For someone with an insatiable need to dissect all events, facts, thoughts and feelings, and in particular those related to my sex or love life, in order to discover the bigger meaning or logic behind them, I have been exceptionally slow in noticing my life has fallen apart ever since my lover left.
Or to be more accurate, and also make it even more weird this managed to escape my attention:
I failed to notice that I, have fallen apart.

The first month it was still pretty straight forward, because I had demonic nightmares, heart issues, and signs of Bell’s Palsy or another so far still undiagnosed neurological and eye condition.
But after four visits to the GP had landed me on a five month waiting list for a brain scan, after the demons had taken their diabolical dreams elsewhere, and I had dropped caring about my heart altogether, things appeared to have moved into calmer waters.

However, what I failed to see was that I had become intolerant to real life human interaction. I say real life, because I appear to be able to handle online meetings far better.

So about the real life interaction, even if it went really well, and it was someone I liked there was always something unfinished about it.
Like the parting was always a tearing, and never a natural letting go in wholeness and completion.

Even in the best cases of seeing someone or going somewhere, there was always something I had to get over, afterwards.

And if it was not the best cases, and I had felt emotional tension or aggression from the other person, it was even worse and I lost entire weeks, staring.
Just like I had spent hours in those first weeks after my lover parting, that I wrote down in my log as “in shock”;
A new category I had never needed before.
And now I needed the category again, although I was less transparent about it. This time I left the hours unaccounted for or I hid them behind or in other activities.
When they were actually the second wave of “in shock” hours, just that they were about me needing to get over social interaction, and not linked to my lover, or at least not in an obvious way.

And although most of these social situations have smoothed out, all of them have brought great insights, and although some caused beneficial change;
Although I made important and essential decisions with regard to certain projects and with regard to my future, that I could not have made if the need for change had been any less urgent;
I still feel broken and worried by the last six weeks.
Because although the work was done on healing the relationships and my life on the outside, inside of me, nothing was healed.
It’s a six week open wound.

Yesterday night I made a note in my journal, in a place where I will be reminded of it, to just accept this state of feeling perpetually broken and groggy like I partied until 3 AM last night, as my new normal.
That it is no longer realistic to postpone living my life until I feel whole and capable.

And I am also leaning towards being better off to no longer expect social interactions to be fulfilling, whole, nurturing experiences.
But to accept this as my new normal, that I come out of them feeling anything between uneasy because of the parting feeling like something is not quite right;
To upset, worried, fearful and rejected, if the contact was stressful.

That the sooner I manage to adapt to THAT being the new normal, the better.

I just had six weeks of trying to fix things, trying to analyze and learn from everything I encountered, and to heal what was hurt;
Ultimately, yes, I can heal all of those things.

But since the inside of me stayed just as broken, and I am now carrying around six weeks of what feels like trauma, moving forward it’s no longer sustainable to try to heal what happens on the outside.

Most bleak future vision:
Whatever my life is going to look like, or whatever I commit myself to doing, will need to be something that can be done while feeling that you’re isolated, that life is without joy, and that anybody reaching out to you, will come at the cost of another layer of social injury that does not wear off over time.

In all honesty, I do see one other cause of suddenly becoming overly socially anxious since the breakup, and that is because I stopped working behind the computer at night time.
And just in general;
I rarely write for a whole day anymore.

For well over a decade, writing under two names (LS Harteveld + my real name), including writing for marketing and sales;
Has been my life.

Being social, privately or for my work, has never taken center stage in my life.
The biggest part was always me being behind a computer.
Something I talked myself out of, because writing cannot be planned. And if I do cap it at a certain amount of hours, I end up with half-done blogposts, never uploaded videos, or other projects I never finish.
So then all the hours invested in it were without result.

In 2024 I forced myself to be more productive and to treat anything I could not predict the outcome of, or could not predict how long it would take me, as a leisure activity that had no place in my workweek. 
And talked myself out of nighttime writing and working in particular!
Because it messed with my sleep, or so I thought anyway.

Not realizing that obscene amounts of writing and working during the day,  including the occasional 8 hour blogpost, were what enabled me to have social interactions in the first place.

And that if I have not spent the whole day in creative and business overdrive, the least I should do is get behind my desk at night before going to bed.
Not stay to away from it.

Writing and working was what enabled me to be social, and what helped me to find my sense of Self before bed.
It’s insane that I didn’t realize I didn’t have social problems, or at least far far less, until I started cutting and capping writing and working, chasing a healthy lifestyle.
It has only made it worse.

So, all in all, my 2024 problems are more complex than
“Lover left me -> no longer tolerate social interactions”

Maybe it is like this:
1.Lover left me.
2.Tried taking better care of myself by not being on the computer at night time.
3.Fell into pit of despair and doom overanalyzing social life and social interactions, when in the past I had just wrote a new blogpost and offer, and would be able to sleep like a baby.

But for the sake of this story, and because I have another great example of exactly the same thing happening (me being surprisingly socially-resilient, as long as my love life is great) let’s just forget about the whole remedial business and writing hours part, and stick with the simplest explanation!

Lover left -> social interaction has become a challenge.
Starting with this old story.

A very long time ago, after having parted from the long-term relationship I had been in, I took on my first lover.
The breakup had also led me to abandon my work as a yoga teacher, and I had starting working at a firm where I did market research and worked directly for an account manager.
A terribly difficult man to work for.

However, because my mind was with my stolen hours with my lover, and because the smile could simply not be wiped off my face by anyone and in particular not by a manager when I was only doing the job for the money, I was completely unbothered by his volatile temper.
I even preferred it.
It dismissed me from caring for him and I always understood what my work was. 

However as soon as that first lover broke up with me, although it was definitely not that clear cut, but more like one of the many mini-breakups he would force into our affair but I didn’t know that yet, so as soon as the very first of these breakups happened, my manager and me clashed and I left within a week.
I had actually enjoyed having him around to have at least some external blowup or breakup, as my lover was the silent emailing type.
Letting my work blow up, by simply no longer smoothing out his temper, was gratifying.

But it also learned me a lesson I never forgot;
That just because you can get along with someone when you’re in love, having an affair, are with your head in the clouds?
Does not mean anything, about that relationship.

It means you have found a very appealing way to deal with reality, that’s all.

And that is the house of cards that is coming down, now that my lover has left;
For nine years, I had a very appealing way to deal with reality.
In my mind, I was always with him.
My real life, under my real name, was one big job I didn’t want.
And although it definitely got a lot better, in those nine years, and I find so much more fulfilment in my new professional life, which is no longer the only-yoga life it was when we met;
There probably will be areas where I have lost my ability to function, just like I could no longer get along with the manager, all those years ago.

After nine years of having my lover, and being a lover, of having the cover of my identity as LS Harteveld (although she is much older than 2015) and  nine years about writing about my love life;
Having all those things for such a long time, has become such a huge part about who I am.

There is no way to tell when exactly, over the course of those nine years, all these things were not, what I was actually leaning on.

When my Lauren Harteveld identity, the lover, the diarist, was not what kept it all together, just like having a lover had been what had allowed me to work as a market researcher, all those years ago.

And writing this piece has revealed that partially, yes, I can resort to my “real me” writing and marketing, and even to writing for this account Lauren Harteveld, publish my 90s diaries here, and that will help to smooth out my social life, as a problem area.
That remedial marketing and sales, and remedial writing, remedial publishing, remedial being Lauren Harteveld, is actually a thing, and I should not and even cannot afford to dismiss it, and to go without it, at this point.

I should really quit all those preconceived ideas about what a healthy  lifestyle is, and make those other things a priority again.

As opposed to the manager, I care about the people in my life. I have no desire to blow any of it up.
And the parts that were not sustainable have already fallen out the past couple of weeks.
That work is done, everything and everyone that is still in my life, is something or someone I love being there.

So I must write, and prioritize computer time and what we shall call “productive-me time”, in order to keep myself whole and to show up capable, in those social circumstances.

But ultimately there is no way of telling where that indulgence in writing and my professional endeavors end;
And the impossibilities of being single without the talents I had when I still had a lover, begin.

There is no way of telling, which parts of my life, which friendships, which identities including possibly my real one, will prove to be unsustainable.

Will prove to be unbearable, now that he is no longer there to kiss the pain away.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The Unmasked
is a sequel to:
Death by real estate (the breakup)
PUBLISHED ON January 2, 2024

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