A field guide

The Gator Box

How a man stays alive when he doesn't yet know how to feel.

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Why I call him Frank.

When I first got to BC and moved in with Lizzie, my mind was just starting to think a different way. I'd done my first workshop. Things had layers. I had choice. Problem was, I was brand new to it, and I was a mess.

My nervous system had something wrong. I didn't know what any of my problems were. I didn't know they had names. But like a renovator with no electrician, I knew my fuses kept blowing, so I just grabbed all the wires and started plugging them back in to see what worked.

That's when I started seeing there were a few different versions of me showing up.

Little scared boy Jhöl was in the back of the bus. Everyone else was trying to protect him. Chuck got to drive most of the time in my 30s — the kid I never got to be in my teens or twenties, finally out, beer in one hand. Chuck got me into all kinds of situations, and I owe an apology to a few women who met him before they met me.

But the most dangerous one of them all was Frank. Frank had one job. Guard little scared boy Jhöl. He didn't care who got hurt. His only job was to keep my ass alive. And to be honest, he did the job.

The problem was how he did it. I didn't want to get angry the way my dad showed me, so Frank handled things differently. Someone would piss me off, or call me on my shit, or get a little too close to something I wasn't ready to look at. And Frank would just grab them and chuck them in the muddy river. The gator would do the rest. Grab the meat. Stuff it under the muck. Never seen again. Just rot.

Those gators never went hungry in my 30s.

Eventually, through the work — Make Your Mark, Mindvalley, my counsellor Ruby — I learned to be my own crocodile wrangler. Frank never went anywhere. He just sleeps in the back of the bus now. The crocodile's still in the river. I just don't feed him people anymore.

All I had back then was a gator. I called him Frank.

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What an actual gator does with the kill.

Alligators don't always eat right away. When the prey is too big to finish in one go, they drag it underwater and wedge it under a log, a root, a riverbank — anywhere it'll stay submerged. Then they leave. They come back days later when the meat has softened enough to tear apart. Biologists call this an alligator larder.

It isn't cruelty. It isn't strategy. It's a body doing what it has to do to survive a kill it couldn't process all at once. The water does the work the jaws can't.

Which is exactly what a nervous system does with a hurt it can't metabolize in real time.

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Why this is the body's most logical move.

If you're a kid who learned that anger is unsafe, that the people who were supposed to protect you didn't, that the cost of telling the truth is being made wrong — your nervous system will build something to keep you alive in a world it has decided is not.

It won't look like coping. It'll look like exits. Conversations that should have been had, never had. Relationships ended without a fight, because the fight itself felt more dangerous than the loss.

That isn't a character flaw. That's a survival system doing exactly what it was hired to do, with the only tool it had at the time.

The work isn't to kill the gator. The work is to grow a wrangler. To build the part of you that can see Frank coming, thank him for the years he kept you alive, and tell him — not today, friend. Sleep in the back.

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Name Your Frank

A field exercise for the part of you that's been running the show.

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