I realize that at the end of every one of my You Tube videos lately I am always plugging this website so people can come and enjoy reading my blogs, yet I have not written anything for 6 weeks now. There has been a reason for this and it is sort of two fold…
A/ Covid is rather boring… affects all of us… and you do not need me telling you about it. My reality has been just as boring as yours. I have no adventures, I only lay around all day killing time waiting for this stupid prison sentence to hurry up and be finished… I want my freedom back…
B/ I have often been living in my own personal hell with my bipolar crew mate… and of course she demands that all the evil things she does be kept top secret. I have no business talking about any part of my life that involves her (so she tells me) but it is MY life and she has dominated it.
So may I speak or must I remain silent (because of social rules)..?
Personally I have been battling with this dilemma in my head for weeks now, and in conclusion.. although I can see both sides of the debate, I understand her right to privacy and secrecy… and I think my rights also apply. Basically do I have the right to write about my own life… even the parts that involve other people…! and I think this is a blog not a newspaper … so yep… on this platform I can say anything I want… !
I will of course be respectful and try to be careful about disclosing too much information. I will try to confine myself to my experience for the last 6 weeks.
I guess I should start with the beginning of this lockdown… at the end of March. I already told you that we managed to check into Antigua and have made it to Hermitage bay. We have stayed here in this bay for the last 2 months. We have not left. We have moved twice within the bay however, once the resort free wifi got cut off we moved further away from shore and anchored off the little island in the middle for a few weeks. Then a few weeks ago they turned the wifi back on so we moved back near the resort again.
It was here in the beginning of April as the scope of this virus was becoming known and the whole world transformed so rapidly. Each day we kept hearing more and more about the horrors of this virus and the fear mongering networks were at their peak. Clearly the zombie apocalypse was upon us and the sky was falling.
So often I just laid in my hammoc up on the deck and thought about the world and our situation. I read books, drank wine and watched many sunsets from there. We are trapped. We are all trapped. There is no escaping this reality of this virus poisoned the world for all of us, this is affecting ALL of us… So we all must make the best of things.
And I figured hey…. I am in Antigua… (paradise) and I live on a completely self sufficient self contained fully stocked yacht. I am sure most of the people in the world WISH they were in my shoes.
Now I do want to go on a little tangent here, make a caveat if you will, Antigua has been great. Their government has acted with thoughtfulness and careful deliberation. They remained calm and rational during this whole thing. Antigua has treated us, their cruiser guests very well, and I have only nice things to say about Antigua. This was probably the best place in the western hemisphere to be during this Covid lockdown crisis. So a big thank you to the people and the government of Antigua.
My problem was that I was not alone on the boat, I have a crew member. This crew took this whole thing HORRIBLY BADLY…! and I have been trapped with her on this small boat unable to escape from her. I cannot get or have any space from her. As she has just gone absolutely fucking mental and had a complete crazy breakdown about this whole thing I have been trapped on a boat in paradise with a Tiger. Interestingly I have recently watch the life of Pi ( a boy trapped on a lifeboat with an actual tiger and goodness could I ever relate).
So we will respect her privacy a little bit and not name her directly but only refer to my crew simply as the dragon on board.
Clearly when you are trapped on a boat with a dragon it is important to get as much physical space from the dragon as possible. My dragon often locked herself behind this door for days and weeks, only coming out to eat or attack me. The dragons lair is probably about 1/3rd of my total interior living space. So my small boat got smaller for me. I became trapped during this lockdown in a living space about the size of an average bedroom on land. The prison being on a boat made it worse for there is no way for me to step off the boat to get any additional space or breathing room from the dragon, I cannot go for a walk. And the world forbid us from leaving the prison anyway. We were not allowed to leave our boat for any reason. We could not go to the beach could not go in our dinghies could not visit other boats nothing, just sit still and suffer in silence.
It seems however my dragon did not share my earlier mentioned rosie view of being trapped in paradise is not such a bad thing. My dragon suddenly began to feel trapped and she reacted exactly like a caged animal. She went completely berserk. I am sure being bipolar is hard enough for her but this being trapped thing seemed to just be too much for her to bear. Now who among you wants to be trapped in a prison cell with a caged animal (who has little self control) when they figure out they are trapped and they begin to rage against their containment…? Whats that… none of you would like to be trapped in a cage with a wild animal…? Well yeah…. me neither… but the world gave me no choice about that.
So as the dragon began to feel trapped the dragon began to freak the fuck out…! I have to be careful here not to disclose too much personal information but… the glazed over picture here… just to give you an idea of how severe this became…. more than her usual bipolar mood swings…
The dragon began getting grumpy angry and mean constantly saying destructive hurtful things. Which of course if any of you have ever been trapped with someone determined to emotionally hurt you, you could understand how un-fun the insults and attacks can make your life. This then escalated dramatically one night in about the middle of April to a full blown crazy spell, involving stealing from me, robbing my money out of my purse, stealing and hiding my SIM card so I could not access any help or communicate with the outside world, a plan to steal my dinghy in the night to “escape” Covid19 and fly home (Despite the airports long since having been closed) and physical violence against me that required the coast guard and the police to come to the boat late one night. I had deep scratches on my arms for the next 2 weeks. Simply put completely CRAZY.
I could not get the police to remove the dragon from my yacht because the whole world was locked down “in place” and there was no place for my dragon to go. There were no hotels or resorts she could stay at for any price, no cabs no restaurants open no way to get food or feed herself. The police asked (sort of like a polite command) me if she could stay onboard because their only recourse was jail, and as they made plainly clear to both of us… “you do not want to get stuck in a jail here it will be very very bad for you“… Eventually the police left the boat and the dragon had previously taken a handful of sleeping pills so by late that night fallen asleep.
This was not good for me though. The dragon wanted to GO HOME NOW without any logic or reason to guide her behavior. She wanted to escape this lockdown and escape this virus and just be free to do whatever she pleases… and we all know this is not an option for any of us.
Well I have remained for the last 2 months trapped on this yacht with the unstable dragon trying to find a way to live in peace with her. I am not sure if you guys understand how vulnerable a sailing yacht is to a crew member onboard who occasionally WANTS to sabotage it… who occasionally WANTS to hurt you when the mood strikes her.
So I must confess that the bipolar makes this situation amazingly confusing and super hard to deal with. See sometimes the dragon is the nicest friendliest kindest sweetest dragon ever and just a joy to be around…. and sometimes (lately most of the time) the dragon is big scary mean dangerous and super horrible to live with.
So mostly I feel very lonely out here. The dragon often shuts down for days or weeks at a stretch in angry silence and refuses to say a single word to me for days and days, which is still better than when she gets actively mean, but still I am a social creature. So I have relied heavily on whatsapp texting with my friends back home for support and some kind of connection to the outside world. Eventually, after days of total silence and not a soul to talk to, I got so lonely I decided to just talk to my teddy bear. He is always my friend and is never mean to me so makes a better companion than the dragon anyway. We all know Captain Lexi is a bit wild anyways so talking out loud to a teddy bear is not such a big leap for me. No worries though… Teddy has not answered back yet.. so that’s good… I have not completely lost my mind out here yet.. 🙂
Sometimes maybe some of you look at a 40 foot sailboat and think wow it is so big… but I have to say for the last 2 months it has felt very small. Slowly the world is opening back up around here. Slowly with much effort on my part the dragon has calmed down to some extent. There is still a good dragon and a bad dragon on board (last night the bad dragon came back) and I still have to make the dance around with the dragon. I work very hard to keep the dragon calm. But understand I cannot go swimming around my boat because maybe the bad dragon will strike and steal damage sabotage or destroy my things (she does this randomly and when I am most vulnerable she will hide or damage the most valuable things). I cannot go alone for a walk on the beach because when I leave the dragon alone on my boat she destroys things. I cannot get the dragon to go away alone on shore and get a break from her because she will not allow that either. I have to code lock my cell phone because the dragon sometimes goes thru it and deletes or steals my contact information. She also sometimes steals or hides my cell phone. Even when the good dragon is onboard I can never trust her. The dragon is very sneaky.. cold calculating and cleaver… sometimes the dragon plans and waits for days before the dragon strikes when I am most vulnerable.
Interestingly the dragon has recently found the opportunity to crew on a German boat with small kids back to Germany soon. They love her and they have a very nice boat and are very nice people. The dragon could finally escape and leave to go back to Germany… the long way mind you… 2 months at sea against the trade winds is not a nice thing to do… She refused the opportunity. I did not push her to go because it would turn out horribly for the family… when they discover she is not the nice person she seems like for a few hours at a stretch. And I would feel too bad putting kids in that position. It seems I am keeping the dragon for a while longer anyway. Maybe she can help me get the boat back to Luperon then airports will open soon and she can fly home.
So I am actually in a very difficult position. I knew when I let the dragon back onboard in Granada it could go badly… I could never have imagined it could go this badly though. I am again trapped far from home or safe harbour with a boat I cannot sail alone. I MUST get this boat back to the safety of Luperon harbour before hurricane season… which is fast approaching. I need help to do this… but the world borders are still closed and I cannot fly in crew. There is no crew available. What ever am I going to do?
Well I decided to show you what she did to me today… Wednesday May 20th 2020 this is what I am living with… Domestic violence is not always caused by the bigger person… sometimes the smaller girl is the dangerous one… When the dragon goes crazy she really goes crazy and I get hurt every time while she plays the victim.. its amazing… If you ask her she will sell this amazing sob story about how mean I am to her and how she is the innocent victim… it is amazing the abuser plays the victim to me… Her violence is only escalating… I am trapped and I do not know what to do… I do not know how to escape… she refuses to leave my boat … but she keeps hurting me… and I just want her to stop hurting me… if only she would just calm down and relax… but she never will… her bipolar will not go away will it… I wonder if I am supposed to keep this all a secret… hmmmm..
I am not sure what to do…
Somebody please come save me…
So just an update… it wasn’t until months later that I finally put the pieces of this puzzle together. This girl was clearly crazy but I never understood what was happening… until I found this video… ( Covert Narcissist ) . The dragon did have a messed up childhood and her parents really did screw her up. It seems there are neglectful things you can do to a little girl to really mess up the way her brain is wired.
After watching this video about what is known as “covert Narcissists” or also called “vulnerable Narcissists“… they use pity as a weapon, they make other people feel bad for them and manipulate people into doing things for them. Elena was masterful at using her crazy making weapons to confuse and hurt me. Power games with her that never made any sense to me. Passive aggression and silence used masterfully as a weapon.
Captain Lexi
…the hurt and the scared…
……….the long suffering victim of the dragon lately…. 🙁