Van life has been teaching me to feel my feelings.
A simple concept, and yet one that thousands (probably millions) struggle with. We are a culture that prefers to repress and intellectualize. Emotions are easy to parse over and pick through, harder to sit with. But the emotional rollercoaster that is life is compressed when you live in a vehicle. Wins and gut punches come flying at astounding speed, and you can end the day at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum than you started it.
When I started my business in 2020, the wins were fleeting and the gut punches were debilitating. A mistake sent me into a spiral that lasted most of the day. Sometimes I had to close my laptop and stop working entirely. The feelings of landing a new client or a placement (in my previous PR life) lasted for seconds, a few minutes at most before deserting me. I couldn’t sit with success and I couldn’t shake feelings of failure.
Four years later, there’s not much in my life that doesn’t look different, including my ability to deal with mistakes. I still make them – and I always will, because I am human and to error is human. (And the whole neurodivergence thing, my brain wiring.) But after 208 straight weeks of exposure therapy, I look at things a lot differently.
This makes me better in my business, but it also makes me better personally, and these two things are circular. Most of my business shortcomings are things that I have dealt with my entire life (not slowing down in my tasks, not giving a piece one more read-through, only paying attention to things that interest me, to name a few) and dealing with them again and again eventually takes the sting off the edge.
It becomes easier to feel things when you are not scared of them.
Much of this comes back to my meditation practice, which is predicated on my yoga and hiking practices, which are predicated on my cannabis consumption. Movement and mindfulness, yes, yes, yes.
But the lows in van life can be so soul-suckingly low that the wins feel better just by comparison, and it stays with me longer. I want to keep those feelings around longer, sit with success for nearly as long as I sit with failure.
If I had to make this longer story short I would say that the way I dealt with being a paralyzed perfectionist is to make mistakes over and over again. Life is better when you open your mind to failure, and to changing what it means to you to fail. Understanding, truly seeing in practice that my mistakes were not insurmountable forced me to reconcile with what it meant to fail in my personal and business lives.
I stumble. I twist my ankle on a hike, I send a piece with a typo, my mind is loud for the entire meditation, the van needs unexpected repairs again. But I return to find a path forward time after time. I do not go home. I do not give up. And it makes the wins sweeter and the gut-punches less soul-sucking.
Let me tell you this.
I have been on a mission for the past year to watch old movies. James Bond, Sylvester Stallon, and Arnold Swazengger are where I’ve started, and Rocky was an early watch in the van. I knew of Rocky, the movie series, the cultural significance, the pop phenomenon, but I had never actually seen it through.
It surprised me.
I thought I knew the movie based on what I had heard, but it turns out I had the characters and the plot wrong. I didn’t know (spoiler alert, if you have never watched it and don’t know how it ends, even now) that Rocky didn’t win.
The best he can get is, essentially, a tie. The best he can do is take the beating for the entire time the clock is running.
My husband and I have often joked that the things going wrong in the van feel like a blow to the jaw. Every time it gets worse, the punches get stronger. And on the worst days, I feel very much like Rocky. Not running up and down the stairs, not taking Adrian out on a date, but in the 13th round, when it still isn’t over and the end is in sight but still out of reach. You think there’s no possible way he gets up again and there he goes.
So this week, after a series of small wins, I sit with it. It is sunny, the batteries are charged, the dishes are done, the bills are paid, and it is the weekend. I am off the find manatees and that is a win.
