This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara 
Before our call I always give her a headsup.

Dear Sara,

I started writing this letter yesterday, and it seems like a lifetime ago. The Netherlands celebrates two days of Pentecost, the descent of the holy spirit onto the people, and maybe that counts for a sleepless night from Sunday to Monday.
I fell asleep at 6.15 AM and slept until 10.15, in a life that felt totally different than it had yesterday.

And yesterday’s draft of this blogpost totally irrelevant.
Or at least dramatically incomplete.

I think I needed the Fuck-that-shit! draft, where I concluded I was going to work as an online creative but;
Not talk about it.
Not explain it.
Not show up for any conversation.
Not set aside any resources, let alone on an ongoing basis, to figure out how to manage comments, mentions, correspondence or requests.
Instead from now on I was giving myself permission to not read any of it.

Not having to show up for any conversation, and that included not engaging with any man wanting to romantically obsess over me, was the big fat perk of having given myself full creative freedom, over being a business.

And from this position of being a writer, content creator, and artist -and definitely sticking to my guns that this time around my income was going to be generated by my work and not through a personal relationship with me, under cover of my work -this meant that my only justified involvements were:
A. With people who inspired me and my work! 
And avoid situations that drained me of my sexual or creative power, threatened my autonomy, or objectified me because I was a woman and that was the only part of me they could relate to.
And
B. With clear cut business proposals
Along the line of:
“Can you do this and this for us/ me? And how much do you charge for that?” 

After years of stripping away all the things that had once made me a “neatly fitting into a box” professional, I had come dangerously close to loading the shit sandwich of micromanaging unwanted attention, yet again.
It would have limited and tied me down in the same way my proper-professional business once had.

Saying “No” in acceptable ways that worked around egos and financial budgets, that did not setoff bullies and that were clearly understood and respected by potential stalkers, had not worked for the past 20 years, and it sure as hell was not going to suddenly work because I was now no longer an official business.

In my 20 year plus understanding of how unsafe you are as a woman service provider or a woman that is being visible online, I had been on the frickin’ verge of making it my (or an assistant’s) job to keep my side of the conversation professional, and also to keep an eye on the trolls. 

A blogpost even longer than the paragraphs I just typed, explained that was not going to happen.
I was going to ignore them instead and never waste another minute trying to find the right way to deal with them.

Women had lost enough momentum being sexualized as it was. We would have been better off if we had charged for just being in the same room as us, instead of getting entangled in delivering anything according to any professional standards, since that was obviously not what we were hired for in the first fucking place.

After no longer being in business, I finally understood that unless connections give you inspiration, energy, money, or all of the above? 
You should not give it even an iota of your presence, nor care, nor attention.

I had slayed the whole stalker, bullying, pretend-customer and obsessive follower monster, and was excited I had finally learned my lesson.
But, as it turned out after one night of having the holy spirit descend upon me, that turned out to be only half of the message.

It is difficult to say what sparked it exactly.
Maybe it was one flawless week of content creation and living my dream life as an artist.
Maybe it was realizing I didn’t like sex the way I used to, because this body  didn’t feel like mine anymore.
Maybe it was the passing of Alec John Such, the OG bass player of Bon Jovi who left the band after the Keep The Faith album.
Exactly the last album that I considered “my” Bon Jovi. After that I dropped out of fandom for 25 years.

He was only 70 years old, and maybe it added the gasoline of mortality to my already burning fire of having created this new creative life.
And in the blazing flames I saw what would happen if I would only do that creative work; The writing, the creating, the teaching, the working.
I would perish.

That I had a different thing to create, before anything else could be created.
Me.
Maybe “create” meant recreate: To bring my body back to the toned yet feminine body I had until a few years back really…. It went away so quickly.
Or maybe “create” meant, to finally create Madonna’s Blond Ambition body.

1990 Was the year I started fitness and it was her body I had in mind back then.
At the time, I only considered myself to be moderately successful at sculpting myself as her mirror image, but that was probably more because I never felt I had given it my absolute all. 
To this day, I feel her 1990s body was my aspirational, and achievable, ideal.

And when I realized that present day, I would rather miss out on:
-earning a fortune
-on being an artist, writer, creative
-on have my lover, or a lover, in my life
Than missing out on having my old body back, and on the possibility of getting in an even better shape than I had been my entire life;
That moment of clarity, changed everything.

I don’t regret having said in the past that I was going all in on my new business, I don’t regret having made my peace with my voluptuous body as it is, but it was impermanent.

No career, no art, no money or no lovers in the world, can ever make up this feeling of deep sadness that I have lost Me, somewhere along the line.
That in my quest to find myself creatively and sexually, and having been successful at that too, but by Gods!  
At what price?
My quest, just like Frodo’s quest coming home from Mordor after having saved the world, has come at the cost of losing myself.

And like Frodo knew he could no longer be happy in the Shire,
I now finally understand that I cannot exist in this body I now have.
That maybe even, to an extend, my Life, all those things I wanted and found out, cannot exist in this body I now have.

A body I love dearly, but it has suffered greatly, in my persuasion to figure things out in the real world. Grownup things, important things. Things I do not want to not have figured out, if I would die at 70.

But I need my body back.
I need me, back.

And not a good enough for my age version, either.

I want my body to be a mirror image to Madonna’s 1990 body.

Like I always meant to.

Books 

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

Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/