I Think Living Alone in a Van Saved My Life

A thank you to the best vehicle I've ever owned, and one which I desperately need to get fixed.

For those of you who don’t know, I spent the first 6 months of 2022 living out of a van. If your immediate thought was to ask how “living in a van, down by the RIVER!!” was (in reference to the late, great Chris Farley), you would not be the first. I did spend approximately four days total living in a van by a river in Arkansas, which *was* actually pretty delightful, thank you for asking! For the most part, however, I found myself huddled in corners of various parking lots and cheap, landlocked campsites after the sun went down. But this made the few nights I spent in the most beautiful places imaginable even more special. I’ll get to the ins and outs of those adventures soon, but for now, I just want to talk about the big picture of what Van Life meant to me. 

It took less than three hours after leaving home for my plans to be hucked out the window of my brand-new converted Ford Econoline. Well, brand new for me, anyway. She was a 2003, but STILL— This wasn’t your classic creepy white van, no sirree. This lovely lass was given the name “Wanda” by her former owners, a name I had chosen to keep intact — because, um, it’s perfect — and she had these sick, 70s-inspired racing stripes along the side. 

See, that’s her right there! Don’t we look great together? I mean sure, I needed a haircut REAL bad, but look at that excitement! Nothing could’ve taken that away from me. Or, I guess, nothing until Wanda decided to crap out on me around 9pm on a Sunday night, somewhere in nowheresville West Tennessee while on my way to Mississippi to watch the super bowl at a bar in Oxford recommended by Anthony Bourdain. I’d thought it all through, and the next day I had planned on making my way to the beach for a week as a sort of trial run for this new way of living. 

You probably know it as “Van Life,” the name by which it’s referred to on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok. For the most part, the Instagram hashtag leads you to incredibly attractive couples wearing bathing suits on the roof of a converted sprinter van in Baja or camping out by hot springs in the middle of a Colorado winter. It looks amazing, sure, but obviously, it can’t be like that ALL of the time. I wasn’t that naive. But come on, I had just left! And on this night, the cars speeding by inches from my stalled vehicle on the side of the interstate were my welcome party. #VanLife, am I right?

Looking back on the entirety of my time in ye ole Wanda, it’s clear to me that this was lesson number one, and easily the most important thing I would learn in my nationwide travels: don’t expect anything to go according to plan.

This was quickly followed by lesson number two: the plan never leads to the best story, and is seldom truly memorable. It’s better to embrace the inherent comedy of accidentally parking in the way of the world’s hottest sunbeam and waking up drenched in a befuddled sweat, or finding you’ve locked yourself out of your campsite because you were late by 10 minutes (which, I learned, is indeed a thing you can do!) and angrily downing a Whataburger chocolate malt in a parking lot as a result.

This is, of course, also lesson number three: “Ice cream is the greatest material reward known to man.” And yes, rewards for suffering due to one’s own stupidity are included. 

The thing is, as many times as these lessons proved themselves, I still found myself getting upset every time it felt like something went wrong. Then, at the end of the cycle, I would realize I’d collected another incredible story that I couldn’t wait to tell everyone once I got back home. 

This is also probably the time to let my lovely readers know that one of (if not *the*) reasons I moved into the van is that I was in the midst of a downright crippling, months-long OCD episode. Suffice it to say, I was having a real blast at home and had gotten quite used to cycles of things that I wasn’t a fan of. But this van-life cycle of unexpected setbacks, followed by a letting go of expectations, and finished out with some absolutely bangin’ ice cream, was an excellent encapsulation of why I needed Wanda in the first place.

When you deal with super intense OCD, your brain straight up forgets how to stop thinking in circles about literally everything. Mine specifically targeted intrusive thoughts that my mind would swarm around to get them to go away. Instead, this just led to thinking about the intrusive thoughts ALL the time instead of for the 2 seconds during which they made an appearance. It might seem strange, but I was in desperate need of real-life problems to force me into the world and out of my head. 

So basically, even when something went all sorts of awry in the van, I found myself deeply thankful for the excuse to focus on something legitimate, even if it was something that my survival depended upon, like finding food, water, and a place to sleep for the night. Over a span of months, this external cycle began to take the place of the internal. Every time I’d come back home to re-stock, pick up some new clothes or sleep in air conditioning for a couple nights, I’d realize I felt better than the last time. It got to a point where I began to trust the outside world so implicitly that I just stopped making plans sometimes. I’d pick a destination and simply hope for the best.

That’s because, honestly?… Things pretty much always took care of themselves. It took me a second to piece together that this new way of thinking meant I was really and truly healing. I thought I was going to be stuck in a broken brain forever, but here I was, sitting on some beach somewhere that I hadn’t even stressed about finding.

This leads me to lesson four:

If we are willing to let go of our fear of the unknown, new people, new places, and new ways of life can genuinely give us what we need to fix ourselves. 

There’s so much more I could talk about when it comes to this season of life. Adventures that were truly miraculous in their serendipity, friends I made, and things I saw. And at some point, we’ll get to those. I found that there are certain things you can’t figure out about the world or yourself if you spend all your time trying to hold onto things. Even my life now, one I enjoy, is often marred with the concern of whether I’ll get the right job, find the right partner, or live in the right place. Those ideas didn’t exist, at least not in the same way, on the road. Life simply happens every day, and I found myself making new discoveries constantly that forbade my attention from turning inward to my mind’s constant stream of extreme worry. 

I learned that I could take care of myself, with significantly fewer external resources than what I’d had during my mental collapse. But more importantly, I learned that I don’t have to worry about every last detail, because most of the time, when I trusted it, the world took care of me. Whether it was in a person, a place to sleep, or a free meal, I was consistently astonished at the way the unknown held me in its arms and made me ok. 

Someday in the near future, I plan on selling Wanda. She just doesn’t make sense for a life pretty solidly based in one place, a thing I didn’t think I’d be able to find as quickly as I did. But I’m eternally grateful for everything we’ve gone through together, and I’ll be forever in her debt.

Thanks for saving my life, Wanda. You’re a dope van.