I am an AuDHD-er (Autistic/ADHD) and I have been nomadic and semi-nomadic for the past 5 1/2 years, since I was evicted from my small town home and my son moved in with his dad.
This has looked many different ways — and not many of them were as glamorous as those #vanlife Instagram stories would have you believe. If you’re someone who’s wistfully dreamed of letting it all go and going off on adventures unknown, but wondered if it would suit your brain wiring, read on …
Here’s a whistle-stop tour through my adventures …
The living on the road phase
From 2017–2018 I lived in a Luton van with my partner, travelling around the British Isles in a wide spectrum of weather, tree-communing, sacred site imbibing, singing and being spontaneous. I tell you all about it in my book — but the short story is, it was both one of the richest, most fulfilling years of my life, and one of the most challenging.
The high points?
~ The freedom, ever-changing scenery and feeling so connected to nature. Nature is a brilliant remedy for neurodivergent people in particular, as it can help to soothe an overactive mind and feel grounding when connection to the physical realm is more challenging.
~ Hardly having to work at all, as it was so very cheap to live this way, was a huge relief and allowed me the downtime and dreaming time that is so essential for the way my brain functions. Retrospectively, I can see that many of the fellow vanlifers I came across were neurodivergent, although I lacked the language for it at the time. They were all, like me, people who fell outside of the margins of society and had ended up ‘houseless but not homeless’ through an inability or unwillingness to engage with social norms and work ethics that didn’t align with their own values and needs.
Low points
~ No personal space from my partner was incredibly tough. It was, essentially, a pressure cooker, with no escape from conflicts or power struggles. My sense of autonomy was severely eroded and I fell into some co-dependent patterns that took a long time to untangle in our relationship.
~ It was difficult to work on my creative projects, since we were in such a small space and the sound of my typing drove him mad. As much as I love peace, quiet and unstructured time, my mind needs stimulation and activity, and not being able to work when and how I wanted to was incredibly frustrating.
~ Eventually, I felt a sense of boredom and pointlessness after we had visited all the places we wanted to go and were just circling around the same territory.
~ I missed friends and being part of regular group activities like women’s circles, 5Rhythms dance classes and choir. Moving around constantly meant there was nowhere to root myself into such activities, and I got bored of just my own company and my partner’s.
The community phase
After a brief winter stint in a rented campervan in a North Dorset garden, freezing with cold, I spent 2019–2020 (yes, through the first 3 months of the first lockdown), in a crazily intense, some would say cult-ish, ‘spiritual’/personal development community, also with my partner.
Almost every minute of my waking life was scheduled on a blackboard, as part of a thirty-member strong collaboration. It was the polar opposite of the carefree lifestyle of moving around from day to day that I had enjoyed in the van. I thrived in the structure — until I hated it.
I remember one of the in-house ‘therapists’ saying to me, “Why are you in community, then?” I had expressed in one of the compulsory sharing circles that I only felt like ‘myself’ when I was out on the grounds, alone with an oak tree, and that as soon as I came back into the house, I felt overwhelmed.
His comment on my vulnerable share felt shaming and brought up my own self-doubt that I deserved to have a sense of community, because I needed so much time alone.
This is a frequent conundrum as an AuDHD-er, as I both crave company and need a lot of time to decompress from contact with others.
I finally escaped to live in a relatively unstructured new rural Dutch community in June 2020, centred around a retreat centre and the practice of conscious communication and full-hearted, authentic living. This felt like a risky thing to do in the middle of a lockdown, when no one was travelling cross-country, let alone moving countries. But since when had I obeyed rules?
This seven-month experiment had a honeymoon period of absolute bliss and grew me in many ways. The relief of no longer having to get up at six am every day for the group morning meditation or engage in cathartic shouting at least once a week was immense.
I sat in the sun drinking Guatamalan cacao, danced on the lawn with the other women, and launched my Rewilding the Womb business because I finally had the headspace to do so. There was a lot of lying around in a swimming pool in that glorious summer, sharing deeply in circles and co-creating a little Summer Solstice festival — just for us.
Ultimately, though, the experience taught me that I’m even more of a natural hermit than I’d cared to admit. The energy of eighteen other people, all with their different energies and needs, proved taxing on my system, even with all the respectful communication. It was just too complex and tiring, and I longed to be able to hear my own clear signal.
The Caravan-Hermit phase
Since then, I have been living in my little touring caravan, acquired in Holland, on a variety of smallholdings in Wales and another retreat centre near Glastonbury, or Avalon as it’s affectionately known. Sometimes, I have volunteered in exchange for rent and food, other times paying for my pitch.
I’ll be honest. Although I’ve loved being mostly off-grid, this has been a difficult phase. Because of the draconian land laws in the UK, finding places that were willing to take on a caravan proved challenging, and there’s always been a navigation around the power dynamics of land-owners vis a vis a less privileged position.
Since the events of 2020, my money and energy levels (thanks to autistic burnout) have been a continual struggle and I’ve often had to scale things back to the bare minimum. Wondering: what am I even doing this for? But unable to imagine going back into a house rental situation, especially given the recent rise of energy prices.
Despite the problems, I would say that I have found myself more than ever in this phase, though.
So what’s worked for me in nomadic life as a neurodivergent person?
Change
My ADHD side means I get easily bored with the same scenery and routine, day in and day out. Completely changing up my routines and lifestyle has given me new perspective, excited me with fresh possibilities, and exposed me to things that I would never have otherwise come across. After four years living in the same small town, constrained by the school run, road life in a van was liberating.
We moved every few days, sometimes staying in a favourite place, like Stonehenge or Avebury, for a bit longer. Every time something felt like it was getting stale, we could just pack up and move on.
Although I stayed in my first community for nearly 18 months, the day-to-day life was full of a variety of different activities, new people were always passing through (except during lockdown!) and we hosted wild, fun festivals — a great outlet for my impulsivity. Even during lockdown, we were having a way better time than most people around the world, still having access to hugs, creative activities and freedom of movement around several acres of land.
Here’s what’s been difficult about nomadic life as a neurodivergent person …
Lack of control over my environment, time and structure
“You’re lucky. You’re living free of the matrix. I want to move towards that.”
A well-meaning guy who was visiting the Somerset retreat centre where I lived and volunteered for a year, said this to me over the outdoor sink one September day.
I wanted to tell him, I’m only here because of the Matrix. It’s the people who have loads of extra money, earned in our capitalist, exploitative society, who keep this place going and allow me to be able to live here. And the price I pay is exchanging my time and labour for far less than the minimum wage.
This may sound bitter, but there were days when the cognitive dissonance felt more real than the beautiful green view over the field where my caravan sat.
I was required to work 20 hours a week at the retreat centre. This worked out at about £800 a month for a caravan pitch with electric hook-up and food — an amount that could have rented me a whole flat to myself and bought low-cost, healthy food so that I could have control over what and when I ate.
This deal was actually reasonably generous, compared to others I had partaken in before. A previous off-grid work-exchange, or ‘WWOOF-ing’ situation, had me working two full days just for a caravan pitch (no electric) and one meal on the work days.
Theoretically, those 20 hours should have still left me enough time to do my own, paid work and creative projects, but it seldom did. After doing tiring yet understimulating physical work that I mostly disliked — cleaning and cooking — I seldom had the energy or motivation for anything but long countryside walks and catching up with friends on the phone. My yoga nidra naps became more frequent and required, and I started to feel demoralised and undervalued.
The constantly changing ‘community’ — new volunteers arriving nearly every week — wore me down, and I started to retreat into my caravan more and more, uninclined to waste energy on people who were going to be gone again in a few days.
My autism gives me a strong drive to spend hours immersed in my special interests and a higher need for rest than most — and I didn’t have that here. I felt trapped, because I wanted and even needed to live in the countryside, because of my sensory issues, but couldn’t see another way to afford doing so.
Landing and Rooting
I am now in something of a sweet spot — renting an offgrid spot for my caravan on beautiful land in Pembrokeshire, South-West Wales, with occasional access to other spaces such as an art studio and a summerhouse. My caravan overlooks a green field with a big oak tree in the centre and, currently, a collection of black sheep (and lambs!). A small stream and woodland lie below this. There are drumming and music circles available nearby, but I seldom go out, and the only human I usually see day to day is my partner, who lives two fields along.
I am putting down roots after half a decade of exploring. It’s time. My autistic side has been coming out more and my needs for stability, quiet and consistency growing sharper in relief compared to the drive for stimulation and novelty.
I still don’t follow a set routine day to day. But there’s a thread running through it all, somehow. And it’s taken me these five years of living out of the box to find it.
Check out my book, ‘The Wild Wandering Arc: A Journey through Vanlife, Nature & Love’ for more nomadic adventures. Join me over at Wildmuse Portal to explore a life of authenticity, creative expression and nature connection.