A Boat Adrift Is Still Going Somewhere
“I feel like I’m in a boat set adrift in the ocean. No land in sight in any direction. I have no clue as to where the boat is headed but I still have to maintain the integrity of the craft or it’ll sink and I’ll drown.”
A lot of my recent past is due for some serious reframing.
I learned the term from Alice, a woman whom I met on Match.com, fell in love with, and lived with off and on for four years. We broke up badly three times during that span yet kept coming back to one another. It was a fraught and overly dramatic relationship fueled by incredible sex and little else.
She was (and I’m guessing still is) incredibly well read. She liked to reframe her experiences to benefit her position, often using the technique to justify her behavior. I didn’t care for that specific use as it generally reframed me right out of the picture yet I learned the method as a manner in which I could spin those glass half empty moments into a more optimistic point of view.
Reframing requires seeing something in a new way, in a context that allows us to recognize and appreciate positive aspects of our situation. Reframing helps us to use whatever life hands us as opportunities to be taken advantage of, rather than problems to be avoided. Breakdowns are transformed into challenges and new possibilities to experience life more fully and to become a more whole human being.
On any given in my new reality—living with my folks, helping with the caregiving of my father, divorced for a third time, back in Kansas, my material possessions locked away in storage waiting to be broken out, perpetually on a razor’s edge between incredibly sad and authentically annoyed that my ex-wife so casually blew up our life—I find myself checking on dad as he naps to see if he’s still breathing. The cosmos has tilted in a way that I was unprepared for. I watch the final meeting of the January 6th Committee and I don’t really care. I dread the idea of going back to substitute teaching in part because of my dismal experience with the job in 2018 and in part out of ego. I go to the gym but feel more like a hamster on a wheel than a GenX guy getting back in shape after nearly six months of bad habits.
While not under threat from the Russian army or homeless in San Francisco, I’m in a pretty shitty place.
Time to reframe.
PROBLEM: My wife of nearly eight years was working as a prostitute for the last couple of years under the radar and I divorced her. My confidence in my ability to detect those now obvious red flags, my ability to earn a living that doesn’t make me want to put a pistol in mouth, and my potential to hold on to a reason to keep going is shot.
REFRAME: She told me when I asked her, after two and a half years of this sordid situation, how long she had hoped to continue being married and secretly blowing dicks for cash, that she had intended to do it “for as long as I could.” By getting out when I did, I dodged a major bullet. No john ever came to the apartment, in love with his hooker, to off her husband. No pimp ever grabbed me on the street to demand his money. No STDs. Aside from the emotional devastation, I managed to squeeze out a circumstance so bizarre it feels a bit like a Netflix series relatively unscathed.
PROBLEM: I dread getting back into a classroom with kids who will, be default, have zero respect for me (substitute), will not look to me for any sort of education, and will do whatever they can to push the envelope of acceptable conformity in order to get away with just about anything they can in the absence of their regular warden.
REFRAME: By embracing this I am a temporary solution to a permanent problem. I’m a skipping stone through multiple schools, will successfully avoid the internal politics and drama of the staff and students, am not tossing frozen french fries into a vat of old grease, and have the flexibility to continue helping my pops get to dialysis for two of three times a week he has to endure this Jiffy Lubing of his blood. Win/Win/Win/Win.
PROBLEM: I’m a 56-year old man living with my parents.
REFRAME: I’m here to help. I’m here to get my boat back on track. I’m here to save money so I can rebuild a life I hadn’t expected to have to rebuild. And my parents are wonderful people who love me and appreciate the help I’m providing. Watching my mom go from resenting my father’s illness and the constant narcissism that chronic pain develops in him to relaxing, going to church, having lunches with her friends is worth almost everything that brought me to the place in my life. She told my dad that I was "saving her life" with both my presence and assistance and it makes everything I'm here for feel validated.
Reframing puts those issues I may be facing in a new light and provides lessons rather than just the bruising of the soul.
I recall a young woman I used to perform with in Chicago. She was a grand human being, very generous with her joy, and her long-term boyfriend dumped her. She pissed and moaned for weeks about her broken heart. Finally, after everyone telling her that there were ‘other fish in the sea’ and that sort of thing, she asked me what I thought.
“That was it. You’ll never find another man or partner you will love or could possibly love you. Hang it up and do you because he was your only chance and it didn’t work.”
She was furious with me. She felt judged and betrayed. Two weeks later (after a silent treatment for the ages) she called me. “You’re a real fucker.”
“Sounds about right, I suppose. Why am I a fucker this time?”
“Because I couldn’t thinking about what you said and then it hit me yesterday. If I just go with your admonition that he was it and I’m done, I have to focus on me just being me. No compromises about what I want in life, no conciliation to the desires of someone else. I have to resign myself to being single. I’ve never done that and it’s liberating. So fuck you. And thank you.”
As I type that I recognize that I need to use the exact same reframe on myself. I’ve been single but always on the hunt for The One. It’s likely that my leap into my third marriage was a final gasp of that I Wanna Dance with Somebody motis operandi. I’ve failed to find The One three (or four) times. No more. That’s it. I’m done with that pursuit. Now I have to focus on myself as a single entity. Hell, Joe is amazingly successful at it—I should’ve just looked over his way for some tips.
PROBLEM: I’m now really single.
REFRAME: I’m now free to just be myself without apology to anyone I need to please. No more apologies for eating cheese or loving the way dryer sheets make my clothes smell. No more justifying a partner who would rather dig things out of the trash than just go to the store. No more fixating on my weight but focusing on my fitness. Single is fucking freedom, gang.
I've leapt into the world of substitute teaching in Kansas. It's a strange combination of high energy (to get everyone settled and on board with whatever we're doing) and then extreme boredom (as I sit and they do the work and dick around on their phones). Hey. It's some coin and an opportunity to get out of the house so I ain't complaining.
PROBLEM: I don’t want to die but I don’t really care to live.
REFRAME: When you aren’t afraid of death, of ceasing to walk the Earth anymore, the freedom to do anything—run naked in a mall, do mushrooms in a park, leap fully into the unknown without a survival instinct whatsoever—is completely a way of living. I might be a bit more cautious but I’ll still leap.
