Where I live creatively ever after

“My name is Alice.
And I remember everything.”

Resident Evil

The first 10, 15 years I wrote, I did not use the name Lauren. Instead I used two initials, L and S.
I chose LS not just because I liked the anonymity, but also because the letters are an abbreviation of Lectori Solutum, a Latin salute to the reader.

In those years the most original explanation someone guessed, was if my real name was perhaps Alice?
But it is a greeting to the reader.

And this LS too, remembers everything. Not like Evil Dead Alice’s biological upgrade from merging with a T-virus that turns other people into zombies;
But a spiritual death, an identity death.
And the big change is not even that I started signing my work as Lauren, and no longer use the letters LSH;
But that it was the Lauren part of me, that survived the transformation.
Not real me.

The alter-ego of LS Harteveld, originally created so I could start writing away from my public self, turned out to be way more flexible than the version of me that lived my real life. Who encountered opposition whenever she changed, explored or did something different, boundaries the digital world did not have.

Here, I could change as often as I wanted. But it could also endure and survive changes I never wanted and would never have sought out for myself.
But that do come with perks, just like Alice’s transformation after being biologically modified.

It makes sense that the identity you literally write yourself is a better fit than the one that was formed accidentally and is consistently kept into place by the image other people have of you.
But it was more specific than the first limited identity being tied to my physical existence, and being kept in place by real life events, people and structures.

These specifics were:
The new identity, LS Harteveld, allowed for infinite complexity and unlimited change.
And I have consistently been using it, always multiplying complexity, which I have done with diary projects that were never normal diaries.
They were reimagined realities, or the same story retold from the perspective of another timeline.

More often than not, even I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.

When I started dating again, I thought my whole point was that I wanted different things. To meet new people, and just in general for the markers of my life, the actual facts, to be different.
I also assumed it would probably end up being a fluke, and that I was going to regret this whole move a few years down the single-road, but nevertheless I just went for it.
Beforehand cutting my imagined losses.

However, the reason it became such a resounding success and I never regretted my decision in any way, was because my new life allowed for a whole different level of being.
When there is no relationship status, and there are no relationship goals, connection becomes something like emotions, feelings, and sexual experiences, all “straight up”, without any container of social expectations.
I could frame them, reimagine them, and write about them in any way I wanted.

It went from writing a Dutch novella Mango, and 22 erotic stories in Dutch;
To my first English diary Dutch American Diary, which stayed very close to my real timeline and the actual people that were in my life;
To Big, a two year diary about a secret affair but shrouded in mystery;
To The Mistress Speaks, now channeling an archetype of “the mistress” 
To my first timeline project;
A Letter from a Stranger and Dear Nikki, covering an imaginary 1994 – 1996
This is the book I’ve been meaning to publish since 2023 but keep dropping out of, unfortunately.

Technically, I am now on my second timeline project, rebooting the 90s timeline, living in 1991.
However it does not require writing, because there is no sex yet on that timeline. 
It’s a bit of a complicated story, and I won’t get into it here. But trust that if I have found a partner who would make a good sexual partner to Lauren 1991, I will keep my diary handy.

So in the end, it was never the committed relationship that suffocated me, nor was it ever the writing or being single that saved me.
It was about the freedom to explore and (re-)shape reality.
To own, my reality.

At the moment when I was no longer expecting it, life turned cruel. In many ways you could say all that isolation and purposelessness, the desolate position you have in society when you are not part of two or three of its nexus structures, came back to haunt me.
There was not much to do, but to keep on living, to keep thinking, keep writing and keep reframing my experience. 
Put words to it.

And now that “it” is all over, an era of isolation and dismantling that would have had me running straight back to my former life had it happened in the first years after becoming single – I am no longer the person I used to be.

I have found a way to live my life though, and under my former identity which from a psychological standpoint, no longer exists.
And in many ways that life has become easier, because I’m no longer emotionally invested.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with astrology, but I would say I now have an altruistic Aquarius-like cool to what I do. 
I feel more of use than I ever have, and there is satisfaction in being of service, but life is no longer something I find myself attached to.
More something I want to make the most of, in a do-what-I-am-here to do kind of way.

Which made it all the more remarkable that my work here, under this alter ego, has not changed at all.
I mean sure, there are no sex stories at the moment.
But that’s because of a changing online landscape, and also simply because Lauren 1991, which is my main project, does not have sex. 

Which is in many ways the point of that whole 1991 timeline project;
What would happen if a 1991 version of me had waited until she had found someone with whom she could really be herself sexually, and still feel safe enough, considering there was an aids crisis?
(explaining the thing here I said earlier I would not explain 😉 )

So the intense period that resulted in an identity change, now has me living a life as an astrological sign I don’t have any planets in, in my natal chart;
Doing work I would never have been able to do in my previous form;
Being only very loosely tied to society, and understanding why that is.

And that same intense period also resulted in me not having to change anything, for my writing as Lauren Harteveld.
The layers I once used to enrich my erotic stories, are now expressed in letters to Sara, in 2200 character columns, or in these The Day After longreads.
The realities I altered for literary purposes, I now live, imagining new worlds as I move through the day.

People call me by my old name, even though I’ve told my inner-circle that is technically only my public name. 
And what started as an alter ego, all those years ago, turned out to be the only part of me that survived.

And I remember everything.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living