How To Pretend You're Not Stressed

If there was ever a person to write a guide on being stressed it’d be me. I’m actually incredibly over qualified for the role. Since March I have had the worst anxiety of my life and have ridden on a rollercoaster of emotions. To summarise…

  • General pandemic anxiety. The world is ending. Lockdown was awful.

  • I spent 9 weeks being the most ill I’ve ever been in my life. It was up and down, new symptoms every day, never knowing if you were hours from paramedics whisking you away or if you were imagining it all. I am 99% certain I had covid.

  • I realised I absolutely despised being stuck in one area. I realised I despised spending the majority of my life at work and only enjoying my time on this earth for 4 weeks of paid holiday time a year and the odd long weekend that Steven could get off.

  • We decided to sell our house and live in a van in the pursuit of happiness, and the house sale fell through multiple times. We’re now in the process of another one and I’ve become numb to it all.

  • Being stuck in a limbo of keeping the house showroom tidy and awaiting viewings on a constant basis, never being able to fully relax in your own space, and trying to handle the boredom of newly found unemployment too.

  • Our already difficult dog picking up on all the tension and being about 100 times more difficult than usual.

  • Coming off furlough and being absolutely mugged off by the place you’ve loyally slaved away at for 6 years and sent away with a p45 and a few weeks holiday pay instead of redundancy.

So 2020 has been wild. All I can say is that I genuinely believe everything happens for a reason, and Steven and I have toyed with the idea of selling our lives and living in a van, maybe buying a plot of land or something in the future, for a long time and this whole shit show was the push we needed.

So, in between varying degrees of hoo har we’ve been trying to get out and about and soothe our souls. As soon as lockdown was lifted and campsites/holiday homes were open again, it was time to get out in the van. These nights away have reminded us that we are absolutely making the right decision by going into it full time. Being able to skip about and wake up wherever we want, and spend evenings walking by lakes and woods that we would only have ever seen during the day packed by tourists is one of the best things I’ve experienced.

Obviously full time van life will have it’s own issues, we’re not totally naive, but the joy of it is that it will all be on our own terms. I’m terrified to not have a house anymore, but not as terrified as I was about looking back when I’m too old for it and regretting not doing it. I’m also aware there are people who’ve had things a lot worse than myself the last few months, people who have lost family members or been hospitalised themselves, but I have felt utterly miserable so please allow me a small time to wallow in it.

By the way, the cure for stress is Staithes. On the Yorkshire coast. You should go.

Also, just to top things off, we decided that rather than spending a lot of time and money on buying a bigger van to convert to live in, it’d be smarter to just spend a little bit of money and kill some time now by upgrading a few things in our current van, and test out van life in that one first. We’ve put a lot of work into it already and it would be a massive shame to sell it on to fun the new van. Also, I really don’t think I have the patience to insulate another van ceiling anytime soon.

Isolation Diaries

I’m not going to write too much for this set of isolation photos… I’ll just be repeating myself. That’s a bit of a theme at the minute, sheer repetitiveness. The same local walks, the same routines, the same views. My mental health has been very up and down but I think I can feel it levelling out to a steady plateau of boredom. I had a little jolt of joy when it was announced that we could drive for exercise, but even that doesn’t seem like a great idea after seeing a lot of local councils recommending you ignore the announcement. Who knows anymore. I got really annoyed at Steven yesterday because he kept saying ‘at least we have this, at least we have that’, but he’s right. It could be worse and we just need to keep trooping.

Isolation Diaries

I have to say, I’m actually thoroughly enjoying this whole lockdown business. It could definitely be worse. I’m on furlough and Steven is still out delivering all your post so we’re not really taking much of a hit with income, and I’m spending less on travel and Grainger Market street food so we’ve been able to buy things for the house we’ve been putting off. We’ve finished decorating and putting new stair treads on our stairs, and the biggest challenge was a three day front garden overhaul, which has dramatically improved the front of our house and I can’t stop looking at it. Photos of that will be in the next batch of film I get developed.

We’ve also become frighteningly familiar with the Silverlink Biodiversity park and the waggon ways, which are both a few minutes walking distance from our house. I never realised we had so many places to walk the dog so nearby, and it’s made me realise how lucky we are to live in such a decent little area. We’ve done the same walk every day, so we’ve started noticing the tiniest details in the changes to the trees and plants in the area. We also nearly got taken out by a gang of low flying ducks at the local duck pond yesterday. I honestly thought a small plane was coming in for attack and almost military rolled off the path.

Most of all, I’ve been hit with a massive sense of pride and appreciation for our house. I know I had doubts over winter about whether I wanted a house, or if I wanted to be travelling in our van permanently, but now I know that even if it’s not this specific house, I’ll always want my ‘base’. There’s nothing more satisfying than spending a day working on project to improve your space, and how nice it’s been (in reference to our front garden overhaul) having neighbours comment on a job well done, from a safe distance of course.

Also, as a side note, massive thanks to local fish quay film lab, Tanners Bank Darkroom, for developing my film and keeping me sane. If I couldn’t document these weird months then I think I’d feel a bit lost.