This has been a really busy year, in a lot of different ways. This post is an attempt to record the important things that have been happening for me.

A Thread

I want to start with a place rather than an explanation, because the place came first and the explanation has taken more than twenty years to arrive. It’s a thread of my life that never ended.

It’s about Wellington, New Zealand.

Specifically, four years on the side of a cliff with million dollar views overlooking the Wellington Harbour (I still can’t believe I was only paying NZD $260 a week for that), with nothing obstructing the view. It was amazing, and memorable. And I wasn’t performing anything there. I wasn’t managing anyone’s expectations of who I should be. I was just there – and it fit in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t had a place do that to them.

In 2001 I wrote a post called I take the road less travelled by. I was thirty four back then, and I wrote a line I’d completely forgotten about until I found it this year. I wrote that the road “has ALWAYS led me to a place far better than where I was”. It was true then, and it’s still true today. What I didn’t know at thirty four was how long I’d spend wanting to be back on that particular stretch of the road.

The reason I left New Zealand back in 2007 was a simple story. At the time, I was with Deidre and she wanted to be in Australia, near her mother. My work situation in Wellington came to an end with a redundancy payout that made moving back to Australia feel like a good thing to do – and honestly, it was. I don’t regret it. It was the right decision given everything that was real at the time.

But what I didn’t account for was that some version of me would stay there.

I came back to Australia and got on with building a life, and underneath all of it, quietly, for more than fifteen years now, there’s been a low murmur of wanting to be back in Wellington that’s been running in the background of my mind – mostly unnoticed because life kept giving me other things to pay attention to.

A couple months ago I did an exercise with AI. I asked it to interview me, one question at a time, to discover what was really important to me. A few things surfaced, but the most surprising was some pretty emotional memories of Wellington, which ended up with me realising a deep part of me needs to go back there. Not just for a holiday – like I did in 2016 to celebrate turning 50 – but to live. My life needs to be there, in Wellington New Zealand. It’s in my soul.

So I’m following that particular thread of my life, the thread that leads back to New Zealand. I’ve got conversations occurring with people in New Zealand about the work environment. I’ve got job alerts letting me know about jobs there.

I don’t know where pulling at this thread will take me… but that’s the purpose of this blog, right? It’s all about the journey. My journey.

# Van Life

I turn sixty in November this year. I don’t know where all the years have gone, but here we are.

I didn’t really realise it until last year Fanfan asked me a question: “What do you want to do for your 60th?”

I was surprised. What? 60? How did that happen?

I thought about it for a while, and something in me decided it needed to celebrate it with travel rather than a dinner. Fanfan wanted me to go to New Zealand again, like we did for my 50th, but this time around I wanted to drive somewhere special in Australia, for a long stretch, and see what was on the other side of doing that. And I was reminded of something…

Back in 2009 I planned this glorious adventure I called The Great Aussie Adventure. But I ended up giving it up because it was going to take almost 3 months. I tried considering doing it over a number of trips over 2 years, but it never happened. Life got in the way.

That came back to me, and I revisited this idea for my 60th, but again – life was still getting in the way. I couldn’t justify taking off 3 months to do this trip around Australia, because paying the bills is still more important. And there just hasn’t been enough money saved up to allow me to take that 3 months off work, or taking Amelia out of school for that period of time.

So a couple of weeks ago I did an eleven-day version of it.

I’m currently not working as I look for the next contract, and I decided that it would be better to take some time out for myself during this particular time, instead of later this year when when I actually turn 60, but when I’d be working.

I drove from Canberra up to Hervey Bay in Queensland over a couple days, and then meandered back down the coastline over the next 9 days. I spent six nights sleeping in the Tesla Model Y, drone on the seat beside me, enjoying the drive down the coastline taking photos with the phone and drone videos.

You can see the photos here: Photos. The drone videos will come later. I need to work out how to process them, and then I’ll put them on to YouTube.

After I got home though, I found myself with a really strong feeling in my mind. It was a mental itch that kept rattling around in my head. Every single day. And night. It led me to explore YouTube.

Hashtag van life.

You see, what I was left with after returning from this trip wasn’t a feeling of satisfaction that I celebrated a milestone. Instead, I was left with something I can only describe as a burning desire to do more of it. But not with the Tesla. That was great and everything, but – I really didn’t like using public toilets every day!

So I got the idea to look at getting a campervan. With a toilet and shower. And get some real freedom while travelling around. And that’s what took me to look at ‘van life’ videos.

It wasn’t just about a campervan though, or even just the toilet and shower – although they were part of it. It was about being able to stop wherever I want, stay as long as I want, and move again when I feel like it, with no bookings, no return date, and no one else’s schedule attached to it.

There’s a vision I’ve been carrying since 2011. I wrote about it here: Roaming around.

I got a vision of me sitting beside a 4WD somewhere in the outback of Australia. The sun was setting, and the shadows of bushes and rocks were stretching across the landscape, and I was sitting there with my camera, taking photos of the landscape in the red light of a beautiful sunset.

The feeling I had when I saw this vision was something like, ‘This is what I should be doing…’

Fifteen years later that vision it still with me. It’s never gone.

I don’t know if it’ll be a 4WD that I’m in (again) sometime in the future, or if it’ll be a campervan (maybe a 4WD campervan?), but the vision – and the feeling – is still with me.

So I’m looking at campervans. I need to work out how to afford that, on top of all the other general costs of life. So I came up with a plan of sorts, to start an online business, a side gig to go along with my day job, and get that up to speed. And when the business is earning enough money consistently to pay for campervan finance, then I’ll get a campervan.

And that leads me to the next story.

Aspergers, and…?

Back in 2012 I read something that sounded uncomfortably like me, and it led me down a path of research and contemplation that resulted in me self-diagnosing as having grown up with Aspergers. It explained a lot about my whole life, so I accepted it as part of who I was. I embraced it as my history, and I guess as my identity too.

But a few months ago, I got the idea to get AI to interview me as a ‘medical professional’ to assess whether or not I actually had Asperger’s. The result was surprising.

By the end of the two-hour interview the answer was clear. ADHD has been running underneath my entire life as well as Aspergers – they were both there in the assessment.

The internal movies that played in my mind instead of whatever boring thing was happening around me. The hyperfocus when something genuinely interested me, and the complete inability to start when it didn’t – even when I wanted to do the thing. Fifteen years being unemployed after finishing high school, because nobody, including me, understood that my mind wasn’t lazy, it was just running on interest rather than obligation, and nobody around me had a name for that back then. A maths teacher once told me to slow down because I was three months ahead of the rest of the class. The moment he said it, I lost interest in learning altogether. That’s not a quirky anecdote. That’s the whole pattern in one sentence.

I want to be precise about what this discovery is and isn’t for me. It isn’t an excuse.

I’ve spent over twenty years actively rejecting the idea that I’m a victim of anything – my own circumstances included – and I’m not about to undo all of that now by deciding ‘my brain did it to me’. I haven’t taken medication at all throughout my life for any of this, and don’t plan to. What I’ve built over decades, a working life, a marriage, a daughter, I built without a diagnosis and without a label, through sheer bloody minded responsibility for outcomes regardless of cause. None of that gets handed back.

What this year has given me isn’t an excuse. It’s an accurate map of terrain I’d already crossed without any excuses. I wasn’t lazy, or ‘good for nothing’ – a phrase I heard often enough from my parents that I ended up believing it for twenty years. I was running my own specific mental hardware, in an environment built for different hardware, with no manual to tell me how to do it, and no one around me who could write one. I worked it out anyway, the slow and expensive way.

Knowing this now doesn’t change what I did. It explains how I did it, and why some of it cost more than it needed to.

And it’s something else to embrace, and add to my identity.

The threads coming together

None of this is new, when I actually look at it properly.

• The wanting to be back in Wellington didn’t appear this year, it’s been there for fifteen or more years, just unnamed and mostly unattended to.
• The pull toward travel and a self contained life on the road has shown up in things I’ve written going back well over a decade.
• The mind that jumps between projects – which explains so much that I’ve recorded in this blog over the years – and burns hot on interest and cold on obligation has been doing that since primary school.

None of it was absent. It was suppressed, or at least set aside, because life kept asking for other things and I kept supplying them. This year didn’t create any of it. It just produced explanations accurate enough to stop arguing with the feelings and start listening to them.

So here’s where I land, and I want to be honest about the part of this that’s genuinely new, because it isn’t the wanting. I’ve wanted versions of this before. There’s at least one other point, years back, where I named my Great Aussie Adventure plan, with just as much conviction, and it quietly went nowhere.

If you’ve read this blog a long time, you’ve probably watched me do that a lot – name something with real intensity and then not follow through. I’m not going to pretend that pattern doesn’t exist, or that this time is simply different because I’ve decided it should be.

What’s actually different is that I now understand why the pattern exists.

It was never that the desire wasn’t real, or that I lacked the discipline to follow through on things that mattered to me – I’ve proven that with my career, and with my successful marriage going on 13 years now. It’s that intention and action have never been reliably connected in my brain unless there’s genuine, sustained interest or real urgency attached, and naming a plan in a blog post generates neither of those on its own.

So this time the plan isn’t just a declaration. It’s a structure, creating work that pays without requiring my constant presence, built deliberately so the doing of it doesn’t depend on motivation I already know I can’t manufacture on demand.

I’m building toward a remote business, or several small ones – something I’ve also been talking about in here for decades – specifically so the campervan stops being a wish and becomes something that simply happens, the way paying a bill happens, because the system underneath it is built to make it happen rather than relying on me to feel like it on any given day.

I don’t know yet exactly when that lands, or what it will look like, or even if it’ll happen at all. I know the shape of it now, which is more than I’ve had before.

And I know that the place I keep wanting to get back to was never really Wellington at all. It was a version of myself who was distinct, present, and not performing for anyone. Wellington just happened to be where I last properly saw him.

Whatever this turns into, that’s who I’m actually trying to get back to.

Thanks for reading! Please add your own thoughts below.



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