Category: Dear Sara

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

Dear Sara,

This letter is a bit redundant, since I need to have figured this out by tomorrow night, when I have an appointment with my psychologist.
By the time you and me have our call, it will already be done, and all the insights from our call and in particular your contributions to which I am already looking forward to hearing because you’re always so good at seeing things I miss;
Those things will need to be squeezed in, or added on, to a train already set in motion.

My psychologist and me are tackling a list of problem areas for which I need strategies, in order to navigate them the rest of my life.
One of them is my inability to deal with hospitals and medical staff.

There is something required of patients which I do not have, that in all probability goes way beyond being able to handle all the inaccuracies, flaws and contradictions in different departments and their opposing messages, and comes down to other patients having some kind of ability to emphatically connect with the professionals themselves, instead of only seeing a sea of red flags in an organization whose logistics would barely pass to move garbage bags around, let alone patients.

An even deeper thought on this, is that other patients may even find comfort that personnel in the hospital is trying so hard, and so emotionally involved with all the people going through;
That what I see as dysfunctional, disturbed and alarming, is experienced by other patients as a bonding experience between the hardworking staff and the worried patients.

Instead of as a sign you’re being thrown in front of a bus.

One of the many racing thoughts I had on the subject was how unbelievable I think it is that everybody, and in particular people with a background in medicine or psychology, find it remarkable that I used to “settle” for a man who was only a lover, who never chose me, and they deem it as something I apparently had some sort of special skill set for, in order to handle such an unsafe relationship.
That I had a secret way to handle holding myself up, in such a challenging environment of a non-monogamous affair.
Where your lover is doing the non-monogamous part, and you are just left to grit your teeth.

Which by the way is something I never did (grit my teeth).
I was delighted that he was so energetic and adventurous and I would submit myself in a heartbeat, to lifelong weekly hospital treatments including snappy receptionists, double booked appointments, broken agreements, ineffective exams and being informed on having life-threatening diseases, if it would bring him back. 

But it shows that during the 9 years of our affair I have been on the receiving side of sympathy, whereas going through this medical mill – and I’m technically speaking not even going through exactly because I took myself out of the loop and I am now in the purgatory of an unanswered thread of messages that was supposed to direct me to another department but that will no doubt be forgotten, unless I bring it back from the dead-I receive nothing.
Everybody seems to be under the impression going to a hospital is an entirely neutral experience, and that it can only be a disease, or an invasive treatment, that are worth mentioning en sympathizing with.

So having an affair is supposed to be challenging, but being in a David and Goliath type of conversation with an organization that seems unable to get even one appointment booked in without gaslighting you, is I don’t know… normal?

That is some fucked up shit, Sara.
And the only reassurance that gives me is that, apparently, I do possess an impressive set of acquired skills and special talents, because almost everybody has admitted to me that they could never have been so patient and so loving in such an insecure relationship style, and be able to deal with such a difficult man for so long. 

It’s just that my talents seem to be absolutely useless, in a hospital.

And what is needed there, in all likeliness, is the same thing that is required to start and maintain lifelong monogamous relationships.
Which by the way, are also skills I have proven to possess, for 17 years total.
I just very consciously chose not to engage in those anymore, because that is not how I want to live my life.

But just saying, Sara; I AM versatile!
How is it possible that I can both rock a longterm relationship, as well as a complex affair for almost a decade, yet I completely bottom out in the most simple phase of medical treatment?
We’re not even in the treatment.
I have not even made it to the exam, I didn’t even get that far.

It feels like everything in the hospital represents neglect, aforementioned gaslighting, and sadism in forms even Marquis de Sade had not thought of.
I think he would be particularly pleased with the added gaslighting effect, and acknowledge his sadists being so forward in their torture and their killing had left so much on the table in terms of psychological pain, where the victims would be told they were not actually tortured and that there was no pain, and that they were exaggerating.
And right before the victims were murdered, and some acknowledgement of pain had to come, he would have the sadists say that sometimes things just need to be done, and that it had been a joint decision. Where the decision of course would have been something like, do you want me to cut of your ear or your left labia; you know- something that really fucks you over.

Okay, enough with the illustrative de Sade spree, and back to the subject at hand;
How is it possible that throughout my life, I coach myself through having this festering evil of the medical world as the authority on our physical existence, and replace it with the generally held assumption that these are well-intentioned professionals who are deeply invested in our physical well-being;
Only to be proven wrong time and time again?

Or, well no, I’m making it too easy now, it’s not that inside the four walls of an examination room there is malice;
It’s everything in between.

The toxins are in the very fabric of the system, the communication, the organization. They’re in the in-between-ness. The evil is not present where one doctor or one nurse is responsible.
In fact, I totally agree that if you are dealing with ONE doctor or nurse, or a guard or a worker walking the hallway at that point, but not behind their computer;
Then you do meet that good side.
Then you do relate as humans, and it’s a beautiful experience.

But as soon as you blink your eyes, it’s gone and they’ve thrown you inside the system again, where no one is responsible.
You’re back in the dungeon of Sodom.

So tomorrow night, I need to have a setup ready for my psychologist, that includes how I want to tackle my complicated relationship to the medical world.
And as I’ve already briefly mentioned, as a psychologist she is one of those people who acknowledges my strength in certain areas, yet she seems to almost gloss over this problem.
She acknowledges its toxicity, or lets not put words in her mouth but she acknowledges that it is toxic for me, yet sports the attitude that since I need them, I need to find a way of dealing with them, implying that it is in some way doable. 
Or maybe I implied that as well, by placing this item on something as down to earth as a list of actionable items.

I made the list on one of those fake-it, pretend-this-is-easy, optimistic, coaching-myself-through-this, moments.
When I now know, this is something that if it is to be solved, needs to be centered as My Main Quest.
And that I should not have put it on a list, in such a downplayed way. That was out of integrity, and did not do justice to the suffering it has caused.
And even Andy Warhol knew he’d die if he was ever admitted to a hospital, or maybe “again” admitted to a hospital, after his shooting.
Either way, he was right.
Most likely he died of neglect, in a hospital bed.
Just to say, being afraid of the hospital is not something that has a history of being turned around that easily. Whereas the stories of people avoiding the hospital only to then die in them, in a sloppy and tarnished way, on wrong medication and preventable mistakes – let’s just sum it up as “in an unsatisfactory way” although death itself is indeed rarely satisfactory-
those examples are numerous.

So what I had just casually thrown on the list as one of the points I need to “figure out”, was actually a mammoth task, that usually does not get done.
Being afraid of the hospital is an indication of your lifespan, and the point  where your life will end.
It is not a movable target that you can push forward.

So without any positive examples, and facing a problem that is way too layered to tackle in one sitting, the most obvious solution then becomes;
“What do I need to do, now that I KNOW I can never go to a hospital without risking my life, just like Andy Warhol did?”

And indeed, that still may be the most effective solution to tackle it. It surely has a higher chance of success at becoming a useful guideline for my life, than learning how to accept or how to manage getting medical assistance.

But I saw something else as well.
Something far more interesting and compelling!
Something juicy, lurking in the shadows of this mundane, uninteresting problem of getting tantrums every time I even think of having to get medical help.

And this interesting thing can be divided into two;
1.This clash can only be caused by the hospital blocking something I really, deeply care about, or something I aspire to. The hospital is blocking something I WANT!
What is it? 
Explain with the aids phobia thing of the 80s.
And
2.This clash is about POWER!
It is about authority, and it is about who rules my body. It is about boundaries, and about being sloppy with them, and it is about not having stepped fully into my own physical power and authority, and therefor being angry when someone violates its boundaries, when the truth is, I am not protecting my body, as if my life is depending on it.
Which it is.
Explain with the medical world/ yoga world and even performance art, analogy.

Point 2 first!
Why is this a sign of a deeper lying boundary problem?
And what does performance art and the yoga world have to do with it?

This came to me in a yoga class, when I realized that the similarity between the profession of yoga teacher and the medical world, is that we are one of the very few who deal with the body.
We don’t just need a functioning body, in fact in theory we don’t;
But, the body is our area of expertise.
We know more about the body than others, we experiment with it. We are in an ongoing conversation and learning process with it. It never ceases to fascinate us, and we love to, very coarse way of saying;
We love to get our fingers in it!

Well, I never touch my yoga students, but you get the idea.

Maybe you could say a medical professional has a more literal relationship to the body, whereas a yoga teacher has a more spiritual relationship to it.
We only recognize one ailment; lack of awareness.
And we only have one medicine; awareness.

And a performer, any performer but in particular performance artist Marina Abramovic, also has this intimate relationship to their body.
Their body, their presence, IS their work.

So what I recognize now, is that I have not decided yet where the medical world fits in here. And if it does, which aspects of it.
Although judging from the rest of this post, it is coming to me now;
I can only deal with professionals who are not part of a system.
Who have their own secretary or receptionist, but who are not part of a system where no one is responsible anymore.

Okay, that was relatively easy 😉
Except of course in the Netherlands, that does limit my medical possibilities tremendously.
Where I live for example, we only have eye doctors in the hospitals.
So if I would exert this rule, I would not have eye care.

But I do think this underlying power struggle, and how it is caused by the way care is organized in The Netherlands, and not by the individuals, does take the sharpest edges off of it.

And that medical care is by definition different if your job too, is to know the body. Either because you are in health care yourself, or because you are a yoga teacher, or you are Marina Abramovic.
Your body is a lot more personal to you.

Now the first one:
What is The Want, the medical industry is blocking?
“Explain with the aids phobia thing of the 80s,” it says.

So in the 80s, I got an anxiety disorder from the aids education. I found there was no way to navigate my sex life, staying within the safe sex threshold. It took me absolute decades to unpack what went down there, and it is still a work in progress to be honest.
But it comes down to the fact that the unnuanced labeling of sex as either safe (you’re a good and responsible person) or unsafe (the label implying you’re taking a serious health risk, that could have easily been prevented) was masking an unwillingness or an inability to have a conversation about the innate risks, tied to ones natural sexual orientation.
For example if you are a homosexual person or someone who wants to have multiple partners, then your baseline risk is a lot higher.
The conversation should therefor always be worded as the safest sex for you, or the safer options for you, within the natural expression of who you are.

The word “safe sex” implies that we all have an option to be 100% safe, when the only real option to be safe, for anyone, is to not have sex at all.
In other words: the words safe and sex, simply do not belong together.
The act of sex itself, already implies a risk.
I know I’ve used the term gaslighting at least twice already, but I am using it again, because the word safe sex is the very definition of gaslighting:
It was suggested we could have sex and be safe at the same time.
An impossibility, and that’s just covering the physical risk of disease, and not even the risk of being harmed in other ways.

We were gaslighted, which in itself would have been enough to develop an anxiety disorder, but I discovered that in my case there was even more:
The safe sex campaign blocked something I really wanted.
My access to a free sex life.

I gave up, and I gave in!
No hero’s journey there.
I didn’t free myself from monogamous relationships until I was in my 30s.
The safe sex campaign effectively blocked my access to my own natural sexuality, and I had monogamous sex WITH a condom, because that was all the stress I could take.

And I can tell you that if you are wired for more free spirited sex, and you have known that since childhood, then sex in a monogamous relationship, after its first six months or so, becomes stale.
I may have many skills, but keeping sex fresh within monogamy, certainly isn’t one of them.

Of course it isn’t.
My skill set is designed to support my sexual nature of having sex with new men, and to have those men be exciting and adventurous!
For that, I have an infinite amount of dedication and enough talents to cover for the both of us.
You just bring us the meat of excitement, and the bones of pleasure, and I’ll get the table in order, consider it done.

So when the safe sex campaigns hit, I had more at stake.
Where monogamy, obviously, is where the majority of us seem to be ending up and choosing for again and again- even when people are well beyond their child bearing years they continu to come back to it – it was never my flavor.
I knew I was born not so much “for more”, but definitely born for something different.

And when I found the road blocked by the Safe Sex Brigade, I realized I was never going to reach my destination. That I didn’t have the strength to fight the enemy of government, and health care, and my parents, and everybody taking sides with this whole idea of safe sex (which was at the time: everybody!), all standing together.
I was just a 16 year old girl, facing an enemy she could not compete with because it was all around her. Evil, was in everybody, around her.

And I let the fear for the people around me consume me.
I have called it an aids phobia, but when I chose my own path, in my 30s I recognized it as social phobia.
I had not been afraid of the disease, I had been afraid of people.
And still am.

I did get a little bit further in, when I was in my 30s, and reclaimed my sexuality. I got the sex life that I had aspired to. But I didn’t do it by conquering those people from the 80s, nor did they change that dramatically.
Maybe they were a little less stubborn in their belief there was such a thing as safe sex, and maybe my age which was closer to 36 than to 16 at the time, had given me a little more wiggle room, than when I was in my teens and my parents worried sick about me.
But in the end, despite aids being treatable since the 90s, not that much had changed.

But I navigated.
Even then, I did not throw over, and I did not conquer. I wasn’t a sexually revolutionary in any way. I didn’t rock the boat even when after 20 years I did rise above the safe sex warnings and chose to honor who I was, sexually.
Maybe it was a hero’s journey, although it was a modest one.

So although I have not connected all the dots, I think my current clash with the medical world, can only be explained as originating in this conflict that started when I was 13, 14 years old, ready to start my sex life, and then aids arose and I saw the sexual ocean I had been looking forward to jump into, being blocked before my very eyes.
They claimed it was poisonous.

And what I have been doing as an adult was only swimming in the guarded area, and between the lines.

I don’t know why I associate being in the medical world both as a violation of my sexual identity, as well as a direct threat to restoring my sexuality after the breakup, and to making the transition into having a healthy sex life in midlife and beyond.
Don’t know why I feel as if letting “those people” back into my life, is not just a slippery slope to being cock blocked, or in my case pussy blocked, all over again, exactly as they did to me, in the 80s, but means risking my life.

That “safe hospital” does not exist anymore than “safe sex” does.
And that No Hospital is in my case the best choice, just like No Sex was that to some gay men in the 80s, who found they were at too high a risk of dying because of it.

Because the truest thing I have to say about this continuously growing crap pile of bad experiences in the medical world, is that I feel I will die if I let them in.

They will murder my sexuality and then they will kill me.
Just like they did with Andy.

.
~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,

I could have literally copy pasted my previous letter to you (“How I lost Lauren“), because it feels like in the field of reviving my alter-ego self Lauren Harteveld, surprisingly if not disturbingly little was done.

The urgency of needing to save myself, take measures with lightning speed and in a timeframe that would take the breath away of the bravest one, with potential consequences as severe as costing decades of your life if you get it wrong, and in all probability still capping your life by years if you get it right;
Took over.

And every measure, every restraint, every worldly, accountable commitment a reason for Lauren to not want to live. 
As all is way too vibrant for a shadow self, a mystery self, or even a whisper of real self, to exist.

There is currently only space for that which can be rounded off, defined, quantified, or squeezed into the tightest of forms.
There is nothing here that I would call A Life. Let alone something luscious enough for Lauren to want to return.
There is only the blinding brightness of reality.

So yeah: I could have just copied the previous post.
Nothing much has changed, as far as Lauren goes, or as far as interesting, sexy, luscious things to write about goes.
If anything it got worse, for there are now so many things which when I think about them – and these can be images, visuals, or neutral language, explaining medical risks or body parts – that are etched in my memory and when they float by I shiver and cringe! 

Yet I chose not, to repeat the previous title or the content of that post.
And focus on the tiny rays of sunshine, the flicker of light that I couldn’t even promise is really actually there, but that I choose to see.
I choose to believe in a future where Lauren can come back.

First of all, a very positive development, is that I have experienced so many heartwarming cooperation. So many people, both in my personal life, professional life, as well as people who are there to help me, who are all going the extra mile for me, and I wouldn’t yet say “committing” to helping me, because they are just as baffled and unsure how we’ll make this work as I am;
But for now, they are definitely on board and they have declined the escapes I provided for them.

Now although this is absolutely not a reason for Lauren to return, it does make the life “real me” has, and will be having, so much better.
I’m not going to think too long about what would have happened if that army of positively responding people had not been there, but it would have made things a hell of a lot harder.

And the second positive thing, is that my medication is working.
It’s not a miracle drug though, and I have already absolutely bumped into limits, and will probably need a life-long commitment to a lifestyle cross over between an athlete and senior-citizen!
But providing I manage to crack the code, and get myself in check, the medication will be able to provide a very firm foundation both under my physical as well as my mental health.

And then thirdly, I can feel my sexuality return.
Slowly!

It’s not earth shattering yet, and it is “only” solo, and only a return of physical sexual strength. So I am not developing new romantic interests, nor am close to existing romantic interests.
They hold their distance, and so do I.
With this body, that didn’t have sex for over a year and that seemed to have gone through so much, I am not sad there isn’t a candidate for a real affair.
Just a little online flirting, or sometimes just knowing someone is there;
It’s enough.

I have lost about 5 kilos since a year ago.
The largest part of it was unintentionally, but since twelve days I have a daily walking routine and it seems to consistently be shaving off a little each week.
Although it scares me I will be breaking a spell by saying it out loud!

But my body slowly losing the weight I put on in all those horrible years, feels good.
I knew dieting or forcing, was never going to be my thing. I knew I needed deeper healing, and that there was a cause for the weight gain. That fighting it would make it worse.

Seeing the scales going down, my routines settling, and my body restoring with a little pharmaceutical help, feel like the first steps of creating a life Lauren would want to return to.

Like a ship has left the harbor, the sails have been hoisted, and we are on our way.

.
~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,

What should have come as a surprise to no one, least of all me (a diarist who has taken introspection to industrial strength levels) still managed to caught me off guard;
I have lost Lauren, the lived identity of who I truly am and have been since 2007.

But for now we’d have to refer to Lauren (Lauren Harteveld) as a  simple pseudonym. A means to an end, of being able to keep a personal blog, without having it tied to my real name.
Lauren is now a hallow writer’s name, that no longer belongs to my real self.
After initially having survived a series unerotic, uninteresting, reality based years (serious mental health issues, my lover breaking up, the Covid pandemic, lover coming back, more Covid pandemic, more mental health issues, six years of insomnia, being diagnosed autistic,  and since March this year the kicker: menopause)
She has finally made the decision to run for the hills.

There is literally nothing in my life anymore, that is even remotely interesting to her.
This is my first login to WordPress, for her account, since my last letter to you three weeks ago.
Technically I do not even need her name as a pseudonym anymore because I don’t actually write as her anymore.
Aside from my letters to you.
Nor do I have time to publish her books, or curate old material. Which is an activity that would be ideal, for these times when “she” does not have anything new to write.

So in all fairness, it was not just that my life has become totally dull (although that definitely was part of her departure).
It was also because the past weeks have been extremely busy, and then the events as described in my last letter to you unfolded.
Leaving me to investigate the territory of Hormone Replacement Therapy, consulting specialists, and so on and so forth.

I really jumped at this opportunity to finally get to the root cause of all misery of these final years, and although my serious study and involvement with Hormone Replacement Therapy was of course done to save Lauren, to get her life back;
It ultimately became the thing that broke it.

She really is nowhere to be found.

My physical ailments keep expanding, the number of medical visits and specialists multiplying, yet the part of me for whom I do it all, no longer has a part in it.
She’s done waiting for what by now seems like a time that never comes.

I know I need the basics in place if I want to have a physical, sexual second half of my life; The only part Lauren is interested in, and then she writes about it.

But here I am, struggling to keep my life afloat while also needing increasing amounts of time taking care of my neurological problems,  post-menopausal health, dental maintenance for my aging teeth, physical exercise and other self-care routines.
And my mental health has stabilized since I started seeing a psychologist, but it has not improved.

Although I’ve always been able to keep some spark of being her alive (which, considering I see Her as my real self, is not a luxury!), the past three weeks, with the menopause/hormonal breakthrough and all the research and cognitive work it took to get that ball rolling, seemed to have been the tipping point.

There is a saying in medical world;
“Operation successful, (but) patient deceased.”
To illustrate that you can treat disease, but if you kill the patient in the process, it’s not effective.

I feel I am heading for that outcome myself now.
The operation of saving my life, physically, will be successful. But the essence of me, Lauren Harteveld, will no longer be there to enjoy it.

In December 2023 my lover broke up, or left, it was messy.
And although I could feel it coming from as early as February 2023-
he was still in my head, throughout the year.

When I thought of him, I felt like Lauren. I was in that energy. It (the affair)/ he, was what kept Lauren alive.

And although logically, I can see Lauren Harteveld was there before I even knew him, so there is no reason her life is tied to him, in reality the affair, which lasted from December 2014 to December 2023-
was the final thing keeping her alive.

She no longer wants to live, it’s that simple.

.
~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,

What I am about to share is the result of us having to cancel last week, and postponing our call.

If it had taken place at the moment we intended it to, I probably would have written you that I would have loved to have a conversation about the conflict of interest between creativity and art, and business and entrepreneurship.
Because I did recall you speaking about it, offering very profound insights, and offering to pick it up in our next call.
I was eager to hear what you had to say.

If we had had our call last week, I am almost certain I would have asked you to let me know what wisdom you had, that I had not.
I usually do not get any further than being jealous of non-creative people, because at least they CAN build a business, without constantly knowing that-it-is-not-THE-work!
That the business is just there to support our creative endeavors, and to give us a place in the world.

Even in the age of social media, the art studio and the writing desks are still the loneliest places in the inhabited world.
For us, pretending to be normal, run a business, and see a fellow human once in a while, serves many purposes.
But there never seems to be the option for us, to only do one thing. We’re constantly torn between the lonely, creative purpose work, and the hobbit-like joy of having a business.

However that whole topic was completely blown from my radar, when the bomb of bombly insights dropped on what the f* has been happening with me over the last four to six years or so, when I definitely lost my mojo.

Now, partially, it will probably require a series of specialists to check me out for neurological problems, eye problems, and a sinus problem which has made me wake up feeling horrible, every day, year after year.
At least I think it’s a sinus problem, that is actually also new information through an article a friend sent me.

But the sinus problem is of course not the bomb of bombs.

No, the big revelation is that my autism, of which I still do not have the official diagnosis (which is probably a good thing, but more about that later) but I do have a psychologist who helps me analyse the havoc my life has been, through the lens of autistic burn-out-ish / high-sensitivity gone wrong;
That this may be directly connected to going through menopause.

I effectively wasn’t autistic, until my hormones dropped.
I was unbothered, by a lot of things that do bother me now. Not bothered by the subtle things, like the mood swings of others, nor the big things like sensory overload.
My senses hardly ever, got overloaded, until a few years ago, and now my thoughts are OUT LOUD.
Well, at least they are in my head.
Together with other memories: Music, dialogue from film, conversations.
I hear them all together, and often with visual images too.

And at night when I close my eyes, I see visions, cartoon-like or AI- generated movies that never happened, and of which I see nothing that is based on my actual life.

However, none of these things were familiar or known to me in the years prior.

So I started Googling and found that although it is very new, pioneering research with massive hiatusses at places where we would have preferred some hard data;
Women not being diagnosed until menopause floors them, is a known phenomenon.
And one with a very simple explanation:
Progesterone, a hormone that starts to drop before oestrogene even does, is the hormone that dampens signals from outside.
It is, in short, the hormone that makes life bearable for women. 

In my opinion progesterone taking the edge off your sensatory experience, also explains why women seem less “autistic” than men.
We’re on drugs 😉

Or at least we were, until menopause hit.

So in other words, this whole story has convinced me to go all in on getting hormone replacement therapy.

I will also give it my all on clean eating, because chocolate, coffee and sugar, do rob you of your final woman strength (and worsen hot flashes);
But as an autistic person, I simply need a lot of additives in order to get things done.

Writing you this letter, required a cup of chocolate and sugar coated peanuts!
And writing you is something I LIKE DOING!

So although I totally understand why medical professionals in the Netherlands, need you to clean up your diet, and step on it with regard to exercise and so on;
I am going to play the autism card here, that I need many of those things just to survive.
Which is not a lie.

For comparison;
They point out how (instead) women should seek solace with each other and take massages.
I find few things as stressful as being in a group of women, but taking a massage would be one of them.

Just saying:
For the neurotypical woman it might be feasible to go clean but I need my coping and my comforting, and I will not be shamed for failing to be perfect in that area.
Nor wait asking for supplements.
In particular not because I found out something shocking, related to this as well:

Contrary to other women, I have always done better, when I was on the pill.

My most violent panic attacks were when I was 15, before I was on the pill. And second half 20s, when I quit.
I had that last one pinned, I immediately blamed coming down from 10+ years of being on the pill, for the heavy backlash of panic attacks.
I felt god awful and couldn’t even sleep alone.

However, what I failed to see then, was that it was not the backlash of quitting with the pill;
It was me getting back to my natural state, which I had also had at 15.

Looking at this from this angle, you could say that autism or not;
I have never felt as good as when I was on the pill.

And the same thing is happening now;
My menopause is not causing anything, any more than stopping with the pill was the cause of anything.

Whether it is because I need more sedation, as an autistic person;
Or whether it is that I didn’t create enough progesterone from myself, to get the natural sedation any and every woman needs in order to survive;
I have a history, of thriving on artificial hormone supplements.
And being totally lost, without them.

Maybe if I had not gone on the pill so young (I was 16), and had not stayed on it for so long (over ten years);
And maybe, if I had gotten proper help those tough years after I quit;
I would have taken this menopause more seriously, a few years down the drain sooner.

I thought I could handle it, I really could.

And even the past couple of rotten years, I only blamed menopause for the hot flashes and the hot nights (but not in a good way).
I didn’t see that since 2018, I have had every possible sleeping disorder linked to menopause.
I didn’t see I could no longer bear seeing old  friends, with many whom  I split up.
I didn’t see that my bitterness and disappointment in life, and also the grudge that I had to think soo deeply about economic and social structures, in order to find my way through them;
That it was all because I was going through menopause.

Up until then I just closed my eyes and winged it!

Basically, I feel I have already lost half my life.
With reading all these articles about menopause and the need for proper bedtimes, and no coffee, and no sugar, and no benders, what else is there to say than that you are already with one foot in the grave?
Even the message to non-autistic women is in my opinion a horribly bleak one.

I no longer know if I am an autistic woman, or a non-autistic woman. And in my opinion, it isn’t even relevant anymore.
But I am happy my psychologist is waiting with her final diagnosis, because now she can include my findings.

Because I do know this:
I have always, done so much better with artificial hormones, than without.
And I am not just going to do whatever I have to, to get them;

I am going to hold on to them.
For dear life.

.
~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,

There is a new Bon Jovi documentary coming out, in April. In the trailer Richie Sambora says: “I’m excited. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna tell the truth, are we gonna lie?”
Which is exactly how I feel, although I’m pretty sure I am not excited.

Disappointed.
Frustrated.
Angry.
Excited? Not so much.

Because I burned myself, again, in the real world.
Something I’ve done how many times now? More than twenty times within the six years we’ve known each other?
And that’s probably a low estimate, that if you spread it out over six years, means I only burned myself every quarter.

The truth is, I STILL believe in having a place in the world LIKE A NORMAL PERSON.
With friends, with connections to the city where I live. Offering something local too.

I so much believe in the value of connection and local, real life things.
And when it comes to teaching yoga locally;
I would sign up immediately, if someone taught classes with this energetic vibe.

“The energy of the band, undeniable. Like a freight train coming at you.”

With this thing, this X factor, that is as undeniable in the entrepreneurial world as it was in Bon Jovi in the 80s.
This life-bringing force that will shock-start any heart that has given up beating, because it got so taken down by the depressing micro-managing of it all.
By the smallness, required to be allowed in, in the local community, and in the yoga community.

The past few weeks I had a vision of how we could change the yoga industry, and make the world a better place for everybody;
Teachers, students, local communities.
I could see it all so clearly!

And then I had four to six weeks, packed with appointments in the real world, including yoga people;
And it was like the life was drained right out of me.

Instead of moving the ball forward, I think I actually lost students, lost friends. And I know, I lost my desire to do anything, at local level.
And that hurt, because I have become nostalgic for my life as a fulltime offline yoga teacher, 15 years ago.
When I wasn’t a blogger/writer yet.

I had been writing under the name LS Harteveld, but it was all offline, and I posted it on a Dutch social medium.
I didn’t even have a website until 2010.
Life was simple; Both for my writing as well as for my yoga.

And I wanted that for myself again, to just run my classes every week. A slow, uneventful, existence as a yoga teacher.
And because I now had insight in where the profession of being a yoga teacher, had taken the wrong turn (worldwide! not just here), I thought I had cracked the code to get it right this time.

A recipe that would allow me to run my classes, without any fancy marketing. (including any additional blogging)
As well allow all other yoga teachers to do the same.
We would all be allowed to live our offline lives, and to give that serene offline energy, back to our students.
It would be heaven.

Until I clashed so hard with everyone around me, and I realized I was just not made for this.
I really, and I mean REALLY, need to rise to that absolute highest level of, yeah of what?
Of being a writer?
Of being an international mentor?
Of being an online marketeer?
What exactly?

I think the most positive thing I can make of this, is by comparing it to Frodo leaving Middle-Earth for the Undying Lands.
He had saved the world, but, as he explained to his friend Sam, it could not be saved for him.
He could no longer live there, the injuries he had  affected him too deeply and could not be cured on the earthly plane.
But at closer look, you can also see that he had been affected mentally. He lost his swagger, on Mount Doom.

I think I knew this would happen when I heard myself explain to someone why I had abandoned my work of helping the yoga world thrive;
That I am, the writer LS Harteveld.
Then, I am the writer under my real name.
Then I am the entrepreneur under my own name.
And only then, a yoga teacher, someone with an interest in the craft. And that last bit could be wishful thinking. Part of me suspects I am zero yoga teacher, that it was the idea, of being a yoga teacher.
And that the clashes came from my ideas colliding with what everyone else wanted (their) yoga teacher to be.

Which then in turn, sparked self-hatred.
As if I wanted to cut everything yoga teacher out of me.
I am still not completely over that. 

I have invested so much in setting up my yoga business again. And part of me still wants to go all in on this, in particular because I know how much value it would bring both to me, as well as to my students!
It already is.

But every time I bump my head and meet resistance when I pursue the bigger yoga vision behind it, I immediately fall back to a deep resentment of not doing my actual purpose work, which is being a writer and being an entrepreneur.
And I just want to burn it all.

And after understanding how beautiful the profession of being a yoga teacher is, as beautiful as the Shire itself, that is just so deeply disappointing.

~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,

The only blogpost I have frequently revisited over the years, is December 2022’s 7 Values, 7 Deadly Sins.
Which also means I never actually revisited anything, until recently.

But this week, I was in for a very unhappy surprise:
My values have changed.
Which, in my opinion, is about the worst, fu**ed up thing one can have to face in ones lifetime.
Well, this time it was me, apparently, who came to the conclusion she didn’t have her priorities in order.

The original order of my values was:
1.Love 2. (Sexual and financial) Freedom 3.sex
4. self-expression 5. body 6.fun and adventure 7. status

Initially I just moved Body from number 5 to the top, at number 1;
Because if I fail to take care of my body, nothing else is going to get done anyway.
I also limited “2” to financial freedom, removing the idea of sexual freedom. After all, Sex was already on 3, and to me the idea of financial freedom was intrinsically linked to it being the gateway to sexual freedom.
What other reason could one have?
Except, apparently, a lot, because no one I know say they want to be financially free so they can be sexually free.
But I am not most people.

So that was that, or so I thought.
Just some light moderations.

Until I realized that my top two values were actually not even on the list.

My top value “1” was being offline.
Being offline is not as strict as it sounds, and basically stands for me for not being sucked into scrolling, refreshing my news tab, or checking notifications.
They stand for having autonomy.
Although this autonomy is of course most easily attained by simply staying away from a computer entirely.

But it was clear to me, that tossing time down the drain online was presenting this huge liability spending time on whatever it was my so called “top values” were.

And this is the same underlying line of thought, that brought me to my new number 2, which I will reveal in a minute.

Just a quick reminder that at this point the original number one (Love) had dropped 3 spots.
One,  because Body went first. And then another two places, because I inserted two new priority values.
Having Love drop three places?
That’s a serious shift, in priorities!

The second new priority value I inserted, after being offline (1), was living in a clean house.
Making “Housekeeping” at large, my number two must-do, every day.
And since “being offline” is not actually an activity, but rather a lack thereof, you could say that “Housekeeping” became my Top priority, overnight!
😱

And that from someone who in December 2022 already felt like a softy for the last-minute addition of “Love” at number 1, when I just knew it should say Sex.
And now in 2024 I have *counts fingers* five other values more important than Sex!
😱

Sex is now on number 6, which aside from the kinky alliteration, is a disgrace. In particular for me as a diarist and erotica writer, who has not had sex in over a year.
Which comes as a surprise to no one, since I apparently have at least five better things to do.

New list of Values

1.Being offline
2.Housekeeeping
3.Body
4.Love
5.Financial Freedom
6.Sex
7. Self-Expression
8.Fun& Adventure
9.Status

The new set of 9 Values, and their specific order, are exactly right.
I would die of chaos and stress, for example if I would have fun and adventure (8) before 1-5 have provided me with stability.

So I think the biggest change since December 2022, is that I realize that the fun things;
Sex (6) Self-Expression (7) Fun & Adventure (8) and Status (9)
Are only fun, when 1 to 5 are in place.

But also:
One to five are completely boring!
I may just as well find my casket right away, because as much as I love the peace of living offline;
The serenity of living in a clean house;
The unconditional love I feel for all the animals I take care of, and that I feel for my family and all of my friends and yoga students;
As much as I absolutely adore the hustle of being a creative and am head-over heels in love with marketing, selling and the lifestyle of an independent;

They are STILL not what makes me tick.

It’s like now that I no longer have a lover, and dating and looking for one seems to belong to a lifestyle from an era that is long-gone and I do not feel compelled to redo;
I have lost my reason to live.

I have lost, the reason to get one to five into place. Without “6” there is no reason to, and contrary to my years before I had my lover, I don’t feel like “wasting” time meeting new men.
That time is behind me, and my lover, the man who changed it all, did not come to me through a dating site nor social media.

And without the 6 of Sex, I do not particularly care for 7 “Creative self-expression including writing”, not for 8 “Fun and Adventure” and not for 9 “Status” either.

I have known for long, that in theory, I lost something when I got into my affair all those years ago.
I lost the simple, pure connection to my own body and to my own sexuality.
Resulting among other things, in a loss of enjoying yoga, the way I had enjoyed it for over 15 years at that point.

Instead, my connection to my own body and to my own sexuality, became synonymous to being with him.

So I knew that now that he is no longer in my life, the logical way out was to detox from that dopamine sex-infused rush that had been the affair, and to pick up enjoying my own body.
In peace, not in a close to a decade long, spectacular sexual affair.

But I really, honestly, a few weeks in and I don’t think that is possible.
I have been way to optimistic.

And now with the Values thing, just looking at that top 5 makes me gag, and not in a choke me when you take me from behind, kind of way.
It’s so vanilla, it’s so boring.
And – like I said – that’s while enjoying all the things that are in that top 5!
But it’s just the lack of excitement, that makes the idea (I will get back to this) of actually starting to live according to my top 5, repulsive.

I know so, because this top 5 is how I have actually been living my life for the last five years! My top 5, is not a conceptual idea, of how my life would look if only I would commit to these top 5;
This has been actual my life for years.
The worst years of my life, when I lost everything.

Disclaimer here that I did not live according to value 1, “offline”. But I think we all became a bit unregulated in that area, since the pandemic.
And unfortunately, my life seems far too broken to be fixed with a digital detox.

I discovered a new “simple life” self-help channel on YouTube, very easy going guy. And I saw one of the other videos which I have not watched yet, having something in the title like “It didn’t fix me”.
I can relate to that.
Simplifying my life, by focusing on 1 (offline), 2 (clean house), 3  (Body) and 4 (Love)?
It has not fixed me.

And maybe, in hindsight, I don’t want to be fixed AND I don’t care for a simple lifestyle!
There!

I don’t care if I know that before my lover, I had a life of simple pleasures that I can no longer enjoy, because I have grown accustomed to having Big Sex.
I’ve changed.
I don’t want to go back to a soft, simple life.

So!
My initial plan, the noble idea of internalizing my sexuality and finding pleasure again in the small things, in yoga, in my own body and sexuality
– it needs to go.

And I need to find a way to make number 1 to 5 of my squeaky clean values, rebellious, sexual, dark and unpredictable.

I need to find a way, to turn them into sins.
Preferably deadly ones.
😱

.
~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,

I’m not writing you last minute, as I intended to in order to make sure any new (medical) developments were included;
But at a sunny, calm Sunday where it’s noon and I am still in bathing robe behind my computer, having done nothing productive nor memorable, aside from watching a documentary Mr.Big and me watched on what in hindsight would be one of our last real dates.

Before he turned away and let the promise of another life, one more fulfilling for him, take over.
There I was, alone after nine years that had left no traces. Something I found both sad, to not have it acknowledged, as well as a thing of beauty.
The invisibility had been painful during the affair, and that was definitely something I had to come to terms with really quickly in order to not be swallowed by it;
But now, in the end, it was a blessing to have our affair not be grounded on the material or relational plane, in any way.

The substance from which it had been made, did not leave marks. Unlike what I have experienced to be true from relationships I have witnessed, ours had not contained any aggressive ingredients.
It’s tempting to say this was because there was no power play, but there was a lot of that.
But in a way that enticed us both, we were always in a game together. We knew who had lost and who had won a day, or a conversation.
There was an unnamed game of power, perpetually going on.

But we never fought over resources, not even over time.
And when it ended the material, visible side of it, was painless.
There was not even a fight, not even a proper breakup.

The invisibility of the affair, and how it ultimately helped me and kept me from any harm happening over the breakup, was not the whole story.

Forced by the violent nightmares of December (“Dark and Unknown Forces“), the heart complaints that started quickly after the breakup, and the awareness that dark forces were starting to find their way into my life at a speed I could definitely not afford;
And all that after having been left in the dark, figuratively, for eleven months in 2023, the eleven months after the date where we watched the documentary;
It all urged me to give up my resistance much quicker than expected.
Including my resistance to him, or that there was anything to discuss or to get back on.

I am not saying it would not be possible to experience new levels of separation, of grief, of shock, should certain things occur, or if he would actively do certain things.
I am just saying;
Those things have not occurred.
They are not here.

All that is here now, is an affair that has ended without leaving a trace (not counting my heart, which is now under doctor supervision).
And a question of how to “move on” with my life, in a peaceful way. A loving way, that not only does justice to how I have behaved in those nine years, but also how he has behaved.

Not counting the first six months, when I had not found my way yet at being a secret mistress and he had not found his way around having a mistress either;
I have always been on his good side.
Which took effort from us both.

To let an affair die out over the course of 11 months, dismiss all opportunity to talk about it, and to pretend nothing has changed and that there is nothing to discuss, is both annoying as hell, not to mention terribly time-consuming;
But it was also very “Us”.

In a way, the eleven months were part of the same game we’d been playing all those years before, where I never confronted him, nor did I make him responsible for my feelings;
And he never picked a fight with me, or did ugly things.

The ending was as respectful to each other, as the whole affair had been.
And as could be expected, after nine years our game had ended in a tie 😉

So when then this month of January, my health deteriorated quickly, and the darkness set in, of course there was a brief moment when I thought I should toss everything out that reminded me of him, draw a line, move on.
Make space in my life for a new man or a new lover.

An understandable phase, but it was inauthentic and I was mimicking what others would have done. For me it was not a healthy, but a vengeful scorned woman mindset.
So I threw nothing out, of the rituals or the tiny objects or items of clothing that reminded me of him.

Instead I made my peace, embraced everything we had had, and expanded it to the lifestyle it had represented for me.
Not only were the dates we had, my peak performances – no one has ever seen me like that, nor would I know who would ever see me in such a state of power, competence and of sexual confidence – but I had always had the ambition to uplevel my whole life to those few hours I occasionally had with him.

My body, my home, my life, my business;
They were all to be drawn from that blueprint.
An effort I made halfheartedly at best, when we were together. Before I got distracted, and my daily life fell back to being a shadow from what I knew it could be.

And so inner-peace came, much quicker then I expected.
And I realized that although he is no longer here – and although yes if he wanted to or if certain things happened, he could still hurt me- I do know what I want now.

Not another man, not a life that is built afresh, independent of the past nine years.

But the body, home, life and business, I had hoped all those years to magically click into, now that I knew what I had tapped into being that version of me, with him.

That it is time, now, to fulfill that longheld promise.
To myself.

.
~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,

In all the years you have been my coach, this time interval between our calls has been the hardest, and the most challenging.
Even now I do not have a coherent story of what happened and why.

There is “only” one actual event I can pinpoint, which must have been the one that is bringing this all to the surface now.
And it can also explain for a Nightmare Before Christmas I had, as well as for the taxing months of October and November 2023, when I ended up needing medical help twice;
I even blame this event for the entire 2023 undercurrent that something was seriously off on a deeper level-
but because that suspicious feeling started after an intense crisis October 2022, one I never wrote about nor will I ever do that, I thought it were my own nerves.

So the only event I have to go by, is my lover breaking up with me in a sloppy way last December 31st, and then the entire 14 months prior to that dropped into place. I had been feeling something was off between us.
(2023’s mysterious undercurrent)
Even though nothing was visibly off between us!
Not counting the fact that he was energetically and then ultimately literally, moving away from me.

So the only thing predicting the events of 31 December were his energetically withdrawing from the “Us” that had been the affair for over 8 years.
And even on the day itself, he didn’t say what had happened until I kept asking very direct questions.

2023 was the first year I had started asking those because he was giving me absolutely nothing.
By asking the direct questions, I have forced him to lie, tell half-truths, which was still one half more than what I would have gotten if I had not asked anything.

So in a way you can say I broke it up for him, because I defined what he did as breaking up.
Something that should have made it easier or harder, but that I can find no emotional response to whatsoever.
Him, me, what difference does it make.

So now I am going to tie the beginning of this to the end of this;
Because I think, no I know, he was already moving away from me October, November 2022.
I know because I asked him on a date, and he agreed, yet I could feel it was getting more difficult for him to see me, but because I just had my crisis beginning of October 2022, I had a terrible feeling of not being good enough.
As if the crisis had been my fault, and it was either condemned or not understood by him.
I felt like I was falling short or disappointing him, October November 2022.

Then we had treacherous December and January where our affair seemed back to normal. My crisis had become manageable, and I had learned not to bother people with it.
Few understood it, and they just made me feel bad, just like he had.
The affair seemed normal and genuine, but it was like there was spice missing. We were not as adventurous as we had been in the bedroom.

But again:
Coming from seeing my life fall apart the beginning of October 2022, our dates were an absolute blessing.
Again, I blamed anything off on my own wobbliness. Not on what in retrospect were his first strides on his way out.

From February 2023 on, the current became apparent, very apparent! We no longer had dates, we had appointments where we could help the other out, cheered the other up. 
But they were all initiated by me.
And a good thing I did, because otherwise I would not have seen him anymore.

And also:
Now, in May, I had the chance to ask him if he wanted out.
But I didn’t ask it that directly (I didn’t get direct until the final months), and he used the room I gave him to ignore it, and as a cue to put in more effort and make our date (appointment!) more fun.
He did not use it to have a conversation and end things.

And then we have June to November 2023, where I understandably stopped initiating dates that were actually appointments, and it became Whatsapp check-ins around the same topics we once had appointments for and see each other in real life.

“Us”, was dying.

Until late November when I started being more direct, culminating to the 31st of December, when it became apparent he had moved himself physically, away from me.
Without ever telling me anything, and still not admitting the symbolical implications it had.

Even on the 31st, he was still behaving as if nothing had changed between us. As if there had simply been a change in real estate, that didn’t need any addressing.
A move by which he effectively denied there had ever been an Us;
His way, of ending things.

Okay, so those were the energetic ebbs and flows, covering 15 months.
And what I also want to point out, and this is the best place I can find in this blogpost because it really is a topic that has no place in this storyline;
But ever since 2022, maybe even sooner, I can “see” weird, extra-terrestial or paranormal things happening when I close my eyes.
I assumed it was an involuntary reflex to too much computer-time, like a song you can still hear in your head.
But I no longer think that.
The images are vivid, like a movie. They’re actually quite entertaining, but because of their “Hieronymus Bosch” like quality, and because I cannot answer the question:
“Can you prove you’re not looking into another dimension?”
And because this entire post is about taking a good look at anything, that can explain the what appear to be unseen, yet very active, forces, causing disturbances in my life and quite possibly having influenced how I have reacted, or how other people in my life have behaved, I did not want to leave  this possible open portal to hell, unmentioned!

Picking up our story, we’re at Christmas 2023, when the portal opened into my dream world:
I had a terrible nightmare about an entity. It was so violent it woke me up, and I couldn’t go back to sleep either.
Which then turned out to be exactly as the Universe intended, because something happened that night, that was clearly meant for me to witness so that something could be done.

Again, just like October 2022 trauma, I do not want to talk about it, but it was super intense.

But now it comes:
After December 31, yeah sure, I cried a lot, the first day, but it was more of shock. Not because I was actually feeling the loss of a lover, the man who I consider the love of my life.
Although not without the disclaimer, that I may have been wrong!
Which is what this blogpost is about.

But anyway, of course, I was happy that I didn’t fall apart!
To me, it meant that I had grown not just since breakups with the two other men that ever really got to me, but also since the crisis of October 2022, which had absolutely floored me.

Clearly, whatever I had put in place as scaffolding in order to be able to deal with October 2022, was equally if not more effective, in preventing the walls coming down, after Dec31, 14 months later.

The house was standing tall, and so was I.
Nothing, revealed I had lost him.
And I felt like a frickin’ grownup!
Eat this motherfuckers, I am nobody’s bitch anymore.

Where I had once felt a strong connection to one man, or where I had once expected anybody, to be there for me unconditionally;
I was now at the point where the love of your life could leave me on the last day of the year, and I was fully recovered before the sun set on January first.

I called it progress.

Until strange and weird things started happening. I am still looking for the right words, but the best way to describe it, is like feeling your foot suddenly steps through the ice.
You expect something to be there, and then there’s nothing.

Instead of experiencing a meltdown, like I used to do when someone broke my heart, I now I experience “fallout”;
Entire parts of my life just no longer being there, because the thing that was holding it all together, was him.
No, “us”! (even worse)

So my genius mind, after its decision to never have one man, or one person, hold your heart in their hand ever again, had found a way;
They used our affair as the mortar, tying the entire life together.

I had hidden our affair, that had been secretive since day one, January 2015, into the very walls of my existence!
Where it had been dripping out off, since late 2022.

This week, every night, I can feel darkness within me. I remember having violent heart complaints in 2018, the year my cat had died in January.
I remember having them in 2008, when my lover had broken up with me. 
And I have them now, but not in the way I used to.

They seem to be tied to a darkness I have never felt. Tied to a rustling sound of the heart, a quickening not the numbness of 2008, and not the violent complaints from 2018.
This time it feels more venomous.
Like a literal blackness, of the heart, the way you sometimes see those pictures of tar lungs.

And I am reminded of Christmas night, a night so disturbing I cannot speak about it.
I am reminded of the dark current, underflowing 2023, and probably sooner.
I am reminded of the biggest personal crisis of my entire life, October 2022.
I am reminded of eight years with my lover that were never allowed to exist, where technically there was no Us.
The only place we were real was in my LS Harteveld blogs, like a fairy tale.

I am reminded of the pandemic, where I lost my faith in ever belonging in society, and accepting my fate of (hopefully) being able to serve her, but knowing I could not afford the price of being part of it.

And I also remember how incredibly light I had been,  before 2018.
That I had so many one-line diaries, where at the end of the day all I wrote down was:
“It was such a great day!”
Before I dropped into a blissful sleep, with dreams I did not remember.

I was an entirely different person, before January 2018.
I was light.

And I started counting and wondering when it had started, and I have to say I don’t know.
In 2017 my best friend left, but otherwise, I was still okay!
So if that is true, then my current state doesn’t have anything to do with my lover brought, or carried with him, that has been causing this darkness, because the affair started in 2015, years before 2018.

And yet, things that are denied to see the light, things that are not allowed to have a name, and to be known for who they are;
It would not be strange to assume our affair mutated into an evil, because denied, life form. 

What it has done, is that I am viewing everything that happened in a different light, and no longer assume so easily, that I know what was cause and what was effect.
I remember the ugliness of the crisis of October 2022, and thinking:
“Something more is here at play.”
The effect it had on me, was so incredibly forceful, like I said my whole world fell apart. I couldn’t believe this was due to whatever it was someone else had said or done.
My grief and falling apart, was disproportionate.

So the good news is: I did not fall apart, when my lover left.

The bad news is:
I have absolutely no idea what forces I am dealing with, where they are hiding, and what my fate shall be, if I do not figure this out.

But I do know it could cost me my life, if I don’t.

.
~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,

I hope, and intend this to be the shortest email in our 5+ years of working together.
Because although from my great suffering, has indeed come great art;
Ending what feels like the, consciously lived, best year of my life, no longer needs words, nor art.
It just is.

I am still intensely grateful for choosing your coaching in 2018. Not just because you have been my companion, on this otherwise terribly lonely road, but because you have been an example of the type of professional I hope to be for others.
This is because of many things, but I think the crucial element here, for me, is that you offer both a service (coaching) as well as that you are an artist.
This is intrinsically different to “just” being an entrepreneur.
It comes with different pitfalls.

Regular business coaching, would never have been able to save me in these darkest of years. But you did.
Or, if you’re more comfortable with that, our work did.

I am working on two projects now, and both feel close to vanity projects, compared to the past few years.
That I even have the clarity of mind to think:
“You know what would be fun? – “
Indicates we’re talking pure luxury here.

The first project is publishing the first two years of my Lauren 1998 project. So these cover the fictionalized diaries of summer 1994 (2019) to fall (2021). I had started this spring 2022, and the manuscript was like 90% done. Just some spacing issues in the second part of the book, as far as I can tell.

I found the manuscript and am working on it, keeping a publishing journal on my oldest website, for which I have not had a purpose since in December 2018, when I started this new one (laurenharteveld.com)

This summer I had to invest in getting it updated, because the old software didn’t allow for the update of the host. Having invested a few hundred euros motivated me to find purpose for it again.
And also because I have to work with real WordPress Gutenberg software there, and don’t have the escapes I have on all my other websites which are hosted by wordpress.com.
Knowing that when wordpress.com stops facilitating the mastodons who still want to use classical editor, at least I will be having some years of experience under my belt using their Gutenberg editor.
Even when I obviously do a dirty hack job posting on that website, but still!
Valuable experience.
A girl should be prepared for the worst, which for me is wordpress.com taking their pre-installed classical editor features down.

So publishing my first retro-diary is the first project I am actively working on. And once this book is ready, I will keep this train rolling, publishing all the unpublished material, and doing it in tandem with keeping a publisher journal. 

As sort of a million dollar ps, that should probably have an entire new blogpost on its own;
I have come to the conclusion that I should start seeing my body of work, as my greatest work, just like Anais Nin’s diaries, the record of her life, were her biggest contribution.
Her erotica got wings because of that, but it was the diaries, that were both the heart as well as the glue keeping it together. 

In the upcoming years I will be publishing all my work, with dates included in a “this post was written on” footer.
And then I will explore options of sharing my work with a publisher or foundation, who will commercially exploit it and curate it.
I want to be the 21st century Anais Nin, or already know I am. But what I need is an international publisher who sees the value of the diaries and dated articles as a whole;
Not as singular books.

Okay, is blogpost is getting really long after all!
😉 

And the second project is one I still have no idea how to do it, it is like it is there on the edge of my consciousness, drifting in and out;
But I am bringing myself, or “us” because I am also bringing my 20th century alterego Lauren 1998 there as well, to December 1989.
I’m putting us on a different timeline;
The month a 17 year old Lauren met Bear, the boy who would become her lover in January 1990.

In December 1989, Lauren was in her final year of highschool, gearing up for her exams in May.
And losing her virginity, in which she probably put even more thought 😉

But what made Lauren’s 1989, going 1990, lifestyle so appealing to both Lauren 1998 and me, in 2023, is that she had a very healthy daily rhythm.
Homecooked meals, no junkfood whatsoever, walking, cycling and fresh air, ingrained in daily activities. 
No going to the movies at night, nothing spectacularly dysregulating on weekends, and so on.
As a 17 year old I/ she, had the aspirational lifestyle of any adult.

Now of course this was largely due to the fact that my mother took care of me, so as an adult I have tons of tasks 17 year old me didn’t have.
But still;
I know it was in how she/I was feeling, more than what I did.

So this means that after the second timeline, where I live my life as if it is 25 year ago, which I have been doing since 2019 (1994);
I have now added a third timeline.

Of a 17 year old Lauren on the cusp of the 90s, and taking matters into her own hands, with regard to her sexuality.
She will be with Bear to lose her virginity, and they will like each other so much that they will keep seeing each other.
He will have other women too, but she will only have him simply because she is most in love with him, and the two men she falls for during their time, are in no position to answer it.
Or at least they choose not to.

In December 1998 (!) Lauren will reflect on the year, marking January as the last time they had sex and May as the last time they saw each other.
She wonders if she has lost him forever, or at least for a few years.
In December she did not count the new year, she didn’t say “I have been with Bear for 9 years.”
January rounds off to the previous anniversary.
Eight years.

Unsure what to do, or how to proceed, she decides to live the first 4 years of their relationship again;
From December 1989 to summer 1994, when she started her diary.

Because she may not have been able to save her relationship with him, but she will try to save time itself.

The time they had, together.

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

Dear Sara,

I feel that despite having gone over the scenario of what the f went wrong, not making my first career in yoga a success, despite being talented, skilled, schooled and experienced in every and any area that would be relevant for such a thing;
The rockhard bottom of it managed to knock the breath right out of me, regardless.

I woke up this Saturday with a two decade long hangover, thinking:
“My God, I really never stood a chance. No one does.”

Plus I identified there was an extra complicating factor, which I managed to overlook as well, but I’ll get to that later.

First:
Why does no one teaching yoga in the Netherlands stand a chance making a living out of it?

This is because teaching yoga is at a toxic crossroad of:

1. lack of recognition of all Dutch professionals who work independently in general, as being entrepreneurs or having a business.
Because the number one executive task for an independent is to create revenue, not to execute their profession.
Their measure of success is a financial one, and in no way entangles the professional accountability of a payroll job professional.

2. me, as a woman, in the women dominated profession of teaching yoga, being in the corner of women who work as independents.
A subcategory in the aforementioned already tricky category of being an independent in general.
We’re now in the corner where we’re barely paid, rarely paid, and an obligation to be nice to everyone. Recognition does not go further than that either you apparently have a hobby to the level that you can ask money for it.
Or, that you have an opportunity to be of service, which is code for that you should never overcharge and be grateful with whatever pennies you get.
Your real reward is in the good you bring into this world.

3.This is the new one: The taboo we have on really BEING someone.
I discovered a long time ago, that for a female independent professional in the Netherlands, it is very difficult to step into their identity of BEING an entrepreneur.
But what I did not see that this is part of a larger, and less gender specific, taboo, where your head gets chopped off the moment you ARE/ identify as,  something.
This is seen as hugely threatening.
Everyone is passive aggressively forced into being some toothless tiger version of themselves, where any OWNING of STRENGTH, IDENTITY, and characteristics, is immediately punished.

To compare: This also means that in the Netherlands anyone owning their sexuality, whatever that sexuality is, or owning their gender, again regardless of whatever that gender is;
Is going to have a really hard time.
The problem in the Netherlands is not lack of tolerance to WHAT you are;
It is that you ARE!
That you have the actual audacity to BE something.

“I am” is where the problem lies.
Not what comes after it.

And then, yes, being a woman in a service-provider profession makes it even more frowned upon to stand in your I AM power;
But that the problem where I live (and maybe in other countries too?), definitely lies in claiming identity as a whole.
Any, identity.

Recapping, all that time, I really thought that the root cause of unprofitable professions was IN THE NATURE OF THEIR PROFESSION!
That when someone is an artist, or a yoga teacher, or a musician, it is something in the very nature of their work, that makes it difficult to make a living.
Nothing which a good dose of marketing, branding, packaging, and stepping on those sales, would not fix!
Or so I naively assumed.

Because now, I understand independents not making any money has absolutely nothing to do with any nature of any work.

It has to do with how uncomfortable society is, if that person commercially sells that work!

Mind blown, Sara. Mind blown.

As a woman, the box you’re dealt with and are supposed to stay in, is so unbelievably small and so terribly plain, that even our casket will be a more spacious and colorful experience.
Pity we’ll be dead by then.

The closest I have been to fitting into that box was around the turn of the century when I worked an office job and was in my longterm relationship.
A time I was so inauthentic to who I am, it’s a miracle my heart did not stop beating out of protest.

So the above is an exploration and an explanation why even at the most no-frills level of entrepreneurship, I was setup to fail. Together with all the other independents, in particular the female ones.
Well at least I now have a better view of the headwinds I can expect in my second career in yoga, and that everything I experienced the past couple of weeks, was just the beginning.

And a sign, I’m actually doing the right thing this time!
That headwinds mean you have not fallen into the same trap this second time around, because deep holes in the ground are always windfree.

So there was that.
Finding the root cause of why we’re all going to fail as independents, unless we buckle up, ready to take on any storm coming our way!
Of which there will be many.

But then, to make matters worse, I discovered something which was more personal than just “being” (identifying) as an entrepreneur, in a society that does not want us to succeed.
And this is;
That I am an artist.

That although I believe as an entrepreneur my job is to build a successful business;
As an artist, my job is a different one.

And that this makes the money streams of the business unpredictable.
On one hand, it gives you the competitive advantage, because  artist-entrepreneurs, by the very nature of who they are, create more beautiful, enticing and compelling products and services.
They know how to pack that up, and make that thing look pretty!

But.
Also.

Unlike most entrepreneurs, an artist is someone with A MESSAGE. And one susceptible to change!
Where a regular business can work very well, staying at surface level, the artist has to not hold back on the deeper values backing up what it is they do.
To them staying at surface level playing nice feels like that grey, crampy box closing in.

To an artist, making generic, liked by everybody art feels like death.

It is why Disney became a business, yet Andy Warhol stayed art. He even made the commerce part of the art.

At the fork in the road between being a business or being an artist, I will never choose being a business.

And after finally and fully understanding how to navigate that business road,  and what to expect and to bring in order to conquer it, it just sucks knowing I’ll never be able to set foot on it!