I hope you can help me because I'm at a loss. I am a 47-year-old woman and still don't know what I am supposed to do with my life. I say that because I've had a yearning for something all my life but can't figure out what.

I've married four times, moved probably twenty, and though I am in the same profession, I have held many jobs. My marriage now is what I would call a sexless friendship, by his choice. He is a prescription junkie, off work much of the time from accidents.

In order, my other three husbands were an ex-Marine with post-traumatic stress disorder, an alcoholic now dying in a nursing home of Huntington's chorea, and a religious fanatic with underlying sexual deviancy.

My once good looks, which I could rely on, are going fast. If I told you everything, you could write the world's most depressing play, or an ironic comedy. I know this sounds like a pity party, and with everything going on in the world right now I should be ashamed to even think like this, but I can't turn it off.

Caroline


Caroline, more than a hundred years ago, a sea captain named Joshua Slocum became the first person to sail around the world solo. About his voyage, Slocum wrote, "I awoke sometimes to find the sun already shining into my cabin. I heard water rushing by with only a thin plank between me and the depths, and I said, 'How's this?' But it was all right. It was my ship on her course, sailing as no other ship had ever sailed before in the world."

That is a description of what a good life feels like. When our life is on course, everything is in its proper place and the sun is shining. It is worth believing that such a positive state exists, because it does. At a deep level, you know this, and have always known this. The question is how to get there.

The first step is to stop what you are doing now. Each of your husbands has been more in need of a rehab center than a wife. No more serial marriages. Don't let how you dress, where you go, and how you act be determined by what you think men want.

Don't let others choose you. It's time to turn the tables. When you pretend to be what others want, then you lose yourself. Of course, you will be unhappy. You wind up with someone who isn't for you. The real you.

The next step is to hold in your mind an image of what you want, the image of what is right. When have you felt good within your own skin? What do you sense would make you happy? If that is hard to picture, another way to get there is by removing from your life what makes you unhappy. Negative people, poor environments, burdensome objects.

Make a space for what is positive to enter. Garner strength from observing people near you who have put their lives together. Your motor is cold now, so it needs a little warming before it can start. That is why you wrote.

Each of us charts a course solely our own. Watching others and looking at life from what is within us, gives us a sense of direction. What to do next is within you. You will find it by eliminating the negatives which have kept it hidden. Focus on rewards to come, and don't let fear stop you from finding what others before you have found.

An ironic proverb says, "Sleep faster, we need the pillows." It takes time to transform a life. But in time, you will feel like Joshua Slocum. I have survived storms, heavy seas and pirates to live a rich, full life. A life where the sun is shining.

Wayne & Tamara