A few years back Meg and I ended up in a situation which we couldn’t escape. Only later I discovered that what I was going through was ‘stress’. At the moment I thought it was just life. I always shrugged off any modern-day talk about ‘mental health’ they love so much in the West. But then, the circumstances threw me into a severe case of hypochondria which in turn lead to severe anxiety, for weeks! The chemical imbalance in my brain was so bad I thought I was going mad.
I was surviving it all on my own. I had Meg with me going through the same sh*t, as in the circumstance and the place we ended up in. But she was not much better off and couldn’t have known what was going on with me.
Every day I was living through the nightmare that was going on in my head. When I finally could sleep, I hated waking up and facing the day because I was overwhelmed with fear. They call this kind of unfounded fear ‘anxiety’, I learned later. Only to be afraid of the word too! I had the kind of thoughts that made me think that I was an awful person. In the galley, behind Meg sitting on the bench, I would think What if I pick up this knife and stab her in the back? A single negative thought would throw me into a physical reaction I had never experienced before, when a wave would hit my entire body.
We were trapped then, literally. We were stuck on a sailboat, on an island in Panama that we couldn’t have escaped due to the world-wide Covid related restrictions. Plus to this, in order to avoid the creeps living in the marina and the misogynistic marina manager, Meg and I were active under cover of night, not during the day. My world had shrunken to the size of whatever boat space I was in at the moment and what was happening in my mind. Imagine that!
I am astonished I have pulled through. But I do have scars. Discovering how complex human mind is, that our peace of mind and our very selves depend heavily on the balance of hormones in our brain, keeps me unsettled. Keeps me watching my own thoughts, worrying about failures. And I still wonder if I am a horrid person (remember that mambo-jumbo with violent thoughts).
When we move the boat or I have things to occupy my mind with, I get distracted from self-scrutinizing but largely it is being stuck on the boat, at anchor (after our Panamanian experience Meg and I are petrified of marinas), in yet another third world place we don’t want to be in, waiting for yet more stupid papers from Canada or Russia that let us move on, i.e. be together.
No matter my logical reasoning, no matter me knowing that chances are I don’t have a mental illness, a nasty thought still creeps in: What if I am going mad despite all that? What if I am mad now?
I can’t even describe clearly what it is I am afraid of. The best I can come up with is some kind of a doom ready to quash me. But the worst of it isn’t even the possibility of doom. It is my own fear, it feels awful. I am tired of it.
I probably would see a professional had I had access to her. But I don’t. I can hardly get food or propane for our boat in the place we are now. All other usual necessities, like mail, a drug store, public transit, town’s streets with people on them, even needing to be dressed, are just a dream to Meg and I. More than anything I need to get my freedom of movement back. We’ve been bouncing between Bahamas and Cuba for a year while waiting for Meg’s passport and boat parts to be delivered from the US where we can’t go because of me. But the waiting isn’t over. It will be two more weeks before I have my passport back with the sticker that permits me to enter Canada, inside.