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.