I need to start this blog with a HUGE CAUTION to warn you before you waste any more time reading this one. I am in a thoughtful and philosophical mood, this blog will not be the usual happy fluff my life is made of on the surface lately.

My blogs are the only place I have to vent my thoughts, like a diary, to clarify my own thinking out loud, and to share the deep personal things that are troubling me. Today my soul is twisted up and my brain is on fire trying to learn and grow. I am raging against the edges of the illusion of reality lately and seeking truth and understanding of very complex things. I have a lot of time alone in amazing places to think about the nature of reality.

So for the simpler people among you, just skip reading this one, write it off to the insane ramblings of a crazy woman, you are unlikely to be able to follow along anyway. Some people do not enjoy depth of character and deep complex thoughts.

For the intelligent and thoughtful people out there who choose to read on… enjoy. Maybe these ideas will set you on fire too, give you pause for thought, help you grow along with me. Give you things to think about when you are at work and bored with the drudgery. Maybe spark a lively conversation with your partner or friends.

We have much to think about

 

 

Background

I realize it will seem crazy that it will take me 5000 words to even formulate my ideas, but this is the way of complex things. It will help if I give you background words to begin framing this socratic dialectic. So let us start with some building blocks. Stay calm and understand none of these blocks are, in and of themselves, inarguable truths, so I understand the shaky foundation I am building here.

If you have been following along for a while you will know most of this stuff, understand where I have been to get here. To catch up newer readers, let me run thru some quick summary type things, a real fast rundown.

 

 

Very quickly…

Lexi was born to an angry mother who hated and resented Lexi from the day she was born…. insert lots of darkness and horribleness… bad programming on my early clay. I turn into a survivor.

Lexi climbed out of most of the darkness and became a naive sheltered Canadian woman reasonably well adjusted. (Read the first book CRAZY WINDS)

I thought I knew who I was.

Insert a lot of books and education and the foundation becomes far less clear.

Go sailing out of Canada with a con man who gaslights me to into oblivion and I lose any sense of personal identity.  (Read the second book SAILING CRAZY WINDS)

Then get seduced by a very cute covert narcissist who really tears me apart. Also getting exposed to other cultural truths really helped to deconstruct all my own cultural truths when I learned they were not indeed, as universally true as I had assumed. (Read the third book DECONSTRUCTED BY CAZY WINDS).

These ideas and experiences are too varied and broad to convey simply here, but ideas like;

A mechanic is someone qualified to fix engines…  not true.

Kicking sleeping dogs is wrong… not True… ask a Haitian

Beating Children is wrong…  Not true either

Throwing garbage into the ocean is wrong… nope not universally true either

Being married and trying to have sex with a chic half your age is wrong… Not all men, but many Latin men will say not true either.

 

 

The list goes on and on, as I learned, as these accepted beliefs I had assumed to be true were all stripped away from me, so too did the foundation upon which my personal identity was built.

Without the benefit of having followed me here by reading all my previous books these things will not have much meaning for you, but please let their basic ideas stand. Ask yourself about how many things you assume to be true, that you can neither prove to be true, nor are totally sure they are not relative cultural truths?

This Descartes style deconstructionism will take you a while and will be rather painful if you ever perform it. Deconstruct all your truths until you find one single thing you can be absolutely certain to build all others from. Such detailed internal exploration is not necessary for you to follow me though if you can just loosely accept these ideas (truth is a squirrely thing to find) I have postulated to let me continue to build towards my main point.

 

Biology and Personal Identity

I am going to be the bearer of bad news here, but your brain lies to you…  A LOT..!

In the beginning of my lifelong quest for truth I figured it would be prudent to know something about the observer before we can then try to learn about what it is we observe about the outside universe. When you study psychology and then advance into Neurology, exactly how your big biological squishy brain works, you will discover this horrible truth. We really cannot prove we are all not in the matrix, our brains in glass jars being fed electrical impulses to simulate reality.

Just research how your eyes work for a week or two and it will shock you how little they actually receive of the outside world. I have done a very quick but crude image rendering for you to give you the main idea.

Your eyes have rods and cones in them to receive photons. Cones, crowded around the middle of the retina, can distinguish color. The rods all around this area can only distinguish light intensity (grey scale) but not color. There are holes with no rods or cones in the retina where the optic nerve passes thru.

What your eyeballs actually see of the outside world looks more like this…

 

 

So why do you not see the world this way?  you ask….    Your eyes literally have 3 levels of information processing behind the rods and cones before they even give their information to your optic nerve to send to your brain. Your brain literally colors everything else in to complete the image by guessing. Basically your brain just makes up so much shit and lies to you so horribly.

 

 

We can leave all the complex ground this drives us into alone and for other people to fix. This is not my purpose here either. Suffice it to say that your brain lies to you a lot and we need to fight thru the limitations of our own biology in our quest for truth.

The second thing we will refer to simply as EGO. There are lots of great psychology textbooks you can read about this well developed theory. True or false is irrelevant to argue here but accept the basic premise in some form or another. We have a protected idea of ourselves, as always the good person and central figure in our narrative inventing brains. This ego based idea of identity, this biological invention of your brain is designed to mislead you into seeing yourself from a highly protected version of reality, often invented.

Most men in prison for committing horrible crimes will tell you they are good guys and wonderful people who are just misunderstood. Innocent and it didn’t really happen that way. Ego paints this illusion for us, it is biologically based and hard to escape. We get fooled by our egos into accepting a false idea of ourselves.

The third thing to add to this line of biological reasoning is memory. Our human brains invent so much reality it is no wonder our memories about the same events differ so vastly. Then of course as we recall and re-encode a memory we alter it slightly every time. Memory sucks and we suck at it, you cannot trust your memory of your past perceptions either because you cannot trust your brain.

 

The Foundation of Identity

Again we can go on forever on this one but I am trying to move quickly thru my building blocks to get to my point as quickly as I can. Please accept that our ego based idea of ourselves is derived from twisted perceptions of the outside world, and the poor record of our memory of our stories.

Storytelling is what all human brains are so good at. We are constantly inventing the story of ourselves based upon our poor memory of experiences. We think of ourselves as being a certain person… we think we are a certain way, based upon these foundations.

This “normal” process in most of has limitations. Our identities are mostly based upon our memory of our reactions to our past environments and the people around us. Drastically change your environment and it will change you. Trap you on a yacht in the ocean with a terrible human being and it will change you too.

 

Who are you?

Who is Lexi..?

 

This is the question that haunts me. Who the hell is Lexi? What this sailing adventure has really been, has been a journey of self exploration. Everything I used to think about who I am or was, has been stripped away from me. I have no idea who Lexi is anymore. The extreme changes in my environment have kept me often very uncomfortable in very difficult situations. The strangers who have lived with me have also pushed upon me until they have bent my identity to react to them they way they need me to be.

So much has changed in the last 4 years I have gotten lost.

Secretly I hope the title of my next book will be called…

The Rise of Captain Lexi

I hope I find myself out here on the ocean eventually. The me who is stable and unchangeable. I hope that I can stop shapeshifting in reaction to my environment or the people around me. Right now I am so very lost, so completely deconstructed I cling to the illusion of the character I invented, called Wild Captain Lexi as a jacket I can wear until I can figure out who I actually am as a person.

Right now, I have no idea who I am

 

 

Using Reflections

We are now beginning to get to the heart of the subject, getting to the interesting parts now. So if we cannot trust ourselves to see ourselves without distortion… how do we figure out who we really are? What are the criteria we will base it upon.

Weirdly, we all seem to be really good at seeing other people, or so we think. Ever notice that people who have met you for a day or two seem to be so certain they know exactly who you are? Weird huh.

Notwithstanding all the easy and obvious ways to shoot holes into this, perhaps there can be something useful in there. I have the unique opportunity to take advantage of this process. I deliberately invite complete strangers to live with me in a tight space, close quarters, in stressful conditions. This sudden closeness with others has consequences. They always project their image of me onto me, which changes me, but I get to see a different version of myself thru their eyes.

This is the idea that we react differently to different people. Who your mom sees you as, is different than who your best friend sees you as, is different than the store clerk sees you as. We also present ourselves differently to each of these people, therefore in essence we mold or change ourselves in reaction to our environments and the various people around us.

I spend a lot of time alone in nature, with only me around, no other people pushing on my identity. I think I get a sense of who I am.

Then I invite a total stranger to live with me 24/7 who then changes me into who they need to see me as. Somehow I get changed and molded by other people’s projections of me, onto me. They are always so certain they see the real me better than I see myself.

This also confuses me. I notice I become a different person to each different crew I have onboard. They all know me differently. So which version of Lexi am I really. As you can imagine, if you have been following along for at least the last 3 crew members, one of them was quite intensely crazy. He was so certain I was a terrible person, a liar, and a bad human being. One saw me as being very strict and uptight and unnecessarily negatively oriented, twisted in my dark view of the world. One sees me as a completely lovely sweet kind generous human being.

So which one holds the truth?

Who am I actually?

 

 

 

The Limits of Monotheism

The human brain began to evolve a need to impose order on the chaos of our existences. About 2020 years ago we began having trouble with so many different gods to fear and worship so we fought to force the world into a simpler unified model. Just one true god became the mantra. However we also began to apply that to everything. Truth must also be singular. You are still currently infected with that so I will not push you too hard to see past that matrix wall.

The thing is… I found my way outside of that matrix wall. There is nothing in science or the actual universe that dictates that “truth” … “must be” singular. Study the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics and the photon experiments done with double slits for more understanding. There is nothing that even says truth actually exists outside of our limited primitive human animal brains.

So why must there only be one true version of Lexi? Prove the way other people see you with such certainty is wrong. This is an impossible task you will not succeed at, I know, I have tried.

Why am I not all of these versions of me being created by all the people around me all the time? Can I exist as the bad girl in crazy ivan’s world, and the too negative and strict girl in Vinay’s world, and the sweet nice girl in Daisy’s world?

But this becomes somehow unsatisfying, something does not seem correct about using the reflection of self as seen thru the eyes of the other. All of these versions of me disintegrate when the other people leave and cease to create them, cease to push me into these boxes. When I am alone on the yacht, who is left behind?

Perhaps this is the real me?

 

 

Honestly I have no idea who I really am, but I am seeking to figure out the puzzle.

How are you so confident that you know who you are? Based upon what? Please explain to me where your certainty comes from so I can follow your path to enlightenment.

 

The Meaning of Life

I know I toy with these pesky little problems all the time, problems probably best left alone, but I cannot help but be eternally curious.

I use the analogy all the time that our adventure thru life is to figure out what kind of animal we really are inside. Then just be the best version of that animal that you can be. I tiger is most alive when it acts and lives like a tiger. But a bunny rabbit would be miserable living like a tiger, it would be a bad fit. A giraffe is happy eating leaves off the top of tall trees, but it would be miserable trying to live in a rabbit burrow. We all must figure out what type of animal we are and create a life for ourselves that fits for us personally.

We all struggle in our late teens to early twenties to figure out who we are then create a life that fits for us. Some of us do well at this game and some do poorly. I think most people just stumble into their lives and allow them to unfold without any specific direction applied.

I am currently stuck, trapped on the ocean, unable to see a future for myself, I do not know who I am. I have no idea what type of animal I am so I do not know what type of life will fit for me. Therefore I see only a black void in front of me each day as I go forward. I want to go back home to Canada, despite how messed up it is lately, but then what?

Well, I should set goals and pursue a life that fits for me. But I have no idea who I am therefore no idea what that life should look like. For the first time in my life I cannot make or set any future oriented steps to achieve my life plan, I have none.

I thought I had everything figured out when I decided to chuck it all and buy a yacht and sail away from the enslavement of social controls and become a sailor chic on the ocean, but this has gone terribly wrong. I have not found the meaning of life out here. I lost myself in the process too.

So this has been a very personally enlightening experience but perhaps too much of me got deconstructed and lost in the process. The Lexi of the first book CRAZY WINDS is not the Lexi of the latest book DECONSTRUCTED BY CRAZY WINDS who got so lost and devastated. You can read my books and slowly watch the transformation of my evolution of self.

I need to start over. Make a fresh new start for my life like a teenager leaving their parents nest, but I have no idea where and how and what to do for this?

In short… I am still so completely lost.

My journey home is both physical and spiritual. The sailing part is rather straightforward, one passage north at a time is not so hard. Figuring out what to do once I get there is a much more complicated journey. Figuring out who I am and where I fit in the world is a much more difficult task. This the ground that terrifies me, keeps me awake at night.

 

 

But the outside world is such a mess now and falling apart rapidly, making my task ever so much harder. Finding my place in such a screwed up future world will be so difficult, but I imagine I am not the only person struggling with this.

Perhaps you can identify with me…?

 

Who are you?

Where do you belong?

What type of life will fit for you?

How does your life now NOT fit for you?

What should you be doing to change it?

 

sigh….

 

Wild Captain Lexi

 

… the very lost in paradise …