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

Dear Sara,

Originally I looked forward to writing you, and was happy I waited until last minute because I thought I had so much great news to share!
That after having been playing with timelines since 2019, and with very limited success, I had now finally found my form.

However, this optimism was short-lived, since it has caused a mental as well as physical health collapse.
So technically the timeline didn’t collapse; I did.
But since I am the artist who was supposed to hold it all together, the difference is an arbitrary one.

So!
No three separate timeline living for me!
1989, 1999 and current day.
It is simply not sustainable, and I know this past week was no coincidence. This is what has happened every time I started doing this work.

As long as it was still a literary construct, to write in my Lauren 1994-1999 (2019-2024) diary, it was great.
But as soon as I really brought the timeline to life and actually lived as if I was a 20th century Lauren, it was like my world started spinning and I got the time-traveling equivalent of a jetlag.

And unlike what regular travelers do which is taking time to let it wear off, it only seemed to be getting worse.
If I would sit it out it would probably be more like a week to ten day detox like with the (metaphorical) heroin addiction I wrote you about last time, and not the 48 hours of disturbed sleeping patterns of a regular jetlag.

But the truth is I have no idea how long it would have taken to really get into this 3 timeline art project.
Which I intended to stay on for life.
And the biggest reason I have abandoned it
– although I do think I learned something on the other side that will allow me to get a more pragmatic less cognitively demanding version of it and go totally rock that the rest of my life-
the reason I quit was because I have no idea what I’m doing.

Call me a coward, but I think that if you’ve come to the point you’re creating parallel realities and your 3D reality is coming apart at the seams
– oh my God, I have to tell you about last night! I totally forgot about this but writing it down brings it back to me –
Well, at that point you should not follow through before you get some very good guidance from a Jedi, Doctor Strange (or was he evil?) or another professional in the field, who you’d have a hard time finding outside the fictional realm anyway.

So it is definitely time to call the 3 timeline setup quits, and I have to tell you about last night.

I’m actually going out now, and will finish this blogpost later, so I’ll write it down in a few keywords, so that I cannot forget it, or who knows!
Could be struck by a memory spell in the meantime, God knows what forces I awakened.

So in short, last night I was AWAKE after a horrible nightmare. And I saw a series of images, like computer emojis, being played very fast in the top right corner of my vision.
It was like the AI generated reality that I used to see before my hormonal medication started working (the hormones help me to process information).
But that AI imagery was with my eyes CLOSED.
I now had them open!
I saw the images in the darkness.

I felt like I was being programmed in my sleep, and that I had awoken at an hour an extraterrestrial force or Matrix was still programming me.
That it had not detected I, the subject, was awake!

God, so creepy. I really thought “Is this was psychosis looks like?!”

(-)

Okay I’m back. And I had a fantastic day but it’s 8 PM already and every minute I am behind my computer, I risk letting the Unknown Brain Master hack my brain again the upcoming night.
So I’m going to cut this as short as I humanly can.

So the big story, my biggest Art, the thing that felt as important and innovative as 3D perspective in the first medieval paintings?
Which is what Timeline Art is in my opinion, where the artist lives on a different timeline or on multiple timelines at the same time;
I’m not going to be the one bringing that to life.
Even though I am totally behind it as the number one route for contemporary performance artists.
Perhaps we have established that I am neither contemporary nor a performance artist.

Anyway, what I did try to do was distil the essence of these three timelines.
What had been their elements, or their themes?
How, had I planned on living on those three timelines of which we now know two were making my head spin and could not be executed?

Those themes were:

The 1989 timeline: Body mastery

It included a daily and lifelong dedication to my health, body and yoga.
It included sex including the relationship I have to myself.
It also included my relationship not just to my body, but to all my material possessions (things, in the 3D world) and taking care of my house.
This was my favorite level, and I could see taking ritualistic care of my surroundings could become a religion I could live by.
How focusing on the material could ground me in a way that was so very much needed after all these years in the world of ideas, and the abstract.
The reason I chose 1989 was because ideally I would have focused on myself from this year onward, instead of on my relationship to men and getting to know my own body through those experiences.

Although I did fitness from a very early age, it watered down heavily and it wasn’t until I started yoga in 1998/1999, that I gained momentum really making my body my own.
My springboard.
Everything else, and by that I mean sex, was cherries on top.

The 1989 timeline represented what would have happened if I had started living from that truth, effectively from the get go.

The 1999 timeline: a real life profession/local job.
And this job would not be teaching yoga.

The timeline also included all friendships, family, and “letter” (email) writing/ long-distance relationships.

It also included my 1999 Lauren Harteveld diary, but with the understanding that only a reboot of my sex life would ever make it worth picking that up.

The 2024 timeline: all my online work, including writing.

This is basically ALL the work under my real name!
And bar the vintage Lauren diary and these letters to you, I would wrap up all work under the LS Harteveld account as well, 2007-2024.

I would quit being the LS Harteveld I have been for so long, who was born in 2007 together with my quest to completely reinvent my love life and go on a journey.
Because that journey ended when my relationship with my lover ended on December 31st 2023.

Maybe there can still be harvesting years, but I feel my growth path is done there.
I need the 2024 online work, and the real life work under 1999 now.
Those are my areas of growth for the upcoming years, which basically comes down to;
Relationships.

Just that my 1999 timeline had them pegged at real life relationships and the 2024 was strictly profesh/ online (entrepreneurship and blogging)

POINT BEING!
I’m doing everything I can to create a way to live into these timelines without calling them out as such.
And then, hopefully, actually being able to fulfil them. Without little green men reprogramming my brain at night.

Needless to say, still being behind your computer at 9 PM and you have not done yoga that day, is a direct violation of living by the wisdom of these three levels.
They have a chronological order;

1.The body and my (private) 3D world
2.Real life relationships including professional ones. Diary and letter writing.
3.Online/ digital (=highest) work, including all other writing.

I’ve also deducted two past 17 year timelines which overlap, partially, with the three timelines above, theme wise.
And although they feel like super-significant (“Oh my God! It’s 17 years again, it really IS time for a new cycle!”) I’m very aware it’s not a 100% match.

These two cycles are what actually happened on the 1989 and 1999 timeline, and what happened in 2007

1990-2007 The First Cycle: THE BODY
In 1990 I started fitness, as one of the first of my generation. As indicated above it was not a lifelong commitment, but I always felt it was the basis for what later became a yoga practice in 1998/1999
In this first 17 year cycle I got to know and understand my body.
Blissfully unaware of the gold I had created, and throwing it all away in the second cycle

2007-2024 The Second Cycle: My Love Life
In February 2007 I consciously and intentionally went upon a quest, to find out and “get” a new love life.
There had been some unprocessed trauma and I knew regular relationships as the one I was in, were just not my cup of tea.
Or at least they were not chosen from a place of freedom.
So I went on this quest, and I could give you the full outline year by year, but the bottom line is that I found what I wanted and that there had been so much more going on at the time, than I had realized.
Looking back I am so intensely happy I made that choice in 2007.

Love and sexual relationships hold no secrets for me.
I really got this.

It is because of the success of this second cycle I know it pays off to really go for it and give it my all. And from this perspective I am now starting on my third 17 year cycle.

And if I collect the unfulfilled aspects of the three timelines I shared prior, I would say the upcoming 17 year cycle, 2024-2041, is about:

Relationships.

Relationships in a 1989 version:
To be in relationship with my body and the things around me, just like I did when I started fitness and started yoga.
But with a better understanding of the Why behind it, and letting it cover all material things.

Relationships in a 1999 version:
To have a job in the real world and it’s not yoga teacher.
Although I give myself props for having run away from the path of corporate job, the choice for the yoga world was one which ultimately cost me dearly.
Just not in the areas a corporate job would have ruined me.
In the past month a very clear path about what professional life I want has arisen, and I feel excited to develop it with the same dedication and practice as I once took on creating a whole new love life. 

Relationships in a 2024 version:
To really take my online professional work seriously.
Curate all the Lauren Harteveld writing, publish books. But also under my real name, to create original content that I want to bring forth, and to plant my flag as a professional loud and clear.

It’s not even 10 PM now, so I don’t expect this blog will cost me another night’s sleep.

But even if it did;
I guess what I worry about most is to choose aright.
So it doesn’t cost me another 17 years.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living