Alone for the Holidays, Tips For Solo RVers, Travelers and Single People

Happy Holidays from Carolyn and Capone and welcome back to our RV life. Coming at you live from the beautiful, yet cold, rainy and cloudy Joshua Tree National Park. It's gorgeous here. I've been here for a couple of days and I wanted to shoot my holiday video here, so I have been waiting for the last two hours for the rain to stop so I could come outside and do it. So welcome! I'm glad you're here. I wanted to do a holiday video to talk about something that I know a lot of you are going to be facing this holiday season. Whether you're a solo RVer, a solo van dweller, whether you're solo going through life, living in a Sticks and Bricks house or apartment, a lot of people really struggle through the holidays and I understand that. So I wanted to share that with you and if you watch this video on Christmas or the day before Christmas, I hope that it can help you feel not so alone. Because there's a lot of pressure on us in general, but especially around the holidays. We see cheesy Hallmark TV shows about new love and wonderful happy families and Hallmark commercials and stove top stuffing commercials with all the family getting together and it's all fun and laughs. That's not the reality for a lot of us. I left my marriage seven years ago without a single friend. My friends had fallen by the wayside years earlier for various reasons and I just didn't make any new ones, partly because I had gone down another rabbit hole of alcoholism. I have a long history of alcoholism and drug abuse and the year before I left my husband, I got sober. So throughout my marriage, I was an active alcoholic and just didn't bother making any new friends. Who needs friends when you have Absolut and Sierra Nevada? So I left my marriage without a single friend. I don't really have family and my husband's family became mine and as you know, often times it's hard to hold on to those relationships. I still love my in-laws to death, but it's hard to hold on to those relationships once the marriage is over. I can't really show up at Christmas with him and his new girlfriend there, so you leave a lot behind. So you do lose a lot. For seven years, I spent every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day alone and it can be really challenging and ironically, this is the first year I'm not going to spend Christmas alone. As of right now, my plan is to head to Ehrenberg where my tribe is, fellow friends that I have made along the way, people like me who are living in their RVs and vans and I have people down there that I can spend the holiday with and that is the first time in seven years I actually have people that I can spend time with and I'm looking forward to spending time with. And I think it's really ironic that I had to give up my entire old life, my friends that I've made over the last several years, my colleagues and business friends, I gave up all of that and found community. I'm not a fan of Christmas, let me just say that. I do not like Christmas for a lot of reasons, but one of my favorite holiday shows, actually probably my all-time favorite holiday show from as long as I can remember is Rudolph and one of the things I loved about Rudolph is the Island of Misfit Toys. Remember the Island of Misfit Toys at the end, Rudolph delivers there, like a jack-in-the-box I remember or something, but I could always relate to the Island of Misfit Toys. I've always, oh my god, all my life I have been a misfit. I didn't fit in for one reason or another, or I felt like I didn't fit in. I mean, I've had groups of friends and I've been involved in activities in college, I was involved, but I just really, even at Berkeley, I just never felt like I belonged there. I never felt like I fit in and I always felt like I needed to just find my island, my little island of misfit toys. And I had to give up everything and move into an RV alone to find my island. I found my island of other misfits just like me. And I say that we're misfits because we are the free thinkers, we're the people who have looked at our lives and looked at our society and said, no, there has to be another way. By being out here and finally grasping my true self, I have been able to find my community. Take two. I wanted to give you another shot, but to continue my story, I have found my island, I have found my fellow misfit toys, and they are full-time RVers, they are van dwellers, they are the people who looked at their lives and said, there has to be more. There has to be another way to live. I don't have to be a slave to a 30-year mortgage and a job that I barely like. I can risk it all, and I can go out and live on my own. And in that way, I think we are misfits, and that's why I say I have found my way. I have found my island out here. I have found my island of compatriots and kindred spirits. And for the first time, I am not going to be spending the holiday alone. For those of you who are aspiring to live out here and worry that you are going to be alone a lot, I wanted to share that. I know I have people. I wander around out here. Lately, I've just been completely wandering aimlessly. Wake up in the morning and I don't know where I'm going. But I know I have community. I know I have people. Real people. Real friendships. I have a couple back in my normal life, some very, very, very good friends that I love very much. But the level of understanding and the level of kinship that we share out here feels different. Now that I have found my island of fellow free-thinking misfits, that brings me back to Christmas. And I know a lot of you are going to be alone. I want to share with you what I have learned. You're going to benefit from the thousands of dollars right now that I have spent on therapy. I want to let you know you're not alone. For people who think differently, for people who see, I'm going to say, a truth that 99% of society doesn't see, for people who dare dream that life can be different, for people who have the nerve to buck the system and chase their dreams, life can be lonely. And I know that. And for me, I didn't know how, or I didn't know that I could be as free as I am now. So I found my freedom in the bottom of a bottle of vodka. For me, I felt that was my way of feeling free and that was my way of feeling like screw-it-to-screw society. It's kind of odd, but I often felt like that was my way of living on the edges of society. A very self-destructive, toxic way to do it. I now have a very positive, healthy way to do it. And this is what I should have done all along. When I was 17, dreaming of hitting the road in my little Nova and waiting tables from town to town for gas money, I should have done it then. Maybe I wouldn't have ended up an alcoholic and drug addict. Who knows? Maybe I still would have. You know, who knows what fate had in store for me. But if you're alone, I just want you to know you're not alone. You have me here. You have so many other of us out here living life on our terms who understand you and who get you. And I want to share a couple things that I did to get through the holidays alone the last few years. Make it your day. Screw what society says it should be. Screw the traditions that, for me, just brought a lot of painful memories. Make it your day. What do you want your day to be? While the rest of the world is suffering through Turkey with annoying Uncle Henry and Grandma who's gassy and tells the same stories every year, a lot of them are suffering through that. They're not as happy as TV and the media wants you to believe because, you know what? Unhappiness doesn't sell butterballs, right? You know, they don't show the reality of the butterball crashed on the floor with the rest of the Thanksgiving dinner because, you know, Dad went into another fit of rage. That's not happy. That doesn't sell a lot of turkeys. Happiness sells turkeys. But not everybody is that happy. Find something that makes you happy and do it. In the beginning, for me, it was, I remember the first year, maybe the second year, I literally laid on the couch for 10 or 12 hours straight and watched Breaking Bad. And then at the end of the day, when I was craving a bag of meth, I thought, yeah, I need to do something different next year. And so the last couple of years, I have traveled. Two years ago, I landed in Athens, Greece on Christmas Day. And it kind of takes the power out of the traditions of the holiday for me to be a solo traveler in an airport en route to someplace wonderful. Sure, I landed in Athens, a very Greek, very Greek, very Catholic, very religious country. But it was wonderful. Last year, Capone and I went for a hike to some hot springs on Christmas Day. I was hiking in Big Sur, Ventana Wilderness, and we hiked 10 miles into some hot springs. And I got to enjoy a hot spring with a naked man that I'd never met before. You never know what experiences you might find if you break away from the traditions of Christmas. But find things that make you happy. You don't have to sit around and mope and hide because you're alone. Go to a movie. Cook yourself your favorite parts of Thanksgiving. If you only like sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, cook yourself a big ass helping of sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes and have at it. Just be nice to yourself and find nice things to do. I actually had on my calendar this year what I was going to do is an assisted living center or an assisted living center or a home for elderly, and I was going to call them ahead of time and see if there were any elderly people who didn't have family that were going to visit them. And I was going to go visit them for the holiday and kind of just try to brighten somebody else's day. The whole, the whole handing out food and volunteering on Christmas is so overrated in the Bay Area. I've tried to do that a couple of times and they're always booked. Everybody wants to help during the holidays. So if you want to volunteer, do it at another time, not during the holidays because they need help year round, but everybody thinks about it during the holidays. But I was going to go hang out with an older person for the day. I thought that would be good for both of us. They would probably enjoy the company and it would help me get out of the house if I wasn't going to travel and feel like I was doing something important. But I ended up out here and I'm okay with that. If you can't travel like I did, go for a backpacking trip. Luckily, I'm from California. I can always find a place to backpack year round. So I was lucky there. But you could go for a hike, you could go for a movie, rent a bunch of movies. If you're an addict, you may not want to watch 10 hours straight of Breaking Bad. But find something that really makes you happy and do it and enjoy your day and think of it as your free day. It's your free to be me day. While the rest of the country is doing whatever it is they do, you get to do whatever the heck you want. That's another thing. Remember, half the people who are doing the family things would really rather be alone. They would rather have the choice to do something else. We are so tied to our traditions and our responsibilities that we don't live for ourselves. And for those of you who are alone on Christmas, you get to live for yourself and be whatever you want. So until you get out here and join your island of misfit toys, where I am here waiting, enjoy your holiday, be nice to yourself, have a great day, do something fun, do something that maybe you don't normally get to do and just enjoy your day. Make it your own special tradition and your own special day. And know that there are people out here who get you and you're not alone. With that, I want to wish everybody a happy holiday, whether you're alone or whether you're with family that you love or hate. I want to wish you a very happy holiday, whether you celebrate Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, or Christmas or something else. I hope you have a wonderful time and thank you for being with me and I will see you soon. From Carolyn and Capone, have a wonderful holiday.