“We have every right to be powerful, in whatever form of sexuality we choose to have.
And no one is allowed to take that away from you.”

Sharon Stone GQ Awards 2019

This is the behind the scenes (BTS) diary, of my third time travel year 1996-1997.
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This first post starts a month ago, because BTS was originally intended to be an offline diary. 

OCTOBER – IT HURTS

Friday 15 October 2021           

For quite a few times today, a day spent only behind my computer because I had one blogpost { one of the final chapters to 1995-1996 } to take down and save, because its sexual explicit content had given me a panic attack, and I also wrote a closing chapter/ final blogpost to a series called The Covid Diaries, and I had an online workshop; 
During that day where I only sat, and worked, and was totally absorbed in basically setting up the basics to transfer my work from blogging, to writing, from online to offline;   
On that day I thought, “That new thing, BTS, is not really necessary. It will only make things more complicated. I will delete it tonight.”           

When now that it’s nighttime I know how crucial this new series is. BTS, Behind The Scenes.     
I need this for my own sanity.

So what happened to writing about my sex life that suddenly bit me in the butt?            
Why didn’t I coach myself to being comfortable with my sexually explicit blog post, called “Promotion”, a chapter to my fictionalized 1996 diary?      
Why didn’t I work through the resistance?         

First of all because the anxiety attack I experienced this morning, was particularly violent.       
I had clearly hit a nerve somewhere, and I felt that taking the post down was a solution that had a limited time window to being effective.         
If I wanted to stabilize with a quick fix, I had to act fast.

The second reason I decided quickly was because I am developing my work and media personality, under my real name.               
My alter ego Lauren Harteveld, now more than ever, needs to be a place of solace. A place of feeling nurtured.                
Not a place where I get stressed out over having sex blogposts.

I’ve known for a while that the nature of my work here would have to change, in order to step into this new role under my real name.  
I just had not thought it through yet.    

Waking up with a panic attack over the sex post was my cue the time had come to scale down on LS Harteveld, and transfer the intimate parts to offline.    
That was the price I was willing to pay for peace of mind, working under my real name and be the real me.

My future was not one where I would wake up suffering from a panic attack from a blog post for my alter ego I had posted the night before.

But thirdly, and this is why it was actually good news and I did not look further for reasons to keep the sex post up, because the final reason I decided I would go underground, was that I want to write so much more about sex!
More explicitly than the post that was already giving me panic attacks.

The post I took down was a 1996 fictionalization of a 2021 email I had sent to a man I correspond with. 
Now it had become a letter Lauren 1996 wrote to an English bootleg trader called Nikki. A blog post. And one that scared me so much, I changed my mind.

The real problem had been that the taken down blogpost was still just a fraction of the honesty and the intimacy I had shared in my email. The contrast had been stark. And confronting.            
Every time I reread my blogpost, I realized it lacked the level of truth and intimacy my email to the real life Nikki had.               
It felt like such a betrayal of something pure. I had censored myself.

Originally, meaning before taking it down, I had planned on writing a second blogpost this weekend.
A second fictional letter to the character of Nikki, but now including details I had left out. And to frame it as being a second letter Lauren in 1996 would write to her friend Nikki, because she had not been ready to share.             

But the panic attack showed me there was no way I would take it up a notch.
New professional-me under my real name, would not be able to write such scary blogposts under my alter ego.      

If I really desired the same level of intimacy in my 1996 diary, as I had displayed in my email to real life Nikki, and I also wanted to become a professional under my real name; 
Then after more than 10 years of being a blogger, the whole online thing had to go.

It’s 10.30 PM now. I feel totally raw, unhappy, overwhelmed, maybe even disappointed.           
If there ever comes a day my work life under my real name starts to make me unhappy, or if I see a way of doing it without feeling threatened by the sexuality of my work here, then I will return to being a blogger.

But for now, this is what it is.

I am no longer a blogger.            
And that hurts…

.
Saturday 16 October 2021      

It got worse before it got much better!  
Going to bed I checked my phone and found a browser open that offered access to yesterday’s Zoom call. It was a url that I had copy pasted manually because the link in the email had not been clickable.          
I usually attend calls both on my laptop to type, and on my telephone for a good camera angle.   
But yesterday, I only remembered being successful at logging in via laptop. As far as I recalled, the phone browser and link had not worked.
Yet here it was, a clear sign that at least the url had worked.

Had I used it, and clicked on an “Okay” to enter the call, without remembering doing it?
Had I been online thinking I was invisible and excusing myself for not being on screen, when all the time I was recorded?

The call was with a group I had not known, and the communication was not entirely in flow. But I had dismissed that, thinking it was because I was communicating through chat only, and that it were all people who did not know each other.           
Had it been because I was visible, in totally unpresentable fashion, and no one told me?

I got the absolute worst panic attack. That morning’s panic attack, triggered by the sex blogpost, was nothing compare to The Biggie that hit me around midnight.          
I was trembling all over my body, I felt sick and I wrote an email to the friend who had organized the call.           
I explained I was unsure if I had opened the Zoom app on my phone.   
“Was I visible?” I asked. “I’ve been crippled with anxiety all day, and thought is daunting! I hope you can help.”

For an hour I tried a variety of tactics from rationalizing the social fear, to projecting it, to ultimately befriending it and accepting its presence. Which was for this crisis situation the best option, although no miracle trick.    
An hour later I was still wide awake and had been checking my email at regular intervals, even though I thought I “should” be able to do without her reassurance.              
But boy, was I happy to read her reply that everything had been more than fine!            
I had not been online with my phone camera.  

Immediately the anxiety subsided and ever since then the return of my generic anxiety has looked like a walk in the park compared to the panic I felt for that hour.      
I can do that!

I slept exceptionally well, and I’m doing great today.

.
NOVEMBER – LET’S DO THIS!! 

Friday 12 November 2021           

In 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, I’ve half-in-half out participated in a performance project, living my life and keeping an online diary as if it is 25 years ago.
These two diaries A Letter From A Stranger (1994-1995) and Dear Nikki (1995-1996), are in their publishing stage, and it has been time to start writing book three for a while now.
Except I didn’t.

After the final chapters for Dear Nikki, which I never published online because it gave me too much anxiety, I did try to start the new book 1996-1997 offline, meaning safer and far less likely to push me over the edge, but to no avail.
I don’t write when it’s offline, I make the wrong choices, avoid adventures.
I am no longer inspired to live a full life, if I keep myself from blogging diary style, about its most meaningful, sexual parts (for one);
And I m also not inspired to live real-time, real pandemic 2021.

I need that extra layer of historical context of analogue (yes I do see the irony here) life, and the performance art based challenge of pretending I’m living my life from being a 20-something living in the 90s.
Not just for my sex life, sex posts, diary of the 90s as Lauren Harteveld;
But I need it for my work under my real name as well.

If I am not online “here” as my alter ego, and if I don’t have that secretive private life which I then share by blogging (and get freaked out about);
Well then I don’t live, write or work in the real world under my real name either!

My two personas really are like a Siamese twin, and if I m committing to creating massive impact, to having big results, and worldly success in every way for the real me?
Then it means I have to amp it up living as Lauren Harteveld too.

And I admit; The time travel projects 1 and 2 have been sloppy in their execution, the first two books have not been all in.
They were more a translation of real time events, to a fictional 90s past, but I wasn’t living it in the moment.
I never did business as if it was the 90s, never made love as if I was in my twenties, I was using the fictionalization of my past as a construct instead of as the performance art it was always intended to be!

For book 3 no more sloppy time travelling allowed.

So last night, I made a list. And I made it short. I left EVERYTHING out, that I knew was critical to feeling good, everything I knew that would frustrate me if I didn’t do it, and everything that would have to be in place before I could get to my core activities for which I wanted to be known.
Because for what has been somewhere between a week and a few years, I have tried to schedule my daily routine so that all the things that matter to me get done. And instead the only thing that got done – and very consistently! – was whatever I felt like doing! What inspired me. And the things that had to get done got done too, and if frustrations reached peak level or deadlines closed in, then all the other things got done as well.

In other words, both my personal preferences, my sexuality for sure (2021 was the best sexual year of my life!), my financial obligations, my social life, and everything else;
It had a way of getting done.
It took care of itself not because I had scheduled it, but despite of it.

However, what did not get done, was what I really want to be known for;
To be a world famous rock star writer, who does yoga.
Well technically the writing did get done, it always gets done because it’s what comes natural. Yoga didn’t get done at all, but that’s not my biggest worry to be honest.
But the part of rock star writer that didn’t get done, or not consistently, was the business side of it. Meaning publishing, selling, and speaking about my work, the being of the rock star writer did not happen.
There has not been a visible rock star writer, not under any of the two names, to relate to.

I have been invisible.

Which is why, I kept this list of what Lauren 1996 would be committing to every day, short.
Very short.

1. do yoga or teach yoga
2. publish books

I fell asleep thinking of myself as Lauren 1996. And as I type this, again, I can feel her living in me.

For the first time since 2019, the summer I started my time travel project, I can feel it is working.

This morning I worked on publishing my books. I took the book on Basic Instinct/ Catherine Tramell, which I pulled from publishing, and that has been on my desk for weeks now to get improved and republished.
I found a reference to the 2019 GQ speech Sharon Stone made, which was about how she dealt with feeling exposed after Basic Instinct came out, and although I had made up my mind and had decided to write the new time travel diary 1996-1997 online just like its predecessors;
This speech was exactly what I needed to hear at this time.

It was about making a conscious decision about what to do with that part that you fear, sometimes correctly obviously, others will use to shame you and try to destroy you.

“Time to decide what you do with the tender, important, beautiful, savage, passionate, most important part of yourself. 
What are you gonna do with it?
I ll tell you what I did with mine.

I respected it.”

.
Lauren
An Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.

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