You'll never know what the fuck you're doing.
On my journey to buying a camper van, and not a lot happening after that.
I, Alex Hare, will hold my hands up and say that I am addicted to planning.
I love the feel of planning, you know?
In fact, the word ‘planning’ takes the romance completely out of it all. It’s much more than that.
It’s the sensation of cold, smooth, empty paper against skin. The scratch of a pen tip. Swish, crack: the opening of a new notebook.
I love the potential in that moment. The un-failure. The hope. The dreamlike ability to be absolutely anything in the day, months or years ahead. The wave of being immersed in desire.
It’s as if I’m dating myself; getting to know me and what I want and what I hope for. Laughing and finding myself attractive. As yet unmarred by letting myself down.
Because I love this process so much, I often find myself with lists upon lists.
To read.
To buy.
To do today.
The long list (to do at some point).
Hopes for the year.
Places to go.
Articles to write.
They are moments of self, moments of dreaming, in a day that promises to whisk me away, to make me forget them - forget myself - if I do not write them down.
But the problem comes in the translation of the activity from list to real life.
I struggle to get off the page.
This became most ardently clear as me and my partner tried to get started on perhaps the biggest project we’ve attempted to date: converting a crappy Citroen Relay into a camper van.
We’ve been planning this project for years. In 2018 the desire started to take root, with a little YouTube watching and a little daydreaming about what it would be like to travel with a comfortable bed in tow. In 2019, I started browsing Autotrader the way I browse Rightmove - kind of like a social media app that you check every day, except all you see are things that you’ll never buy - and sending my partner completely inappropriate suggestions.
In 2020, the world fell apart, and I become legitimately obsessed with the idea. We’d become somewhat nomadic by that point anyway, moving in with my Dad for a while, then into a house our friends were selling, then into another friend’s, all in order to pay back credit card debt we’d accumulated, so I’d become used to only having enough belongings for one room. It didn’t seem like that big of a step to take those belongings and live in a van instead.
So by 2021 I was also desperate to travel. It couldn’t be wasted, I realised; this life, this freedom. We must DO THE PLAN NOW.
My YouTube watch history became less about travel aspirations, and more about van layouts. Wonderful people, who’d heard us yabber on about these plans, started buying us books on How to Live in a Van and Travel, or Outdoor Cooking, or designing a Tiny House. We rented a van and spent a week mooching about Scotland as a test to see if we’d like it as much as we thought (see photo at top - how could you not?).
Then in November 2021, we did it - we bought a van. A somewhat filthy, ramshackle van, but a van we bought, so planning reached a fever pitch.
I made tiny cardboard cut outs of potential layouts - to scale, no less - so I could try out different ideas. We bought The Van Conversion Bible, which is a step-by-step guide on how to do absolutely everything. We watched countless videos online about how to lay a floor, or install a fan, or build a bed.
And then: nothing.
Some very early mechanical issues put a dampener on our initial jolt of energy for the project, but even after sorting them, we ground to a halt.
Spring rolled by. Summer appeared.
We’d done nothing more than remove the old ply lining and give it a right good clean.
Honestly, I was embarrassed.
Instead of actually doing what I dreamed of, I was watching people online who were already doing it. I felt as though I need to know so much, learn SO much, that I shied away from it once faced with my own big, empty, white box.
I could give you all sorts of excuses as to why nothing happened.
Money.
Nowhere to easily work on it.
Lack of tools.
A sink hole (really).
But beneath all that, I think we were just intimidated.
I’m sure you’re sensing a turn-around in my tale - and you’re right.
A few weekends ago, we got stuck in, and we now have a floor and about half of the insulation done.
It’s not a lot, granted, but it’s a lot more than we had done before, and I realised something while we were doing it:
You will never know what the fuck you’re doing.
I thought all the planning would make it easy because we knew the steps. Big tasks, broken down into bitesized chunks.
But we still had no idea how to do it until we were doing it.
We still had questions that all of our research couldn’t answer. We still had awkward shapes that didn’t lend themselves to being dealt with in the ‘correct’ way. We still fumbled and fucked up and made mistakes we had to fix.
And I know - as you do - that part of my love of planning comes from fear. Fear of exactly that: of not knowing what to do.
I hate that feeling.
The dream is completely ripped away. My vision of myself as the person who can is utterly wrecked in that moment, replaced with the reality of being someone who doesn’t know. Someone who maybe can’t.
That sensation is awkward, unsteady. My limbs don’t quite know how to move. Where the certainty of knowledge was in my centre, like a rock below my rib cage, there’s a gap. A without.
But it’s temporary.
In action, in the doing of things, we figure it out.
We find our ways of doing things that aren’t already written down, that we couldn’t possibly have learned about in advance because they’re ours.
I know it’s scary, a less reassuring sentiment to hold, but I am trying to nestle in to the awareness that I will never really know what I’m doing until I’m doing it.
It doesn’t take the romance out of planning; I still believe that’s an incredibly important part of the process because it generates desire - but it means desire is the point of planning, not the acquisition of knowledge.
That shifts something for me.
If the not-knowing is an inevitability, I can get okay with that.
I have no other choice, right?
—
So tell me - is there something you’re planning for? What if you realised that you’ll never know enough, never know what the fuck you’re doing? Would you do it sooner?
P.s If you’re interested in following along with the van journey, then you can find us @thegoodsaltvan on Instagram and also on TikTok
I like this a LOT. You're a beautiful writer. X
I relate to this so much. I make lists, do extensive research to make sure I know everything I need before I start a project but naturally there are going to be things that I just can’t google. I just have to start first and figure it out later, which is such a massive fear of mine, hence the large lists and hours of YouTube watching (it’s obsessive isn’t it? 😂). I think I spend more time watching people do things and hoping I can do the same rather than just doing it myself!!
I’m hoping to pick up painting...but i just keep watching “beginner” tutorials on YouTube that are so clearly NOT for real beginners. I think in my head I think if my art turns out ugly...well then it’s a waste of time and all that effort/paying for materials wasn’t worth it so I give up.