Author: LS Harteveld

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

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