Author: LS Harteveld

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.

Dear Sara,

Do you remember when I started identifying with the Will Smith movie I am Legend?
2020
The man alone in a deserted city, devoid of human connection with merely his dog to keep him company.
The same tv show playing over and over.
And zombies to fear on daily expeditions across the overgrown city.

For years, I woke up with the distinct feeling of isolation.
Which turned into waking up sick.
Which eventually led to the point I got sick the moment I lay down.

And although medicine have taken care of my physical symptoms, and the damage these years did to important relationships (the ones that stuck but eroded none the less) is slowly being repaired;
And although I have no doubt the final part of my career will have the same carefree social connection as my entire life was blessed with until 2018-ish (years before the pandemic) when it all started falling apart;
Something has changed.
Something which will never return.
The isolation will stay with me forever, and the only way I will ever be able to belong is through my work.

Because I am no longer connected to others.
It is only through my actions, that I can make the difference now.
And maybe that is what maturity is, and it has opened up new avenues of thinking. It is strange to realize how much of the drama and the despair that I once thought was part of life, I realize now is not mine.
It only seemed mine, because I was connected.

I didn’t really connect the dots until today, when I came across an analysis of Bladerunner 2049, a movie that I have started to feel such a kinship with.
Yet I credited it to Ryan Gosling, or to the Rutger Hauer connection to the 1982 Bladerunner movie.
The magic of art and male beauty. 
Yet didn’t expect my fascination with Bladerunner 2049 to be so personal.

But of course…..

Bladerunner 2049 is about a replicant “named” K who follows his orders to eliminate older model replicants, who still have the ability to disobey.
K hates his job, yet executes without question because his whole life he has been told his feelings do not matter.

This is the point where I had written multiple paragraphs (which I lost when  I lost internet connection), about how we all recognize this as the way we live our lives too.
Execute regardless of how we feel.
Amplified, during the pandemic.
At least in The Netherlands, the discussion about what was “good” and what was “bad” and who were the good people and who could be ignored and marginalized, peaked during these years.
And to me it was not so much the content of the discussion, on either side, as much as it was the total absence of a discussion about the characteristics of the conversation itself, that upset me the most.

And although I still hope to one day get a full insight in what it was exactly that changed me forever during those years, for now I m keeping it at feeling isolated in my need to have a meta conversation about it.

Seeing my position mirrored in Bladerunner 2049, is a first and welcome step.

In the movie a replicant named K, played by Ryan Gosling, hunts other replicants who can still disobey and are therefor terminated.
After every assignment he receives a psychological test with the Nabokov quote above, to ensure he does not start attaching feelings of guilt or remorse to killing is own kind.

On one of his assignments he finds proof of a replicant having had a child, and he has memories that suggest he was that child.
That he is therefor not a replicant, he is not made, but he is born from a special replicant who, much like Mary could conceive Jesus, could get pregnant when law said that should not be possible.

The moment K starts questioning his artificial background is the moment he starts questioning his work and gets a growing sense of meaning and purpose.
Yet despite his possibly divine-like origins, the movie makes it clear that is not what makes him human.
What makes him human are his actions.

Just like the thoughtless, routine-like way in which he did his work (assassinating other replicants) at the beginning of the movie, was what made him a machine, or a non-human.
Not his origin.

Two, three months ago, I was on the verge of starting my own version of  a job where I would assassinate other replicants. 
Like K, I had lost all humanness and had made my peace understanding that to society I was only of use if I did my capitalist duty.

But I had a change of heart.
Just like K, something happened that made me choose to do the right thing.

And not because anyone will notice. Like K, I know neither the resistance, nor capitalism, nor the law, will be able to do what I consider the right thing.
The right thing is always personal. It’s small, insignificant, and impossible to scale up to an organization, religion or philosophy.
Doing the right thing is too subjective to be of any use on a bigger scale.

Because the right thing, is the thing that is done with love, and for love.
And once you see, it becomes the only option.
Yet I am certain that if I were still connected to other people I would not be able to act accordingly.
Because it’s also the most difficult choice.

Despite its fluffy connotation, choosing to act from love is an extremely hard path.

At one point, K asks Anna, who is a creator of memories much like an artist paints a painting, he asks her how you know if a memory is real or not.
At which Anna answers:

“Anything real, should be a mess.”

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.

Dear Sara,

Literally, Sara? Where do I begin?
For the longest time I was unbothered by our new arrangement landing on monthly calls, and therefor just sending you one monthly letter.
There was always a topic at the top of my mind that was clearly the right one to address, regardless of the fact that of course!
Four whole weeks had passed by and there had been other angles, other events, other topics which would have been equally valid to bring to the table.
It’s not like my life was on standstill, and there was only one thing on my mind which then automatically became the topic of our call.

But there was always something, one thing (not a multitude) that I was emotionally entangled in. 
And now?
Nothing.

For the first time since 2018 when we started with weekly calls, my mind is not engaged with something important.
And I feel incredibly peaceful.

And yet in terms of events, the weeks were so incredibly full and I did many important things. But it’s all like “okay”.
Although in the words of someone who knew a thing or two about women:
“My mother told me that when a woman says she is okay, she never is.”
For now my okay feels mostly unfamiliar.

So let’s unpack my two biggest insights.
About the root causes of what happened the past decade or so.
Why.
And how to move forward. 

First off, the title of this blogpost “Where do we begin?”.
It was the only thing even remotely usable I could come up with, creating the Canva image. And even for the imagery, since I had no idea what this blogpost would be about, I let myself be inspired by Canva’s “Magic Recommendations”.
Which gave me antique objects and stationary. Since I liked the vibe, I finished the collage with a vintage photo of a woman.

But the title is a reference to the podcast from Esther Perel, Where do we begin, which was couples therapy.
Which is a great begin, for sharing my first insight because it is this;
That my loneliness as a single, although never having been a conscious choice, has become a way of life.

That much like people who are together ultimately end up having a relationship, even when neither one officially asks the other person for consent.
In the same way, I ended up having a relationship with myself.
Not because I chose to, but because it happened. Because when given the choice, I much rather solve the problems of being single, than the problems of being in a relationship.
And I like dates with myself, meaning typing a letter to my coach on Sunday night, way more than being with a friend or a lover, at this time of day.

So it’s not I cannot imagine a fantastic night out, where the memories would last me throughout 2025;
It’s just that I have known that for the past couple of years, I am my own best company.
Or my work is, writing is.

And what happened is that I have been able to identify two breaking points here, that have attributed to this situation.
One was eight years ago, when my best friend migrated and half a year later my cat died, with whom I had a symbiotic relationship.
That was when my world fell apart, but also, it was the moment when I started realizing I was alone and my mental health started to deteriorate very fast.

Fortunately, I found my feet again and even survived the first breakup to my lover, confident to not let this destroy me, when the pandemic hit.
The second event.

Where in hindsight the first breaking point had been about me realizing I was all alone, as in the consequences of not having children or a partner;
The pandemic became the breaking point of realizing I was all alone in society.

I have never seen people being more insufferable as the pandemic years. In the first years the measures (in the Netherlands) were just inhumane, and caused tremendous suffering not just for me, but also for people in nursing homes and so on.
The whole approach as if we were fighting Ebola instead of a flu like disease, was in my opinion ridiculous, and we had government organizations tracking everybody you had been in contact with, if you were infected.
And then the final years of the pandemic the government demonized unvaccinated people, and gas lit them into complying and they were not allowed to enter restaurants and so on.

And the number of people who picked up that both phases had been deeply disturbing, was so limited, in particular under those who got vaccinated (even though those two areas should have nothing to do with each other since wanting the vaccination should not affect your ability to see this should always be a free choice);
I will never trust “them” again.

And not because I think the government had some super plan to take over our minds or free will, because I do not believe in conspiracy theories either.
But because group pressure and that includes the group of people living in the same nation or city, is just so toxic I have seen with my own eyes people are no longer able to thinking straight.
Matthias Desmet calls it the psychology of mass formation.

But what it taught me is that I am alone.
Not just because I am single, which was the shock that undermined my mental health years prior;
But alone because everybody around me cannot be trusted.

2020 and the years that followed brought the realization that I fundamentally do not belong.
And that consequentially, and in all likeliness, I have absolutely nothing of value to offer to anyone, since what I do has always been under the assumption that you know how to think for yourself.

So the original living single crisis, turned into an existential loneliness crisis, and then in a professional crisis.
Since I, referring to the title again, literally have no idea to begin.

And then now the good news.
Because I am beginning to understand why I am so keen to start my new profession. And I’m not going to call out systems and titles or names, but for now let’s just define it as that I will be a project manager, working according to a certain methodology.

So!
Spelling it out – why did this grey mouse profession of being a special-skills project manager appeal to me so much?

Because of course, as this project manager, it is my business to get all those hidden toxic structures out in the open and do something about it.
If I manage a million dollar project, like hell “gas lighting people into cooperating” is going to be the way we execute!

By learning a new profession, at practical and applicable level, I am able to step back into a society I thought I would never see from the inside ever again.
And in a positive and constructive way, where I can be of service doing the unpopular work of exposing anything fishy, but also offering a solution.
A new way of working, so we can all thrive.

My new grey mouse profession will not give me belonging.
That ship sailed in 2020, or at least that was the moment I realized I wasn’t on the boat.

And it will also not change my mind about being single, but I am at the point where I can say that “we” (me and me) have been together for so long now, I’m gonna take care of this relationship with the same care and effort I would if it had been with someone else.

If I start counting the moment I moved out from my ex, I have been with me for 16 years!
I am definitely past the point I’m gonna give that up for a new person. 
I’m taken.

So when I say I am okay, I mean that the consequence of being single is that when your best friend moves and your cat dies, you’re completely alone;
Maybe okay means, I have come to terms with that.
And that it really is okay now.

And maybe okay professionally and within society means that 2020’s shock about who other people were will never be undone, but I have found a way to make myself useful.
A way to contribute so that it no longer matters that at heart we are so incredibly far apart.
And that we’ll never have warm feelings for each other.

But that as long as we do not beat each other over the head;
It really, really, is okay.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.

Did you notice?
Back to the small square picture, aligned to the right of the first paragraph!
Which means?
That contrary to last post, I found a way to bypass the by now almost-but-not-quite inescapable block-editor on WordPress hosting.

Despite the software-net clearly having closed in just a little bit more (again).

Although I will hopefully always be autonomous in my professional life, and will never be at the merciless hands of an employer (the way I will inevitably have to succumb to the innovation drive of WordPress hosting), I do think that today?
The two went hand-in-hand.

That escaping WordPress’ block-editor once again, and also escaping what would have been the most destructive career and revenue path, and one I didn’t see myself having in a million years until 5 months ago;
Today, I did suddenly see the light, escaping both of them.

It is a brand-new start.
Like the new moon in Pisces, which is also today and together with the 7 planetary alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

An event that will not happen again until 2040, and in all likeliness not in the same 24 hours as the new moon.

Astrologically, this is seen as the biggest reset, probably of the decade…

But I didn’t know and I didn’t care.
Because I had my own things to worry about, because as I wrote you last Sunday, contemplating my choice to plunge into the darkness of a corporate career in order to pay for my art, and I wrote:

“I have also created a way to open more than one door to financial freedom.
To make the hardest most destructive career, just one door.
But to deliberately put in place two others!
As a sign to the universe saying:
“If I’m not supposed to go through that first door (of career), then cast me a boon through the others! Or a husband!”“

A husband who would provide for me, and my art.

In that post I also said:

“I haven’t seen the movie Oppenheimer, but I’m guessing he just wanted to go to art school but his parents made him choose physics.” 

In other words, I stood by my choice intellectually, but I was also resisting it. In particular the idea that I felt in any way satisfied, that as part of my  pain as an artist, I would destroy the world.
Yet I resisted this warm glow of poetic justice, that just like the imaginary Oppenheimer I created in my head, I would not destroy the world accidentally, as unintentional collateral damage on my path to securing my financial future.
But that the destruction was what actually made it bearable.

Last Sunday, the only way to give meaning to the destruction (on all levels) encoded into my new choice of career, that I felt pulling and tempting me to go on it!
That way, was to fully own it.

What I wrote you was that I knew it was the only path that made sense, but that the only way to survive that hellhole was to claim everything that would happen as MY destruction.
My wrath.
From my colleagues being crushed in corporate politics, to any harm big or small I saw happening, to the devastating affects on the environment and the insane amount of cheap resources we devoured;
I would embrace it.

Like a corporate Kali I would not try to contain and downplay the destruction of the companies I worked for;
I would fucking unleash it.

I really thought that the biggest mistake employees anywhere and everywhere make, think is that they can do their job with integrity.
And that the way out is to accept your work is evil.
And that that is okay, because you have bills to pay.

My previous letter caught me trying to get my inner-Kali back into the box!
I wanted to be back to the neutral stance of “This is what I’ll be doing for a decade or so. And it’s not ideal, but it’s okay.”

I knew that as long as I was still in the pitch black darkness of seeing my job as a weapon against world who had taken me away from my vocations as a writer and a yoga teacher;
I was not ready.
I would die, from sheer toxicity alone.

But I was not there yet.
Even rewriting, reliving basically that entire blogpost, and I can see the Dante’s Inferno-esque beauty of it all.
I wouldn’t say that 50 years from now they’d have a three hour Oscar-winning movie called HARTEVELD;
But I wouldn’t have said No to it! 

I was way, and I mean way too close to the flames.

So that is why I wrote that I had opened two other doors for the Universe.
And called out something like:
“If you don’t want me to continue with this unholy plan, then give me a sign!”
Or throw me a boon, or a husband, as I said it in the letter.

And what can I say?
The Universe did….. 
I’m back, Sara!
I’m here!
It is I, your little coachee client since 2018!

And I’m so sorry I scared the shit out of you.
If it helps, I scared the shit out of myself as well.

How terrifying it has been.
I really felt like Frodo at the end of his journey to the fires of Mount Doom, and he doesn’t think he’ll survive.
And no longer cares.
He’s okay dying there, on a rock floating in lava.

So of course I had to write you again.
Sunday’s story is definitely, and thankfully, not the point at which our conversation will start.

Because although the Universe did not throw me a road to financial freedom, it did throw me something else;
My life, Sara.
I have my life back.

Through sheer luck I came into contact with a group of people who will be crossing guards for amphibians, mainly toads, crossing the road very near my house.
Every year it is such a massacre, and I find myself stepping off my bike and picking up the tiny corpses with two sticks, and dropping them in gras in the roadside.
‘Cause that’s all I can do.

But this year the majority of them will be safely crossing over to the other side, thanks to the project which is a collaboration of two organizations as well as a large group of volunteers.

I could not be blowing up the world from my desk, when there are dozens of people saving toads, less than a mile away.
I just couldn’t.

And it reminded me of Anais Nin, and how she had this resistance to car driving because it forced her to be alert at all times.
When all she wanted was to daydream.
She did not want the responsibility of driving in a car that could kill someone. She didn’t want that kind of responsibility.

I think she too would want to be the person who saved the toads. And not be the one running them over.

So today I set my very first fresh steps, in how I can find a job that makes at least my world, a little better.
What it would look like to contribute to this wonderful country and beautiful city that I live in.
A place where in many ways we are so very privileged.

How can I have a paid job that contributes beauty to the place where I live?
And where the toads live, and where 50 years from now people are hopefully still going to the movies, worst case scenario about a failed artist who designed the weapon of mass destruction of the 21st century.

But it’s no longer me, Sara.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.

Dear Sara,

Today is such a weird day, because it is the 10 year anniversary of the first time my ex-lover and me slept together. 

And when I say ex I mean it’s been years since we had sex and I have not seen him in absolutely ages.
So I do not mean “ex”, as in that I’m over him, that my feelings for him have changed or even that I would have an explanation why he left.
All I can say is that it was his choice to retreat from our affair, and it being his choice is exactly the way I like it.
It’s the very reason I will never stop being fascinated by him, in a way usually reserved for men falling for the wrong woman.

It is the pull of the mystery.

A religious man once said to me that what made the Catholic faith different from other Christian religions is that it’s all about one thing;
To hold space for the mystery.
And that’s what my lover did, and the more time has passed, the more elusive he seems to be.

And given his own mysterious nature, and my fascination for him, I also held space for his mysterious side as well of course.
It went both ways and we shared an equal fascination for each other’s darkness. The aspects of ourselves we rarely showed to others.

There was a fullness, a richness to who we both were that I at least, didn’t share with anyone else.

As sort of a side note, a spark of hope!
Because I did meet someone whom I feel also has the capacity to hold that space for the unknown.
Although he’s a very different type of man, more of a recluse lone ranger and not so deeply intertwined with capitalism the way Mr.Big was.
But I feel he too could “hold” that aspect of me.

A space for a woman as pure potential, because when we’re talking about heterosexual relationships, this is the mystery these men are holding.
They’re able to hold the space for the female mystery.
In this case represented by me.

It’s like the promise of a place where I can learn to know myself, that allures so deeply to me. It is that space I found with Mr.Big, all those years ago.
It’s that promise I felt behind the second man, the one who was new to me.
And it’s that thing I see other couples or singles, either not valuing or not naming, or trading in for things they value more.

But I do not desire anything else.
For a man A. to be mystery, and B. to hold the mystery of me. That’s it.
And that’s not a 24/7 job, nor will there be a 24/7 claim!
But maybe that’s what holds them back as well, right?
The mystery is mysterious. 
Whether we look at him or me, the unknown will always be unknown.

Sometimes I feel the men who left me started craving the known.

Anyway!
The big win from January has been that I do realize that whether I call it “only interested in sex” or I call it “being a femme fatale” or in any other way emphasize my perpetual fascination for my love life vs everything else;
January did affirm that it is the only thing that really matters.

That although my fake and masked life is around the corner, the life where everyone will be so happy for me I “made it” and “overcame” what was holding me back;
That I, at least in this moment, know it was the last 10 years when I was in integrity.

A decade viewed as a waste of time and bad decisions.
That decade.

Where I, the mistress, lived expansively on paper through my writing, and was present in the margins of (his) real life. Until I was pushed out and the pen dried up. There was nothing more to write.

It is a bold claim to state that was me in integrity.
I know.
But in the moments we were together I got all the gold any woman could possibly wish for.
And he never, ever, soiled that memory.

So now that I have devoted, although “made the rational decision to” would have been a better verb, my life to a path of fakeness, to what feels like a pledge to capitalism in the same way Mr.Big unconsciously must have made one;
I find myself doing all sorts of variations of pinching myself if I can still feel, if I am still awake, and if I still know the path I am choosing is fake and without any intrinsic value.

January did that for me;
It’s like it galvanized the entire weight of the past eighteen years because that’s how long I’ve been on this quest for love, that’s how long I’ve been a writer – and turned it into an immovable anchor.
January made it irreversibel.
Like an integration.

But I did not know that yet. Because I actually started a journal, in order to log and write about all those moments I am not in integrity. Everything I would stop doing if I no longer needed the money, or if I was no longer legally required to do it.
The log was going to keep track of all those moments, and it would be my mirror, my accountability.
I was convinced that consciousness was the medicine to being out of integrity.
Consciousness; Not avoidance, not sugarcoating, not finding purpose where there is none, and definitely not investigating and writing about it and giving it a millisecond of my creative time.

No. It was the relentless responsibility of facing capitalism head-on with the purpose of draining it so that I can save my art.
So that in 10 years time, I can be a writer, a yoga teacher, a lover.
Forever.

I believed that as long as I faced my own actions, keeping my endgame in mind; I would never mistake the fake for the things that really mattered.

I even invented a word for it;
Untegrity.
For 10 years I was committing to being in Untegrity, meaning I would do things with a 10-year goal in mind.
Only restricted by a few ethical boundaries, which I knew were arbitrary. 
I was already out of alignment and out of integrity, the ethical boundaries were just there to keep my place within society.
When I knew very well that if my life was not about writing, not about teaching yoga or teaching something else;
And in particular if my life was not about being in bed with a man;
It didn’t matter if I was saving the world or selling nuclear warheads.
It was both equally fake.

But I did not write in the Untegrity Journal.
Or I did write, but then I wrote stories.
And not just because I didn’t want to give the life that was not in integrity another minute! But because I found it was exactly right.

That although I would never confuse the realness of being a lover, with the fakeness of being part of a capitalist world;
I could live with the dichotomy this presented.
There is no untegrity.

If a man ever offers to take care of me, and in a way that the money is mine, and that I’m taken care of and not in exchange for sex or a relationship but because he wants to do that for me;
Then I will always accept it.

If he can bear that burden of doing the capitalist work, then I will trust he is speaking the truth, and I will receive his gift.
But I am okay here.

January brought me the insight that being in “untegrity” where I focus on money and not create any art and not have any sexual relationships;
Well that it all feels surprisingly similar to being in integrity.

The wealth of our love life gave me something to look back on, something to savor. 
It filled me up, and it got there first.
I drank from a different well, I became a different person, and I feel capitalism will be less harmful to me than it would have been twenty years ago.

That Mr.Big, inadvertently, showed me how he used capitalism to create the life he wanted, including a space where we met each other and were together.

Considering the unlimited potential of both capitalism as well as the divine feminine;
It should be within my abilities to create a space, a new life, a new decade, for myself and for my art. Build the church that will helm all that I have to offer the world, my teachings, my writing, and also my lovers.
I will build the church, and I will do whatever I have to, to accomplish that in the next 10 years.

But still; I will never confuse what I am creating for the one he, Mr. Big offered to us. The condo where we made love, and where the affair took place in what must have been stolen moments.

Building something for yourself is never as sweet as it being gifted to you.

But it wil do..

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.

Dear Sara,

Wrapping up the year I am happy it’s over for many reasons.

First of all because it’s an Era wrap-up. The Worst Era Of My Life Wrap-up. Happy it’s over, be gone thy demons of the underworld.
Monsters of the darkness.
Evil, lurking in everyday mediocrity.

You will never be let in ever again, and it took me way too long to find out how you got in, and more importantly, how to expel you and banish you forever.

You have taught me, I have learned and I stand wiser but also more cynical, colder, calculated.
The core of me has become more pure, more tender, but I have created a fake persona to take on the world.

The real me only speaks through her art.
When the Me that is what I would call public, meaning tied to the world;
She is no longer me.
A hologram created for a world that doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.
It cannot, or no longer, distinguish what is conscious and what is hallow.

I could say I will stay aware of the difference between the shell Me, and the real me, but the truth is there is a chance I will start to believe the lie of the hologram myself.
In particular because that is the validated part, whereas the real me has become a hermit, these past years.

People will think I no longer am, but I am.
I just hide it better nowadays.

Shell me goes outside, and looks fine.
Better than she was in every way, ever.
More confident, more resilient, reliable, ferocious, interesting, deep.

But real me is still at home, where she always was.
She does not care for the world, and she lost everything she cared about.
All personal growth bullshit aside, Real Me didn’t get anything out of this.

She’s still the same as before, just with ink black holes in her love life where men used to be.
Real Me lost all of them;
The man who was my lover for 8 years.
The man who wrote me letters for years, that I credit for pulling me through the absolute bleakest of years, 2020 and 2022.
I lost him too.

And I lost a third one as well, with whom I shared so little time, and there is so very little we know about each other.
Yet, I fell in love so unexpectedly. In autumn. It was so very welcome to finally start feeling again.

When we talk it is as if worlds are created, a force neither of us controls nor could ever have anticipated.
It is, or past tense was by now I guess, effortless and magical.
It makes me cry I lost him, but maybe it was just so raw because I already lost the other two.

All in 2024.

So I am happy Sara, happy the shitty as fuck era that apparently needed to happen to turn me into a fucking badass who can fend for herself;
Glad it’s over.

And the medication I found this year is so good, it has not just taken away the mysterious ailments that absolutely floored me;
It has reshaped me.
My body, still heavier from all the struggle of course, but the first kilos just dropped off by themselves, and it has gotten toned and radiantly healthy, without any noteworthy physical exercise or dietary restrictions.
Just from finding those pills this year, the ones that finally healed me.

So I have so much to be grateful for.
It really is like a second chance.

But a second chance for who?
Because Lover Me, didn’t win anything.

The real me will stay home in 2025, because her wrap up of 2024 is that she lost the only thing she ever cared about.
Love. 

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.

Dear Sara,

If I remember correctly, you once told me every artist has two choices.
Either find a way to let creativity pay the bills.
Thereby not just risking the integrity and quality of their work, but to get disconnected from their artistic calling altogether.

Or, alternatively, to choose a job unrelated to their art and losing their creative time but with the payoff of securing their creative freedom.
Now the time which is spent on creativity is free from commercial distractions.

My last letter to you (Timeline Collapse)  had a lot of exposition about my failed Timeline project (living in different timelines ’89, ’99, and 2024) as well as a realization that there had been two distinct 17 year time periods. 
Wondering if I was on to something, and able to predict what the next 17 years were going to be about.

And I quote: “I would say the upcoming 17 year cycle, 2024-2041, is about: Relationships.”
* coughs *

Like you often say: “There is just so much to unpack here.”

In that blogpost I indicated that after the previous 17 year cycle which had revolved around developing my love life and sexual identity, I was now talking about relationships in a broader perspective.
In particular a local job that would provide me with a sense of belonging.

The 17 year long Love and Sex Book, was put to rest because, and I quote again:
“Love and sexual relationships hold no secrets for me.
I really got this.”

The good news is, one month later and I still stand by this.
I do not expect it will be holding secrets for me.

But also;
Going back from the excitement of being a mistress until 2023, and having the best-sex-ever and with the same man, for 8 years?
To now suddenly think you can go raw dogging normal non-sexual relationships?

Of course the fuck not.

From when I was just a child there was only one thing that could hold my interest, and that was sexuality. And I developed myself in that area in a consensual and very age appropriate way.
Although there have always been time periods when there was nothing, from the years when I transitioned from child into teenager, to as recent as my current state.
It is almost my 2 year “anniversary” of the last time I had sex.
But as uncomfortable as I am with it right now, the droughts have always been part of my natural cycle.

As if the intensity of my sexuality makes it necessary that, contrary to most, I need abstinence to process it all.

So although I still understand why, now that I am middle-aged and under the threat of a lonely death bed, I suddenly started fantasizing about partaking in social structures such as working locally;
That, is a farce.

I will only ever be interested in one on one relationships with men.
After that, we have one on one friendships.
After that comes family.
And after that online communities and friendships around areas of interest.

Real-life relationships that are tied to my geographical location are not my thing.
Aging comes with many side-effects but becoming a completely different person isn’t one of them.

So here I am one month later.

And the good news is that the career path I had chosen in October, is coming together so gorgeously!
I will be studying from December to March, and start working in April.

But after sobering up from my head-in-the-clouds ideas about this new path being my ticket to starting connecting to The World again;
I would like to use this letter to put my priorities to paper.
Now that there still is time to create some clarity around it.

First the path itself:
After my studies and certification, in 2025 and 2026 I want to learn the craft in practice, having my first jobs.
This is the only phase I expect (and hope) to be working locally.
2027-2030 I want to work remote, most likely internationally, and for the highest bidder. 
There are a lot of deployment agencies which I think will be able to help me here.
From 2031 and up I want to offer my services independently, and as a package so no longer billed per hour.

I’m not mentioning my craft/skill here, because I think it is not relevant. 
Although I absolutely adore what it is I will be doing, and look forward to it a lot, it doesn’t come close to the joy of writing and engaging in the topics I do for my work under my real name.

So it’s only for the money.

And because of that, I wanted to close this letter with the list of priorities!
Because I will not be the first person to forget all about their art, and why they accepted the normal job in the first place.

So this is my list of passion projects.
Top to bottom: How I would like to spend my time.

1. Living a life worth writing about
   E.g. having kick-ass one on one relationships, incl sexual one(s)
   This also includes my “timeline projects” or living in the past, because when done well that is definitely worth writing about. 
   I like the idea of combining my renewed love life with living in a fictional past of 1999 or 2000.
2. Writing about those adventures!
   For Lauren Harteveld, in particular the Lauren1999 or Lauren2000 timeline (in 2025). 
3. Curating my Lauren Harteveld work 2007 – 2024 and publishing my books
4. Writing and making videos under my real name
5. That’s it, right? Did I forget something?

So in the end, although I look forward to starting this new career next year, I did come down from the idea that it can in any way be fulfilling the way art has been for me.
And that bigger social settings can never become as meaningful as 1-on-1 friendships and dates.
So I should not invest in them.

Looking back on the past 17 years, I think everything went way better than I thought. It was just that career wise I had ended up on the wrong side of capitalism.
Choosing to fund myself, with a profitable career, solves that.

Anais Nin, the 20th century diarist, was financed by her husband Hugo, to whom she stayed married until the end.
Hugo was a banker.
Hugo’s and Anais’ marriage wasn’t easy because they had married very young and Anais developed herself throughout their lives.
She’d even marry a second man, on the West Coast, when Hugo and her official residence was on the East Coast.
She died being married to two men.
A diary covering those final years was published a few years ago, and was fittingly called “Trapeze”.

The way I see it is that my new career, under my real name, means I have become my own Hugo.
I have become my own financier.

So the Anais Nin within me, the Lauren Harteveld within me, can live, write, and most importantly;
Live a life worth writing about.
* insert vegetable emojis *

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living