Missing the Boat
It takes a lot of effort to leave a toxic relationship. Not only do you have to plan financially and logistically, but your heart has to be ready for the “not knowing” of what’s to come next. After eight years of cyclical chaos, a stable life seems unpredictable, confusing, even scary, because it asks you to become someone you’ve never been - reliant on yourself. Your nervous system becomes so entangled in the toxic cycle that pulling yourself away from it is unfamiliar. And the unfamiliar haunts you like a ghost in the periphery, disappearing the moment you turn around to face it. It takes a while to confront the ghost - to realize it isn’t a ghost at all - but your future self peeking at you, waiting for you to make a move.
A couple of months ago, when I was still living with my alcoholic boyfriend, I watched the movie Send Help, starring Rachel McAdams. If you haven’t seen it yet, I apologize for the upcoming spoilers. I think my now-ex-boyfriend was off binge drinking and wandering the neighborhood, a common tactic he used to avoid getting caught intoxicated. In the beginning, my abandonment issues would rise every time he picked a fight so he could have an excuse to leave and drink. I saw his leaving as a punishment, as if I had done something to deserve his absence and I was being left alone to learn my lesson. But after a while I told myself the alone time was a gift, as I could finally use that time to focus on myself, or what I wanted to do that day.
I chose to watch Send Help because I love Rachel McAdams and the plotline was intricately twisted: Rachel plays a nerdy but dependable executive in Strategy and Planning at a large firm. After years of loyal service, the aging owner promises her a seat at the table. When he passes unexpectedly and his egotistical son takes over the company, Rachel is left empty-handed. After a plane crash leaves her stranded on a remote island with her terrible boss, she discovers skills and strengths she never had the opportunity to use in her old life.
Rachel is a Survivor nerd who has studied primitive bushcraft and quickly adapts to the harsh conditions of an island environment, while her boss suffers daily due to his own egotism and negligence. I won’t give you an entire synopsis, and here is your second spoiler warning, but there is a scene towards the middle of the movie where she is hiking alone on the opposite side of the island from camp, and sees a large yacht approaching the shoreline. The viewer believes she will do what all stranded people do, and run dramatically towards the yacht for immediate safety. However, Rachel chooses to do the opposite - she hides behind the trees in the jungle and watches the yacht with crew members aboard. The camera pans away and the viewer is left wondering why she chose to ignore her own way out, purposefully missing the boat.
When I watched Rachel do this on the screen I was genuinely perplexed. I couldn’t help but notice both the subtle and obvious similarities between her decisions and my own. Even though I wasn’t stranded on a deserted island and purposefully ignoring the boat to safety, I was in many ways doing just that, metaphorically. I can understand that Rachel had created a new power dynamic on this island, and that probably contributed to her lack of interest in returning to a world where she was underappreciated and undervalued. But for myself, it was something deeper. The boat to safety illustrated a gateway that was unfamiliar and scary, while the deserted island, although harsh and chaotic, had become normal. Everything had flipped. I caught myself realizing how many times I had missed my boat.
There was the time when I lived in Florida and was invited to rent a room from my manager. I remember hastily reloading all my belongings into my car after only a week away, ultimately returning to my boyfriend. In difficult moments, I would think back on that opportunity and curse my weakness, replaying the decision over and over, imagining versions of myself who could have tolerated the discomfort long enough to find solid ground. Those solutions seem obvious now, but they were not accessible to the version of me who stood in that driveway. Hindsight is 20/20.
Or the time my dad offered to help me, but required a multitude of strings attached to his metaphorical boat. He demanded that if I accept, I would have to provide him with my bank statements, paychecks, and be forced to move back to my hometown so that he could control every aspect of my life. He did not care about where I wanted to live, where I wanted to work, or how I wanted to heal. Sometimes my living situation got so bad that I would consider if I had missed the only boat that would come, albeit all the strings attached.
I often felt like I was mentally ready to leave, but the boat just wasn’t perfect enough - why would I run from one controlling or unstable situation, to another? How could I count on other people to help me, when my trust for humans was in the depths of the ocean? How could I trust that the boat coming to save me wouldn’t sink? How could I determine if the land I was standing on, stranded and all, was stronger than the wake of the open ocean? I stared at the television screen, not actually watching the film anymore, and everything became quite clear.
Eventually I came to realize that the trust I really needed to build was with myself. I had to trust that I could figure out any confusing or difficult situation that came my way once I was on the boat. If the boat did start to sink, I could find the safety raft. I could swim. I could save myself, again, and again. After all the adversity I had gone through inside of the toxic relationship, I could handle any challenge that came up on the water. I often imagined myself as a lab rat inside of a science experiment, stuck inside of a box without any control of her own life. With enough awareness of her situation, how would she escape her prison? The answer came to me that day - build a ladder.
That evening, I spent time in my backyard looking up at an almost-full moon against a pitch black sky. I told her I knew what I wanted: a stable job that values my expertise to support my self-sufficiency, and a safe place to live that would appreciate my cats and support my emotional safety. While I didn’t know the “how,” I had finally nailed down the “what,” and I wrote a letter, to the moon, the universe, myself, labeling these requirements as Universe Non-Negotiables.
In the weeks that followed, all of my demands were answered. I applied to a job that appeared challenging in all the right ways, and I embraced the opportunity to allow myself to feel that I deserved it. After each interview, I felt more confident in my ability to really create the life I wanted for myself, with the help of the Universe. I realized that I could not control what opportunities were offered to me - all I could do was focus on what I wanted.
When the job offer came through, providing me with more than enough money to eventually support myself, I was tasked with finding a home for my future self. I had once imagined a tiny shack surrounded by redwoods, working as an innkeeper for some remote property. At the time, that was the best scenario my imagination could craft for myself. But instead of sticking with that particular vision, I chose to let it go. That vision would require movement to a new place, and a job that would be filled with unknowns. That vision kept me stuck, missing the boat. Instead, I chose to open my mind up to the invitations the Universe could provide. What opportunities exist outside of my own perceptions? Which at the time, given the level of toxicity I had lived in, mostly consisted of running away. What if I chose to stay here, and embrace the alignment of what is offered to me? I put down the Seeker badge and created the space for whatever was seeking me to come through.
A couple of days after accepting the job offer, I found a room for rent on Furnished Finder in a town closer to my new job. For less than the cost of a studio, I was offered space in a beautiful house tucked away on a private lane, with a lush backyard featuring redwood trees and including a hot tub, adjacent to many trails and wildlife. The landlord was genuinely excited to have cats, after many years without pets. I realized that my brain literally couldn’t have conceived this option, so manifesting something precise had been holding me back from something greater. I knew that the transition wouldn’t be perfect, unforeseen circumstances would inevitably arise, but I was finally okay with life being messy. I could ride the wake. I have a life raft. I am a good swimmer.
I imagine a fictional character who has been rescued from a stranded island probably reminisces on their time spent in deserted solitude from the comfort of their home years later. I also think about all the years I spent isolated and hyper vigilant, paralyzed by fear of the unknown, and unable to run out into the water. I can see myself hiding behind the brush of the jungle as each boat approaches the shoreline, imagining every worst-case scenario about the boat, to make myself feel safer about my inability to move. I know now that it was never about the boat or the ocean, but actually trusting myself and having the confidence to know that I am stronger than any storm.
I am the storm.
