Saturday August 29, 1995          
4 P.M.  

On September 1st, I’m starting my new life.        
I still can’t believe it, but here it is;         
I’m becoming a yoga teacher and starting my own publishing house.

There is no telling what the future will bring, and if it ultimately will be enough to sustain myself. But having lost a year of my life, the upcoming September certainly feels better than the last one, when I had just started working as a copy-editor for a publisher.       
It paid well, and I learned many things.
But it wasn’t satisfactory, and I knew I could do better. Both in terms of publishing as well as writing my own books, which mattered to me even more.

However, the decision to quit, and switch to work I adore, had ultimately become inevitable because I had been robbed from my only compensation, only sedation, the only thing that made the dullness of being a desk editor bearable:           
My love life.      
My phobia for aids/hiv has returned at a time when I no longer expected it. I’ve been with Bear for so long, and there’ve always been other girls so I thought I was able to enjoy my love life with the little risk of contracting something if the condoms were not enough, or not used well enough.     
The risk of safer sex not being safe enough.        
But as it turns out, I can’t.

It’s almost as if overcoming my hiv/aids phobia with Bear, meant exactly that: With Bear.        
And that’s where it stayed.         
Every new lover would be a whole new ballgame.

I’m getting psychological help, but I’m not counting on that to work miracles. At least not short term because there is a long waiting list.
I could overcome it by myself again. But then what? Face this demon again, with every new man? Or with every lover added?

When I move from one lover, to two, to three perhaps?  
I don’t know if I am able to be intimate with more than one man at a time. I know I can be in love with more than one man, so I think my default sexuality is to have more than one lover. 
Ideally I see one permanent lover, and that we live together.       
And from there we both have adventures, we both have other lovers.

This time I want a strong mental foundation for my new love life, and not a flying by the seat of my pants solution, that may or may not last.
That’s why I see myself addressing this with the proper mental help, and not hit rock bottom again so suddenly.        
It was as if I was given an exact number of days for which I would feel healed, or a partial healing that was only valid as long as it was with Bear, and after that the spell would be broken.
For the first time I felt I would have been better off, if I had tackled this with a psychotherapist at 17, instead of fixing it myself only to have to solve the exact same problem six years later.

The phobic attack was ugly. I forgot how ugly they were. How lonely, ghostly, numbing. How the coldness of the fear crept into your bones in the middle of the night. I had to forget it, to get over it.            
If I had lived on with that memory, I would not have mustered the courage to ask Bear to be my lover, and to have all those years we had.

This relapse may have been prevented, or at least I would have known the frailty of my ability to have affairs, if I had tried to have more lovers and not be so dependent on Bear. If my college years had been filled with more experiences with different men, would it then have been easier?
Would Bear’s presence, even from a distance since we didn’t see each other on a regular basis, have been a form of cushioning?
Would he have been available to catch me, even?                          
Would Bear have helped me through those nights, when I came home from another man and my body shook violently with fear?

It’s not that I blame myself, but it’s just such a big disappointment. I lost Bear in December when he broke up with me. He’s with his new girlfriend now. But I didn’t know I had also lost my nerve, my healing. And that the old fears would come back to haunt me, and make my life miserable.        
Or very productive, since I’ve become an independent yoga teacher, a writer and publisher.  
I’m going to throw myself at my work, and let the professionals take care of my mental health, and that will be “all” I will be investing in my own healing.             

There is however one perk, one aspect of my life that I had vetoed but that I had longed for, and that had taken me a lot of effort to talk myself out of. Because I can now keep a diary, without incriminating a lover!  
There is no one else, I am my own significant other.

Until I am able to deal with my fears, I have only one vacancy:   
For The One.    
Or at least I think that’s how you call someone who doesn’t mind being there for you the next day.     
Who sits by your bed when you don’t feel well, and fear robs you of your breath. The One who promises that you’ll get through this together.        
The One who accepts I am a 23 year old erotica writer, and that he’s the lover who came to me, when I needed him most.         
Both, sexually as well as literary.

.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living