice. That’s the take home from today’s blog post. If you have anxiety, think about some of your background programs and ask yourself if and how they may be making your anxiety worse, especially if they are the kind that make you feel vulnerable in the world.

In my case, Mike and I will take a language class when we get to Mexico. We understand that there is a good one in La Paz that many cruisers have recommended. I’ll have my phone with a translation app as well. Maybe flash cards I can whip out when the going gets tough. If worse comes to worse, I can wear a T-shirt that says, ‘Just speak slowly and clearly, in English.’ Or maybe, “I’m not really a bitch. I just can’t hear you.” Too much? Ok, maybe not, then.

Just joined us for the A to Z Challenge? Want to read all about anxiety from the very beginning? Sure you do. 

I struggled with the letter P. I wanted to make this something fun like P is for Porpoises, or P is for Parrotfish, but clearly I’m not the least big scared of those two things and really hope I see a lot of them. I am, unfortunately, worried about feeling like I’ve been sent to the ‘poorhouse’.  People who are ‘out there’ cruising on their boats say that it’s all worth it, and that they love living on less money and living a simpler lifestyle. I truly hope they are right and that I love it, too, because we are taking a serious decrease in income in order to make this happen.  I’m also giving up a career that will be difficult to return to in the same way if I ever need to start practicing again.

P is also for our dinghy, Puddler, which Mike is selling since we can’t take her with us. She’s a great dinghy.

Even though we feel pretty old, and are anxious to get going before true old age hits us, Mike and I are actually young to be ‘retiring’. We are not independently wealthy.  It’s probable that this will not be a permanent retirement, but only a hiatus from the daily grind and level of responsibilities that make us both just, well, tired. As the day when we stop bringing money in through work gets closer and closer I think more and more about how we’re going to be living on less than 1/4 of what we live on now. I try to imagine it, but when I do, my imagination gets the better of me. Will I never go to Starbucks again? Will I forgo Costco? Perhaps this is what is currently being referred to as a ‘First world Problem’, but I don’t care. We have worked very hard to be where we are in life financially. It’s something I continually have to talk myself off the ledge about. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. Stop worrying. It’ll be okay.”

Not high, but definitely something I can waste a lot of energy thinking about.

If we were in our ’30’s, or even our ’40’s, it would be easier to wrap my head around taking a few years off from a career. We would still have many years of earning potential left and still be young when we returned. At this point, however, I worry that coming back to work might be hard for us in terms of finding jobs, mostly due to ageism in the workplace. Mike feels confident that he can get a good job, and he does have excellent skills as a programmer/developer, as well as good job contacts.

But I have absolutely no idea at all what kind of employer would look at hiring me, someone who has been in private practice for most of her career. What do you do next when you’ve had a career as a psychotherapist? Do any of those skills even transfer to anything else? It takes a long time to build a practice. I have given up all my insurance contracts, something that fills me with an odd combination of joy and dread. (No, I would not be able to get those back. The networks are all closed.) Will I even want to continue to practice if and when we come home? And if not, then how will I make money? I’ve worked since I was 16. I don’t yet know how to not make money. It makes me feel ‘poor’ to even think about it. And yet…the freedom…

In terms of what keeps people our age at the dock until they are too old to go, I’m betting this is the number one fear. It would be so easy to convince myself that if we just stayed put another couple of years, we’d be financially so much better off. But of course, we could also be dead. There’s that. And I’m pretty sure Mike would die of pure misery.

Cost to have this view? Nothing. Worth? Priceless.

Perhaps this anxiety is more about my own identity in the world than it is about being in the ‘poorhouse’. Actually, as I write this I get a little excited to see what’s next. There is a very fine line between anxiety and excitement. And sometimes where you are on that line is dependent on how you look at things. That’s where psychotherapy can really help. It teaches you to look at things from another perspective.  If I focus on the money, I’m going to be very anxious. But when I focus on the freedom, that’s where the joy is.

What’s the next thing I will do, that I can’t do as long as I continue the job I have? Looking at it that way, being “poor” might be just the right thing.

Just joined us for the A to Z challenge? Want to know more than you ever thought you wanted to know about Anxiety? Start with the letter A, here.

One of the first rules of sailing is to ‘stay on the boat’. There’s a good reason for this. Should one of us fall off while underway at sea our chances of being able to get back on depend on many things, including weather and sea state, and whether it’s daylight, the water temperature, whether the person in the water is conscious or injured…all those things and more come into play. We have a Life Sling on board and sure, we’ll practice with it.  But what are the odds we’d have to use it under the circumstances that we’d be practicing in? Not very good, frankly. When I think of one of us actually falling off the boat, I feel like this:

The best we can do is to mitigate the circumstances under which we could or would fall off the boat. So we have safety equipment, and we have protocols.  Knowing that we’ll be using logical brains to create rules for safety, and that we’ll have the right gear, means that I can sleep at night and not worry too much about this. Isn’t it odd the things our brains choose to be freaked out about? This one doesn’t freak me out much because in spite of the fact that I would be freaked if it DID happen, I don’t think it’s GOING to happen.  So really, when I think about the chances of one of us actually falling overboard in the middle of the ocean, I feel more like this:

Maybe I’m in denial. That’s a good defense mechanism to have when it comes to leaving your home on a daily basis. I mean, if you think too hard about how dangerous a place the world can be, then just getting out of your bed becomes an exersize in throwing caution to the winds. Perhaps I’ve fallen under the spell of denial and it’s keeping me from perseverating on whether either of us would fall overboard.  On the other hand, we do have a few things going for us on this matter.

We have a big, well designed boat. We have high lifelines, which we will not be depending upon to keep us on the boat, but which help. How does having a big boat help? Well there has to be a good deal of wind to get our boat to heel over very far, and she can take bigger waves than our Cal 34 could. When she is heeled over, we stay on the high side if we have to move about the deck. We have high freeboard, which is both a blessing and a curse, so waves have to be pretty big to wash over our deck. Our cockpit is super protected. It would be really hard to fall overboard from our cockpit. And if you did manage it, I guarantee that being overboard would probably not be the only problem you were having.

Furthermore, there are lots of handholds and we are very good about keeping at least one hand on the boat. After all, we learned to sail on a Catalina 27, then graduated to a Cal 34. Both of those boats were much more tender than our 47 foot Galapagos. We developed the habit of holding on tight from the get go and don’t take that for granted. Neither of us is too proud to crawl on hands and knees to get forward if conditions require it. And we have mast pulpits. Actually those sturdy mast pulpits are a very attractive feature of our boat. We also have high bulwarks, which give us something else to brace against when sitting down on the deck.

Our center cockpit is down low in the boat, allowing you to hunker down and be protected.

When we are on a passage, we will have harnesses and jacklines and be attached to the boat in the cockpit. The lines will not be long enough to allow a body to fall overboard. We’ve all seen those videos where people use their harnesses and the lines are actually pretty long and they go overboard and then get dragged under the water. No thanks. I prefer to stay on the boat no matter what, so ours will be too short to allow us to go over. We’re just going to have to make the rule, which we had on Moonrise when doing that overnight passage across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, that when conditions are rough you cannot leave the cockpit without your harness and line on at all times, day or night, when on watch alone or not. And no one leaves the cockpit at night at all without alerting the partner, regardless of whose watch it is.

The most dangerous thing is not being in high wind/waves at sea. Everyone is on high alert then and thinks about things like falling off the boat. The most dangerous thing is complacency. It’s when things seem safe and calm that people let their guards down. This causes behaviors like forgetting to put the PFD on when it’s a calm day, walking forward without paying much attention because the scenery is so nice, and in the case of men, peeing overboard. Ladies, don’t laugh too hard at the  men. Women have been known to fall overboard this way as well, although on our boat this would be a mighty uncomfortable position.  Just use your head and use your head.

A sobering statistic from the US Coastguard tells us how easy it is for people to become complacent, fall overboard, and then drown. This, from their 2014 statistics:

Where cause of death was known, 78% of fatal boating accident victims drowned. Of those drowning victims with reported life jacket usage, 84% were not wearing a life jacket.

The mast pulpit, seen on the right of the photo, is completely sturdy and makes a huge difference to security at the mast. The high bulwarks give us something to brace feet against when sitting on deck and keep things from going overboard.

At the end of the day, these rules are only as good as the people who go by them. We will have to both agree that we will follow them all the time. Not just some of the time, but always. We’ve been discussing this lately and so far, we both agree to all of this. This summer we will be putting attachment points for tethers in the cockpit and deciding how to deploy our jacklines. If you’ve done this on your boat and want to give us your opinion of what would work for ours, please let us know or come by the boat.

What are the rules and equipment you have on your boat that help you stay on board? Got a confortable offshore PFD that you don’t mind wearing all the time? Let us know what you have. They are on our to-buy list for this year.

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