Julie Van

Social Media Marketing Director

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.” Mark Twain

Tears trickled down my cheeks as I sternly stared at myself in the mirror asking, “Who is Julie Van? Why am I here? What am I doing? Why am I crying if life’s so perfect?” I was 19 going on 20, and life’s been lived on the safe side. There’s always more to life, but it came down to how much more I was willing to take before I was content, and it became apparent that I wasn’t as satisfied as I had thought I’d be.

As a child, I liked to learn new things, and I didn’t always mind the penny-scented blood and salty tears that sometimes resulted. I was an inquisitive one, maybe even an exhibitionist in retrospect. All kids have questions they’d love to ask, but I loved to find things out for myself—answers weren’t quite as satisfying when they’re told rather than experienced. I felt unbounded—as though I was the exception, especially when it came to the old proverb, “Curiosity killed the cat.” I used to think people were filming me as though I were Jim Carrey’s character from the Truman Show. How else would it explain why I have a family of nine when everyone else has a family of four or five? Yeah, don’t answer that. Plus, my siblings always used to tell me they found me in a trashcan, and I believed it too–something about that story seemed fishy, so it gave more reason as to why I was Truman Burbank.

Somewhere along the line, I lost who I used to be as I developed the habit of “playing it safe.” Speech after speech, I recall my father lecturing about life, and of them all, I remember one very well: the three types of learners in the world (those who learn from others mistakes, those who learn from their own mistakes, and those who never learn); my father claimed the smartest of those three were those who learned from others. I didn’t quite understand as much as I thought I had at the time, but I did know that I wanted to be the smartest one. This led to life on the safe side for years to come, and one day, I found myself short of my previous identity.

I realized that I’d never had the chance to be a “kid.” I never got to do most things that I wanted to do–and I found myself trying to live as many childhood dreams as I can. After much thought and much time, I decided to take a leap into the risky side. I wanted to complete some of the things I’d always wanted to try but deprived my instincts of. I tried questioning what career I wanted (from surgeon to firefighter), riding motorcycles (from Ninja to Honda), I tried driving cars (from FF to FR), and things were only limited to where I drew the line; I was empowered. This was around the time I bought my Cressida (May 2009). By September 2009, I became an official member of JZXProject.com after a long application process and endless emails proving I’m female and a genuine owner of my Cressida; apparently, I was the first female who’d ever applied, and they refused to believe a girl could actually like a Cressida and chose to build one. This was also the time when I decided to submit my application to Drifting Pretty. Everything since then moved very quickly and growth was exponential.

From then, I’ve been involved in this community. With their help, I had people I felt comfortable to come to to build my foundations and grew into researching independently and building my own dream car. I learn more and more through our Drifting Pretty Instructors, and mainly from Benson and Nadine. They’re amazing people with very big hearts and so is everyone—no one’s ever short of a smile. They’ve grown to become a second family to me, and I have so much more to grow with them. Drifting Pretty has grown to become a big part of who I am today and so has all the life changes from when I was 20 until now. I hope that when another twenty years go by, I’ll be able to have tears of joy, love, and contentment when I find myself in the mirror.