I am not a city person.

I am not a city person. At all. The noise, the people, the crowdedness. Ugh, it makes my heart race.

We are still in Bend, OR waiting for our transmission to be replaced on our campervan. We have been staying at a Motel 6 since the beginning of November and will be here for probably another week. I don't know if any of you have ever lived at a motel but it is not fun. First of all, it is expensive, we are about $1,200 deep at this point, and counting. Also, it is LOUD. Like yelling in the parking lot at 2am loud.

I am having a hard day today so I decided to take a walk to a local park (being poor in a relatively rich family that doesn't believe in community care makes me feel like such an outsider, a story for a different day). And even the park is loud. There is a community building with a utility box outside that has a loud hum. Car alarms are going off. I can hear traffic noise in the distance. I can tell that there are birds chirping in the trees, but I can barely make out their sounds from the buzzing of the city.

I thrive in silence. It is my happiest place to be. If you have met me in person you know that I don't talk very much. When it is silent, I feel like I can relax, like I can just be me.

I have lived in cities before. I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco. I went to college in a big city. I loved it at the time. The noise, the people didn't bother me as much as they do now. But the more I lean into my need for my surroundings to be quiet and still, the more I realize how much over-stimulation has affected me.

Going from living at a campground to living in a motel, I can feel a difference in how at ease I feel. My creativity feels like it has abandoned me, I can't find it anywhere. Which isn't something I felt while living in our van. There was always some picture I wanted to take or some part of my story I wanted to write down or some piece of nature I wanted to paint. But in the motel, I have been straining to find creativity.

I just don't feel like myself. I get so much pressure from my family to settle down and get an apartment anytime iving in a van gets hard . But being here in Bend, in the center of a city, I know I am doing the right thing. That paying $5,000 to get our transmission replaced instead of using it for a security deposit on an apartment was a good decision. That living in a van affords me the ability to live the life I want, the life I need to feel safe being me. That the life I want, full of creativity and wonder, isn't going to come to me living in a city. I was a different person when I was living in a city. And that person wasn't really the truest version of me. It was a version of me that was trained from a very early age to fit in. Into society, into capitalism, into other people's expectations. But deep down, I just need space and quiet to be me.