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How Small a World Can Slowly Become
On overstimulation, feeling trapped, and why mobility is no longer a luxury for us.
There are moments when I think people on the outside can hardly understand how small a world can slowly become. Not all at once, but little by little.
Through constant tension. Overstimulation. Lack of rest. Always having to stay alert. Barely having any privacy. Never really having a place where your nervous system is allowed to settle. Until even simple things start costing energy that other people never have to think about.
For most people, a car is just transportation. For us, it has become the ability to be somewhere independently at all without coming home completely exhausted. That may sound exaggerated to people who have never lived for a long time in an environment where their system is almost constantly “on.” But over the years, our world has become smaller and smaller. Public transport, crowded spaces, and shared environments have become almost impossible for us to handle. Even going somewhere to calm down now takes energy we often no longer have.
And yet there are still moments when we briefly remember how different life can feel. When we are somewhere at the edge of a forest. When it is quiet. When there are no voices, doors, devices, or tension surrounding us. When our bodies no longer have to spend every second adapting, absorbing, and surviving.
Those are the moments when we realize how deeply dysregulated we have become. That is why we have spent years working on an old car and camper. Not for a romantic vanlife dream, not to travel the world, and not because we are chasing luxury, but because mobility has increasingly become a form of accessibility for us. A way to occasionally step outside an environment that is slowly draining us.
The car we currently have still needs major repairs that we simply cannot afford anymore. At the same time, our old camper has been standing still for a long time as well and, after a mouse infestation, now needs to be completely cleaned and repaired before it can ever become usable again.
Sometimes it feels confronting to even write this, because invisible exhaustion often seems less “real” to people than visible problems. As if you first have to completely collapse before others understand that something has become unsustainable. But truth remains truth, even when it cannot immediately be seen from the outside.
So despite the shame that comes with it, we are trying to ask for help anyway. Not to build a dream life, but to regain a small amount of mobility, rest, and recovery space. To maybe one day find a quiet piece of land where our old camper can simply exist, so that we no longer have to survive every single day in an environment that is slowly wearing us down.
Maybe that is ultimately what this whole story is about. Not about traveling. Not about freedom as an aesthetic. But about the need for one place where your nervous system no longer has to fight all the time.
To anyone who wants to support, share, or simply read our story: thank you. That means more to us than we can properly explain.