Sigma Birthday

Published on by LS Harteveld
This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.
Dear Sara,
.

I am writing you from a place of heavily mixed feelings.

Part of me is exhilarated to have cracked the code to her life, and knows what she’s doing.

But there is another part of me that has become painfully aware of a thick layer of trauma around things that are very close to home, and would theoretically need clearing out before this new life starts.
They currently revolve around being bullied by patriarchy on the moments I resisted being socialized. And that not being a closed chapter, but like a war that will never be won.
I have been on the cusp of social exile for as long as I can remember.

And that was week 2’s drama, after traumatic memories from childhood returning last week. And I will never share them because I have decided earlier this year that I will never do emotional labor for someone else, but that also means that no one else ever has to do mine.
I recently cried with a friend and – although there was nothing about it that could have been prevented or that was inappropriate in any way – it was the moment I realized the contrast between that one moment of vulnerability and no longer giving anything personal in all my other relationships.

The deeper layers in me are, and I would say “finally”, completely closed off. They are no longer taking part of my daily interactions, and this has been a strategic and conscious choice.

And yes, that’s a trauma response.
And also: It’s the best I can do.
There’s not going to be a part two, where I’m letting people in.

And also!
As sort of a mid-post PS, real connection at a pure 5D energetic level is still very much possible. I’m still present there, I live there. 
The sealed gates are only felt at earth level, which is not where we’re going to have any conversation of meaning anyway.
I am now ready to be the warrior who never sets foot outside the house without her armor.
Trusting people with the real me has proven to be a very unsatisfactory experience and I am, again “finally”, dressing for the occasion. 

So no details on week 2’s realizations on social exile, nor on week 1 of childhood memories, but I mention the sequence here to illustrate that I was disappointed when after properly, although grudgingly, finding a way to deal with those very unwelcome childhood memories in week 1, I had systemic social trauma coming for me in week 2.
It was the point when I realized:
This is never gonna stop.

Either I’m gonna do the work I am here to do, or I am going to waste my life figuring out what is haunting me, on repeat, like I’m in the Tartarus.
*in line with earlier explained policies around not sharing stressful stories, specifics about Tartaric torture have been omitted*

I can heal and work through traumatic layers of my past, and spend my precious weekends on it, or I can cut my losses and say;
Goodbye trauma.
I see you, I know you, and you’re welcome to take your seat in the back, but you’re not driving this bus and you’re not giving directions.

So there is all that, Sara.
An awareness that I went through so much excruciating stuff, and that the past tense there is definitely not a real-life-depiction of truth.
Past tense is a statement.
It’s a declaration that I decide those things are in the past.
Or, as I often see with Tarot readings on Instagram where viewers are encouraged to leave a message in the comments (but often do so without needing any encouragement);
“I claim this message.”

It’s over, it’s done, and after this acknowledgement that I enter this birthday carrying the scars of my past, fresh cuts as well as wounds that will never heal, we now get to the good part;
The Sigma part from the title.
Which is not a new thing, I ve written about it multiple times, but after a year or eighteen months of detours I’m circling back to the label because I find it the easiest and the most clear one.

A Sigma is someone who lives solitary and isn’t part of the emotional infrastructure of society. There’s different interpretations, but an agreed upon aspect seems to be that they are disciplined, have a plan in life and execute it.
A Sigma operates according to their own set of internalized values.

All things considered, it makes this birthday a mixed bag.

The acknowledgement of deeper wounds than I ever realized I was carrying.
The exhilarating choice to be Sigma, and Sigma only.
And the comfort that there is at least one friend with whom I can still cry.

All things considered, I claim this birthday.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for these letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Nederlands blog:
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New Foundation

Published on by LS Harteveld
Recently, I had a call with my creativity coach Sara
The email sent before our call was:
Men. Yoga. Writing.
This new series “The Day After” is written in its aftermath.
.
But today, I’m also using it as a soft disclosure of what will be, in all probability, the most important shift I have made in my entire life.
.

New Foundation

Even 35 years after the date – as 1991 is the year I am now in, conducting my back-in-time timeline experiment – I feel guilty positioning myself between gay men.
Men whose sex life was physically dangerous because of the aids crisis.
And whose sexuality at large was socially dangerous because society’s newly acquired “acceptance” of homosexuality had proven to be little more than veneer.
Although I do credit The Netherlands for not letting the gay community down and refusing to frame aids as a gay disease.

Someday I will probably have to be more nuanced and explain how pretending we were all at equal risk came at a cost of turning back sexual emancipation across the board.
And teenage girls in particular were barked back into the barn of patriarchy.
But ultimately, as my coach Sara pointed out when I said that in both pandemics, of 80s aids as well as the Covid pandemic, The Netherlands had been pretty specific with regard to the choices the government had made, ultimately human nature is the same everywhere.

Dehumanization of homosexual aids patients on one continent is rooted in the same deeper discomfort with sex as a whole, as that of a 1991 Lauren betraying her true sexual nature on the other side of the globe, because she knew that was the only way to stay connected to everyone she knew.
She stayed, in her way, in the closet.

So what can I say about this shift in my life, without immediately becoming disheartened by all the layers there are to this?
Is there an elevator pitch to this?
Probably not.
There’s no such thing as an elevator pitch to something that is both an artistic experiment (pretend-living in 1991) as well as what I would label sexual activism.

But the new direction my life is taking, and the new direction of the 1991 timeline project, is that I will redo my life from 1991 up, from the stance of:
“What would have happened if I had stayed sexually true to myself?”

Now there are multiple options here, of course.
Maybe Lauren 1991 will make the same choice real-me made back then, and have a monogamous relationship with safe sex. The in-the-closet option, that kept social and medical disturbances at a minimum.

Maybe she’ll repeat what I already wrote about in an earlier timeline project, which was to have an affair with Bear, who had other lovers while she was seeing him.
That type of affair never happened to me when I lived through the 90s.
It was redeeming to give that to myself in my first timeline project, which ran from 2019 (1994) to 2023-ish.

Or maybe “she”, Lauren 1991 in this second timeline project, will honor the fact that I never valued my partner being monogamous, and was only truly invested in the sexual part of relationships.
And had a love for gay men, bisexual men, and for adventures that were unforeseen and just went with the flow.

But what I want to highlight is a third option, one 1991 Lauren never knew she had and that to the untrained eye may look like America’s revival and re-instalment of promoting not having sex before marriage;
But that is actual a type of celibacy of an entirely different nature!
Which is abstinence (yes), but because having sex is too dangerous, too risky, as long as there is no proper hiv/aids treatment yet. An abstinence that comes with the understanding that you are still a sexual being, your sexuality is still honorable and in its true form. It’s just not practiced.

I think it was about 2015, when I read about that third option. An openly gay man told about how he had refrained from sex when there was no treatment. If I remember correctly he was about my age, so he had basically been halted in his tracks.
He never had a “carefree” time, quotation marks because the virus was already  being spread before the first infections were registered.

He gave this interview looking back, and said it had been an incredibly difficult choice to make at the time, but he did not regret it.
That was when I thought: “Wow! That is so cool! I could have done that!”

Honoring both my fear as well as my true sexual nature in the late 80s, early 90s, would have meant to say, just like that gay man;
“This (-) is my sexuality. But I am currently not practicing because it’s too dangerous.”

That’s not making abstinence morally better, and it’s not piggy-backing on religious values. That’s owning your sexuality, and also making a choice that aligns with the circumstances. 

I have so much more to say about how it was ultimately the 2020-2022 pandemic and radically falling out of love with society and losing all sense of belonging, that brought me back to the underlying dynamics of my difficult sexuality, a trajectory that I thought I had already corrected.
And a long time ago.
I had no idea I was still carrying “stuff” from that trauma of feeling so pressured to limit myself sexually, still things I had not put to words and did not fully understand.

This blog has dozens of articles of me deciphering the societal dynamics of the 2020 pandemic, when it was actually also me deciphering something that had happened in the 20th century.
And yes, there are also articles where I link this to the aids crisis, definitely.
And yet my current stance, and rekindled 1991 experiment, is different.
The talk I had with Sara locked in a new direction for my life and my work as a writer. And for that timeline project of being in 1991 and saying No to the easy solution of fitting in via a heterosexual monogamous relationship.
And saying Yes, to being different.

It’s about experimenting with accepting the social fallout in 1991, instead of seeing it implode in 2020.
It is about daring to see society exactly for what it is, and allowing deep isolation to happen before you’re 20 years old. 

It’s about choosing truth over comfort.
A sexual truth.

One that was a long time coming.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for these The Day After posts, my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/

Men. Yoga. Writing.

Published on by LS Harteveld
This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.
Dear Sara,
.

This is mostly a part II to the last letter I wrote you, where I came to the conclusion that my desire to be a yoga  teacher had been genuine, and that I was going to rebuild teaching it, in some shape or form.
And I did, rebuild.

Shortly after writing you I started an online space, where I can build a body of work. In the upcoming years I do not see myself having opportunity to teach classes in real life, but I will be able to hang on to my teaching skills this way, as well as being able to build towards having a global audience.
Something teaching locally would never be able to do, or if or when it does, it will be on top of online visibility anyway.
So the online option suits me well.

However, once I had successfully brought this online, it definitely took a while for the excitement to kick in, I have to say.
And when it did it the online yoga space was not a major part of it, but a minor one. A seed, not something in full bloom.

And as I’m writing this, days after the big breakthrough, even the excitement of that epiphany, the ecstasy of finally having life figured out, has entirely left me.
Which should come as no surprise because I’m writing this on Friday afternoon, which has become notoriously unproductive.
I want to squeeze in everything I did not get done over the week, when I don’t have the energy for any of those things.
I’m having trouble even keeping my eyes open, and just took a nap lying straight on the carpet, and it took tremendous willpower to end it after 15 minutes.

All in all, the festive mood of having it all figured out, and looking forward to writing it all down in this letter to you, has definitely left.
But I remember the parts, and how they went together.
So let’s go.

First of all, a recap of the yoga epiphany that started it all.
The one I wrote you about, last month, when the epiphany was that I realized that although the profession of being a yoga teacher had proven to come with some baked-in financial challenges that I was ultimately no longer able to outsmart or outrun;
It had been a legitimate choice, and one that dated back to the previous century.

That it had not worked out did not mean it had been the wrong choice. 
It had been my original profession, and practical concerns should not overwrite that.

So that’s all stuff I wrote last time, but what it inspired me to do is to take stock of other original things, that had been present from the very beginning.
Because if my turn of the century choice had been to become a yoga teacher, then what had been the rest of my original blueprint?

I identified music/ hardrock, but also Madonna.
Music was and is present in my life. It’s not something that suddenly falls out or something. Those areas do not require active management.

I suddenly remember one of the first emails I wrote you, in 2018, a drawing of a tree symbolizing what I was about.
The roots of the tree were Madonna (50%) and Men (50%). And the trunk and branches were split in two as well, with half being writing and half being yoga.
So I think that is one of the things that has not changed, because it was pretty much what I landed on this time as well.

That yoga had indeed been genuine, and truly me (half of the tree), but that the other two were writing (the other half) and men (the roots).
Madonna has taken a backseat, for non-specific nor dramatic reasons.
If I had to guess, I’d say it is because I integrated and internalized what she stood for to me. Like I said, nothing particularly dramatic or anything.

So since our last call and the redemption of yoga, I am looking for ways to integrate those two other areas back into my life, writing and men.
The writing, and in particular the body of work I created as Lauren Harteveld in the past. It’s something I’m not altogether clear on how to move it forward, but somehow being clear that Writing (or Publishing) is on my To Do or To Tackle list, is already clarity in its own way.

And the Men!
Oh, the men…..
Well, just like with Madonna, I think I integrated much of what they meant to me. And that, fortunately, a lot of what they stood for can be achieved by myself. And I also mean that punned 😉

But at the same time Men give my life its true meaning.
And I know how tone-deaf that is, in a time when women are finally, one-by-one, standing up, refusing to keep carrying the load of being society’s unpaid therapists and caretakers, and be the emotional-support laborer of the relationship or family.
No more, Sara!
Hell hath no fury like a woman no longer cleaning up after patriarchy.

So, yes, there is all that, and expect to see me at the barricades.
And at the same time?
Once we’re clear that from now on, we are all gonna clean up after ourselves and respect the sacred space of our conversation, our games, union and frankly just of society at large?
We are definitely ready to rock!
Because I love men so very very much.

Their defensive silences sealing off emotional depths the size of the Mariana trench, no one will ever set foot in.
Their two-punch jokes, that rely on you asking a predictable question.
Their sexual omnivorous nature, where the first flavor of what they do not like is yet to be invented.
I like their enthusiasm, their risk-taking.
I like how incredibly low maintenance they are, like dandelions happily sprouting from the cracked pavement and happy with a pizza and a beer.

I love their bodies, all shapes and sizes. They are like an entirely different species to me, so foreign. Like they hold an energy or ingredient I do not have myself, but on which my survival will depend.
The key to life but in a non-verbal way.

So again! There is all that!
And yet, still not done.
Because there is also a more quiet, and far less obvious thing men “bring” me, but that has nothing to do with them.

Because I am an entirely different person, when I’m dating.
Someone who takes excellent care of her body, and her house!
Two things that will become how I make my “Men Roots” operational.
And I’m nowhere there, just to be clear, but like with the humble yoga platform beginnings, and the At Least Now I Know I Got To Publish The Book beginning;
There is comfort in knowing what to do.
Taking care of my body and house, is a start.

Now naturally, I look forward to growing beyond these humble beginnings.
From an empty new online yoga space into a large online yoga empire;
A neglected collection of writings to a pristine collection of hardcover Lauren Harteveld books;
And from the mundane start of taking better care of my house and body,  to a bells and whistles sexual renaissance.

But these seeds of my new life have been planted, and the soil is being attended to.
The dandelions will be there, as they’ve always felt welcome.
And the rest will take a bit longer.

All in all, the old 2018 tree still proudly stands.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for these letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/

No longer that type of writer | Harteveld 2026*

Published on by LS Harteveld
Initially, I posted this without the cover-up; Until I realized that of course, the Goddess no longer has to reveal everything anymore either! So I gave her these fig leaves.

There is a conversation in Basic Instinct 2, a film probably only two people saw and half of them wrote this piece.

In the movie, the police psychiatrist asks writer Catherine Tramell, who is suspected with reckless driving causing the death of a lover:
“Do you ever write about yourself?”
She denies at which he asks her why not.

“Maybe I like to just sit back and get other people to reveal themselves. For instance, you look a little divorced.”

For over a decade, I did write about myself, and considered myself a diarist and erotica writer.
But by now, I’m enjoying sitting back getting other people to reveal themselves.
Without the smallest spark to ever reveal anything, ever again.

Instinctively, I’ve known this for a couple of years now. But it has definitely taken me a while to understand the Why, of not being an erotica writer, slash, diarist again.
The identifiable structure, underpinning it all.

Which was: normalcy.
Belonging.
A life of leaving no stone left unturned, and liberating myself from social and sexual constructs, was made possible because literally at the end of the day, I went to work as a yoga teacher.

And although the majority of my students knew I was also a writer, they always knew that was a separate world.
We all seemed to crave the yogaclass for its predictability and uneventfulness.

And that is a foundational structure to my life, that will never happen again.

Moving forward, I am aiming for a few markers that will bring parts of what I had back into my professional life.
Predictability, comradery, and even yoga itself.
But I do not see a way (yet?) to successfully lay out the full puzzle ever again.

And maybe ultimately, this turn is actually the way life intended it to be.
A good thing, in particular for that body of work that used to be my lived experience.
Because it has created distance from it, that allows me to start taking proper care of everything I wrote during those years.

To act as an agent and publisher of that past work, instead of still being consumed by the life that created it.

Like people inheriting and unpacking enormous collections or buying and restoring once abandoned houses.

I’m just happy to take care of it.

.~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2026*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The series started in 2025, inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk from the movie Thunderbolts*

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 project.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Weekend 1991. Ish. | year 1991 behind the scenes

Published on by LS Harteveld

Years? Decades? Last weekend I had the first weekend without doing any work in any way. I wrote a blogpost, but writing blogposts is basically as leisurely as it gets around here, so that does not count.

I once read there were four relaxation types, and one of them was movement. It was referring to people who need to physically move to relax, versus for example attending a social event;
But I see being creative as movement too.
Even when that creativity is productive rather than impulse-creating dozens of laminated vision board cards for private use.

I still recall that Saturday as one of the best I ever had.
Together with one where I created an actual vision board, which reminds me I should dig that up!

But last weekend was neither.
There were no creative sprees, and with the exception of writing the blogpost, I imagine it was a weekend that looked entirely normal.
And I deeply, deeply, loved it.

Swept off my feet by this new big love The Work-Free Weekend, I swore I would never go without this luxury.
A sentiment that lasted exactly until the next Friday night, when I started planning my upcoming 7 days. Only to fall equally in love with the idea of doing the creative work, this weekend.
And every weekend after.

Weekend = create

For every weekend I succeed to do that, I gain one workweek where I can let myself be totally swept off my feet by whatever happens.
And of course I imagine Whatever to be amazing adventures, unforgettable gettogethers, and once-in-a-lifetime moments of joy and meaning.

All, real life.
All, like it’s 1991.

Sacrificing a weekend, equals winning back one week for 1991 me.

But it’s not just the boon of the upcoming week that has me excited;
It’s like I’ve already dedicated this weekend to a lover.

Creativity, the lover who never leaves.


~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The story behind this time travel project has been added below, and adjusted to the format it will have in 2026..

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara;
The series Harteveld 2026*
And these Behind the Scenes of my 1991 timeline.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

About: the 1991 project

For an indefinite time, I will be moving to the, I assume fictional, timeline of (re-)living 35 years ago.
Making the current year 1991, and I’m switching to a new shorter format:
The number of characters will be my fictional age on this timeline x 100.
This means until summer 1991 (2026), they will be 1800 characters, representing 18 years old.
And after that 1900 characters.

This project has a predecessor, where I wrote as if I was in 1994 – 2000;
But this was mostly a literary (diary) undertaking.
I’m cutting back deeper into time, and do not intend to keep a diary. It is the living in the past itself, that is the art.

In September 2025 I came up with these goals, covering the first 8 years.

My 8 year goals are:
📵 to live a 20th Century life
🎸 to be a 20th century-inspired Rock journalist.
But on the current timeline.
So this means I make money creating content and speaking about rock music and 20th century things 
📚 publish Lauren Harteveld work 2010-2025
📢 to make the Lauren Harteveld legacy visible

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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Categories BTS

The Profession it always f* was | Harteveld 2026*

Published on by LS Harteveld

Rage.
That was the unexpected but so very welcome emotion. Somewhere between 1.5 and 25 years late.

But of course, as is often the case with her (I insist on calling rage feminine, the gender that can make the biggest claim to feeling it) I had no idea she was on her way, nor that she would bring an important message.

Because fuck that shit!
I let the bad guys (I insist on this being male) take my chosen profession away, poison it and internalize the loss of it, now questioning if I had ever wanted it.
Which was to be a yoga teacher.
My choice, late 20th century.
And it was one of the most authentic, heartfelt choices I had ever made.

Yoga, to me, meant mastery and therefor autonomy over one’s body.
It was liberating.
An act of rebellion.
A path to freedom.
It was a Fuck That Shit, with Punk Rock gusto.

Yet, what did I do?
I let it slip, fizzle out, a slow and painful death.
And now that I’ve switched industries, to something that I both love but also pays the fucking bills (I think I’ll keep swearing about this, for the rest of the century);
Now, I recoil.
Now, I realize what I fucking lost, and let capitalism and patriarchy win.

Patriarchy, because you can’t be a powerful female yoga teacher, who inspires physical liberation, in a system that represses sexuality for everyone, and objectifies women on top of that.

It’s impossible to be the professional giving people (I insist on this being all genders) physical autonomy when they have never been allowed to feel in the first place.

In retrospect, I had tiptoed around the force I knew would be unlocked if I taught yoga from power, and without watering it down.
I could not make myself do it, for many reasons, most of them purely professional. But also out of fear.

Because the system does not let you become The Great Liberator, and let you live. And if you’re a woman, you don’t even have to be a Great Liberator to be considered a threat. Staying unseen does not equal safety for us, and visibility compounds to very bad things.

Until it’s 2026, and although I fully understand why I abandoned teaching yoga, and acknowledge I never taught it the way I intended it;
Now, it is time.

Let me rephrase;
It is fucking time.

.
.~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2026*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The series started in 2025, inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk from the movie Thunderbolts*

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 project.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

The Nature of Reality

Published on by LS Harteveld
Recently, I had a call with my creativity coach Sara
The email sent before our call was:
The Sweetest Life
This new series “The Day After” is written in its aftermath.


The Nature of Reality

Our call was so abstract and complex, I already knew it would be impossible to come up with a catchy title, and still cover its essence. (and not be empty clickbait)

So to compensate for its lack of juicy content, I will try to keep it short, and therefor sweet.
And who knows!
Maybe these findings are the missing keys to your life, and you’ll find them fascinating and just what you need to turn everything around for the better.

To understand the conclusion, I first need to draw a picture of the impossible task I present Sara with, every time we start a call.
Which is that I barge into it, Kramer from Seinfield- style, and open with an unfinished but for some reason incredibly important-to-me model of reality, that I drop on our proverbial table.
My energy says: “Look Sara! Don’t mind the mess, I know there’s something brilliant in there somewhere, but I’m stuck.”
And then, without missing a beat, I take her deep into the rabbit-hole of some sort of highly abstract model of reality, that would explain my most pressing problem, if only I could find the final missing piece.

I often have moments when I fear she’ll one day say she’s tired of coaching me, because it is just too much. And she would be right.
But to me, her coachee, it is so welcome to have that one time every month, and that one person, with whom I can share these new inventions without holding back.

And low and behold! We always finish them.

Having an extra pair of eyes to assess what it is we’re really looking at, always turns out to be extremely helpful.

Maybe you too are someone for whom the solution lies with understanding how things came to be a certain way in the first place.
Someone who does not need, nor want, nor is in any way helped by, a conversation about how it makes you feel, but should instead wonder things like:
– How did I get here?
– Why is this in my life?
– Is it part of the larger constructs or contexts I have agreed to, or is it an intruder?

For example – and I really mean just any random example because this is not judgement but just the first thing that pops to mind – a preventative screening for diseases can cause a lot of complicated situations.

But if you had beforehand made a decision at a more abstract level that you personally believe in and endorse preventative screening, and that it is part of your life, then you can act much calmer if something shows up, because you’ve done the groundwork.
Whereas if you’re in the midst of medical unrest, it may be because you never bothered to make the principal decision if you want to even engage with that part of (preventative) medicine.

Very often we find ourselves in difficult situations that actually have multiple causes or are composed out of multiple layers.
Some of them could have been smoothed out, and dealt with, as if they were a separate chapter. Because they are.

Abstract problem solving, and abstract living according to your own values, makes life far less chaotic, stressed, and like you’re at the mercy of other people’s ideas and interventions.
It enables you to make conscious decisions, and push your own agenda.

For me personally, pulling a problem apart into its components has proven to be the only real way to solve it. And some have taken me decades, but now that I know what I’m doing, and also have Sara to look over my shoulder, the process has sped up for sure.
And new problems actually excite me, because they’re like a puzzle.

With the medical stuff I mentioned, my decision is to reject screening, but I would have been equally happy if I had decided to be pro-screening, and might have gotten more screenings than Dutch government offers for free.
So the secret is not in the choice itself but in the fact that I’ve made a conscious choice to begin with.
And these are choices at an abstract level, before you take it down to execution level.

But the catch is that most problems and situations are not singular, but have many moving parts!
Which means that before you can make a decision or understand why something did not or does not work, you need to develop a working model of reality.

You have to come up with an abstraction of your problem;
Only then, can you make this decision or understand what to change for better results.
And making new models takes a lot of times. And, in my case, a lot of calls with Sara.

“My only task is to help someone to keep on going,” Sara said.
She wasn’t looking for the satisfaction of providing magical quick fixes or in being able to claim miracle results thanks to her amazing coaching skills.

If what I needed to keep going were meta conversations, centered around a pile of unfinished ideas;
Then she was happy to help.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

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New books will be added.

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The Sweetest Life

Published on by LS Harteveld
This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.
Dear Sara,
.

The best thing would be if I could write you I’ve got my dream man, my dream job, my dream business, my dream life and, why not, the dream body where I elegantly float through life as a 1991 yogini.

But what would be the next best thing?
How about: I can feel it’s all there, and I am absolutely stoked?

I can’t really pin down when it happened, which is a shame because then I’d know how to recreate it. On the plus side, I can’t hoard or hold on to it for dear life either, because I have no idea what it is.
So there are benefits to being clueless why life suddenly feels so good.

The closest thing I can compare it to is one of those early memes where a cute looking sticky man with large eyes carries a big jar with a label that says Happiness. And they say, in respons to something I forgot:
“Thank you, I made it myself.”

Without downplaying all the generous and unwavering support I got from so many people, including you because you have been with me ever since the walls came crumbling down in 2018, the closest thing I can say about this dangerously high level of bliss is;
“Thanks. I made it myself.”

Only to then be unable to resist and analyze it after all, even though I don’t have a clue what I’m looking for.

We start, of course, with the men.
Because I’m the only feminist still insisting her world should revolve around men, despite having the cognitive skills to reason that obviously, it should not.

The general reason why the men in my life have started to feel so good, is because since 2024 I’ve started falling in love again. There’s movement in an area that had fallen completely out of order over the years.
And I’ll leave it up to the imagination which area that is, because I like being mysterious.

But more than facts or details, it’s just the entire vibe of my love life that has changed. For a long time, I’ve had the endgame in mind to be able to feel (big apology for the theatrical language) like an absolute Goddess, fully owning my sexuality but completely independent of if I have lovers or not.
And that is exactly what has happened.

It’s best explained as a feeling of sovereignty.
There is so much, that is no longer on the table.
And if you caught the sexual reference, then that was punned. The Goddess demands a proper bed.

Simply put, sovereignty means I’m not going to share my life in any traditional, or non-traditional, sense.

As soon as I wrote it out, the word sovereignty also gave me the key to what the jar of happiness is made of. Fortunately, because I do not feel like analyzing every area of happiness. Just analyzing it by my changed relationship to men, already gave away the answer.

Sovereignty is the reason I’m now suddenly carrying around this big jar of happiness, looking forward to lovers, career, business and the whole rest of my life, because I got everything handled and whatever happens on top of that will spark even more joy.
Give more satisfaction, interaction, meaning and purpose.

Every area of my life, I’ve already determined how I relate to it, and what my version is.
Including estimating the maximum price I am willing to pay to live this independently.

It’s like I engineered something I always believed was up to chance, until it was within my control.

There is an old riddle about two guards, guarding two doors. One leads to heaven and one leads to hell. The guard in front of hell will always lie, and the one in front of heaven will always tell you the truth.
What question should you ask, to know which door to take?

The riddle teaches us how to navigate uncertainty, by using what little certainty we do have.
But prior to that, there’s an even bigger message;
Only walk through gates if you know exactly where they lead to.

In particular, if they’re guarded.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for these letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 diary.
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Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/

Herstory Repeating | year 1991 behind the scenes

Published on by LS Harteveld

I have no idea if this is a disappointment or a relief, but this timeline experiment seems to be leading to redoing everything I thought I regretted.
Or at least could be improved upon.

Last year I started a project of living 35 years ago, but this wasn’t my first timeline project.

In 2019 I already had one, going back 25 years, where I translated my real (2019) life to what the events would have looked like in 1994.

Two most striking elements (and, in al fairness, the only two that were consistent) were to translate my affair with someone I had up until then written about as “Mr.Big” to 1994, where he would be a 20-something called Bear.
And the other one was of course making this Lauren 1994 a diarist and aspiring published writer.

When that project had slowly fizzled out, I did not choose to reboot that timeline, but to create a new one.

Instead of continuing in the year 2000, I set it back to 1990.

Lauren was having a leap year, so she had not yet started university, and it was unclear if she ever would.

And instead of having an affair with Bear she had chosen to stay alone.

This new Lauren 1990 was not a writer nor a diarist, and I was sure this time would be different.

By cleaning up my online behavior I did what I could to get a sense of the holy grail of feeling like 1990.
And yet, this whole offline life thing stayed so, so flat…

Until I realized 1990 wasn’t just about removing;
It was about adding.

Because interaction with boys, later with men, has always been pretty much my whole reason for existing.
Which was magnified when I started writing about it as well.

So to come to life, 18 year old Lauren did not need me to substract anything, but to add 2 things;
1. A lover
2. A diary

And the diary was optional.


~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The story behind this time travel project has been added below, and adjusted to the format it will have in 2026..

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara;
The series Harteveld 2026*
And these Behind the Scenes of my 1991 timeline.
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About: the 1991 project

For an indefinite time, I will be moving to the, I assume fictional, timeline of (re-)living 35 years ago.
Making the current year 1991, and I’m switching to a new shorter format:
The number of characters will be my fictional age on this timeline x 100.
This means until summer 1991 (2026), they will be 1800 characters, representing 18 years old.
And after that 1900 characters.

This project has a predecessor, where I wrote as if I was in 1994 – 2000;
But this was mostly a literary (diary) undertaking.
I’m cutting back deeper into time, and do not intend to keep a diary. It is the living in the past itself, that is the art.

In September 2025 I came up with these goals, covering the first 8 years.

My 8 year goals are:
📵 to live a 20th Century life
🎸 to be a 20th century-inspired Rock journalist.
But on the current timeline.
So this means I make money creating content and speaking about rock music and 20th century things 
📚 publish Lauren Harteveld work 2010-2025
📢 to make the Lauren Harteveld legacy visible

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
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Categories BTS

Enlightenment or de-socialization? | Harteveld 2026*

Published on by LS Harteveld

It happened when I had my own place again. And depending on how you count, you could say it was actually the very first time that I had my own place.
Just for me.

The lease was temporary, but it was with a real building cooperation, not with a landlord.

It should have felt isolating.
I was used to living with other people and even when I wasn’t, I had a partner one phone call away.
We shared dinners, and we shared our bed.
I was never really alone.

Until after a long process of letting each other go;
I was.
And it was absolutely intoxicating.

Now by this time I had a decade of spirituality under my belt. My shelves were filled with books about yoga, Tantra and Louise Hay;
I had a double yoga teacher certification, one of them a 4 year yoga training.

But nothing had prepared me for the instant enlightenment the moment I started living alone.

And there was something that magnified the effect;
I didn’t have internet.
It would not be connected for months, I ran my yoga business from my landline and checked email on the computer at a gym where I worked.

When the pleasant haze had worn off, I thought I understood what had happened which was that living alone, had made me enlightened.
In other words; We are all, already, enlightened!
But our social structures repress it.

You do not need a retreat or to spend years in an ashram.
You “just” need to live alone.
This is usually way more expensive than even the most expensive retreat, and not encouraged by the society we live in (in particular not when you are a woman);
But still!
I decided to never forget this insight.
Living alone = enlightenment

I am currently coming out of a profound and prolonged period of social isolation. By now, none of my relationships are casual anymore;
They’re chosen.

And looking back on the earlier experience, I realize;
I didn’t understand all of it.
Because early 21st century me could not yet see WHY living alone had led to enlightenment.
What it had been, that had kept her in darkness when she lived a more connected life;
Unseen social dynamics.

My earlier interpretation had been very personal.
I thought it was him, I thought it was me, I assumed it was us.
But our heterosexual relationship had been an entry point where expectations of the whole World could come in.

A place for myself, was the foundation.
The recent time period of isolation, an initiation.

And the real journey, has only just begun.
.
.~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2026*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The series started in 2025, inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk from the movie Thunderbolts*

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2026* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1991 project.
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Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld