It’s midnight here, I m shaking and had the most awful week. And yet I feel I had such an important insight, which has the potential to alienate me from the people around me; I just need to get this written now.
Will have mistakes/ be draft. 
I ll clean it up tomorrow.
But I had a terrible insight. Or maybe not so terrible, since it was either this.
Or suicide.
And to then have me coming to this, ain’t that bad.
I had the most horrific week, emotionally. A lot of loneliness, as well as a business dispute which cost me so much energy, but most of all the whole week had this aura of failure.
Not just of my yoga company.
But the realization that somewhere along that path of becoming a yoga teacher and having a business, I have lost sight of who I was.
Which doesn’t just mean that the development of ME, has ceased. But also that I have lost traits I still possessed before.
My spontaneity.
My outspokenness.
Looking people in the eye.
Faith in myself.
The past two decades have been one slow but steady slope down the hill of mediocrity and people pleasing.
Toning myself down and keeping my mouth shut.
Tonight I realized I haven’t spoken my real voice on my writer’s account under my real name, even though that’s what I expected would happen after being a yoga teacher. I was now free. I didn’t need a pen name. 
That had been the whole idea.
And I knew it was because I had nothing to say there.
Nothing that was between the lines that had been set out for me, due to the yoga career for sure. But mostly due to myself.
Maybe I had become tired in my twenties of standing out.
Or maybe I just expected that becoming a professional required being agreeable. Not charismatic.
Who knows what happened.
All I know was that tonight I thought about taking my life because I just didn’t see the point in living.
Now this is not a new thought.
Ever since my cat died at the beginning of this year, I ve been prone to darker thoughts than I even knew existed. And yet before January, I never held them possible for myself.
I ve never been depressed, or burn-out or anything like that.
And I m 46.
But give me a life without cat, and I start wondering after how many days without drinking I ll die. And how to plan that so that no one finds me.
In 74 days I ll have cat M again. She stayed over 10 weeks, August to October. And it were the happiest weeks of this year.
Having her again after the renovation, is what I look forward to.
But tonight that wasn’t enough to guard off the demons and I had a melt-down.
I wrote a blog post under my real name, which basically came down to me realizing I wasn’t inclined to write real things, under my real name.
That that blog would always remain only my most childlike, the cutest, version of me.
And that was okay.
Just not what I had imagined what it would be like, after I had become a full-time writer.
But in itself, having all the real stuff here as LS Harteveld? And the cute innocent side of me there, under my real name?
That’s not a bad thing. That could work.
It wasn’t until after writing that (pretty raw!) blogpost under my real name, and yet still the suicidal thoughts came, that I realized:
“I m missing something here. And it isn’t a cat.”
Because in my rush to separate Interesting Tell All Me (LS Harteveld), from cute and fluffy me (real name), I failed to see – or I did see that, I just didn’t think it mattered to the point of suicide – that I would still have to go to events or parties or even employers or God knows what the future would bring:
Being agreeable.
Being sensitive to what others thought.
NOT speaking my mind.
I may have an outlet on paper, in the form of my pen name. But whether my real name account was a yoga teacher? Or a fluffy writer?
Didn’t make that much of a difference.
It would still have to go to places and make conversation in a beat-around the bushes kind of way. Hell! I may even still have people in my first circle who would not like certain aspects of who I was, and who would hang on to this fluffy writer side.
And see it as proof that I was a good person.
And I didn’t MEAN “it” that way.
It was almost a reversed coming out; where instead of the yoga teacher persona, I know had a writer facade to cover up for all my LS Harteveld work. 
I could now actually say: “I m a writer” 
And everybody would think: “Oh! The fluffy one!”
But it was most of all trying to protect the people I knew, not the people who were new to me, that drove me to madness.
I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Not at all.
And I thought they were entitled to having nice parties, and social gatherings, and I did feel out of place there often. The times I spoke my mind.
And then, feeling all awkward and socially handicapped, I thought:
“Oopsie! Must not speak my truth again!”
Whereas now, on this Friday night November 23, contemplating on the most humane, non-disruptive way, to end my life?
I know: NO.
Can’t do the sitting up and the fake smiling.
But I can’t do the opposite and speak my truth either, as if there’s only ONE truth right? Of course not! 
And I know so VERY well that people use differences of opinion to let stuff escalate on a surface level. That it’s merely a sign of deeply rooted differences, that cannot be solved. Nor need they be – on a surface level.
Suddenly I knew, what my truth was:
That I share my truth, not because I want to provoke.
Nor hurt.
But because I need to make sure that at a deeply rooted level, we are on the same page.
And that apparently, at this point in life, I can honestly say that I am no longer capable, nor willing, to operate at surface level.
This could mean that I lose acquaintances. Mostly I think it means that I won’t attend social events that require me to play nice and fluffy Me.
I like that fluffy writers account I have under my real name.
I like that side of me, I really do.
And I also like telling everything that comes from the soul here, as LS Harteveld. Without everybody who knows my name, simply because they’re my plumber or something, being able to Google it.
But that plumber or the mail man, is really as far as I m willing to go, when it comes to facades.
On the 23rd of November, 2019, I want to be able to say:
“I ve been my true to myself for 365 days.”
And feel that’s it’s okay to be me.
Instead of wanting to end it all.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Cry Baby is the thirty-sixth chapter from Project M. 

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