Here’s something you may not know about me: I don’t travel well.
A pharmacist I once talked to about neurodivergence said “sensitive brains, sensitive bodies” and that has been true for me my entire life.
My gut is easily upset by changes in routine and changes in food access. I get nauseous often, throw up frequently, and get horribly motion sick in most forms of transportation.
So how tf do I live in a van?
The van is my home, and although my life is not one with much routine at the moment, the van is the routine. In there, I have my own pantry, fridge, and freezer. I have total control over my food, my meals, and what goes in my body. Although I am traveling frequently, having my home and control over my food makes things much easier.
But in recent weeks, I’ve been doing a more grown-up version of couch-surfing. This has allowed to me to enjoy the hospitality of friends and family but it also puts me in a different bed every week with varying degrees of control over my food. I’ve been eating out more, drinking more, sleeping less, and just generally out of sorts.
The less consistency my system has, the less tolerant I am to changes in environment. My sensory issues flare, my social battery is smaller, and my energy is lower when my gut feels heavy.
I heard it said in meditation once that having a body is hard. The spirit and the body are two separate entities, and the body is firmly tied to this physical earth, In this physical earth, things often hurt. I wake with a dehydration headache, my gag reflex is triggered by post-nasal drip, my incoming period brings sharp cramps, and sometimes it feels like my stomach is just rebelling against me.
What can you do? At home, I can retreat into a bedroom and lie down, but when I experience a “bodily flare-up” while out in public, all I can do is mitigate it and ride the wave. The things that trigger me are hard to avoid and (in my mind) trivial.
I want to be a person with an iron constitution, who can try the wildest dishes on the menu without a second thought and function well after a 4-hour nap. But I’m not. I’m useless without at least 8 hours of sleep and I have to carefully read through menus when traveling to ensure I’m not eating something that I’ll regret in a few hours.
This is where I am. This is who I am. Sometimes having a body is hard, and some of us have more sensitive bodies than others.
This isn’t new to me. I’ve had a delicate gut from a young age. There was a period where I would fall asleep every night with a bucket curled in my arms, so nauseous I couldn’t reliably make it to the bathroom. Sleepovers, those all-important events of youth, were like trials by fire for me. I would spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, just waiting to throw up, and had to call my mom to come get me in the wee hours of the morning more than once.
It comes and it goes. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s harder. Sometimes I go weeks without thinking about my gut, but more often than not it’s front of mind. It’s always a consideration in my plans.
What can you do? Having a body is hard and often painful. Some forms of pain are easier to deal with. I can comfortably ride the waves of cramps that only last a few minutes, but I am rendered useless the moment I become nauseous.
Early in my meditation journey, I tried the Waking Up app with Sam Harris. In one of his meditations, he says that pain is unavoidable and we will all experience it, whether we want to or not. The difference, he continued, was how we handled it. Could we sit with the pain? Feel the physical sensation separate from the emotional response?
I have sat with that often in the years since, and still for me the answer is still usually no. Physical pain comes hand in hand with an emotional response. But I also know that your thoughts create your reality, and you can increase your pain through hysterics and hyperfixation.
Sitting with a body in pain, living with a body in pain, is an ongoing challenge. It is one of the greatest challenges we face, in my opinion. How often does pain turn a person mean?
My spirit hurts far less than my body, but my body is more tangible. And still, I can live so separated from it, so isolated in my head, which is even worse. The irony is that I feel better when I exist in my body fully, even when it hurts and I want to retreat into my head.
Cannabis helps. Sometimes it brings pain relief, sometimes reprieve from nausea, and other times it brings the mental space I need to simply reframe my mindset. Topicals help me sleep after long drives and smoking delivers instant benefits. I go back and forth on my conscious consumption of the plant, but I will never deny that access to weed has changed my life. Learning how to smoke and meditate ushered in a new capacity for stillness that I am still exploring today.
This was a heavy one to dive into. Here’s some photos of the Colorado Rockies.
