It can be intimidating when your dream lifestyle is saturated with people who don’t look like you. A good portion of van life is filled with girls who look like they spend most of their time tanning on beaches and carefully selecting their outfits for vanlife photo ops, or your typical white hetero couple who worked hard, sold all of their stuff, and bought a new Mercedes sprinter.
I’ve always had the travel bug, and my eyes lit up when I first discovered vanlife. After months of research and mostly only seeing my white counterparts doing it, I knew I had to do it even more. I wanted to live a lifestyle that was accessible for everyone even if it only seemed accessible to a few. The wild thing is the more I dug in, the more I discovered there is a community of POC in the van life world. There is space for us and representation, we just may not have our Tik Tok or YouTube videos circulating around as much. This affirmed for me that I have as much of a right to access this life as others, that the privilege to live in a van (oxymoron?) extends across race, gender, and social status.
Buying my 2004 Dodge Sprinter (which I named Mac) pumped me with feelings of liberation, fear, excitement, and hope. This marked the beginning of a new adventure, a new journey for me to embark on. Driving the van around at first was terrifying, it was huge! What was even more uncomfortable than driving it was the stares I got driving around downtown Seattle. This could have all been in my head of course, but it is a rare sight to see a black girl with a 4c afro driving around in what’s typically seen as a maintenance cargo van, driven by.. well not 24-year-old black girls. No matter what, the van is mine, and that’s where the true power lies. Life is about finding your power and then using that to live your truth and your best life. If your best life includes taking up spaces where there aren’t a lot of people like you, then so be it, there’s plenty of room (:
Stay tuned for more updates on Mac’s buildout, and where we’ll hit the road first when he’s all done up!
