Sweet dreams — doing what you want to do, your way
Navigating misogyny, relationships and self-doubt on the road to realizing your dreams.
Navigating misogyny, relationships and self-doubt on the road to realizing your dreams.
For decades I’ve been managing a household, children, a band, a business, and a ton of other stuff. Now, at retirement age (but never retiring), I find myself hovering on the edge of burnout and craving a change. I would go as far as to say that I am desperate for my life to be much different. While I am happy as ever in my relationship, except for not currently giving a shit about sex which is undoubtedly not so fun for my partner (and apparently pretty common at my age), I feel time and space encroaching. Sometimes I feel trapped like a spider in a drain.
I basically do two full-time jobs — ongoing design for a handful of loyal clients, and being a folk musician, which includes booking, promoting, writing and performing. I don’t have regular, guaranteed days off, and as a freelancer on both fronts, there are, of course, no paid vacations. If I am lucky — and luckily, I sometimes am — I manage to wrangle a job that involves travel to somewhere interesting. While I thrive on my design work, I cannot say the same about the musical portion of my job, which I have been doing for somewhere around 40 years (do I even want to admit that?). I never quite end up feeling successful, and unlike my client work, after every show, it is like starting over again not far from zero. This causes a certain level of perpetual anxiety.
Every musical gig requires endless, repetitive emails, the production of little, custom-made promo videos — a recently developed requirement from presenters inspired by pandemic virtual performance marketing panic — social media, website updates, practicing, travel (often in challenging weather), and the inevitable stress over how the sound, accommodations and attendance will be when we actually arrive at the venue. Add to that, there is the fresh, new fear of forgetting lyrics that comes with aging, a recurring feature of recent nightmares. My primary bandmate has historically rarely been pleased with the venue, the pay, the sound or the performance, so lately I’ve begun to fantasize about stepping off the musical hamster wheel. I daydream about never having to sweat any of these things again and it scares me just how much that appeals to me, even as I continue to compose, embark on new projects and book the next show. But I am getting off-track…
Escape routes
Several years ago, we purchased a used short school bus (at the time, my partner’s fantasy) and proceeded to convert it to a rustic camper. When he told me he wanted to do this, I enthusiastically got on board, researched and shopped until I found the perfect vehicle. We bought it, drove it home and began converting it. This was pre-hashtag, i.e. #vanlife. I researched, shopped for, and scavenged materials for the build, which took a few months with some long breaks in between them. In the end, we had some incredibly fun trips in the “Tradmobile”, as it came to be known, and some pretty expensive adventures when stuff broke, but the overall experience was a good one. I was especially excited about doing the conversion — I could even imagine doing it for a living, it was so fun. Friends who saw it asked if we could do one for them. I loved how relatively quickly one could transform something at this small scale. It was a lot more fun than building or renovating a house, something I have done numerous times in my life. Now, there are countless YouTube channels featuring people who do exactly this, a fair bunch of them making a half-decent living off of the millions of views they garner.
For me, the only downside of the whole experience was how difficult it was to do the build with my partner, who would spend an hour arguing or fretting about how to do a particular task, only to end up doing it the way I first proposed. I had to put up with his outbursts when he didn’t understand or didn’t agree and because he is not someone to verbally share what he is doing as he is doing it, it was hard to be useful when I never knew what the next step was going to be. I didn’t feel confident enough in my own skills, despite having grown up using all sorts of tools from a drill press to a radial-arm saw. To put this in context, I grew up in an eighteenth-century house that was in a constant state of renovation and one of my first birthday gifts was an electric sander. At one point, to my Mom’s horrified protests, my engineer Dad (who knows how to do absolutely everything) hired us three kids for $25 each to rip off the old roofing and toss it to the ground three stories below.
Not long before I met my partner, I spent two years gutting and renovating an 1851 house from top to bottom. I did all of the design, dirty work, interior framing, electrical and window and door installation with some help from my Dad, then-partner and the occasional actual carpenter for the trickier bits. Now, here I was, building out a bus and lacking the confidence I once had to cut holes for windows, frame bathrooms and wire up electrical sockets. My suggestions were met with disdain, dismissal or simply ignored. I wanted to try stuff, even if it took time and didn’t work in the end. But my co-worker didn’t like to explain — or to fail — so that was that. I had to settle for being a “gofer” or secretly work on it when he wasn’t around, when I could never find the tools I needed because he is a god-awful mess when it comes to putting things where they belong.
A few years on, we were taking fewer and fewer trips in our bus, so just before the pandemic began, we decided to sell it. Talk about bad timing! After about three days of online advertising, we sold it for about what we put into it, repairs included. If we had only waited a few more months, we could have certainly sold it for triple the amount. Everybody and their aunt was snatching up cheap buses and campers and hitting the road since it was about the only way to experience any semblance of a getaway at the height of a pandemic.
https://youtu.be/E2TgLmW9q10
A short video tour of the converted Tradmobile.
As we plunged into year two of covid, I began watching the new genre of #vanlife channels that seemed to have sprung up — or become popular — overnight on YouTube. Some were regular travel vloggers who had switched from flying to van-based travel mode. I learned all about the best types of heaters, solar installations, battery chargers and water filters to use in a conversion. I debated with myself over propane or invection cooktops, whether an oven was necessary, or a shower, and what kind of toilet would serve me best. I bought an e-book on doing van conversions and came to realize that we’d done pretty well with our own. We’d applied some of the best approaches — a marine foot pump for water, potable and grey water inside the bus, a propane tank, a fixed bed, a portable toilet and lots of counter space. But now our bus was gone, and prices for used vehicles were through the roof. I was shocked by the asking prices on rusty Dodge Sprinter vans with 300,000+ km on the odometer — often $20k or more!
I secretly started looking online because I was afraid to dream out loud. Even my Dad, who had taught me how to swing a hammer, along with the rest of society of my era, continued to make it clear that my female ideas weren’t automatically as valid as those of the least-informed man in the room. This lesson had been reinforced in a variety of ways as I grew older, including my partner’s own inability to believe in anything that didn’t seem easily within his own reach. His responses to my ideas about doing things that seemed outside my immediate skillset ranged from none at all to dismissive, designed to stop any daydreams before they might get out of hand.
Make it… or break it?
Two years worth of a pandemic was the true test for many couples, but against all odds, in our case, it seemed to have softened something between us. So I let down my guard and started to let my actual ideas slip out here and there as I tried to gauge his possible receptiveness to my fantasy. I started a notebook with lists of the equipment I liked, sketches of layouts, links, notes and tricks from my favorite online sources. Most people were looking for smaller vans like the aforementioned Sprinter, maybe because they had never driven a big vehicle and were fearful of something the size of a bus. Not me. I had learned to drive large, funky trucks and trailers from an early age so I was had my heart set on something a bit bigger, like our bus had been. In my pandemic-induced state of going nowhere, I became a YouTube travel addict and developed my own opinions about many of those van conversion designs. No vehicle that I built out would ever have fairy lights, plastic plants or cutesy signs. No dog hair in my bed or cats lounging on the kitchen counters either (apologies to some of my favorite YouTubers). I was struck by the comic fact that each time I clicked a Subscribe button, I was now relating and virtually connected to (with a few exceptions) carefree, childless, twenty and thirty-somethings. I was fantasizing about a similar freedom — my three kids had long ago left the nest (I am a grandmother several times over) and I have a job that has always been remote, so I was better prepared than many who dream of such a lifestyle.
As months passed, I came to realize that this project was actually about self-empowerment. Others seemed to think that I was naturally confident, even a leader, but the reality was that I doubted my own ability at every turn.
I’m still the girl that dies of embarrassment if I have to walk across a room in front of a group of males. I fit the description of what some refer to as an extroverted introvert — in other words, I have learned how to fake it. Well. And some of you buy that. In a household where both us work from home 24/7, the year long, I look forward to my partner going away for a day or two and having the place all to myself. When he does (a rare occurrence), I build things. I move furniture around, then I move it back. I try out stuff that I would never be brave enough to do with him around. And I spend a lot of time cursing him as I search for a saw, a drill-bit, a shovel, the key to the shed.
Meanwhile, the love of my life (and he truly is) wakes up each morning and does exactly what he wants to do from morning till night, as he has done since the day he moved out of his childhood home. I am jealous of his ability to move through the world in his own way. Even though he doesn’t earn much, he still says what he thinks and feels entitled to take up the space he wants. He can live on nothing, and often has. His frugality is his number one defense against my dreams, yet it is I who earns most of the household revenue and despite his doubt about my financial choices, we have zero debt, decent savings and actual money in the bank. I do spend more than he does, but I do my research and buy things that I use every day, in many instances, to do tasks that support his career. Even though I am the primary breadwinner, I really don’t care what he wants to spend money on or whether or not he really needs the thing he desires (remember, he is super frugal), I feel intimidated by his opinion of my financial decisions, despite handling 100% of the accounting. He has never even logged into our online bank (or any other) account! Should we need to talk to them about anything, it is me he puts on the phone with the accountant, the bank, government entities. If I were to be hit by a truck tomorrow… well, let’s not go there.
So, when I dare to talk about my current dream, I am shocked to discover that it is as if I am speaking a foreign language. Our conversations are like that Gary Larson cartoon where a dog hears only its own name and the rest is gibberish.
ME : “I want to create something that is entirely my own, done my way. I welcome your skills and support when I ask for them, but this will definitely be my project, done to my specifications.”
HIM (texting) : “Let’s wait a few years and get an electric vehicle together”
ME : “I’m really not looking to do this together. I want to experience doing something on my own. I want to do this now, while I am physically able to.”
HIM (texting) : “When we have more money, we can rent an RV for a month to go on vacation”
I bite my tongue and keep on trying with my apparently incomprehensible words :
ME (what he hears) : “Aasdlf jlagoiekad goslfjveil kadfa dfjkdad TOGETHER”.
I realize that there is no hearing aid that will help with this. And I am suddenly enraged to realize that for every single project he embarks on, he casually assumes that I will provide full support, yet here I am kissing his ass and struggling to prove that my idea is worthwhile… to me. So, I have to settle for sharing my possibly-worthless-to-others, probably expensive, maybe a bit crazy plans with others I don’t wake up in bed with each morning. In other words, you.
So here’s the plan :
Buy a used short bus or cube truck. Enjoy taking my time designing the conversion of this vehicle into a mobile studio and off-grid, livable habitat. Tear it down and rebuild it to my specs. Cut metal, chase wires, insulate, paint, scrape, sand, floor, and finish. Install the electric, heater, fan, solar and battery charger systems. Learn how to use tools I am unfamiliar with. Buy any new tools I need to get the job done. Probably do some of this in less-than-ideal weather, without a fancy garage to do it in. Don’t allow myself to be pressured by anyone. Relish, learn from, and correct my mistakes, guilt-free. Ask for help from those who know more (lots of people, including my partner) but only if they are willing to help without judgement and will respect the outcome I am striving for. Learn to stop worrying about the egos of others who don’t share the same concern about mine. Savour the whole experience as a journey in itself, along with the chance of things going wrong and having to be dealt with.
Just like I have been doing all along.