Free

During 2 weeks in October lots of people who are part of The Turning Tides Project had the opportunity to stay in the beautiful Dream-a-way caravans at Sandy Bay.  We were there to practise living independently, try some new things, get outdoors and active, relax, spend some time together and have a lot of fun.

Here’s how Nathan felt about the stay:
 
What’s lockdown been like for you?
Lock down has been hell. Being closed off from the world is like losing your senses.
With everyone at home, I find it hard to work. The house has been full of constant noise.. I can only work when it’s peaceful and I know that no one is going to interrupt me. So, I’ve been in my room all the time. It feels like it’s the only place I can be myself and do what I need to do.

What would you like your life to be like in a year’s time?
I’d like to be living on my own and working towards living with my girlfriend. My home will be a 'man cave' and a place where I can work. I’ll have to get used to the local area so that I feel confident about finding my way around.

In the house, I think I’ll be able to do most things for myself. I’ll be fine with cleaning and making food. I’ll probably need some help with managing my budget and my bills, with reading my post and making sure I don’t get scammed. I’m a bit paranoid about my money getting stolen.

What have you done whilst you’ve been in the caravan?
We’ve had so much privacy – and that has been really good.
We enjoyed shopping for the things we wanted to eat and planning our menu. Cooking on our own was a lot of fun. It’s nice to do it without other people telling us what to do. We shared the washing up. We stuck to the budget we were given. We’ve kept the caravan clean.

We used a timetable to help make sure that everything we needed to get done, got done. We crossed things off as we did them. It worked well. Next time we’ll write the timetable ourselves.
We spent time with other people and by ourselves and planned our time carefully so that we could do what we needed to do and what we wanted to do.
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We managed to shop, cook and clean on our own. We took care of ourselves and each other. We hardly used our phones at all. We chilled out and enjoyed being with each other and other people.
 
I have just felt free. 

Written by Nathan, Published by Tom Burns