BTS – Page 2 – LS Harteveld

A Rock Journalist | year 1990 behind the scenes

Published on September 30, 2025September 30, 2025 by LS Harteveld

Before I knew what new 18 year old Lauren Harteveld wanted to be when she grew up; I knew the weight of the past 20 years had to be lifted off my shoulders.

Having been a writer since 2006, and online since 2010, with over 400 blogposts since December 2018 alone (which is this website, an act of flat out abandonment of my older website), it had gotten too much too carry.
And it had been for a very long time.

My body of work had gotten so large it was probably too much to bear for any writer, but in particular for someone who wanted to start fresh.
As an 18 year old, in the year 1990, with a future of endless possibilities.

The countless blogposts, offline diaries and Word-files? Screamed obligation, stuck-ness and threatened to drown me alive.

So last weekend I made the decision to retire Lauren Harteveld, as we know her, or knew her.

Don’t worry!
The current three series, which have been going out for months in this format, will go on unchanged!

With every week a new episode of either Behind the Scenes, of Lauren 1990, or Harteveld 2025*, a post capped at 2200 characters.

And once a month I write a letter to Sara here, my coach.

Of which the latest was three days worth of writing and creating art work and then re-creating it.
Dear Sara will always be as long as it needs to be, because they are like foundational posts on which the whole thing is built.
After writing her, I can see where I need to change things up.

As was the case this time.
The separation the letter spoke about, into three different personalities (Rock Star, Mad Chaotic Person (MCP), and Lauren, the soft, feminine side of me who isn’t online) proved that, ultimately, there were no years attached to them.
They are all whole personas, all living on both timelines, 1990 and 2025.
But initially I did not get that, and having three personalities on two timelines, at first, drew me absolutely nuts.

I thought all work on these three personality types had been in vain. I should have used the two timelines as starting points.
Because with three personalities, living on two timelines I now I had six; Obviously undoable.

I thought I had broken it, and that the only way to free myself was to burn the 20 years of writing, so that I could actually BE in 1990, as an 18 year old version of myself.
I was like an animal wanting to chew off its own leg….

But then, fortunately, I found a way out. And before I burned it all down in an attempt to free myself.

So what happened to the three personalities and the two timelines?

Well, I could extract one personality (the Rock Star/ Artist), and one professional timeline (2025).
The other timeline 1990 still exists, as do the other personalities of offline Lauren and the Mad Chaotic Person (MCP) who is in charge of all online posting, and the backup option if the situation requires warmth, fun and casualness;
But the things essential for my success could essentially all be boiled down to one career, and one persona;
The Rock Star/ Artist.

She will be working in 2025.

On the 2025 timeline Rock Star-me, writer me (mostly under my real name), will almost mechanically handle all my current day projects and work on all areas.
Including publishing all work Lauren Harteveld in the upcoming years.

I’ve always had it as my main goal to become the Anais Nin (a famous diary writer) of the 21st century, yet I’ve decided to end my diary writing years.
Almost 20 years is enough.
And closing my years as a diarist, and switching to curating this work and securing the legacy of it, feels like the best choice I made in years.

So like I said, the current three series will stay on, but they’re not written from living the experience itself.
Like this piece, what you’re reading now, it’s from a bird’s eye perspective.

That’s not the same as writing from a diary standpoint.

Professionally the personality of the Rock Star will live fully in 2025.

However, the 1990 version of me, will embody her. Live her.

And she will live with the idea of becoming a journalist.

In 1990, I’ll be studying rock, and pretend that I’m a teen in 1990, who has decided she’s gonna go for it.
She wants to write about rock and become a professional journalist!

She and current-day me are the same person. Just that real me has more on her plate, including publishing the Lauren diaries 2010-2025 and secure her legacy as the diarist of this century.
Maybe that will happen within my lifetime, maybe not.
I keep seeing recognition coming in a hundred years from now when my work be uncovered, vault style.

Meanwhile (like I said) I will keep writing posts like this, to let people know what’s going on now.
And to share how things are going on my 1990 timeline.

Should the 1990 adventures be worth writing about, I always have my offline dairies to document that.
But I feel diary writing, even as a way to shape my time travel project (like I did 1994-2000, a publication which also desperately needs to be published and I keep dropping the ball) is no longer my thing.
I am really done writing diaries, and I want to BE the rock journalist, and under my real name.

Lauren Harteveld the diary writer may one day publish a new book/diary, but I don’t expect it. And not before I have her whole legacy wrapped up.

My 8 year goals are:
📵 to live a 20th Century life
🎸 to be a 20th century-inspired Rock journalist.
But on the current timeline.
So this means I make money creating content and speaking about rock music and 20th century things
📚 publish Lauren Harteveld work 2010-2025
📢 to make the Lauren Harteveld legacy visible

Coming back to the three-part identities I distinguished in the long letter I wrote to Sara, and why they (thank God) had not actually multiplied after all (into 6 different ones, spread over two timelines) the answer is this:

The Rock Star/Artist is who I am professionally, under both names, and in all different fields.
Lauren, the soft, beige clothed femme, is private me. Although I acknowledge there are few social situations and few people with whom I will be choosing to “be her” (meaning, my real me)
And the Mad Chaotic Person (MCP), the fun, outgoing, let-it-rip persona, who can step in for both (Rock Star or Lauren) if social interaction is required.

There is no punchline to this story, yet I cannot express how relieved I am. Relieved the lengthy post that took me days was not in vain;
Relieved to have a separation between the professional and the private;
And to have someone (the MCP) who can navigate between the two.

I’m relieved to be wrapping up 15 to 20 years of writing;
And to have a whole new career, ahead of me.

Starting fresh.

..
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my 1990 timeline.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Total Recall | year 1990 behind the scenes

Published on September 16, 2025September 16, 2025 by LS Harteveld

Treading lightly!
That’s probably the best strategy in this unknown art form called timeline travel.
Which means I am in the process of teleporting myself to 1990 until I feel I live there.

My end game is to only come to 2025 (and beyond, as this is a long-term project) to do the job of whatever online work is required.

Like how you’d go to work in the morning, but want to leave at the end of the day.

I don’t reject professional use of the internet and smartphone, but as I progress I want it to be restricted more and more, until it really feels like work.
And no longer something I do in my free-time.

Obviously, being, or not-being, online is the most identifiable area where 1990 should start feeling entirely different than 2025.

And I have been successful with this, but it is still very much in the “doing-stage”.
So my online behavior is different, but I don’t feel different.
The grey noise in my head which has become my companion, is not lifting.

A few successes have been the moments when I imagined my new-body. Sometimes I imagine my actual former 1990 body, but usually it’s easier for me to envision a body from a book from the 80s, I keep next to my bed.

I make sure not to lose sight, that this is not a body make-over challenge in any way.
Because yes, it would help if my body became the physical reminder of the fact that I am pretending it is 1990.
But the real goal is to feel the era in my mind.
It’s a brain-make-over.

I am prepared to do whatever it takes to really get that open, quiet offline consciousness that was so normal in 1990.
And I know getting offline is key to achieve that, yet so far I hardly have any 1990 progress after cutting my online presence in half.

The real results are much quieter…
Like fairies or ghosts. Glimpses that appear one moment, and that I then try to catch!
By taking on the glimpse, expanding it, living it, seeing through its eyes, by letting the images unfold like a reel;
I hope the experience grows big enough to hold to.

One of the most powerful yet largely artificial “memories” that helps me to get into the 1990 feeling, is the movie Atomic Blonde from 2017.
The movie is situated in Berlin in 1989, to the backdrop of the wall coming down.

The wardrobe of the female protagonist, as well as her London apartment, is totally minimalist, only black and white, which is of course the most timeless look the 80s produced, and would seamlessly move into 90s minimalism.
The color of the year 1990 was eggshell white.

At the time itself, I wasn’t into the combination black/white at all, but right now, and no doubt sparked by that movie Atomic Blonde, it is one of my favorite time travel tools.

Also both London as well as Berlin remind me of the era as well.
I can think of those cities, and myself in those cities in that era, and have 1990 wash over me.

I also know exactly what Madonna was up to that year.
Touring the world, which would be documented and released as her tour movie in 1991 (not mentioning the title since it depends on where you live)
And in December she would release her Immaculate Collection, which would also contain her summer hit Vogue, which was released on the album I’m Breathless, which was promoted as a soundtrack to the Dick Tracey movie instead of a studio album.
Making it a niche album, despite Vogue’s unprecedented success as a single.
The release of December’s Immaculate Collection was promoted with the to-be-banned-by-MTV single Justify my Love, which was written by Lenny Kravitz.
Justify My Love and nude photos by Steven Meisel, which were shot in December as well, were in retrospect the start of her new Erotica era.
Which would last for four years.

1990 was in many ways a landmark year.

Maybe it’s a sign of how much my brain has already eroded from all the internet use, that I still cling to being offline as my roadmap.
As if being offline is what classified the year 1990, or the decade it broke in.
It didn’t.

Just that for now at least, my brain seems too far gone to grasp the truth about this monumental year.
It is captured in its own 2025 prison of small-mindedness.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 1990 (formerly 2000) diary.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
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Freedom ’90 (there she f’k!ng is!) | year 1990 behind the scenes

Published on September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 by LS Harteveld

If you could see me now, I would not be able to wipe the smirk off my face.
And the reason I’m over the moon is not the usual suspect of Man-Interest-Going-My-Way.
Because that is very much not going my way, and has been a great and apparently necessary lesson in what happens if you make yourself too available!

No, the reason for this euphoria is because I finally got myself injected into the 1990 timeline.
Where an 18 year old fictional Lauren has just started her gap year, unsure if she’ll join university in August 1991, or if she’ll become a yoga teacher.

Finally, after years of trying to time travel to HERE, there, 1990-ish
– a process which intensified over the past couple of months when I was really trying hard, yet it was still not working –
I now managed to get this highly coveted job of timeline jumping DONE.

And it may actually have been the silent slap on the nose in the Man department that did the trick, because what was I doing making myself available like that?!

It was the perfect incentive to time jump, because if I was successful, it would allow me to go from leaning in, to meeting his demands to keep this as casual as casual goes;
To disappearing.

*soft poof sound*

Not just no longer showing up, but vanishing, sinking away in time.
First a big leap to 2019, the year I started my first timeline experiment.
Then another giant step, to 2007, when I started dating again after a 14 year relationship.
A step to the year 2000, where my current retro timeline stranded. Knowing it would end here, and that I would jump back again, to 1990.

I would step lightly, and affectionately, onto 1994, for having been my fictional starting point in 2019, when I started this whole experiment with timeline jumping.
In 2019 I went back to 1994, a timeline where it is currently 2000.
I would smile at 1994 and say:
“Love you! And going back to 1990, so see you in a few years!”

And then arrived, both feet in, in 1990. And smiled because I thought it was so cool, that I finally “did it”!
Even though I don’t think anyone, not even me, knows what that means.
But before I could worry about that, within a day, I realized Why, I had landed here.
What it was about 1990, that made this year so magical.

‘Cause ever since 2023 I have been trying and wishing and begging for the timeline 1988 – and failed.
And as one year passed, it became 1989.
About which I still had memories, and had that panned out, then it would have been perfect too.
But 1990?
Although I was happy the timeshift had worked, part of me still felt like 1990 was nothing more than a two-year overdue 1988.
A delay, because I was crappy at time travel and it had taken me two years to figure it out.

But oh no Baby….. Oh no!
This is all so very perfect.

One year from now, I will meet the man who could have been, and in all probability should have been, my first real love.
If, I had waited.
If, with super powers of restraint I definitely did not possess, I had refused to have sex or a relationship with anyone unless I was madly, all encompassing, sanity devouring in love?!

Then I would have stayed a virgin and in summer 1991 I would have met the man of my life.
I, a 19 year virgin who had saved herself for 27 months after her heart was broken – She, would have met an experienced young man, exactly her age, who would have been my/her ideal partner for a number of years.
And in all probability;
I, would have been his ideal lover too.

One year from now.

Which gives me exactly one year, to get ready.
To get Lauren 1990, ready.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

Desires of a timetraveler | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on August 19, 2025August 19, 2025 by LS Harteveld

There’s a new man in my life, and I feel he’s entered on the wrong timeline and is connecting to the wrong woman.
Or not connecting, it all remains to be seen.

The chemistry is undeniable, yet undeniable is a strong word for someone old enough to see people deny everything from purpose and callings to carbohydrates and the primal urge to get together with the one you love.

Everything, can be denied.
And people who stir every cell in your body, are among the easiest.

If it is followed up upon, then it is called a mistake, a fling, a being carried away and blamed on not thinking straight.
Stripped bare of its alchemy, its higher meaning or the visceral urgency of it.

So of course I know that even if he would have similar feelings, which the chemistry implies, he can walk away from this in a heartbeat.

But what makes the whole situation frustrating, is that he does not know me under this name.
Just under my local name.

And part of me is happy about that, for multiple reasons all of which are boring as well as irrelevant to this conversation.
But what bugs me is that consequently the story is unfolding on the wrong timeline.

Because under my real name I only live on one timeline;
2025

Whereas under alterego I live in 2025, where I write all these blogs.
I live in 2000 where I keep an offline diary, recording how I try to rebuild my love life as a 28 year old who has been with the same man since she was 17, and who has now been alone for 1.5 to 2.5 years, depending on how you count.
The 1990 timeline is where Lauren 2000 is building a new life for herself.

Pretending she’s still in 1990, she wonders:
“If I had not hooked up with Bear (her longterm lover) in the first place, and also had not gone to university, and also not become a writer but had focused on doing yoga and becoming a yoga teacher instead;
How would my life have unfolded?”

If this man would become a lover to the 1990 timeline version, that would be awesome!
Lauren 2000 would write in her offline diary, how she was giving her younger self a clean slate, a brand new love life.

But even if Lauren2000 would not know how to do that, and would start dating this new man herself, it would be something she/I could write about in our offline diary.
(yes lots of consent conversations to be had beforehand, don’t get me started, I know)

But me dating in 2025?
Absolutely impossible, I have zero desire to.
In 2025, and in particular in my real life under my real name, everything is contained, planned and polished.
For me life in this timeline is so exposed, so vulnerable, so cramped in between the expectations of society as well as digital and other surveillance-
There’s no way I’m bringing my love life there.

So there is a new man, and next to the normal doubt of not knowing how this will pan out the upcoming months, there is the frustration that he’s seeing a version of me that is literally impenetrable, by design.

2025 Version of me has been stripped bare of its alchemy, of meaning and of her visceral urgency.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

So incredibly necessary | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on August 5, 2025 by LS Harteveld

It reminds me of the 90s where I no longer liked being a smoker, and the rebel identity and Hollywood glamour had worn off long ago.
Yet I could not stop.
Not even for a day.

Ultimately I managed to quit on the back of a “smoking hangover”.
The day after a party and it was almost noon before I got out of bed anyway. So the first hours without cigarettes were “on the house”.

The alcohol-free night had left me with a hangover because I had been smoking all night, at a loud venue with dozens of other smokers.
When I should have been in bed sleeping.

That day I quit and never went back.

I had been trying for years, with several attempts dating as far back as high school.
For a couple of days, or a couple of weeks, but I had always fallen off the wagon.
Over the years quitting seemed to have gotten harder.
Not easier.

Yet this final “attempt” immediately felt different. A spur-of-the-moment decision, and I remember buying the widest variety of bubblegum flavors I ever owned, including Donald Duck bubble gum that came with a cartoon in the wrapper.

And pricey nicotine gum.
But I had not read the instructions (which I believe will tell you to chew it slowly) and it made me cough.
I never bought a second pack.

But regardless of the messy start, as well as my poor record of always starting again, I immediately, and with certainty, knew this attempt was successful.
And I was right.

And I am waiting for the moment the same click happens with my internet addiction. And to only be online in a deliberate way. Which can also be for entertainment, I’m not depriving myself.

But it has not come.

I have definitely gotten better, but the finality is not there. I’m making the most of what I am humanly able to do, from my end.
But I’m gonna need some magic from the Universe, to make this final.

I have three timelines to attend to;
1990, where I am rebooting my body.
2000, where I am rebooting my love life.
And 2025 where I am rebooting success.

None of them like waking up to the taste of internet in the morning.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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A copy of a copy | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on July 10, 2025July 10, 2025 by LS Harteveld

“With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away.
Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.”

Fight Club (1999)

A grey leather, A4-sized ringbinder with lined paper, and 15 minutes extra time in bed every morning, to write three diary entries.
That, for now, is the recipe.

Three entries, one for every timeline.

number 1: 1990
The timeline I cancelled because I did not want to forget the affair with Bear.
And if I would restart Lauren2000’s timeline in 1990, then my part-fiction part-real 27 year old counterpart would not have had an affair with Bear.
She’d be 17, and a virgin.
Starting her love life pretty much from scratch, and do it differently now.
Stop giving it so much of her attention.

The thought fascinated me, yet ultimately I refused to let my/Lauren’s history with Bear go.

Until this morning when I started a three-timeline diary!
This, was how I would preserve old timelines.
They would unfold simultaneously.
And Lauren’s 1990 virgin life was rebooted in a paragraph that took almost half a page.

Lauren’s 1990 priority, the decision she has made this morning, is that she will become a yoga teacher and will do an hour a day of yoga.

Then, the year 2000.
This is definitely my main creative timeline.
Although I am aware that living in the past, and writing from it, is completely unpackagable and in probability also ridiculous art, I’ve been mesmerized by it since 2019!

If I could choose I would go back today.
So I wrote from Lauren’s year 2000 timeline.
A short diary entry where she says she’s rebooting 1990 none the less.
But will never forget Bear, nor erase her own timeline.

2025
Where such a top heavy workload seems to have overtaken my life, it makes both my desire to move to simpler times totally understandable as well as totally impossible.

As of today, if I want this to work (finally!), then I now have 1 hour a day less to be creative.
Because Lauren 1990 is claiming one hour a day for her yoga.
And Lauren 2000 could not do any of my 2025 creative projects because we didn’t have content or internet then, like we do today.
So because almost all of my creative work is online, this automatically means it can only be done in 2025.
Therefor, it needs to be done within a regular workweek, so there is still leisure time that can be dedicated to my offline writing (Lauren 2000) and yoga (Lauren 1990).

This post + Canva took me (Lauren 2025) one hour and 29 minutes to create.
The other two girls, are waiting.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

A refusal to forget | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on July 1, 2025July 1, 2025 by LS Harteveld

We all know that a book within a book, or as it was in my case, a timeline within a timeline, usually does not work.
And yet!
This did not keep me from trying.

Since 2019 I have been writing a diary as if my life is happening 25 years-ago.
So I am 25 years younger, as is everyone around me including a lover whom lived on as “Bear” here in this altered universe, which started in 1994 (= 2019, minus 25 years).

When the affair ended, I gradually stopped blogging for that timeline. In 2024 and 2025 combined maybe like a handful of posts.
Then I stopped.
If there was anything remotely interesting, I’d write it offline and wait 2 years before publishing it into a book.

I hoped the 2 year delay would rekindle both the 2000 project, as well as my love life of course.
I don’t want to cockblock my Year 2000-self, by blogging all our secrets.

Last month, I created a Word file in the book-to-be format.
The diary starts when Lauren 2000 decides to rewrite her own history by going back in time, and pretend it was 1990.

This was the aforementioned timeline within a timeline;
Lauren2000 pretends it 1990, and she starts again.

The reason she did this was because she was tired of trying to get over the breakup with her lover Bear.
Something I can totally relate to, since I’m still recalibrating after the breakup with Mr.Big, although fortunately this is one of those things that gets far less painful with age.
But I’m in, girl!
Throw us back another decade Lauren 2000!
💪

Yet despite putting in the work, it turned out to be more difficult than I thought.

It was not that the alternative 1990 timeline itself stopped appealing to me.
I could still see that if at 17 years old, Lauren/ fictional me had made a different choice – to not team up with her lover Bear, and had focused on herself – it would have made for an amazing life!
And radically different to what both I had, as well as what my fictional 20th century Lauren had had with Bear.

I loved this the idea of starting fresh, in 1990.

However;
Lauren 2000 stopped wanting it.

She stopped wanting to erase the years with Bear, only because she kept feeling broken hearted.
It had been too important, too valuable.
Flaws and all.

What changed her mind was a 1995 Bon Jovi performance, of the song Damned. In particular the live version makes a powerful and seductive statement to just go for it.

“If loving you is wrong,” Jon Bon Jovi sensually sways his hips. “I don’t want to be right.”

Neither do we, Jon.
Neither do we.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

the 1990 (sex-free) makeover | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on May 30, 2025May 31, 2025 by LS Harteveld

One of the things I will have to come to terms with is that I will not be the best timeline artist that has ever lived.
Despite technically not being the first one to deliberately decide to live in the past, I feel that in many ways?
I am the first.

.
Maybe the difference is that I am not an actual time-capsule artist.
Thrifting secondhand stores for turn of the century items and redecorating my home or assembling a turn of the century wardrobe have never been the heart of what I consider the creation of a new timeline.

So from my perspective I am the first timeline artist, because what we have seen up until now are time-capsule artists.
Not timeline.

Twenty years from now, I think more people will be working with the creation of timelines. And we’ll know how to start or set it up and live it, and how to keep getting better at it.
But for me the goal is doing it at all.

To make the first mark in untrodden territory.

And it’s not even a matter of not knowing if I’ll ever reach my destination, but being okay with not knowing what my destination is to begin with.

So this blogpost (again) is little more than me trying.
Trying, to give you a behind the scenes of what is now still my Lauren2000 project, and how I’m setting “us” up to be shifted into a new timeline.
1990.

First the recap of what got us here.
Why am I on the year 2000 timeline?
It started in 2019 when I moved my literary as well as real life storyline of having a lover I called Mr. Big, to an alternative universe of 1994 where he was called Bear and we were college graduates.
And I liked it….. I liked it a lot.

At the time I had been writing about my affair with Mr. Big from March 2015 to 2019, and this was a new way of seeing our liaison.
It was a new narrative, a new story, based on the same events.
In this new story Lauren had “recruited” Bear in December 1989, because she needed someone experienced to lose her virginity with. Something he had agreed to. They had both liked it so much they kept seeing each other during their college years which would start Summer 1990.

So in 1994, when I began writing my new storyline (it’s poorly searchable on this website, but you can do a search for “Letter from a Stranger”, which will bring you to the first chapter and a category at the bottom of the post) Lauren and Bear are both graduated and starting their working lives.
Lauren has just moved into an apartment, and she now has cats.

So the Lauren year 2000 timeline, the one this current series you’re reading right now is a behind the scenes for;
Well that is nothing more than the 6 years later – storyline.

But in the year 2000 the relationship with Bear is over, and she no longer has sex. This is the reason I am no longer writing for her because I don’t “need” a Lauren2000 diary saved until eternity, if Lauren doesn’t have a lover.

Lauren 2000 does keep a paper diary but unless she gets a lover none of it will be published into a book.

The timelines that will come out in book form are:
“A Letter to a Stranger, including book 2 Dear Nikki” 1994-1996
And then I’ll supplement it with a yet to be titled book:
“Lauren Endgame” 1996-2000
It will end in the year 2000 with Lauren deciding to turn the clock back in time and start all over again.
As if Bear never existed.

Now we’re in 1990 territory.
Because both Lauren 2000 as well as me real time 2025, have decided to set up and live into a new timeline:
What if, in December 1989, Lauren had not recruited Bear?
What if she had made a different decision, which is to focus on herself and worst case scenario to stay a virgin?

1990 was the heart of a worldwide fear of the aids pandemic, and this would stay on until second half of the 90s when combination therapy took the sharpest edges off.
It was an inauspicious moment to get experimental in your sex life, and the idea that Lauren would have made a different decision is quite plausible.

So this is where we are setting up our new story.
A story I will be writing about, in this series (“behind the scenes”), but then it will be called Behind The Scenes of Lauren 1990, and no longer Lauren 2000.
So it will be a completely new timeline.

.
However, as far as I can tell I will not be writing from or on, this timeline. I will keep a paper diary but I expect it to be brief and not be publishing it, since writing itself was connected to both being sexual, as well as in being in liaisons that were so complicated and emotional that I needed writing to process it.

On the new 1990 timeline we’re not having any of that.

In a very 2025 word, the 1990 timeline is all about decentering men and no longer making (shared) sexuality the core of her/my identity.
Lauren is to stay connected to her own body and not to lose herself in falling in love in a way that makes her give away her power.
She/ Lauren 1990 has no intention of writing because the point is she’ll be in charge of her emotions.

Chances are that this Lauren, sex or not, will never turn into a diarist.
But we’ll see.
If she does, we’ll get diaries written by Lauren 1990, but don’t count on it.

Although I have been playing with the idea of cutting back so deeply in the 80s/90s to starting all over again for a number of years – and I know this because it started with the idea of returning to 1988 two years ago –
the choice to now actually get serious and do this, is really fresh.
And the newest aspect about it, and one I consider a big deal and me “getting serious” about it!, is that I have set up a date in July where I will transit.

I will be treating this new timeline project like a departure, a migration, a move into foreign lands.
Just that this shift will be inward, and not in the physical world.
It will be in mindset (a word that I cannot use in 1990).
It will be about who I/Lauren become, after making a totally different choice.

And I have less than two months to figure out how to get there.

.A
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
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Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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Cleaning up timelines & Closing portals | year 2000 behind the scenes

Published on May 17, 2025May 18, 2025 by LS Harteveld

About a month ago, I was by myself at the movie theater watching the commercials when I had the most unsettling experience.
It would have helped to have a friend there, just to check if I had lost it;
Or, alternatively, if the world around us had.

But I was by myself, and because I have been on this time travel project since 2019, I decided the most logical explanation was that I had lost it.

In 2019 I started diary writing here on this blog, as if it was the year 1994 and I was in my early 20s.

So the events that happened, got translated to that time period.
But I wasn’t particularly good at it, and it was little more than a literary construct.

Before I had decided if this whole faux 20th century living was even worth pursuing- it was March 1995 then, on my timeline – I was down the rabbit hole.
With the 2020 timeline collapsed, the only stable one was 1995.

So there I was at the theater March “2025”, but still playing it was 2000.
Seeing a commercial that I not just did not understand but found downright repulsive.
You can watch the commercial here (Hornbach, a gardening center).
There is no dialogue, so you can watch it.

I guess the good news is that after six years I am standing firmly in my own Y2K truth that this commercial is portraying serious mental health issues as entertainment.
The neutral fact is that I can never go back to my own timeline, which is a story for another day perhaps, but there is no way I could sustain the barrage of media and interpersonal communication ever again at any point in my life.

But the bad news is that seeing unsettling commercials does not even begin to scratch the surface of all the weird things I have discovered, both researching timelines as well as flat out experiencing them!
From being frustrated thinking: “Gee, I’m so flaky with this living in the past-thing! “, I am now at:
“Oh my God, I have no idea what I’ve unleashed…”

I thought ending this project concluding it was getting nowhere and considering it a very lengthy yet ultimately flawed artistic experiment, was the worst that could happen to it.

But now?
The worst outcome would be that I have opened a doorway to another dimension and entities that do not belong here on earth are coming in.
If you want to create your own timeline scare this weekend, I suggest you look for Montauk Project which directly inspired Stranger Things, including a demon coming from the other side, as well as CERN where it is said the find of the God particle in 2012 has (as Stephen Hawking predicted) ended the world as we know it, and we have gone through a blackhole to another time.
And that we have been living in a simulation ever since.

It was enough to make me delete all my playlists on YouTube with regard to timeline “magic”.
Which is just as good since I’m in 2000 so I shouldn’t be on YouTube anyway!

So instead of making the 2000 trip as “real” as possible, in a mind blowing What the Bleep Do We Know – way, I’ve taken it into an entirely new direction.
Rooted as deeply as I can in the 3D. Into matter. Into the NOW.
I’m taking my Y2K project into the physical experience of living in this body, in this city, on this earth.

This tree is not going anywhere.
She’s home.

.A
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, the series Harteveld 2025* and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld

the updated rules of engagement | How we will date pretending it’s the year 2000

Published on April 24, 2025April 24, 2025 by LS Harteveld

I was watching a 1998 episode of Sex & the City this morning (on dvd, because I am pretending I am living in the year 2000) and it featured a man who not only slept with models;
He also secretly taped them.

He had a whole collection of videos which he could not show to the public “yet”.
“Yet” was his own word, when he showed his collection to Carrie Bradshaw.
He was an artist who had never sold a single painting. Carrie’s classification, not mine.

Yet this 27 year old scene was surprisingly on point in illustrating my prediction I will in all probability never have sex again.
I feel so overwhelmingly unsafe, so objectified, so assaulted, that I am pretty sure I will never trust anyone with a mobile phone with my secrets let alone my body, ever again.

And I was already a few paragraphs in linking these safety issues to our era, when I realized that first of all, if I would go down that route, this piece would become just as toxic and frightening as male internet culture itself.
And secondly; That the old Sex & the City episode proves that this is not a new thing.

Ever since the invention of video, every woman having sex, trying on clothes, changing clothes or using public bathrooms, has risked being exploited by someone secretly filming her.
It’s just the scale of it, that has changed.
And that’s without counting the number of times something that was shared in private was later posted to the internet or shared on WhatsApp.

Oh well that got pretty toxic even after I deleted the paragraphs I refused to finish.
Guess it just can’t be helped.

And maybe because I originally started writing under this name because I thought a life of sexual freedom was desirable, and also interesting to write about, it is not so strange that I feel both angry as well as anxious, that it has become seemingly impossible to continue.
I really don’t see how I would ever have sex ever again.

But this post is titled the updated rules of engagement, and how we are going to date as if it’s the year 2000.
So obviously, I am not ready to throw in the towel.
Not yet.

Because I think that if this is MY problem?
If I feel so unsafe that I can no longer have sex?
Then that is not just me, then it means something bigger is at play.

In 2019 I wrote a post called The Rules of Engagement, about the project that has helmed the majority of my sexual writings, which is the timetravel project.
At that time it was 1994, in that world.
And in the article I wrote that any new men would have to be aware that I was writing about my love life.

So even though in the 10+ years I had already been writing about my sex life at that time, and even though this had never lead to any problems of any kind, I did know I had a pretty much ongoing responsibility to keep thinking about the consequences and to keep improving on my disclaimer and consent policies.

In other words, I knew what any writer knows and that is that having someone write about you messes with your head.
Their head, as well as mine.
The moment you write about something reality changes, and the moment you do that with the emotional charge of having a sexual affair, the chemistry becomes incredibly potent.

I don’t think any writer really understands the power of it.
And if we did, the responsibility would probably immobilize us.
Or me, anyway.

Anyway, I don’t know what I put onto paper in 2019 because I have not reread the article, because I feel such a Last Hope urgency to tackle this with a fresh pair of eyes.
But if you are interested you can read the 2019 version of The Rules of Engagement here.

So what did I come up with, for the 2025 Rules of Engagement?
What will happen if we start hanging out, and become friends?
What will happen when we fall in love, and become lovers?

In the case of friendship, nothing will happen on paper.
I have not written about any of my friends for absolutely years, so that is very simple.
It is also good to point out that a friendship, meaning hanging out together at dates which are scheduled in advance, is a prerequisite before there ever happening anything else.
There are no casual visitors in my life.
Everybody who is in my life is a friend, meaning a reliable person who is free to be seen with me in public.
And enjoying it!

Scenario 2.
If you fall in love with me one-sided, nothing will happen either.
I have never seen this end well, and we will both go our separate ways, and that’s it.
You will never have to worry about there being anything in my writing, because there won’t.

Scenario 3.
I fall in love with you, one sided.
This is absolutely amazing chemistry, and again, nothing will be there in my diary.
We just hang out, and then off you go to wherever it is you go off to, and it will be brilliant.
Out of all scenarios, number three is absolutely the best possible outcome possible for both of us!
No drama, no fuss, and an empty diary.

Scenario 4.
We have so much chemistry, we have no idea what hit us.
Two ways to go about it:
1. We talk about it.
This will be very unerotic and I will fall out of love immediately, and no diary writing will be needed or desired.
2. We don’t say a word
And just have these ubercool dates with subtext and hidden flirts, and our friendship coating is so thick and slick it will fool anybody around us.
Just that you and I both know this will one day be a hell of a lot more.

So in the very unlikely scenario that we both fall in love, and manage to not say anything about it but instead play it super cool?
Yes, Lauren living in the year 2000 will be writing about you.
OFFLINE!

And you will get a different name, and locations, situations and dates will be altered and none of your personal information or stories will be shared in any way.
It is a reimagined version of a timeline that never existed.

You will receive any sexual entries by email, or other content as well, if you wish.

Ultimately the interesting entries from the diaries will be created into printed books, in the vintage diaries which I am still in the process of creating the first volumes (1994-1996).

There will no longer be an online version of anything happening in my or our lives, April 2025 moving forward.
I have taken all diary writing offline.

The time between anything (sexual) that could happen between you and me, and writing the diary entries, offline, on one hand;
And the printing of the journals, thereby making them available to the public, will be 2 years minimum, most likely longer.

So there they are.
The rules of engagement 2025.

And our phones are tucked away, in a timeline far far away.
It’s just us now.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara, and the Behind the Scenes of my year 2000 diary.
The subscription button is on this page, most likely on the top right.

Books

My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

Or follow my Facebook page
/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld