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

The good news is I haven’t changed my plans, or what I want for weeks now. Just details, but nothing big. I feel secure in the commercial or official company I will be starting tomorrow, and in the understanding that I will bring teaching yoga and writing under the umbrella of the company, in future years.

It is doable, it is clear, and I like not having everything in there at this phase. I can really focus, on monetizing and selling just a selection of services, and it is breaking the cycle of loneliness.
It is a first step to recovering from what I will call my personal dark ages.

Like the real dark ages there is an early dark ages and a late dark ages. I think you don’t really see what the early dark ages are, until you are sinking even deeper.

I didn’t recognize any part of the dark ages, for the longest time, because the early period was set off by my little cat Maxie dying in January 2018.
I lost all my joy or interest in my work of teaching yoga and quit teaching that summer.
I picked it up early 2019, after my renovation was done, and I started teaching yoga to friends.

Late 2019 I had started developing Rock Star Yoga, and I am convinced that would have been how I would come back to teaching, if it had not been for the obvious 2020 reasons.
I ended the lease of my yoga space late 2020.

All in all I thought my misery was circumstantial.
That it was the result of not having cats for the first time in 15 years, and of a renovation in my building late 2018 and early 2019.
Workers coming into my house, the heating being turned off numerous times, and two weeks where I had to leave the house because it was unlivable and then the alternative housing was hardly better because they had started renovating there too, and everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

By the time it was all over I adopted two cats and 2019 was the year I started designing my new life!
There were some major changes but I knew it was me getting back on my feet.

So when in 2020 I started feeling miserable I didn’t think much of it either because everyone was miserable.
And because I was healthy, lived alone carefree and didn’t have children that needed homeschooling, I did not have the heaviest burden.
But I found the pandemic magnified the inter-human expectations that it was my task to make sure somebody feels safe with me.
A fear at the heart, of my social phobia.

I feel I still don’t trust people the way I used to, because in the past at least I thought it was me.
That I was exaggerating, and too sensitive or even seeing expectations that were not there.
But now I believe it is even worse than I imagined.

During the pandemic I saw a wide array of blaming, of not taking responsibility that we live in a free country and this entails several rights and risks. Our government demonized people who did not behave the way they thought was appropriate, and judging by the lack of protest that was apparently okay.
When now, the people who are vulnerable are still vulnerable, and everybody moved on and no one talks about what the vulnerable people are supposed to do.

So they all felt really good about themselves, being the good guys and blaming the bad guys, only to just leave all those who actually do have reason to worry unprotected after.
The silence is deafening.

The loss of my last cat, became a switch in careers,  became a year long void where I waited for the renovation to be over.
And when the upwards going curve of teaching yoga and new cats, was finally taking off, and I knew where I was heading;
It was 2020.

With my new company, and knowing exactly what I am going to do, I feel the grief of all those lost years, requires attention.
That I have been carrying this around since January 2018, when my cat died in my arms.

So much has happened since.
And nothing has been processed.

It’s all still raw and painful.

And I couldn’t help but wonder;
How do you recover, from the dark ages?

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living