I Can Do Hard Things

I set myself free from a stationary life on March 1, 2025, to travel around the country looking for my forever home or as I call it, my Downtown Disney. My first stop was in Pensacola, FL, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It was a bit of a rough start with my first hurdle being, “the jack”.

A few weeks before I planned to leave, I noticed my jack wasn’t working. No power even though it was connected to the battery (which was new). I called out a technician and he said it was the fuse which he replaced and all seemed to be fine when he left. Fast forward to my departure day… camper was loaded, truck was loaded and ready to be hitched to the camper. I went to raise the jack and nothing. It was dead again. I called the technician but he didn’t answer, so I had no other choice but to get out the manual crank. For some this would be no problem, but for me, almost sixty years old and haven’t been working on building my arm muscles, it was difficult. I had to manually raise the jack to be able to connect to my hitch. That means I had to raise the front of my loaded camper with a metal bar/crank! Then once it was attached to the truck hitch I had to raise it even higher, including my truck, to attach the weight distribution and sway bars to it. Good grief, that was testing my abilities… but I was determined. Also, because I had a reservation that I had already paid for, so no giving up. I kept hearing my sister’s voice in my mind, we can do hard things, we can do hard things…

Yes we can. I did it, I attached the camper to the truck and the bars. Then the technician called me back... of course after I did it manually. He said it was probably the fuse again, so he walked me through replacing it… again. All was fixed and I was ready to take off on my adventure, starting at Pensacola. The drive was pretty easy and not too long. Thankfully I reserved a pull through site, since backing up a camper wasn’t something I had practiced as much as I should have. Once I was there, I was ready to unhitch and wouldn’t you know it, the darn jack blew the new fuse! I was panicking at this point because I didn’t know why it was happening. So, back to the handy dandy manual crank. I’m getting good at that tool. Got everything unhitched, got everything set up (electric, water, sewer), put all the extra stuff I threw in my truck at the last minute, into my camper, went inside, shut the shades and collapsed onto my bed. I took a nap for a few hours (I never do that unless I day drink). When I woke up, I looked around at the disaster inside my camper. It looked like someone had picked it up, shook it all around and then set it back down. Completely exhausted, I decided to put the image of the chaos in my camper out of my mind. Just like Scarlet O’Hara said, “I won’t think about that today, after all, tomorrow is another day.”

The next day, I woke up and broke down into tears. I felt like I had made a huge mistake. I even pulled out my laptop and started to search for places to rent. Thankfully my son called and talked me off the ledge. He said I would regret it if I gave up so soon and he was right. Then my sister called and walked me through the reasons I was feeling the way I was feeling. Turns out I just needed to get rid of some things I thought I would need, find out what was going on with the jack, and to organize the camper into a functioning place for me to live and work. That worked. A technician came out and attached a breaker and increased the fuse. That seemed to be the solution.

Each day after, I settled into the new life of living in 24 sq ft instead thousands. I have everything I need and if I don’t, I’ll go buy it. I can do this… I can do hard things!