On rewind days, I bring you a post that has previously appeared at my other now-defunct blog, Right to Bleed. If you’ve read it before, skip on by, or go ahead and enjoy the rewind.

This one is from July 31st, 2008, when I was living in a van.

Failure of Expectation

A friend recently asked me about why I was living in a van. Didn’t I like living in a house? I said, yes, I had liked my house okay, but I was never there. Between work, being at my boyfriend’s house, etc., I was only there a couple of nights a week, and then mostly to just grab some stuff or to sleep.

I had an odd little moment where I realized that that’s mostly what I’m doing with the van, too. With temperatures being so high, I’m mostly just in the van to grab some things or to go to sleep. I spend my time at my boyfriend’s house, working online at Chick fil A, or spending all day at the gaming bar on free ladies day. So why the van, if I’m not living in it any more than I was living in my house.

I realized that expectation is the difference in what makes the van more comfortable for me. Having a whole house creates a certain set of expectations just by its being and by your having it.

There’s a full kitchen, a huge fridge, a microwave, an oven, a stove, a dishwasher, all of which communicates the expectation that you’re going to have a variety of food on hand, spend time creating meals, make varied meals using different means. I never did that. I never used my stove or oven. My refrigerator never had more than 5 items in it.

There’s a dining room with a big table and seating for 6 or 8. This communicates the expectation that sometimes 6 or 8 people are going to sit there and eat or play games or plan a project together. I only ever once in the entire year I lived in my last house had more than one other person in my home.

There’s an extra bedroom, which communicates that sometimes, people are going to visit you over night and nee a room of their own. This never happened, the whole time I was in that house.

There’s another bedroom, which communicates that you’re going to have an interest that takes up another room – maybe crafts, sewing, art projects, enough books for a library, etc.

There are lots of closets, which communicate that you’re going to have a great variety of stuff that you won’t need to access very often, so it’ll be okay to hide it away in closets.

The only one of these expectations that I met was the closet one. I had all the stuff. All the stuff sitting around being useless, being a weight. But everything else that a house begs for, I never fulfilled. I’m not very often into mystical woo-woo theories, but I do have to wonder what it does to you, what it means, to set yourself up for one kind of thing but then never rise to meet it. At the very least, I think it could go a ways to explaining the restlessness and discontent I felt living in a house.

One solution, of course, would be to start doing those other things – cooking more elaborate meals, inviting guests over for dinner, having out-of-town friends stay the night, developing a hobby that takes up room. I clearly wasn’t interested in those things, though, since I wasn’t doing them, even though I had the means to do so. To put effort into doing those things would contain an element of “should” for me.

The other solution is to tailor your surroundings, your possessions, your expectations, to what you actually want from your life. What you really want, not what you’re supposed to want.

I did not want space that begged to be filled with unused things. I wanted space that asked me to keep my possessions to a minimum. I did not want a dining room sitting abandoned. I wanted to meet my friends in restaurants and the woods and the gaming bar. I did not want a fully decked-out kitchen, enormous in size and unused absurdity. I wanted a two burner cook-stove and a little cooler that perfectly held the kinds of meals I like to make. I did not want several rooms with doors hardly ever opened. I wanted one room just the right size for sleeping.

Now I have all that. I no longer have discontent with my living space, because rather than failing my expectations – and me failing them – my living space is exactly the same size as my expectations, my desires, and my life.

Edited to Add:

This is a great post for me to look back on, since I live in a house again. It’s interesting that some of the things that I never did before, like cooking at home, are now very interesting to me. I have almost all my meals at home now, and it’s great that I have a kitchen the size that I do. I think it’s just a reinforcement that cookie-cutter expectations never quite work out, even within the same person. There was a time in my life when a van was the right size home, and now is a time in my life that a house with 3 acres is the right size home. I’m so very glad that I did the van thing at the time, and I’m also glad to be at The Wallow now.