This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
“The fact is, sometimes it’s really hard to walk in a single woman’s shoes.
That’s why we need really special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun.”
Carrie Bradshaw
Dear Sara,
Thank you for offering me an option to write an extra email, in between our calls. I appreciate it and to an extend I need it, in order to consolidate the results so far and not let it wash away at the first setback.
The good news is I am finding my feet again.
Although I do not expect to find anything remotely resembling stability after what happened.
The past few weeks have changed the perception about who I am, and how poorly understood my relationship with the world has been.
And in particular with my family.
There is a French novel which was made into a television series in the 80s: Sans Famille (Without Family), translated in Dutch to Alone in this World.
And although thankfully I have not lost my family, and if all goes well the future looks brighter for all of us than if the line of the past two decades had been continued, I did lose the part of having a family that was natural and unquestioned.
I will no doubt have good relationships with individual family members, but I no longer feel part of any family as a group and I never again will.
And in that sense I did lose my family, and it has shed light on another aspect of my life that I managed to overlook.
And which all those giving me well-meant advice of how to create a career out of my talents, or how to build a new career in yoga from the ashes of the old, seem to have overlooked as well.
Nobody talks about this when in my case, and in the case of millions of singles out there, it should be the first thing we take into consideration when speaking / thinking/ analyzing/ planning anything!
The thing I managed to overlook in my whole writing/ yoga/ academic credentials/ entrepreneurship journey, is this;
I am single.
I don’t live with a partner nor do I have children and I don’t have a boyfriend or partner with whom I can interact with on a day-to-day basis, and talk with about work.
I used to have a really great friend but she migrated to the US in 2017, and although I love our weekly calls, it does not compare to eating muffins on the couch together and watching television series on Sunday morning.
This means that the first thing I need to “acquire”, in the outside world, is a social life, or more generally speaking:
Social context.
Because I am not someone’s mother, nor someone’s wife or girlfriend.
I have realized before that my social life is largely dependent on friends;
But now recent events proved that the social belonging of a family too, was not as unchangable as I presumed it was.
Yet aside from all those painful truths, something bigger seems to be at stake.
Bigger than having or not having regular dinner dates or muffin moments with people who know you well and who are, or who feel like, family.
And that bigger picture is that as a single, you need to BE somebody.
And that somebody needs to be somebody people can relate to!
My realization (from 2020? 2021?) that my work under this alter-ego LS Harteveld/ Lauren Harteveld, would never give me social context, was correct.
My choice to put this account on the backburner and focus on my work under my real name, was/is the right one.
But what I didn’t understand was WHY no longer writing as LS Harteveld was the right choice.
Not fully!
I didn’t realize that being single is a defining and in many ways limiting factor, in any career and working life. And definitely in mine because it comes on top of all the other already conflicting factors:
My desire to work as an independent/entrepreneur versus my desire to work with peers, colleagues, and not be in charge as an expert.
And not wanting to put in hours a day in marketing and acquisition, building systems, and other aspects of working as an independent which are all lonely desk-sitting hours that are bad for your physical and mental health.
They say loneliness is as bad for you as 14 cigarettes a day.
As a single, working as an independent and thereby spending the majority of my time working alone would literally kill me.
I can already feel how the past 4 years have aged me, for no other reason than no longer having the social context of being a (fulltime) yoga teacher.
From being an entrepreneur in transition in 2018 to ultimately quitting being an entrepreneur full-stop in December 2020.
It is extremely frustrating that I feel I cannot do my highest work as a writer nor as a yoga teacher, because my first thought apparently needs to be-
Does this work provide social interaction and/or a social context?
Or does it isolate me even further, just like writing as LS Harteveld isolated me over the years?
Or if all this is true, should I just risk it?
Should I just accept that the work I really want to do will probably isolate and kill me like 14 cigarettes a day will kill me?
Is it time to realize that being an artist, having a purpose, being an entrepreneur AND being single and not sharing your life with someone, are isolating callings that determine what your life will look like?
But that they are callings none the less?
Should I attempt to re-create a sense of stability and belonging, now that the little I had has fallen apart?
And risk missing out on the life I know I am here to live?
Should I risk dying with my life inside of me, in order to attain the day-to-day sense of belonging, that is at the heart of almost everyone’s life?
And at what cost?
.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living
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