Is is strange that I live in a van?
Or is it strange that you *don't* live in one? On what "normal" even is and how we habituate to our own situations.
I think one of the strangest things about living in a van for nearly three years (948 nights, to be exact!) is how not at all strange it now seems.
Experiences that were hard to imagine before we moved in—things like sleeping on the side of a city street or opening our bedroom doors to a view of an honest-to-god glacier or rationing water usage and cabinet space—are normal after doing them so many times. This is life. This is home. This is the longest Sean, Scout, and I have stayed anywhere together.
And it is also, hard as Past Me might have found it to believe, the most comfortable we’ve felt anywhere together.
Even after our break this past summer when we leased a short-term studio to compare road life more directly with apartment life1, it wasn’t difficult to jump back into traveling full time. There was no learning curve this go around. It felt like coming home.
Because it was coming home.
Hermes is home to the degree that I get a little peeved when people refer to him as a camper, actually. They’re not doing anything wrong—I myself use the combo word “campervan” to describe our rig pretty often because it’s a recognizable term—but I do resist my van’s reduction to something in which you camp. In my mind, a camper is temporary. A camper is where you take a break from the rest of your life. A camper is roughing it.
But this has not been temporary, and it’s not a break from anything else somehow more real, and I don’t feel like I’m roughing it2. I feel like I’m living my dog-damned dream. And the longer I live it? The less strange it becomes.
My daily routines on the road have lost that surreal quality and instead become, you know, just my daily routines.
I do still know, somewhere deep down, that a ton of the things I’ve accepted as “part of regular life” are in fact extremely odd to most people. Once in a while I get a reminder of that, chatting with someone new, and I suddenly realize all over again how bizarre this whole thing has been. How absurd my life looks from the outside. How no, actually, it is not a common experience to lift the toilet out of your bathroom before showering or let the temperature of your living space fluctuate 30 degrees before you intervene or take a nap in a grocery store parking lot.
I feel out of touch. I don’t know what “normal life” even is anymore, let alone what it should be. But honestly, I love that ambiguity.
I’m reminded that 1) we are adaptable creatures who can habituate to a wide range of experiences, 2) we all get “stuck” in our own perspectives sometimes, even if we don’t mean to, and 3) it’s worth questioning our assumptions of what is and isn’t normal at regular intervals—because mine is not yours, and yours is not mine, and that’s okay.
It’s actually pretty wonderful.
Related posts
And my flash essay, “Diary of an adventurous homebody”, published by The Amazine earlier this autumn!
I think it’s valuable to check in with other options—in many areas of life—to make sure we still love our current choices.
Well, not most of the time. Ask me during the next catastrophe where we have a dire maintenance issue that means I can’t use any electricity before a big writing deadline. 🤪