The good news is that my work under my real name, is taking shape.
And I love it so much.
The past couple of months I have streamlined my content planning, my wardrobe, my personas, and life has been throwing me boons instead of curveballs.
The right people are crossing my path, I’ve been incredibly lucky.

And yet….
Yet something is seriously off.
And because everything professional is better than it has ever been, I know the problem is not there. It is within. 
I’m losing my real myself, Lauren the writer.

It has been a blessing that, because I have been a writer under this alter ego for such a long time, I found who I truly was many years ago.
It made my “real life” easier. Because underneath I knew who I was, even though most people didn’t see me that way, and didn’t know I was a diary writer.

And I expected that once my career in this real world was just as well-thought through and fitted me the same way writing as Lauren Harteveld fitted me –
My life would feel even better.
That now, everything was aligned and as it should be.
Except apparently, it isn’t.

It feels like a brick has come loose in the road. Or an iron lit covering a manhole has shifted.
That something that used to be fixed, even when the rest was falling to pieces, has come loose.
And it won’t go away by basking in my newfound happiness in the workfield.
This, is deeper.

And I think it’s “Lauren”, this writer persona that is also my truest self.
The person I chose to become two decades ago, when I was solid in my work, and was willing to pick up some personal projects such as being single.
Which I had never tried.

I thought I’d do some stupid things, regret most of it, and probably even regretting breaking free like that and be lonely when I know I could have stayed with my boyfriend.
I was so willing to be disappointed.
But I wasn’t.

I loved being single, and it also made me a writer.
And I became Lauren.

But now with the rest of my life firing on all cylinders, I feel she’s slipping away…

I need to make her a priority once again.
Because I’m nowhere without her.

I have become her.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living