Three weeks ago, I wasn't sure this trip was still going to happen.
Three years ago, Zach and Gigi, the 1981 VW vanagon, found each other and then they found me. We determined that together we would forego a city-dwelling Toronto winter, paying the bills, shooting the shit, in exchange for #vanlife and all of its idiosyncrasies. To us, the idea of adventure and the unknown, although romanticized, outweighed perfect predictability.
But despite what we see in movies, on TV, and flooding the Facebook page of that one perpetually-in-transit hippie friend, it's not so easy to just drop everything and go. I already had a great job in my field--one that I had ultimately acquired after years of riding a guileless merry-go-round of service industry gigs. This job let me be creative, it made me feel cool, and perhaps most notably, it gave me stability. Every time I thought about giving it up, I experienced a queasy sensation in my gut not dissimilar to that of a mild to moderate hangover (you know, that 5pm to 7pm window? Not the worst, but not easy to ignore). I figured out that this feeling is called anxiety. A few days before handing in my resignation, it really began to wear me down. I almost cancelled our plans altogether. Zach was sympathetic, but insisted that he was going anyway. So I pulled up my socks, rolled into work, and gurgled out something along the lines of "I'm so sorry I'm moving into a van and leaving the country."
I learned a few things from this delicate moment of my life:
- Sometimes if you're anxious, opening your big fat mouth and talking about it will make that anxiety dissipate.
- You can both be comfortable and in motion simultaneously.
- Change spurs creativity (at least for me).
- If something feels weird but not scary, maybe weird is exactly what you need.
We leave tomorrow!
N