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

Wrapping up the year I am happy it’s over for many reasons.

First of all because it’s an Era wrap-up. The Worst Era Of My Life Wrap-up. Happy it’s over, be gone thy demons of the underworld.
Monsters of the darkness.
Evil, lurking in everyday mediocrity.

You will never be let in ever again, and it took me way too long to find out how you got in, and more importantly, how to expel you and banish you forever.

You have taught me, I have learned and I stand wiser but also more cynical, colder, calculated.
The core of me has become more pure, more tender, but I have created a fake persona to take on the world.

The real me only speaks through her art.
When the Me that is what I would call public, meaning tied to the world;
She is no longer me.
A hologram created for a world that doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.
It cannot, or no longer, distinguish what is conscious and what is hallow.

I could say I will stay aware of the difference between the shell Me, and the real me, but the truth is there is a chance I will start to believe the lie of the hologram myself.
In particular because that is the validated part, whereas the real me has become a hermit, these past years.

People will think I no longer am, but I am.
I just hide it better nowadays.

Shell me goes outside, and looks fine.
Better than she was in every way, ever.
More confident, more resilient, reliable, ferocious, interesting, deep.

But real me is still at home, where she always was.
She does not care for the world, and she lost everything she cared about.
All personal growth bullshit aside, Real Me didn’t get anything out of this.

She’s still the same as before, just with ink black holes in her love life where men used to be.
Real Me lost all of them;
The man who was my lover for 8 years.
The man who wrote me letters for years, that I credit for pulling me through the absolute bleakest of years, 2020 and 2022.
I lost him too.

And I lost a third one as well, with whom I shared so little time, and there is so very little we know about each other.
Yet, I fell in love so unexpectedly. In autumn. It was so very welcome to finally start feeling again.

When we talk it is as if worlds are created, a force neither of us controls nor could ever have anticipated.
It is, or past tense was by now I guess, effortless and magical.
It makes me cry I lost him, but maybe it was just so raw because I already lost the other two.

All in 2024.

So I am happy Sara, happy the shitty as fuck era that apparently needed to happen to turn me into a fucking badass who can fend for herself;
Glad it’s over.

And the medication I found this year is so good, it has not just taken away the mysterious ailments that absolutely floored me;
It has reshaped me.
My body, still heavier from all the struggle of course, but the first kilos just dropped off by themselves, and it has gotten toned and radiantly healthy, without any noteworthy physical exercise or dietary restrictions.
Just from finding those pills this year, the ones that finally healed me.

So I have so much to be grateful for.
It really is like a second chance.

But a second chance for who?
Because Lover Me, didn’t win anything.

The real me will stay home in 2025, because her wrap up of 2024 is that she lost the only thing she ever cared about.
Love. 

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living