One area in my life effected positively by my time-traveling projects, are my self-made postcards for New Year.
I have always made them myself but didn’t really land on a formula.
They varied from a sonnet, to a hand-drawn comic, to two of them being from the pond in my backyard in the years I rented a family home.
One from an incredibly large frog, unexpectedly appearing in spring and sitting there like he owned the place. Which he probably did.
And the year after I photographed the pond’s waterlilies.
The house also had a shed with a stone marten, but they never made it to the card because I never saw it. Even if I had it would have been too quick to make a photo.
But I recognize stone marten smell ever since.
It’s the smell of carnivore poo, you can also smell it in the predator enclosure in the zoo.
So over the course of my life making New Year cards was a recurring theme. Yet I was aware that it had started to slip.
Inspiration was running low, and although I didn’t realize it, it was at the point where it would either fall by the wayside entirely;
Or be upleveled into something I could commit to.
And then, a couple of years into my first timeline project which I did from 2019 to early 2025;
A couple of years in, I suddenly saw the light.
I would make a card, explaining my timeline project, and wishing everybody a happy 1998.
I repeated it the following years as well (1999, 2000), and assumed I would keep this going forever.
Until early 2025 when I noticed the timeline project in its current form, was no longer alive.
By now it was in the year 2000 and both my love life as well as my love for the project, had been cold for over a year.
The timeline, was dying.
If I wanted the fate of my love life (which was supposed to be the star of this whole project. Kind of like the frog!) to be different, something needed to change.
So I picked up an old timeline. Imagine a Star Wars scene where they find old spaceships, crashed into the ground a long time ago, during wars long forgotten.
That’s how I found this timeline.
Because I had already been toying around with this one, on and off. It was linked to the idea of living in 1988 or 1989.
Visual for this paragraph:
A foggy rain forest and a woman investigating a site with crashed spaceships, overgrown with forest vegetation.
She wonders if she’s attracted to the idea that the spaceship era might revive?
Or to the idea that it will not? And that this remote site with its abandoned relics will be hers alone.
That’s how I scavenged my old timeline projects, wondering if I should pick them up.
I had written about those experiments (living or drawing inspiration from 1988/1989) before, but had never pushed through.
Therefor, they had never become a “real” timeline. Nor did any of the things I had connected to it taken root or were any of its goals achieved.
But this year (2025), with my initial timeline project flatlining in the year 2000, I decided to give this other 90-ish scenario a serious go.
And although definitely not perfect, I could feel this was the breath of fresh air I needed, as well as what the reboot the whole (let’s be honest: WEIRD) idea of doing a time travel project needed.
That the first timeline project, 1994-2000 (2019-2025) had been a draft version, my early work, perhaps just an experiment.
And that now, with the new 1990-ish timeline, I would get serious.
So this December, creating my new cards to wish everybody a happy New Year, I did not continue on the previous storyline (where the new year would have been 2001), but I explained I had opened a New Timeline.
And wished everybody a happy 1991.
I used a photo from myself from 1990, but it was more like “THE photo” (not “a” photo) because it turned out, I only had one set of photos from 1990.
As if the first time around, I had left the thinnest trail of myself, so I could relive it again. There was an abundance of concert clippings though, and other souvenirs and keepsakes. But it was in particular the music clippings that interested me.
Apparently I had been trying to expand my horizon from the bands I loved and adored, to a more broader palette of rock and metal.
You could say I was dipping my toes in the water of becoming a rock journalist.
A dream that came back to me this year, even before I found the clippings. I now have a small collection of reference works from the 70s and 80s, that would have kickstarted my career as a rock journalist in 1990.
Over the course of 2025 this new 1990 timeline had naturally started taking shape already.
And finding the gap in my 1990 photo album reinforced this idea, this was indeed where it was supposed to land.
There was space here, to live it a second time.
So I created the cards, ordered them, wrote them, and was already starting to feel really good about how smooth it had all gone this year, and how ahead of the game I was!
With a little luck some people would even have it before Christmas, and I was confident everybody would have it before the New Year.
On another positive note there had not been major changes in the list of addressees either. Just a few minor ones, which were related to professional choices, situational changes and I sent a few extra cards to people with whom I had reconnected this year.
A drama-free year, without any breakups.
Here I was, at the post office, thinking how fortunate I had been, when I discovered the stack of mail had caught some unexpected, but extremely minor, water damage.
It had silently wiped out every letter it could get its slippery hands on, and I discovered the few single drops had not come alone. Multiple envelopes were damaged, although miraculously none of the essential part of addresses (which would have required my address book) had been affected.
Everything that had been smudged, I could easily redo.
And I had stickers on me so I could fix up the envelopes before posting them.
So there they went: A few of them a bit battered, but most of them fortunately still in their original pristine condition.
Except now of course I knew how fragile both their good looks as well as their addresses were…
They could all be taken out and disappear forever.
This year’s events around this card, activating this 35 year old timeline, confirmed what the silent death of the year 2000 had already proven;
Timelines can be created in the blink of an eye, but they’re volatile, unpredictable and can disappear without anyone noticing..
Keeping your timeline alive will require focus, effort and willpower.
And possibly, stickers.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living
This is a letter to
“What message for my readers?”
This is a letter to
Babysteps, according to some, are an inefficient and even dangerous way to move around.
LS Harteveld 