Category: Basic Instinct

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

Dear Sara,

It is not an easy time, and yet technically it is by far the easiest is has been in years.
The euphoria from last summer has not made it into the new season, and the last two weeks were even marked by a darkness that I was no longer familiar with.
It feels like I should be doing some mending, some reconnecting to the insights I had this summer which I wrote down, particularly for times like this.
So why am I not?
I do not know.

I am typing this, and the answers present themselves immediately though, I notice. 
That there is no not knowing of any sorts!
That I know exactly why I am so apathic;
Because my new businesses are not based on writing or blogging. If I were fully booked I would have zero time to write, and only an hour a day for marketing related writing.
And LS Harteveld is not included in my workhours either.

My new businesses are great in theory! I have things to sell, I feel professional, and they’re real businesses.
And it feels like a thin line (meaning they feel similar) between writing something to build an audience ->for a business<- and writing to build an audience period.
Or even simply “and writing *point*”.

The number of hours necessary to write an article, in particular when research is involved, which it almost always is;
There is just no way of justifying that from the purpose of building a business.

But I think my lethargy and my absolute obsession to squeeze all my business duties within a 40 hour workweek- and that is including social hours, because I need 3 hours a day, every day, for housekeeping, my duties for the neighborhood animals and yoga.
During summer when I was on my high, I let my whole self-care fall by the wayside (I did care for the animals!), and I felt so absolutely horrific about not being in touch with my body, nor with my house.
It was a mess!

Okay, I have no idea at which point of the story I am right now, to be honest.
But suffice to say, that as brilliant as I felt about finally understanding what my new businesses were going to be, I dread the execution now that we’re in THAT stage.
I dread anything, that is NOT me writing.

AND living a life worth writing about!

So the answer to how I can feel better is by stepping into my WRITER boots,  and my storyteller boots, more firmly, and letting the business side just take care of itself.
I have a business, but I am not the business.
I am a writer.

So that bit is solved I think.
But there is another dullness inside of me. A numb feeling where I would expect light and happiness, because I have come so far!
It’s about sex and men and letting go of the idea that I need a man in my life. Just the thought of spending a minute searching, dating or in any way investing, in the process of finding a new lover?
No way!

It probably happened at exactly the same moment when I mapped out my roster of maximum client hours, and needing 3 hours a day for myself to feel human;
And realizing there was no time for writing.

From there it was a very easy choice to accepting I will never invest in men again, and that the Lord will just have to organize them appearing at my doorstep, or on my Timeline, because that’s the furthest I’m willing to travel.

It felt incredibly mature to let this desire for a new lover go.
And either way, I had little time to think about it because I was fighting tooth and nail for time in my schedule to WRITE.
Something had to give, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be my last chance at writing something beyond the 2200 character Instagram limit.

To not let my whole sexuality dry out, the desire for men was replaced with the resolution to nurture and develop my femininity, my receptivity.
Including healing massages, a cleaned up diet, and a peaceful energy. 

But there was also a deliberate intention, a vision of developing a feminine business, where the love and effort I once reserved for men, was now gently directed to more profitable waters.
Where every word was written for the world, not for him (whomever he may be).

Emails are for romantics.
Femme biz owners write for the world, and I intended to live according to this rule religiously.

Until I stopped feeling and a dullness set in.
And I m not even curious to what I wrote down last summer to protect my inner-light, although I do remember that I said to myself I needed to start treating writing as a business too.
That that was the only way to make it a priority… And I know I have not done that. I have treated writing like a luxury after a 40 hour workweek.

In the movie Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell breaks up with detective Nick Curran, after she has finished writing the book about the detective. That same night she returns to him, after she learns from the news that his partner has been murdered.
“I can’t allow myself to care about you,” she explains the breakup.
“I can’t allow myself to care.” 

That resembles how I feel the closest:
I have broken up with my writing, by planning my whole week about making money like a normal person. Just like Catherine disposed of Nick when he was no longer necessary to write her novel, because it was finished.

Nick enters his apartment after a horrific day where first his lover has broken up with him, then his partner gets murdered, then he shoots his other lover the psychiatrist because he thinks she has a gun and has killed his partner;
Then he finds out she’s only holding a set of keys.
Then the police find out the psychiatrist was actually the killer, Nick is cleared of all charges and free to go.

He opens the door to his apartment and walks in, not even bothering to turn on the lights.
“Hi,” Catherine says, from the shadows. She has been waiting for him.
“I heard about what happened. On TV.”
Nick nods his head, his face is dark with grief.
“I can’t allow myself to care about you,” Catherine says. “I can’t allow myself, to care.”
“I don’t want to do this,” she starts pacing the room, frantically. “I lose everybody. I don’t want to lose you.”
He steps towards her and holds the sobbing Catherine close to him.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she repeats.

He doesn’t answer, but the love-making that follows shows his answer:
She’s not gonna lose him.

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

Dear Sara,

To compensate for my click bait title and those cheesy posts where they drag-on-and-on about what you think first the post is about;
Only to then in the final sentence “reveal” that it was about something rather dull;
It is dull!
Because the 20th century person who has returned from the title is not a lover.

It is Me!

The real me. The one I lost in the 20th century, and recently tied finding her to my project of living in 1998. A project which I have been on-and-off doing since 1994 = 2019.
Well it worked!
Found her!

Same for a project I started since our last conversation, which is to study the Femme Fatale and get a better understanding of the rules behind Sharon Stone’s character Catherine Tramell, in Basic Instinct.
What makes Catherine Tramell so omnipotent?
I was certain that cracking that code, would provide insights still valuable today.
And I hoped that the study of the magic of the Femme Fatale would reboot my sex and love life, and snap me back into actually having one!
Because by the looks of it, I don’t have a sex life

Something that would have worried me, if I had not been so incredibly happy this summer.
Who needs a sex life when apparently, you can have the best summer in 25 years without leaving the house or taking your clothes off!

Literally (as in: concerning the amount I will write about it, and the intensity of the content) it is a shame that the Femme Fatale “clicked” in me, shortly after writing the first episode of the series.
But for the personal intention this project had, it is great news of course.
I am not turning into a Femme Fatale though! Like I said, I found the real Me back.

So although I now have a perfect understanding why my favorite playtime will always be to be a Femme Fatale, or a Dark Femme;
Why I will always long for men who like to play that game with me;
And why I will never burn myself on anything even remotely resembling a normal relationship where my freedom and growth are under threat, and I will VERY happily let him go to do that with other women.

Yet I am not not, a Femme Fatale.
For the first time in over 20 years, I am Me.

So as far as that time frame is still applicable “without further ado”, I will tell you what I found.
No real system, I will stick to “loose” terms, because the past five years I have done so much thinking, the last thing I want is to think even more and formalize what I found.
I’m not a psycho-analyst or researcher, I’m a storyteller. 

So what I found, studying what on YouTube is called the “dark femme” or the “femme fatale”, is that although she has incredible powers, the power she holds is not male!
She has power over men, but she is not a man.
In fact her power comes from being more feminine than what we would consider normal women.
The Femme Fatale does less, not more.
The Femme Fatale holds back, so that he can lean forward.
A Femme Fatale is that unavailable woman so that he needs to REACH and grow, to get to where she is.

In other words, the reason the Femme Fatale is so successful with men, is because the only way they can be with her is if he rises to her level.
So he is forced to become the strong, independent, dominant man he desires to be.

Where a damsel in distress makes men feel good because they can be their heros and protectors;
A Femme Fatale makes a man, who has it in him to rise to her level but just needed a little nudge; she makes him feel better than any other woman can or ever will, because she is the one who has forced him to rise above himself.
And without using any force, but by creating distance.

She has created, a demand.

Now there are of course many “The Rules”-like approaches, and multiple female archetypes who use this technique, yet the Femme Fatale the way I see her, and the way Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct operated, is that she is the only one of the bunch for whom their play is the reward.

The chase is a one-off play, for many female archetypes. They do it in the courting stages of a relationship, but change to a less exciting way of being together later.
But for the dark femme/ femme fatale, playing is a way of life!
She does that, with the same men or multiple, on repeat.
She is only in it, for the game.

A Dark Femme/ Femme Fatale the way I see her, as well as the only man she will ever consider her equal, appear to be both what Jung called the archetype The Lover.
Both men and women can have this archetype dominant.

So not only does this solidify what my love life will always be like, and what kind of man I will always date and all the other archetypes will always be way too serious;
But it also revealed what the f* went so horribly wrong around the turn of the century!

It was never my male side that I lost.
I mean yes, when my father died something inside me shifted, which was even worsened by entering the yoga teaching world around the same time.
I went from being in a masculine world of engineers, to being fatherless in a woman’s world.

And to this day I will defend tooth and nail that any independent, including any professional yoga teacher, first and foremost needs to start seeing themselves as a business and fall in love with selling as a way of making connection!
It is borderline irresponsible to train professionals without sharpening their skills to become good business people. 
So yes, feeling the masculine is being swept from underneath of you, when you’re a professional in her 20s, is bad!
Very, very bad.

But that was not the greatest loss in general, and in particular that was not the biggest character or personality shift inside of me that caused my misery.

The biggest loss was that I loss my feminine power.

My father was a strong and dominant man. But he was full of unconditional, beautiful and clear love for me, and he expressed it in deep conversation. 
In supporting my education.
And in paying anything he thought I needed in life, he was a huge giver!

And I?
I was an amazing receiver.

I have made gestures telling the story of my youth, with my arms up in a V! Ready to receive everything he wanted to provide, with the same joy he had giving it.

And it was that power, that quality, I lost.

As small and inexperienced as I was, I brought out the best in my father. He made sure there would always be ample money to support our family, and he made sure I knew his door was always open.
Years after he died, I heard from one of his few female friends how he had counseled her, how he could spelling check the English in the thesis I had given him for proofreading, in a supportive way.

My father went through lengths, to be the best father he could possibly be. And I was there receiving.

It was this receiving quality, I lost.

And my desire for “Rock Star strength and presence”- Rock Star being a word that resonated with me since 2019 and that has been instrumental in finding my way back! – I had missed one super big cue! 

My strength is not the performance and extraversion, it is not to have the strength and size and visibility of being a Rock Star.
And what I lost around the turn of the century was not my ability to be a Rock Star.

What I lost, and now have found, was my ability to awaken someone’s true strength, reveal their most vibrant truths and to unleash their biggest potential.

I was never a Rock Star;
I created them.

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

Dear Sara,

There were plenty of titles to choose from for this post, and all would have been a great fit.

“I don’t need six months to reappear a Dark Femme”
or
“Being Catherine Tramell: part deux”,
a follow up to an earlier post on this blog about Basic Instinct’s omnipotent female writer protagonist (many would say antagonist) who was described by the director Paul Verhoeven himself, as being all-knowing and as possessing supernatural powers because she was the devil.

Or the title could be:
“A year to live like a Femme Fatale”
– as a follow up from the post I wrote you three weeks ago, in this same blog:
“A year for my essential self to play major league and major league only and come up with catchier project titles“

Isn’t it ironic that three weeks ago, I knew the direction of what I wanted
– to be my true self and play what I call “Major League”-
but was also annoyingly aware I was lacking a catchy title?
When now everything fits like a black over-the-elbow-glove?

It is a symbol of how it was indeed an umbrella term or idea, the thing that would hold it all together, that was missing.
Why I could understand the content of my vision for myself, but did not have a catch phrase.

It’s like being pregnant but not having seen your child yet.
I’ve heard from many mothers they did not know the essence of who their child was, until it was born. Then they realized how “wrong” they had been, how many things they had thought they knew about them, which had actually been assumptions.
The child had been unable to show their mother who they were, as long as they were still inside.

Three weeks ago, my year long project was still inside of me.
I thought I knew what it was, because I had such an intimate relationship to it. But as I know now, it is actually quite possible to have an intimate relationship with something you do not know at all.

In fact, looking back at my three decades of fascination with the omnipotent writer Catherine Tramell from the movie Basic Instinct, and her game-of-equals with her love interest Nick, played by Michael Douglas, it is quite a surprise what I am about to tell you took me this long!

What I am about to tell you, is a big case of:
“How did I manage to miss this?”

It all started a couple of weeks back, when I saw an advertisement for a personality test that portrayed as a how-to become a “Dark Femme”.
I remember clicking the link, and being annoyed it was a test that ended up including about 8 or so personalities, and I was not the Dark Femme.

But the biggest turn-off was that it was aimed at, you know, “getting your man”, that kind of thing.
Something I have never been interested in.

Just for your point of reference: I have no idea what my lover has been up to, but I feel he’s in a good place, and he’s having a good year.
I’m sure he’ll be “back” at some point in time, because like Nick and Catherine, we had just such a deep understanding of who the other was.
There was so much love, and joy, and respect, and fun.
I’m not calling it coming “back” to me, because that suggests he’s not having fun now, or that he made the wrong choice.

If there is anything I know it’s that if you want to have a relationship based on equality, any relationship, you need to start trusting the other person to live their own life.
I trust him to be doing exactly the right thing!
Even if it would mean I would never see him again.

There is zero tendency or desire within me to influence it, if anything I “push” him away, by never faking a disinterest or an unavailability.
I never play the game of moving out of his life, if he fails to do this, or return to me by whatever.
I am much more interested in seeing him return, without giving him any reason to do so.
Because then I know he’s really back to play;)

So ultimately it was the underlying tone of playing a man to make him choose you, that disappointed me in the company behind the Dark Femme advertisements.
And I’m not 100% sure it’s the same company, as the one from the screen shot advertisement, used in this post.
I clicked and did that test weeks ago, maybe even two months ago.
But when I saw the (or “this”) advertisement, I was reminded of clicking that or a similar advertisement weeks ago, and made a screen shot because I had not “let go” of this Dark Femme idea!
If anything, in the weeks in between the idea within me had strengthened that I was missing some Dark Femme cues to life.
Cues far more important and far-reaching, than getting a man to call you.

And since then I have done my research, and I now know:
-what gives this femme her power
-which is the same thing I was intrigued by in Catherine Tramell as well as in Nick Curran (Michael Douglas). It is this thing, that binds them.
-why I developed an aids-phobia in the 80s, later relabeled by me as a social-phobia, because it was being expelled and unloved that I feared. Not death.
-why during the pandemic, social interactions became unbearable to me. I felt I had to comfort an unnamed fear, on both sides of the polarized pandemic spectrum and anything in between, before we could have a conversation.
-why these heavy 2020-2022 interactions were a magnified version of “work” I had been feeling I had to do, ever since I became a yoga teacher.
I felt I was paid or expected to comfort something, to put a blanket over something very painful, before yoga could begin.

And I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was exactly;
There were times when I was sure this unnamed work, soothing, or pampering, had something to do with having to cater to someone’s ego.
But during the pandemic it felt more like having to put the blanket over a sincere fear of illness, or a sincere fear of loss of freedom (other side of the spectrum).
After about two years, I finally understood what the criterium was within Dutch pandemic strategies;
They were all designed to give most people the impression something was being done. 
There was literally no other criterium for Dutch pandemic measures, everything could be brought back to this.
F.e. deaths were only a problem, if they caused people to feel that not enough was being done.
Deaths counted in the media were a problem.
Silent suffering, of any kind, was not.

Perhaps by now you know what I found out;
The reason social interaction is such a minefield, is because what people are facing is their own death.
That, is what you are veneering, comforting, framing, softening, coaching, and whispering them through.
That is the work, you are doing, in social interaction.

Someone’s ego can take over, and start compensating or self-comforting, a fear of death. That is why for so long, I thought the ego was involved.
But it is much deeper.

And it is here, where the omnipotent taps in deeply.

What binds them all, what gives the Dark Femme, the Femme Fatale, Catherine Tramell, Michael Douglas, my lover, and me, our power;
Why we can navigate through layers and through worlds, and why we can choose to play in the Major League of dating and sex, without even the slightest interest of following someone who walks off the field to go do other things;
Is not because we followed an Instagram advertisement of how to become a Dark Femme.

Each and every one of us, overcame our fear of death.