An unexpected farewell to vanlife (for now)

On 4 May, 2022, after a year and a half of living on the road, I walked out of my van with the essentials crammed into 2 backpacks and said goodbye to the place that has felt more like home than anywhere I’ve ever lived. 

I spent the last decade shifting constantly between countries and states, spending as many nights in tents or hostels as I did sleeping in “my” bed— various mattresses that came with the apartment or that a friend gave me or that a boyfriend already owned, sort of symbolically never anything I bought myself. Even when I was studying in Australia, I was gone a third of every year travelling, so much so that I didn’t even hang a single photo in my last apartment in Melbourne.

All that to say: the van was the first place that I really tried to make my own, because it’s the first place I ever saw myself long-term. I drained my savings to buy it, spent hours obsessing over its decoration and organisation, worked tirelessly on upgrades to make it a home. I just never imagined it would end like this.

The day I left the van was the hardest day of my life and, despite everything that led me here, I felt impossibly heartbroken to walk away from not just my home, but also the dream of what my life was going to be on the road. And the person who I thought was going to do it with me.

It’s incredibly hard to type this. Just as it’s been incredibly hard to say it out loud. But for nearly half of the time that I was travelling in the van, “living my dream”, I was being physically abused by my partner.

There are not really words to describe the feeling of having someone that you love and trust put their hands around your neck or kick you so hard that you can’t breathe.

But I’ll promise it’s still nothing compared to the pain of hearing that person tell you it was your fault, that you caused it somehow, that you deserved it. Bruises heal, but I carried the echo of those words around every single second of every day, feeling trapped between the knowledge that this wasn’t normal and the fear that, maybe for me, it was.

Trying to de-escalate things didn’t work, defending myself made it worse, and when I got desperate enough to run away in the middle of the night, miles from the nearest town without access to my passport or my wallet, I just got chased down and dragged right back to the van anyway.

It was difficult to imagine a way out, knowing I might never see my van again, but what truly kept me in the situation this long was my own inability to let go of the dream and accept what was actually happening. I did have other opportunities to leave, plenty when things were good between us, and I chose not to take them because I wanted this life more than anything. More than my sanity, more than my peace. More than myself.

As much as it probably doesn’t make sense to other people, I stayed for so long because I was still trying to salvage the dream. I wanted the trip to continue, I wanted to see all these incredible places, and I wanted to do it in the home that I’d made. And so I covered things up, I made excuses, I lied to the police, and I blazed ahead as if sheer willpower could undo what was happening to me— and I did it at the expense of my safety, my mental health, and my self worth. 

And then, at some point, I looked at the dream I’d been holding in a vice-grip and realised I was actually just clinging to a fistful of dust. It didn’t even exist anymore.

The dream wasn’t to cry myself to sleep every night. It wasn’t to be locked in a van while I screamed to be let out. It wasn’t to see beautiful places by myself and then come home to a partner who screamed at me. It wasn’t to have all of my time controlled, my hobbies taken away from me. It wasn’t to lie awake feeling like I didn’t even know the person next to me anymore. And it wasn’t to retreat farther and farther into my own head, just trying to survive each day.

So, I finally left. 

I got on a plane in Mexico City and I flew to Southern California, where my best friend flew to meet me and her twin picked us up from the airport. I wasn’t ready to go back to Washington and face family after what I felt was a massive personal failure, I didn’t have the money to go home to Australia, I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere else at all, and so I started the unfathomably painful process of recovery on a couch in San Diego, surrounded by support from two girls who are more like family than family.

In the beginning, I barely slept. I’d lay awake struggling to breathe, I’d sob uncontrollably through the night, I couldn’t silence the chorus in my head: why, why, why, why, why.

I felt like a stranger to myself. I’d hid enormous parts of my personality and my values away, just trying to survive, but I’d buried them so deep that I didn’t even know where to find them anymore.

I was out with lanterns, looking for myself.

But I questioned everything I found. I worried I’d gotten it all wrong, spent a lifetime convinced the sky was green. I imagined I’d float away, no meaning to tether me to this reality anymore.

I realised that leaving was the easy part. The things I’d become in order to survive, the lies I’d told myself, that’s what I walked away with. The dream was dust, but so was I.

Eventually, I went to Seattle and started talking about what had happened to me. Through tears, I told my dad and stepmum that the person we’d climbed with on so many family trips had been hurting me for months. I laid on the floor in the spare room of mum’s new house trying to understand what I was supposed to do next. Friends and family came around to sit with me. I could either smile like I wasn’t burning from the inside out or I could get lost in the ocean of agony, but not much in between.

In the absence of someone to hurt me, I did it myself. I got lost in endless loops of blame.

My therapist told me it wasn’t my fault, but of course that’s what she’d say, it’s what everyone said. But no one else was there. So how could anyone possibly know.

After a month, I finally got a cashier’s check in the mail with my half of the van money, an agreement we’d come to before I left. It was a great outcome and a huge weight off of my shoulders, knowing I’d at least have the money to go somewhere and do something.

It took a really long time before I could step back from the situation and understand why everyone said it wasn’t my fault. At the end of the day, there wasn’t anything I could have said, any mistake I could have made, that warranted having my head bashed into the floor of my van by a person who called me the love of his life.

In a weird way, I came to feel grateful for the physical incidents, the ones I could hold in my hands and say ‘look, look at this thing he did to me’. Turn it around, watch it catch the light, understand the start and the finish, see the ugliness of it all. No one actually had to be there to recognise that as abuse. I’d started keeping records somewhere along the way, dates and details, some photos of the bruises, and I could so easily look back at these and understand that I’d gone through something terrible.

But what took even longer was the emotional abuse, the unseen ways in which I’d come to believe that there was something wrong with me, that there were parts of me that deserved punishment. I got there, though. Slowly, I started to see myself again. I started to exist outside of the things that had happened in the van.

Colour came back. Life started to take shape. I methodically collected truths to reassemble my reality, like a bird building a nest.

I’ve accepted that this will always live somewhere inside me, but I’ve also accepted that it isn’t all of me. And though I may never truly know why, I don’t think I need to anymore.

Domestic violence resources

I’m no poster child for domestic violence, but I can honestly say that without the support of friends and family and without the information available on some of these websites, I wouldn’t be where I am now. If you or a loved one is experiencing domestic violence, here are some support resources that might be valuable:

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline offers free 24/7 hotlines for people who are in an abusive situation and need help. You can contact the live chat line for a confidential, online conversation with an advocate or call 1-800-799-SAFE.
• Better Help provides low-cost online therapy (as little as $200/month without insurance) from thousands of experienced clinicians, and you can sort to find counsellors who specialise in trauma recovery, abuse, and relationships. Group sessions are also included in your membership and I regularly attend a women’s group for survivors of domestic abuse that has been pivotal in my recovery.
• The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) is an organization that supports survivors of domestic violence and aims to hold abusers accountable. On their website, you can get a better understanding of abusive behaviours and read personal stories of survival.
• WomensLaw.org provides legal help from experts and information about state laws pertaining to domestic violence. Check out its national directory of advocates and shelters, as well as its directory of lawyers who provide free or low-cost services to victims of domestic violence.