Sailing Boat

This piece of writing has been submitted by an anonymous survivor.

Like a sailing boat, at the mercy of an ocean with no breeze to help it travel, I am in a state of drifting limbo.

Spending time gathering the courage to talk to someone, to pick up the phone, then not knowing what to say when it’s answered- the long list made of things aching inside not able to be verbalised and then I stupidly reduce it to, ‘I’m okay’.

Okay? What is actually okay is that it’s not okay. It is actually alright to admit that life is not okay!

Yet… I want to believe everyone else needs the help, deserves the support more than me. That by me being on the phone, another person, more valuable, more fragile, could be accessing deserved help and feeling more able to set sail, to travel on to a better place.

Me, the one that cannot even articulate a conversation or who cuts off a call when it is answered, freezing in the limbo of a sailing boat with no breeze- not knowing what to do, to say, how to respond. Just at the mercy of emotion not held tight enough on a lead from within.

Like a sailing boat, bobbing up and down, drifting into unknown and unchartered waters I carry on. I cannot stop the emotions I feel and the effect they have on my daily life. I am unable to control the swells that rise up like the seas inside me- that I feel I should be able to cope by now, yet I am so out of my depth, lost in a vast ocean- an unfamiliar place, lost, lonely and so afraid.

So I reach for the phone again. I even write my list of what I am so longing to verbalise, to share, to release and I yet, again, I cannot. I have failed.

I speak of nothingness, of all the things I really deep inside have no need to talk about. Yet aching within are the things I so wish the other person, the listener, could ask, could hear, has the power to search deep inside me and unlock the fear within.

I wait again, for another call, this time determined to say the things that are grappling with me inside my mind. I am tired of talking now- mostly by text, by writing not being able to be set free by verbalising it. I don’t want to waste resources. I don’t even know why I need to call, to be heard, to just be in conversation with someone who knows and understands- not is repulsed by my experience or too shocked to then see me face to face.

Like a sailing boat, at the mercy of an ocean with no breeze to help it travel, I am in a state of drifting, or limbo yet I have travelled some distance when I look back.

I have journeyed through storms and survived, become more resourced to cope and move on, on my own. Feeling in a state of nothingness is better than being in crisis. Bobbing up and down on the waves is better than trying to survive a storm lashing from within.

I will continue to sail… one day actually raising to sail to go it alone, saying what I feel and being okay with that.