I encourage young people from western nations like the United States to do their traveling to less developed countries while they are young. They need to be old enough to make reasonably thoughtful choices, but not so old that they have spent literally decades being swaddled in the false sense of security that comes with living a middle class life in the midst of laws intended to keep a person safe from themselves.

We have seat belt laws, speed limit laws, building codes laws, car safety laws, stop signs that should be heeded… the list seems almost endless. And we have laws about how long a commercial driver can be behind the wheel when taking passengers or freight over our roads. These laws seem like good common sense laws. We get used to them and take them for granted.

This doesn’t look like a country I am traveling to. But, um, NO.

We have lived such a swaddled life. And in my protected world, I do not ride chicken buses. In fact,  I almost never ride public transportation even here at home because, hello, I don’t go anywhere that makes it necessary. If I lived in Seattle, it’s likely I would ride the bus frequently because driving and parking in Seattle is a nightmare. There is good public transport there, unlike here in Tacoma. Still, I like my buses clean, on time, in good repair and not overly crowded. HAHAHAHAHA! Can you say, “Good luck, Melissa. Didn’t you say you’d be traveling to Mexico and Central America?”  Yeah. I did.

I probably wouldn’t be very concerned about any of this if it weren’t for my friend. Her 16 year old daughter went to Bolivia to study on a Rotary Club scholarship and never came home. Her daughter got on a bus with a bunch of other students. The driver had been driving for over 24 hours. He fell asleep at the wheel. The bus went off the cliff and killed her. Sure, that’s not likely to happen to me, but remember: Amy G. Dala does not play odds. She plays to survive.

Our clean, efficient, regulated buses with drivers who may be cranky but are unlikely to drive off a cliff.

Here’s what my mind tells me riding a chicken bus will be like: crowded, smelly, hot, filled with noise, with people sitting in my personal space, and just possibly dangerous. Why would I choose such a thing? Why would I willingly get on a bus like that without wearing a respirator and protective bubble wrap suit? Because some places I understand that’s just how you get around. That or walk. Part of the entire point of this trip is experiencing how they live in other cultures, something Fran ‘the frontal’ Cortex looks forward to but Amy G. Dala really doesn’t. Besides, I know Mike will be the first one on that stupid bus and he won’t even save me a seat. That being said, check out the Fear-o-Meter.

Well, okay, it’s maybe a little irrationally high. I mean I kind of want to do it for the adventure part of it, and to say I did it. Probably if we aren’t going a great distance I am going to be fine.  But if we’re going to someplace far away, and there are mountains involved, it’s likely I’m going to want to ask the driver if he got a good night’s sleep.

Nah, I’m totally going to do it. Just shut the hell up, Amy.

Well, yes, that does sound redundant considering these are all posts about feeling anxiety lately. However, one of the tenants of anxiety as a diagnosis is the avoidance of feelings of anxiety. It’s not really circular logic. Let me explain through a real life example.

Be soothed by this photo taken at Benson Island.

This summer I had anxiety pretty bad. I was rocking and rolling from one hour to the next and feeling very out of control much of the time. My brain really was not my own. I was hoping that our cruise would settle me down, but, of course, it’s so much more complicated than that.

As long as I was on the ocean, with land really far away, I was fine. In fact, when we left our anchorage in Seiku to cross the Strait of Juan de fuca and Mike said we were taking on water through the shaft seal, I didn’t even flinch. I wasn’t the least bit worried about that, and you’d think that would be the kind of thing that would set anybody off, especially as it was one of the big three things that happened on our first day out. Nope. I’ve always handled things like that really well (when they are not bundled on top of lots of other bad things)  because I know Mike will fix it.  Engine won’t start and the tide is pushing us toward the rocks? No problem. I will make that sail fill with whatever air is available.  Shaft seal lost some screws and water is pouring into the bilge? Why worry?  I just sailed around in circles until he got it managed and we carried on. I love being on the open water. There’s almost never anything to hit.

In spite of my anxiety, we really had a wonderful time this summer.

Let’s compare that to the almost complete melt down I had halfway into the trip. We’d been traveling up one of the fjords and all was well. We had a few wonderful days of anchoring and looking at wildlife, but we were running out of fresh food and we’d had no cell service for several days (more on that in another post). My internal stress level was a little high because of that.  Mike suggested we go to Tofino to get groceries and some walking. And that’s when I began panicking. Why? Because the water around Tofino is crowded with people and boats and sand bars that shift around, and we’d have to find a place to dock. (Read my post on Death By Docking to see why that matters.) We don’t know our way around the water ways there, there is a lot of shallow water, and not a lot of dock space. It’s the kind of place I like to avoid. My day was about to be seriously ruined.

I lay in the cockpit and breathed, realizing how silly it was, trying to talk myself out of feeling terrified. I mean to tell you, Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex was really giving it her best shot but I was seriously on the edge.  Poor Mike. He knew I was suffering, but really there was nothing he could do about it. Here’s the Fear-O-Meter reading on that situation. Yeah, it was pretty bad:

How can I make this point most succinctly? The avoidance is only partly about the docking per se. That is generally over fairly quickly. There is either space or there isn’t. Of course, I hate docking, but it’s really the fear, all the feelings that surround the experience of it that I want to avoid. And this is a crucial thing to understand about anxiety. If I have to participate in getting the boat docked, I’m going to be feeling tense and anxious until it’s over and so I prefer to not even entertain the notion.  Avoidance of the fear is a significant part of having a traumatic memory. Sometimes people can try to organize their entire lives around avoiding having to feel what we identify as fear, whatever causes it.

Let me say it another way. If you were to ask me if I was worried I would be hurt or killed during docking I would certainly say no. Absolutely not. And that would be true. But when I think about participating in a docking experience in a marina, my brain creates certain feelings in my body and those feelings (increased heart rate, nausea, feelings of being unconnected to my body) are identified by me as ‘fear’. That’s what I want to avoid. Capice?

Here’s another example of what I mean by avoiding the feelings. I have clients who need to have things a certain way in their physical surroundings. They keep their homes just so, have many rules about right and wrong, have exact ways that things should be done, etc. They lack the internal flexibility that is required to ‘go with the flow’. If there is anything out of place, it creates feelings of uneasiness, restlessness. In other words, anxiety. It isn’t that they have some kind of moral value about having a tidy room. They don’t care a bit about how you live in your own space. If you want to be a slob, that’s fine by them. But they can never relax in their own space until they know that everything is in order; their own special kind of order. They create all these rules in order to avoid feeling out of control. It helps them believe that they are in charge of their lives. When asked what would happen should someone, for instance, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, they generally respond that they would feel very uncomfortable until they put the shoes away. Sometimes these people have anger problems because they are always so tense and watchful about how things are going that the least little thing sets them off. Thankfully, I don’t suffer this particular form of anxiety.

Incidentally, I am relieved to report there was no room for us in Tofino on the public dock, which is usually taken up by fishing boats. I did put my big girl panties on and we did pull up to the public dock to give it a shot, but Galapagos is a big boat and we were too long for the space. Frankly, it would have been rude of us to dock there even had there been space. Don’t we all love the big assed boat that swoops in like they own the place and takes up all the room? Yeah, we aren’t that boat.

Can I just say my husband parks that boat like a boss?

We anchored around the corner, out of the way, and rowed to town and had a lovely time. That creates no anxiety for me whatever. I will row for an hour against the current to avoid trying to squeeze onto a dock, unless we’re the only boat around. If we are securely held with our anchor, I’m fine with leaving the boat for a few hours, although we are both always relieved to see her floating where we left her when we return. I think that’s a normal cruiser response.

I know this post makes it sound like we had a terrible trip. We didn’t. We had an awesome trip. I’m not going to let this demon win. If you have anxiety, one thing you can do to help yourself is to begin to separate your identity from the anxious feelings. I might be me, but I am not my anxiety. Get it? My brain may be causing these feelings to cascade through my body, but I’m not my body, either, and if I just wait, these feelings will pass. (Incidentally, this is a very useful technique when children are needing help managing their emotional state. We can say things like ‘your body needs a rest’ not ‘YOU need a rest’ or ‘Let’s teach your body how to sit quietly for a couple of minutes.’  You get the idea. Works well with little ones in early childhood.)

Give it a try and see if it doesn’t make you feel differently about the way your own brain and body react to situations you’d like to avoid.

Ahousat. We didn’t even try to dock there. We wanted to anchor at the head of the cove.

Recently on the Women Who Sail Facebook page a woman posted a photograph of a tiny crab. The crab was very cute.  As a rule I kind of like crabs and other creatures with exoskeletons (except for the one I wrote about in B is for Bugs), even if they ARE like giant insects of the sea. I won’t say that the spider crabs we have up here don’t kind of give me the creeps, but I my internal Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex can convince me they are kind of cute, from a considerable distance.

No, actually what sticks in my mind about this particular crab is that the woman said she had pulled it out of her partner’s ear. WHAAATTT? That’s disgusting! I cannot unsee or unread that. (And now, neither can you. Just sharing the wealth here. ) So… apparently now I have to be worried about tiny animals finding ways to enter my bodily orifices when I clean the hull down in the tropics? Who knew? To make matters worse, this is not an unusual occurrence. Other people have found crabs in their ears. One person even found a baby eel in someone’s ear! OH MY GOD! I don’t know about you, but I’m just saying ‘no’ to any kind of living creature taking up residence in any of my personal orifices.  Now I cannot get this scenario out of my head and I am completely grossed out. I mean, how can you have an entire crab living in your ear?

Not too worried because I will be taking steps.

Because of this, I will have to ‘take steps’. I’ll need to get a full body dive suit, including the hood, for any hull cleaning. Either that, or we have to pay someone to clean the hull. I have learned through the feedback on this FB post about a tiny crab that there is an entire ecosystem that begins to form on the hull bottom. First I’m reading about small crabs, and the next thing I know it’s all kinds of tiny living creatures floating around in the water. Of course, that makes sense, I just never thought about it. And I wish I wasn’t thinking about it now. When you scrape all those tiny animals off the hull, they float around looking for somewhere else to live. How do they know they won’t be welcome in your ear? Or some other more personal place?

Not to put too fine a point on it, the reason I’m not particularly anxious about crabs being in my own personal ears is because it’s not going to happen. Because I will TAKE STEPS to see it doesn’t. Amy wins on that one. Now she can go drink her milkshake and read Harry Potter.

The other giant exo-skeletoned animal I am not looking forward to is lobsters. I don’t really have anything against them, but they are a bit repulsive. And apparently fishermen and other cruisers just love to share them with you. The problem is that I can’t imagine eating one. I mean, these are GIANT INSECTS, people! I kind of have a thing about eating things where the bones are on the outside. Perhaps if I use enough butter.

If we were meant to eat lobsters, do you think they would be starring in horror movies?

Plus, I had a bad experience with cooking lobster when I was in high school. I don’t remember all the details but it was in Maine and whoever I was with had decided he had to eat lobster for the ‘full-on Maine’ experience. But he couldn’t afford to go to a restaurant to get one cooked the normal way: by someone else trained to do so. No. Of course not. He got a live one and dumped it in a pot of boiling water. And the pot was too small, and the poor thing just suffered rather than dying. Okay. First off, I do believe that if you are going to eat meat, which I do, the animal should be dead before you eat it. I’m not into eating living flesh. Plus, I don’t like animals having to suffer. That damn lobster wouldn’t die and it made noise. Have you ever heard a lobster make the noise of death? Yeah. I thought not.  Now the thought of cooking lobster makes me a little sick.

So I worry that on our trip, I will have to eat lobster. And crab. And maybe other things that have an exoskeleton. Or that live in shells.  I’m not sure about that, either. I’m kind of not into eating filter feeders as well because, you know, detritus and all that nasty stuff. Frankly, I’m not really into sea food at all, having only recently learned to eat fish. This has been hard on Mike, who loves all kinds of sea food. And still, we’ve managed to be married for a long time. We’ll figure this out, too.

Hmmm. Check back with me in a few years on this.

To be clear, I would be perfectly fine with not EVER eating any of those things if I didn’t know that I will be in situations where people are bound to say things like, ‘You don’t eat lobster? Really? What’s wrong with you? It’s delicious! Here! Just try it, you’ll see.’. Then they will point and laugh. And then I will feel compelled to try it just to please them and put a stop to their mirth. Because I kind of know that if most people in the world eat seafood, then how bad can it be?  Now I want to run screaming. And also probably brush my teeth and rinse really well.

Exoskeletons. Just let them stay in the sea as God intended.