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

Dear Sara,

Today is such a weird day, because it is the 10 year anniversary of the first time my ex-lover and me slept together. 

And when I say ex I mean it’s been years since we had sex and I have not seen him in absolutely ages.
So I do not mean “ex”, as in that I’m over him, that my feelings for him have changed or even that I would have an explanation why he left.
All I can say is that it was his choice to retreat from our affair, and it being his choice is exactly the way I like it.
It’s the very reason I will never stop being fascinated by him, in a way usually reserved for men falling for the wrong woman.

It is the pull of the mystery.

A religious man once said to me that what made the Catholic faith different from other Christian religions is that it’s all about one thing;
To hold space for the mystery.
And that’s what my lover did, and the more time has passed, the more elusive he seems to be.

And given his own mysterious nature, and my fascination for him, I also held space for his mysterious side as well of course.
It went both ways and we shared an equal fascination for each other’s darkness. The aspects of ourselves we rarely showed to others.

There was a fullness, a richness to who we both were that I at least, didn’t share with anyone else.

As sort of a side note, a spark of hope!
Because I did meet someone whom I feel also has the capacity to hold that space for the unknown.
Although he’s a very different type of man, more of a recluse lone ranger and not so deeply intertwined with capitalism the way Mr.Big was.
But I feel he too could “hold” that aspect of me.

A space for a woman as pure potential, because when we’re talking about heterosexual relationships, this is the mystery these men are holding.
They’re able to hold the space for the female mystery.
In this case represented by me.

It’s like the promise of a place where I can learn to know myself, that allures so deeply to me. It is that space I found with Mr.Big, all those years ago.
It’s that promise I felt behind the second man, the one who was new to me.
And it’s that thing I see other couples or singles, either not valuing or not naming, or trading in for things they value more.

But I do not desire anything else.
For a man A. to be mystery, and B. to hold the mystery of me. That’s it.
And that’s not a 24/7 job, nor will there be a 24/7 claim!
But maybe that’s what holds them back as well, right?
The mystery is mysterious. 
Whether we look at him or me, the unknown will always be unknown.

Sometimes I feel the men who left me started craving the known.

Anyway!
The big win from January has been that I do realize that whether I call it “only interested in sex” or I call it “being a femme fatale” or in any other way emphasize my perpetual fascination for my love life vs everything else;
January did affirm that it is the only thing that really matters.

That although my fake and masked life is around the corner, the life where everyone will be so happy for me I “made it” and “overcame” what was holding me back;
That I, at least in this moment, know it was the last 10 years when I was in integrity.

A decade viewed as a waste of time and bad decisions.
That decade.

Where I, the mistress, lived expansively on paper through my writing, and was present in the margins of (his) real life. Until I was pushed out and the pen dried up. There was nothing more to write.

It is a bold claim to state that was me in integrity.
I know.
But in the moments we were together I got all the gold any woman could possibly wish for.
And he never, ever, soiled that memory.

So now that I have devoted, although “made the rational decision to” would have been a better verb, my life to a path of fakeness, to what feels like a pledge to capitalism in the same way Mr.Big unconsciously must have made one;
I find myself doing all sorts of variations of pinching myself if I can still feel, if I am still awake, and if I still know the path I am choosing is fake and without any intrinsic value.

January did that for me;
It’s like it galvanized the entire weight of the past eighteen years because that’s how long I’ve been on this quest for love, that’s how long I’ve been a writer – and turned it into an immovable anchor.
January made it irreversibel.
Like an integration.

But I did not know that yet. Because I actually started a journal, in order to log and write about all those moments I am not in integrity. Everything I would stop doing if I no longer needed the money, or if I was no longer legally required to do it.
The log was going to keep track of all those moments, and it would be my mirror, my accountability.
I was convinced that consciousness was the medicine to being out of integrity.
Consciousness; Not avoidance, not sugarcoating, not finding purpose where there is none, and definitely not investigating and writing about it and giving it a millisecond of my creative time.

No. It was the relentless responsibility of facing capitalism head-on with the purpose of draining it so that I can save my art.
So that in 10 years time, I can be a writer, a yoga teacher, a lover.
Forever.

I believed that as long as I faced my own actions, keeping my endgame in mind; I would never mistake the fake for the things that really mattered.

I even invented a word for it;
Untegrity.
For 10 years I was committing to being in Untegrity, meaning I would do things with a 10-year goal in mind.
Only restricted by a few ethical boundaries, which I knew were arbitrary. 
I was already out of alignment and out of integrity, the ethical boundaries were just there to keep my place within society.
When I knew very well that if my life was not about writing, not about teaching yoga or teaching something else;
And in particular if my life was not about being in bed with a man;
It didn’t matter if I was saving the world or selling nuclear warheads.
It was both equally fake.

But I did not write in the Untegrity Journal.
Or I did write, but then I wrote stories.
And not just because I didn’t want to give the life that was not in integrity another minute! But because I found it was exactly right.

That although I would never confuse the realness of being a lover, with the fakeness of being part of a capitalist world;
I could live with the dichotomy this presented.
There is no untegrity.

If a man ever offers to take care of me, and in a way that the money is mine, and that I’m taken care of and not in exchange for sex or a relationship but because he wants to do that for me;
Then I will always accept it.

If he can bear that burden of doing the capitalist work, then I will trust he is speaking the truth, and I will receive his gift.
But I am okay here.

January brought me the insight that being in “untegrity” where I focus on money and not create any art and not have any sexual relationships;
Well that it all feels surprisingly similar to being in integrity.

The wealth of our love life gave me something to look back on, something to savor. 
It filled me up, and it got there first.
I drank from a different well, I became a different person, and I feel capitalism will be less harmful to me than it would have been twenty years ago.

That Mr.Big, inadvertently, showed me how he used capitalism to create the life he wanted, including a space where we met each other and were together.

Considering the unlimited potential of both capitalism as well as the divine feminine;
It should be within my abilities to create a space, a new life, a new decade, for myself and for my art. Build the church that will helm all that I have to offer the world, my teachings, my writing, and also my lovers.
I will build the church, and I will do whatever I have to, to accomplish that in the next 10 years.

But still; I will never confuse what I am creating for the one he, Mr. Big offered to us. The condo where we made love, and where the affair took place in what must have been stolen moments.

Building something for yourself is never as sweet as it being gifted to you.

But it wil do..

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living