About 15 years ago, I corresponded with a young writer, Elliot.  My side of the story turned into a book Bedtime Stories, which is in my bookshop. In 2023 we briefly reconnected, and now we are writing again. 

The Scavenger was written in response to Elliot’s second public letter to me:
Inner-worlds and the Real Questions

 

8 November 2026
Season of the Witch (Northern Hemisphere)

Dear Elliot,

Do you know those challenges, where people flip or trade a cheap product until they have their dreamhouse?
That’s the world I feel I’ve been living in.
When it comes to relationships but also other areas of life, because it’s really a mindset that seems to have permeated every area of existence. One that could no doubt easily be brought back to consumerism or capitalism.
But I’ll leave that to the ones who are actually still invested in getting the full picture including its historical context, because I sure as hell don’t.

But yeah;
I think that’s what I started realizing in the two days that have passed since I received your beautiful letter that made me cry. Made me cry on repeat and which, in just a moment, when I am going to read it again because I want to make sure I reply correctly;
It will make me cry again.

And the tears were like the boy and girl from the Snow Queen fairy tale by Andersen. If the boy was my heart, cold and devoid of life. And my tears were the girl, whose warm tears thawed the splinter of ice that had penetrated the boy’s heart.
That’s how your letter brought me back from the almost dead, where my after-death scenario to avoid reincarnation excited me more than the decades of life, loneliness and duty that I still have ahead of me.

It was the letter that made me realize I was now understood.
I was, what they call seen but that is rarely “Seen” by my standards, but this time it was.

And then, came the rage.
Because then why hasn’t it happened before?
Not even by my amazing mentors, without whom I would not be able to function;
Not even the best of the best friends;
Not seen like this.

So I’m already crying again (before I even reread your letter) but I can also feel an incredible rage. Because apparently this level of understanding is available, but Life just refused to give it to me for the first half of my life.
Until I was down to prioritizing not reincarnating, to actually living.
And my life in the truest sense having ended years ago.

My anti-reincarnation plan did not change, Elliot.
But your letter did made me realize that I did not ask for too much, when I wanted to be accepted unconditionally by a lover.
And to not be traded for a better gadget just like that challenge from the first paragraph.

It was not too much.
Because you re-phrased what I was saying, you confirmed, and you related.

But the reason this good news, of finally being understood and not asking for too much, did not make me more excited or hopeful about finding love and did not make me open my heart to surrender to Life, and rejoice in our humanity  – instead of plotting my way to never come back – was because of that first paragraph metaphor of having felt like I was discarded and swapped in my love life, that men were eager for something they did not want to see what I had to offer.

Grudges aside, the days after reading your letter really made me realize I play a totally different “game”; The game of the Scavenger.
My game is collecting and finding parts, doing maintenance, and curating and treasuring what is there instead of constantly looking for something new.

The Scavenger analogy is inspired by Star Wars’ Rey from The Force Awakens, who was called “Scavenger”.
A scavenger is not just a bird or predator who eats dead animals, but it is also someone who collects parts that can still be re-used.
My “Scavenger relationship model” means I repair things that are broken, I do not throw away, and that I have the capacity to keep things afloat for fifty years, just like the Millennium Falcon.

The Millennium Falcon may look like a piece of junk but it still flies and after Rey and Finn  reverse Unkar Plutt’s crude modification that was slowing it down;
The ship still surprises people with its speed and agility.

So the past 48 hours did not take away from the glow, the thawing of the ice splinter that was stuck in my heart. Our correspondence could stop today, and it would forever keep its value in many ways, but one of them was that it brought me back to life.
But the realization that I live in a world where everyone is always looking for a better spaceship, or a less demanding mode of transport, when I will always be the one who wants to repair and who values the classics with the long history – well, that realization was a bit of a party pooper.

I’m now going to reread your letter.
Brb.
*gets tissues*

1/3 through: (not crying yet)
Suddenly realize I wanted to write you about two different things, which I’ll both do a bad job at, but I’m just gonna drop them now that I think of them (and the first is known, because I asked your permission specifically if that was okay for you)

1. Gay man in a woman’s body
   One thing I discovered since 2023, is that I “really” am a gay man in a woman’s body. Quotation marks because I’m quit happy with my female body, but I don’t identify with it. If it had been a man’s body I would have looked at it with the same surprise, gentleness, and admiration. So I don’t have problems with my gender, and if I were a real man in a woman’s body, then I would have a problem with my body.
   Hence the quotation marks.
   But yes, this year actually, this vague idea of being a gay man in a woman’s body got much more pronounced.
   My relationships with men are so entirely different to how other women seem to relate to them. Emotionally, I relate to being that single gay lover they allow themselves to have, only to then pick up their heterosexual lives again.
   This reveals itself the strongest when they leave – because I’m never jealous.
   And I don’t think that’s because I’m incapable of being jealous, but because from me being a gay man perspective, there’s simply nothing to be jealous about.
   But if they left me to be with a man, I’d be soooo jealous!!!! 😉
2. I think Mr.Big was a Soft Dom 
   Soft dominants arrange pleasure for their sub. And although I looked into it at the time, what the word Soft Dom meant, only to discover that the dynamics and specifics were way too narrow for me, resulting in me rejecting the whole Soft Dom idea (or the whole Dom idea, to be honest) for months;
   I keep circling back to it.
   He was so incredibly tuned into my body and to what I liked, it was intoxicating.
   And he took real risks in pushing me, not so much risks as in doing something I did not want – because he was so attuned that he knew he could trust himself with that-
   But he took risks in me having to say No, or perhaps even rejecting him or laughing at him. Ego risks!
   That’s the reason there are so few men capable of being dominant in bed (in the sense that they carry the emotional load that comes with it), because you have to be incredibly vulnerable.
   You can be rejected every time you initiate something.
   Anyway, it’s months later and I forgot what the internet thinks a Soft Dom should be and I m back with: Mr.Big was a soft dom

Now I m going to read the rest of your letter.
(tissues still waiting)

–
“And I think that’s where your letter hits a nerve. How much of a relationship is actually about being understood, and how much of it is about learning to live with the fact that you ultimately aren’t?”

Lets promise we will not let each other get away with that, and will ask each other, as friends, again until we do feel understood.
Coming back to your reference of a GPS taking over and getting you to your destination but at the cost of missing out on the scenery:
Instruct me to put the GPS of our friendship down.
“And put it the GPS down, Lauren. Don’t make me ask twice.” :p

–

“Perhaps that’s what settling actually looks like; not necessarily choosing someone terrible, but choosing someone with whom certain parts of yourself must remain largely your own.”

I know there’s a ton of paragraphs coming after this one, but I want to use this one as the key here. Yes, it’s the pain of certain parts of yourself remaining unknown, but that is only the result.

By now I’m convinced the real pain is the other person not being willing to be in relationship with those parts of us, or those parts of the relationship.
We see them failing by not even trying. And that stings.

And I know this is not their ill-will, nor a sign they’re not invested in us, but rather a reflex, childhood wounds left unattended, and that there’s probably incredible pain, unsafety and trauma underneath their sloppy and uninterested behavior;
But it’s that turning away from it, that stabs us.

The fact that your partner was not ready to have that conversation about what you both wanted and needed.
Mr.Big breaking up by half a year of excuses not having time to see me, while silently selling his house, our love nest.

And you say that literally, later in your letter;
It was Mr.Big not letting me be part of the breakup process that hurt the most.
And your partner not giving you a conversation about your grievances.

You could argue that the GPS may offer a short cut to normal people standards, but that it does nothing for us. That we don’t care about the destination, and are only there for the scenery.
A breakup conversation in a house for sale, would have been “scenery” to me.
Melancholic, beautiful, dark, and unbelievably potent and powerful.
It would have been intensely painful but ultimately pure alchemy.

A boundary conversation, even one where your partner had told you he did not have anything to give, to make you happier; I would have made your bond stronger and deeper…..
The conversation itself would have been the understanding you so desperately craved, the destination of what you got out of it suddenly irrelevant.
Because I think maybe, the GPS version could have come true you know. Your partner may actually be integrating things he remembered, right now as we write….. He can very well be trying to remember the destination of your laundry list, and trying to get there without asking for directions.

Not realizing that – my guess – I don’t think you wanted any of the things that were on your laundry list. You just wanted him to acknowledge there was a list, and be okay with you bringing it up. The conversation being the magic. The scenery. Not the destiny of the outcome.

I think we should crown ourselves as scenic route people, with little appreciation for the destination if the drive to get there was unpleasant and spent in silence.

The people who want to remove Unkar Plutt’s compressor from the ignition line, and make the Millennium Falcon fly like she used to.
Not get a new ship because this one’s too slow.

We think the work itself, is what makes the relationship better, and the ship more valuable. While they are afraid we’ll find out that what we’re riding here is not a new, perfect model straight from the conveyor belt.
We can’t wait until we can get dirty and dig our fingers in (pardon the graphic choice of words) when they hope to finally, finally, and for once, get a clean ride.

Would there be a way for us, to assure them we know this ship like the back of our hand?
How to patch up the compressor tank without risking the ship gets filled with poisonous gas.

–

“Which brings me back to Connor.
[….] why his silence has been so difficult. It isn’t just the absence of a person; it’s the absence of an opportunity to discover what that connection could have been.”

Okay. Crying now! 
Because yes, that’s exactly what it is.
Missing out on the destination and the scenery.

–

“In both situations (Connor and Mr.Big), the silence seems to have done something that an actual conversation might have done differently. It removed your ability to participate in the ending. You were left to interpret the absence rather than being invited into an explanation. I think there’s something especially painful about that when communication is one of the things you value most.”

Making grown women cry, Elliot!
😭

—

I love you for all the effort in writing back as a whole, but also the topic of emotional processing before sharing something with someone else.
It was good reading that back, but with different wording.
Like you processed it a bit for me 😉

And then what you made me see, is in the next paragraph, the idea of monogamy as something you do to protect the relationship. This was something I never considered, for which I will not feel guilty because monogamy is so normalized, it’s not my job to think about its virtues.

Meanwhile I m way past the point of risking writing an ugly letter back because I quote too much and have too little original ideas of my own, so I may as well continue and copy paste this whole thing:

” I do wonder, though, whether the possibility of losing someone to a conventional relationship is particularly painful because it would suggest that the connection you believed was significant was ultimately conditional – that someone could enjoy the freedom and intimacy of your relationship until something more conventional came along, at which point you would suddenly become expendable.
You don’t want to be someone’s temporary exception. You want to be someone whose importance survives the arrival of other people. I think that’s a very human thing to want.“

A human thing to want, until it starts fucking costing something and the Falcon, the scenery, the soft dom, and the mistress are quietly deleted by giving them the silent treatment.
I can feel a new ice stalk forming in my heart, Elliot.

I once read (source: Florence Given) that you should not make yourself smaller to be palpable to other people, and it closed on:
“Stay whole and let them choke.”
The only reason I did not make Let them choke my life’s mantra was because I have to stay karmically neutral, or they could (and probably should!) send me to back to earth to reincarnate.

Which is why I have trained myself to reframe being discarded and ignored (and I m not talking about Connor obviously because he does not owe me anything), but almost everyone who I ever dated yes;
I have reframed being walked away from – not even being granted a conversation – so they could have some SUV version of life as:
I am happy that they are free and know how to make the choices that work for them.
And then I breathe, Elliot.
And I breathe again.
And after a while – oh no a little longer than that – then the anger subsides and I am me again. Human again. Soft again. And I no longer want anyone to choke, and understand that building Millennium Falcons is not for the faint at heart.

That scenic routes are a bit of an acquired taste.

And that most of us have had more than enough stress for one lifetime;
With too many things breaking down on them;
Too many destinations that were never reached;
And a lot of terrible company and unwanted guests along the way.

And I no longer blame them, and a Zen like peace comes over me that makes life feel kind of nice.

So no, I would not call it settling, really.
We both made a choice: You for a relationship, and me for living alone.
But we have our eyes wide open, and we encounter different things. Different challenges. You encounter disappointment with how you would like to be understood by your partner, and he seems incapable or unwilling to do that.
And I experience disappointment of men not valuing me and the type of relationship I have to offer, and only allowing me in their life if they don’t have anything (or anyone) better to do.

I refuse to see either one of those choices as settling.

In particular not when there are blogposts that are thousands of words long.
And two souls meeting online in what Anais Nin foreshadowed in the 70s, by wishing for “a Café in Space”.

Final quote from your letter:

“The interesting part of a story isn’t always what happened.
Sometimes it’s what happened inside you while it was happening.”

As long as there are things happening inside of us we have not settled, Elliot. Which is why it will never be true that you settled in your relationship, nor will I ever settle in my abstinence.

Neither one of us has settled, and we now also have each other.

I have a good feeling about this.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara;
The series Harteveld 2026*
Behind the Scenes of my 2001 timeline
And more letters to Elliot!
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.