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

Dear Sara,

To compensate for my click bait title and those cheesy posts where they drag-on-and-on about what you think first the post is about;
Only to then in the final sentence “reveal” that it was about something rather dull;
It is dull!
Because the 20th century person who has returned from the title is not a lover.

It is Me!

The real me. The one I lost in the 20th century, and recently tied finding her to my project of living in 1998. A project which I have been on-and-off doing since 1994 = 2019.
Well it worked!
Found her!

Same for a project I started since our last conversation, which is to study the Femme Fatale and get a better understanding of the rules behind Sharon Stone’s character Catherine Tramell, in Basic Instinct.
What makes Catherine Tramell so omnipotent?
I was certain that cracking that code, would provide insights still valuable today.
And I hoped that the study of the magic of the Femme Fatale would reboot my sex and love life, and snap me back into actually having one!
Because by the looks of it, I don’t have a sex life

Something that would have worried me, if I had not been so incredibly happy this summer.
Who needs a sex life when apparently, you can have the best summer in 25 years without leaving the house or taking your clothes off!

Literally (as in: concerning the amount I will write about it, and the intensity of the content) it is a shame that the Femme Fatale “clicked” in me, shortly after writing the first episode of the series.
But for the personal intention this project had, it is great news of course.
I am not turning into a Femme Fatale though! Like I said, I found the real Me back.

So although I now have a perfect understanding why my favorite playtime will always be to be a Femme Fatale, or a Dark Femme;
Why I will always long for men who like to play that game with me;
And why I will never burn myself on anything even remotely resembling a normal relationship where my freedom and growth are under threat, and I will VERY happily let him go to do that with other women.

Yet I am not not, a Femme Fatale.
For the first time in over 20 years, I am Me.

So as far as that time frame is still applicable “without further ado”, I will tell you what I found.
No real system, I will stick to “loose” terms, because the past five years I have done so much thinking, the last thing I want is to think even more and formalize what I found.
I’m not a psycho-analyst or researcher, I’m a storyteller. 

So what I found, studying what on YouTube is called the “dark femme” or the “femme fatale”, is that although she has incredible powers, the power she holds is not male!
She has power over men, but she is not a man.
In fact her power comes from being more feminine than what we would consider normal women.
The Femme Fatale does less, not more.
The Femme Fatale holds back, so that he can lean forward.
A Femme Fatale is that unavailable woman so that he needs to REACH and grow, to get to where she is.

In other words, the reason the Femme Fatale is so successful with men, is because the only way they can be with her is if he rises to her level.
So he is forced to become the strong, independent, dominant man he desires to be.

Where a damsel in distress makes men feel good because they can be their heros and protectors;
A Femme Fatale makes a man, who has it in him to rise to her level but just needed a little nudge; she makes him feel better than any other woman can or ever will, because she is the one who has forced him to rise above himself.
And without using any force, but by creating distance.

She has created, a demand.

Now there are of course many “The Rules”-like approaches, and multiple female archetypes who use this technique, yet the Femme Fatale the way I see her, and the way Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct operated, is that she is the only one of the bunch for whom their play is the reward.

The chase is a one-off play, for many female archetypes. They do it in the courting stages of a relationship, but change to a less exciting way of being together later.
But for the dark femme/ femme fatale, playing is a way of life!
She does that, with the same men or multiple, on repeat.
She is only in it, for the game.

A Dark Femme/ Femme Fatale the way I see her, as well as the only man she will ever consider her equal, appear to be both what Jung called the archetype The Lover.
Both men and women can have this archetype dominant.

So not only does this solidify what my love life will always be like, and what kind of man I will always date and all the other archetypes will always be way too serious;
But it also revealed what the f* went so horribly wrong around the turn of the century!

It was never my male side that I lost.
I mean yes, when my father died something inside me shifted, which was even worsened by entering the yoga teaching world around the same time.
I went from being in a masculine world of engineers, to being fatherless in a woman’s world.

And to this day I will defend tooth and nail that any independent, including any professional yoga teacher, first and foremost needs to start seeing themselves as a business and fall in love with selling as a way of making connection!
It is borderline irresponsible to train professionals without sharpening their skills to become good business people. 
So yes, feeling the masculine is being swept from underneath of you, when you’re a professional in her 20s, is bad!
Very, very bad.

But that was not the greatest loss in general, and in particular that was not the biggest character or personality shift inside of me that caused my misery.

The biggest loss was that I loss my feminine power.

My father was a strong and dominant man. But he was full of unconditional, beautiful and clear love for me, and he expressed it in deep conversation. 
In supporting my education.
And in paying anything he thought I needed in life, he was a huge giver!

And I?
I was an amazing receiver.

I have made gestures telling the story of my youth, with my arms up in a V! Ready to receive everything he wanted to provide, with the same joy he had giving it.

And it was that power, that quality, I lost.

As small and inexperienced as I was, I brought out the best in my father. He made sure there would always be ample money to support our family, and he made sure I knew his door was always open.
Years after he died, I heard from one of his few female friends how he had counseled her, how he could spelling check the English in the thesis I had given him for proofreading, in a supportive way.

My father went through lengths, to be the best father he could possibly be. And I was there receiving.

It was this receiving quality, I lost.

And my desire for “Rock Star strength and presence”- Rock Star being a word that resonated with me since 2019 and that has been instrumental in finding my way back! – I had missed one super big cue! 

My strength is not the performance and extraversion, it is not to have the strength and size and visibility of being a Rock Star.
And what I lost around the turn of the century was not my ability to be a Rock Star.

What I lost, and now have found, was my ability to awaken someone’s true strength, reveal their most vibrant truths and to unleash their biggest potential.

I was never a Rock Star;
I created them.