Author: LS Harteveld

It seemed like such a good idea:
To center my whole life around my relationships.
Professional relationships, friends, family, lovers, all, relationships.

If I had learned anything, and I certainly hoped so because it was one of the few things that kept me afloat these recent years, then it was that relationships require at least the same amount of planning, resources, and strategy, than “all” other areas of life.

“All” between quotation marks because there’s actually not that many areas.
In Africa they talk about “The Big Five” referring to the biggest animals, but I think humans have got less areas they actually focus on.
I’d say three for some, two for most.
And relationships, outside of romance or the nuclear family, is not one of them.

I had realized that my happiness throughout my life had been heavily dependent on at least one main social structure, and usually more, being presented to me on a silver platter…..
School, university, work;
There was nothing I needed to do, I could just hop on the wagon and off I went.
I never had problems socializing.

Looking back however, I can see the High Risk episodes in my life.
Time periods to a maximum of 6, 9 months maybe, where one social structure had ended and another one had not quite begun, and loneliness started creeping in.
So yes, I could have picked up this lesson sooner, that I was dependent on these structures.
But I didn’t.
Not until it came all crashing down in what was a perfect storm, that has been going on to this day.
Yet, I feel it is clearing up slowly, it’s definitely less dense. And either way, it is time to extract its lessons!
And since I’m probably still not done paying the price, I intend to find each and every one of them and get my years-long investment back.
I want to uncover every lesson that’s in there.

For what was probably just hours but it seemed like a lifetime, I believed one conclusion of this Storm Era, was I would be centering my life around my relationships.
This even tied into what an astrologer had told me, that my relationships were my wealth.
In the unlikely case this storm would ever fully clear up, I did not want this long Fall Out to happen again. And it didn’t have to, because this time I knew what to focus on. And more importantly, what NOT to focus on;
Writing.

My writing has damaged relationships, not facilitated them. And this came on top of writing itself being an isolating activity. A joyful, feeling-on-purpose and in-flow activity;
But technically isolating, none the less.
Just like fasting: Many people believe fasting to be healthy, but we’re all aware it should be done in moderation or you die.
Writing works the same way.

In my experience, creativity as a whole is a demanding lover, where you’re constantly wondering if this is one of those unhealthy relationships;
Or if it’s The Love of The Century.

I’ve been writing since 2006, yet never without questioning its true character. To have it pop up again as something that had eroded my social life, was kind of like the final drop in a bucket that had been overflowing for years.
It was time to close the tap.

My social life would become my number one priority.

But within hours, I course corrected.
I made a diary entry and photo copied it 4 times and pasted it into all the other notebooks of relevance.

If my diaries are ever studied and my life reconstructed, the curator will call it the diary entry of October 14, 2025, where you can see the writer accepts who she is.
“See, she copied and pasted it into all her running diaries at the time. It was clearly an important decision for her.”
And it clearly was.

So what have I decided?
Now that I have obviously accepted my fate that, just like all the other people, I do not center my life around my relationships.
And I don’t have a partner nor a nuclear family to take care of, so my number of things to focus on is even one less than for everybody with children, or a partner, and far less than anybody going on safari hoping to catch a glimpse of wildlife.

Which is that I will focus exclusively on my professional life.
Or lives.

From Monday to Friday, I work under my other, “real” name, including on all the content I create there. 
And on Friday evening I switch to weekend mode, which is for this account, for Lauren Harteveld.

Social appointments during the week will cannibalize be deducted from my creative hours, aka content hours.
And social appointments in the weekend will be very welcome because that’s what weekends are for.
And on weekends I will also write one small blogpost for Lauren Harteveld (this blog).

Should I have more time I will publish my book(s), but I’ve fallen off the wagon there so dramatically, I don’t even remember how to get up.
And either way, that’s not the most important aspect of this split.

The most important thing is that the author has accepted her fate as a writer and has effectively resisted the temptation to center her life around her relationships.

And here the middle-aged generation gamma curator pushes her glasses up her nose, and stares intensely at the small group of people taking the guided tour of the Harteveld Estate.

“This letter, which she pasted in all her diaries, is why we believe the 14th of October 2025 was one of the most important dates of the author’s life,”
The tour guide will say.
“She finally understood who she was, and what she had to do.”

And that it was indeed;
The Love of the Century.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

I think I just had the worst week of the year, but I could be wrong.
Maybe wounds that have only just healed feel just more tender than the rest of the scars.

But omg what a result I have to share with you!
What an amazing and most-welcome breakthrough, that will last me for decades if not the rest of my life.
‘Cause I finally nailed it, this thing called Life.
Turns out I have some sensitivities I need to work around if I don’t want to end up in total meltdown.

If I don’t up my game plan, and keep being caught off-guard by betrayal, emotional hijacks and just the general rub-off of stress from other people onto me;
Well, then I’m not going to make it.
Simple as that.

Unless I hack this, I will not recover to my pre-pandemic self.

Plus I have an agenda. And what this agenda needs more than anything, is a fucking robust foundation that cannot just stand the storm;
It needs to be, the fucking storm.
But let me start at the beginning.

Like I said there was a meltdown.
A complete fallout of everything, after a week where according to extrovert/ normal people standards, nothing actually happened.

I often tell you how I feel I go through so many cool adventures, and when somebody asks me how I’ve been I want to start telling.
Until I realize it’s all internal.
From the outside, nothing noteworthy happened.

The same thing goes for bad weeks too.
I couldn’t tell you what happened, because it was absolutely nothing outside of the ordinary.
And yet?
It killed me…. it really did.

Ended up having to spend a whole day in bed, only waking up to get more painkillers and a bucket because I thought I was going to throw up.
At 8.30 PM I was healed, like always I could not believe it. Although I know these episodes, I’ve been having them since 2020.
I believe the accurate label would be migraine and thank god they’ve become very rare.
But not rare enough, obviously.

Anyway, I made myself a breakfast, that was actually my dinner but I didn’t dare having any of my regular past 10 AM foods yet. But all was well.
When I went to sleep again, just a few hours later, I had a full night’s sleep yet again. Still exhausted apparently, by what had happened.
So I’m good now.

Good, but clearly this past week needs to be dissected to the t, in order to find the ingredients that drive me into a meltdown. I simply cannot afford to have this happening again.
Where did I go wrong?

And after a day of puzzling (seems wonderfully symmetrical! A day in bed counterbalanced by a day of creative puzzling on my identities) I came up with a chart.

The three layers are:
outer layer (black): Artist/ Rock Star
second layer (pink): Mad chaotic person (The MCP!)
third layer and core: Lauren 2000 (light blue) and Lauren 1990 (eggshell)
Lauren (the deepest layers) is a friend (or a lover, hopefully one day again) living in the year 2000 or even 1990.
Lauren 2000/ 1990 lives offline and it is a timeline travel project, my experimental art form.

I will now tell more about each layer, and how this new setup will help me navigate, so I can avoid losing more days to meltdowns.

first layer: Artist/ Rock Star
This is where I create ALL my things.
I could even start using it for publishing my books, which is the hot potato in my schedule that never actually gets done because it does not feel important enough, and it’s also boring.
But Artist layer does not mind boring, because
-> they don’t have to interact with anybody <-
Like a true Rock Star, they’re completely inaccessible and they only show up if you pay them to do so. 
A lot, if you pay them a lot. And for a beforehand agreed upon time bracket, only.
However, the negotiations for this are not handled by the Rock Star themselves, but by the agent.
A.k.a. mad chaotic person, an entirely new layer built upon the smoldering ashes of the meltdown.

How the Artist/ Rock Star layer will help me navigate, so I can avoid losing more days to meltdowns:

The Artist/Rock Star-me creates within the safety of my own home. The production schedule follows a predictable pattern of what needs to be done and when.
And by taking all social responsibilities off their plate, they are given full creative freedom and are shielded from disruptions.

second layer: Mad Chaotic Person (The MCP!)

Responsible for (almost) all social interaction, including posting content the artist/ Rock Star has made.
The only exceptions are people who relate to the deepest core layer, of Lauren 2000 or Lauren 1990, who obviously communicate with her.
But even there….. falling back onto the Mad Chaotic Person, could be welcome every now and then!

So how did this MCP (Mad Chaotic Person) come into being?

It all started when I realized my view on what it means to be human had shifted.
You see, through a combination of factors among which (yes) privilege but also courage to make incredibly bold choices, I can look back at life and say I always took the right turn.

Sometimes things did not turn out the way I thought they would. But that was because I did not have the right knowledge, sometimes society at large didn’t even have the whole picture yet.
So although I will never stop being bummed out by what all that, cumulatively,  cost me *insert curse*, it simply is what it is.
When you know better you do better.

But at large, yes, I can look back and say I made some damn smart moves when it came to relationships, sex and even career and finances.
And I definitely managed to miraculously avoid the trap society has set up for us, where women end up attending to everybody’s needs but their own.  

However, from the green pastures of having escaped that trap I can tell you this:
If you’re not bound by shared resources, consider yourself an outcast.

Although it was no doubt a gradual realization, as one by one my relationships fell out or altered in a way that their conditionality and fragility had come drifting to the surface, this does feel uniquely like a 2025-breakthrough.
The realization that nothing binds us, but pain.
(the pain of shared “resources”)

In other words, by now I believe connection is “nothing more” but someone you share your pain with. Not pain, which you can then share (as in cut in half). No, I mean that the connection itself is established THROUGH the shared resources, which can be validation or other intangible payoffs, which then cause pain.
It is the pain itself, that makes it a relationship.

Now this may just be an individual experience, I fervently hope it is!
I really hope that to other people, relationships or even casual human interaction does not feel like someone scraping a blunt potato peeler over your skin.

If I look back at the past year – where I have actively been aligning my relationships to a higher form of communication and I’d say with some very impressive results! – I thought what I was doing was outcome focused, Sara.
So I thought (in my ignorance, obviously) I was redesigning my friendships, and really all relationships, so the outcome would be higher.
For almost 14 months, I have believed that.

Now I see that the quality of those relationships did not improve because I boosted the outcome, the results, no;
They improved, because I removed the pain!

The pain of bickering over resources, like if we were going to see each other, and so on.

It has only been possible to see me if you took full responsibility, were present, chose me, us, our time together.
I have demanded dates to come fully funded, and fully resourced in every way imaginable.

And these dates will still go on, in the core two layers of Lauren 2000 and Lauren 1990- but it is not having a Plan B for when these conditions are not met- that caused the meltdowns!

I lost a whole week because I was showing up for people like that pure Lauren 2000 or Lauren 1990 core, or in a half-assed dangerously accessible version of that Rock Star outer layer, in situations that neither met high-paid professionalism of the Rock Star, nor the New Dating Protocol of Lauren 1990 or 2000.

In other words, I gave my best self, in situations that were cut out for normal resources-based pain and chaos relationships!
I showed up as caviar when they craved a proper meal.

Proper meals, Sara! 
I need to BE a proper meal!
Someone people can relate to, be human around, feel SEEN and about a thousand more things that are still largely foreign to me.

What I realized after last week’s debacle was that I need my default to be messy chaos, because what I meet 99% of the time is messy chaos. 
So although I think the work I put into my friendships was really useful, they are not a prelude to what will help me through the rest of my life.
Instead of a default, or a standard or aspirational level, my friendships are in fact more like an oasis to the desert;
A rare exception.

And my meltdowns stem from taking on the desert like an oasis, with a thirsty delicate core, that is absolutely not built for hardship. Only for clear bodies of water, luscious vegetation and drinking milk straight from the coconut.

And it’s not even a service to my friends to only and automatically show up that vulnerable (in bikini!).
Maybe they first need to vent about the world being filled with cacti, or are otherwise in a bad mood or whatever.
I owe it to them that I can take that on, and to not show up attuned to the most ethereal layers of existence.
I’ve been cornering them, even they need me to show up more robust.

Mad Chaotic Person will be my new persona that handles all social media as well as real-life interactions, including first-contact with the ones meeting to Lauren 2000 and Lauren 1990.

And not only will Mad Chaotic Person be built not to give a flying fuck about how reckless, inauthentic and sloppy other people are in interacting with her;
She’ll also be equipped with all my unprocessed emotions, my grudges, my unfiltered aggression, and of course my madness and my chaos.
She will be the embodiment of the ultimate human experience.

Which, according to my mathematical calculations that equate relationships to pain, will make her incredible popular and adaptable in every and all relationships!
Wasn’t it in Alice in Wonderland, where someone (probably the Mad Hatter) says “We’re all mad down here.”? 

(In hindsight) I believe my recent years of trying to regulate my relationships, by trying to be honest and clean, have alienated me, and have taken away my ability for true human connection.
But this Mad Chaotic Person looks forward to embracing the blunt potato peeler and unprecedented levels of impurity.
And to be a proper meal (and not a dish of caviar), when meeting the hungry.

How the Mad Chaotic Person (MCP) layer will help me navigate, so I can avoid losing more days to meltdowns:

Simple!
By putting her in charge of all interaction, I have both a place to emotionally dump all my unprocessed shit (Oh, I’m sorry, did I say that out loud?) but also a tornado layer of forcefully moving energy that can pick up anything big and small, only to spit it out and be done with it two miles and five minutes later.
I will be incapable of holding on to anything, including any memory of what happened.
Mad Chaotic Person will help me show up like a force of nature, instead of like a delicate snowflake that melts at the first sign of heat.

third layer: Lauren 2000 and Lauren 1990

Oh Sweetie!
Oh Lovergirl, Babygirl, the hell we have been through.

At the risk of sounding even more over the top dramatic, but I really can’t believe I never got the memo that showing up authentically will not just make human interaction practically impossible;
It will also make it unnecessary painful.
And I mean more than just all of your expectations not being met and you first being energetically drained and then discarded;
I mean at the most existential level, being rejected as a human being.

The biggest change in who I am has been in recent years and it has resulted in not feeling connected to anyone anymore. Not in that automatic, unconditional, way. There is no belonging.
And this process has been symbiotic with living more from my truest self. So much so, that I can’t even say which caused what.
Did I start living my authentic self, and then stopped connecting?
Or were the connections severed and did this disconnection allow me to become my truest self? 

I cannot blame other people, because I’ve been trapped in a web of micro-deviations from being my real self, for decades…
So of course everybody around me was used to that. 
But still; it hurt.

It hurts finding your true authentic self, to then realize that only a handful of people like her. But that should never be a reason to not honor her, and to be happy you found her.
That person is Lauren 2000 or Lauren 1990.
So they’re versions of me, living in different timelines.
Lauren 1990 is new, but Lauren 2000 has been on this timeline since 1994 (our 2019).
She (Lauren 2000) is the one who decided to go back, and start her life again in 1990.
I don’t know yet how this will all go, artistically or otherwise, we’ll see.

Anyway, what is obvious is that all my friendships and future love relationships are under the identity of Lauren/ the 1990 and 2000 timeline. My authentic self came at a price for sure, but also with an incredible payoff!
I can now have relationships as my true self.
For the real inner-circle, I no longer hide.

How the Lauren 2000 and Lauren 1990 layer will help me navigate, so I can avoid losing more days to meltdowns:

This is where all the hard work is stored, of finding my way back to who I truly was, and now am again. Decades of being led astray, undone. This persona is home, it is not even a persona. It is who I am, even though I understand this time travel aspect is weird and unusual. But I like it.

The hours or even moments I can “be” her, are the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the reason for everything else.

She is the reason I want to live.

Happily, ever after.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living