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

Dear Sara,

There were plenty of titles to choose from for this post, and all would have been a great fit.

“I don’t need six months to reappear a Dark Femme”
or
“Being Catherine Tramell: part deux”,
a follow up to an earlier post on this blog about Basic Instinct’s omnipotent female writer protagonist (many would say antagonist) who was described by the director Paul Verhoeven himself, as being all-knowing and as possessing supernatural powers because she was the devil.

Or the title could be:
“A year to live like a Femme Fatale”
– as a follow up from the post I wrote you three weeks ago, in this same blog:
“A year for my essential self to play major league and major league only and come up with catchier project titles“

Isn’t it ironic that three weeks ago, I knew the direction of what I wanted
– to be my true self and play what I call “Major League”-
but was also annoyingly aware I was lacking a catchy title?
When now everything fits like a black over-the-elbow-glove?

It is a symbol of how it was indeed an umbrella term or idea, the thing that would hold it all together, that was missing.
Why I could understand the content of my vision for myself, but did not have a catch phrase.

It’s like being pregnant but not having seen your child yet.
I’ve heard from many mothers they did not know the essence of who their child was, until it was born. Then they realized how “wrong” they had been, how many things they had thought they knew about them, which had actually been assumptions.
The child had been unable to show their mother who they were, as long as they were still inside.

Three weeks ago, my year long project was still inside of me.
I thought I knew what it was, because I had such an intimate relationship to it. But as I know now, it is actually quite possible to have an intimate relationship with something you do not know at all.

In fact, looking back at my three decades of fascination with the omnipotent writer Catherine Tramell from the movie Basic Instinct, and her game-of-equals with her love interest Nick, played by Michael Douglas, it is quite a surprise what I am about to tell you took me this long!

What I am about to tell you, is a big case of:
“How did I manage to miss this?”

It all started a couple of weeks back, when I saw an advertisement for a personality test that portrayed as a how-to become a “Dark Femme”.
I remember clicking the link, and being annoyed it was a test that ended up including about 8 or so personalities, and I was not the Dark Femme.

But the biggest turn-off was that it was aimed at, you know, “getting your man”, that kind of thing.
Something I have never been interested in.

Just for your point of reference: I have no idea what my lover has been up to, but I feel he’s in a good place, and he’s having a good year.
I’m sure he’ll be “back” at some point in time, because like Nick and Catherine, we had just such a deep understanding of who the other was.
There was so much love, and joy, and respect, and fun.
I’m not calling it coming “back” to me, because that suggests he’s not having fun now, or that he made the wrong choice.

If there is anything I know it’s that if you want to have a relationship based on equality, any relationship, you need to start trusting the other person to live their own life.
I trust him to be doing exactly the right thing!
Even if it would mean I would never see him again.

There is zero tendency or desire within me to influence it, if anything I “push” him away, by never faking a disinterest or an unavailability.
I never play the game of moving out of his life, if he fails to do this, or return to me by whatever.
I am much more interested in seeing him return, without giving him any reason to do so.
Because then I know he’s really back to play;)

So ultimately it was the underlying tone of playing a man to make him choose you, that disappointed me in the company behind the Dark Femme advertisements.
And I’m not 100% sure it’s the same company, as the one from the screen shot advertisement, used in this post.
I clicked and did that test weeks ago, maybe even two months ago.
But when I saw the (or “this”) advertisement, I was reminded of clicking that or a similar advertisement weeks ago, and made a screen shot because I had not “let go” of this Dark Femme idea!
If anything, in the weeks in between the idea within me had strengthened that I was missing some Dark Femme cues to life.
Cues far more important and far-reaching, than getting a man to call you.

And since then I have done my research, and I now know:
-what gives this femme her power
-which is the same thing I was intrigued by in Catherine Tramell as well as in Nick Curran (Michael Douglas). It is this thing, that binds them.
-why I developed an aids-phobia in the 80s, later relabeled by me as a social-phobia, because it was being expelled and unloved that I feared. Not death.
-why during the pandemic, social interactions became unbearable to me. I felt I had to comfort an unnamed fear, on both sides of the polarized pandemic spectrum and anything in between, before we could have a conversation.
-why these heavy 2020-2022 interactions were a magnified version of “work” I had been feeling I had to do, ever since I became a yoga teacher.
I felt I was paid or expected to comfort something, to put a blanket over something very painful, before yoga could begin.

And I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was exactly;
There were times when I was sure this unnamed work, soothing, or pampering, had something to do with having to cater to someone’s ego.
But during the pandemic it felt more like having to put the blanket over a sincere fear of illness, or a sincere fear of loss of freedom (other side of the spectrum).
After about two years, I finally understood what the criterium was within Dutch pandemic strategies;
They were all designed to give most people the impression something was being done. 
There was literally no other criterium for Dutch pandemic measures, everything could be brought back to this.
F.e. deaths were only a problem, if they caused people to feel that not enough was being done.
Deaths counted in the media were a problem.
Silent suffering, of any kind, was not.

Perhaps by now you know what I found out;
The reason social interaction is such a minefield, is because what people are facing is their own death.
That, is what you are veneering, comforting, framing, softening, coaching, and whispering them through.
That is the work, you are doing, in social interaction.

Someone’s ego can take over, and start compensating or self-comforting, a fear of death. That is why for so long, I thought the ego was involved.
But it is much deeper.

And it is here, where the omnipotent taps in deeply.

What binds them all, what gives the Dark Femme, the Femme Fatale, Catherine Tramell, Michael Douglas, my lover, and me, our power;
Why we can navigate through layers and through worlds, and why we can choose to play in the Major League of dating and sex, without even the slightest interest of following someone who walks off the field to go do other things;
Is not because we followed an Instagram advertisement of how to become a Dark Femme.

Each and every one of us, overcame our fear of death.