Category: The Time Travel Project

Thursday January 7, 1996

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~Lauren96
An unexamined life is not worth living

I am a writer  | 1996 diary
is the first chapter to
1996 diary 

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Archive:
“1994 A Performance Project“
and “1995-1996; book 2 of my performance project“.

TO RULE THE WORLD
Monday December 28, 1995

At the risk of sounding like The Twelve Days Of Christmas, what I will refer to as “the third day of Christmas”, was a reflective one.
After all the wining and dining and surplus in being social, I couldn’t even think straight anymore.
Plus I m having a holiday, so although I should probably think about how I m going to make a living as a writer in 1996;
I just couldn’t make myself.
I didn’t even go for a walk, and spent the day at my mother’s where we went through old photos.

We encountered photos from 1989, the year Jonathan became my boyfriend in January, broke up with me in Spring, and in December I asked Bear to be my lover. What a transformational year.
I ve changed so much since then and not in a good way.
As pragmatic and determined as I was then, that’s how lethargic I ve become.
I ve gained nothing but years, weight, and disappointing experiences.

Part of me is still angry I cannot profit from my academic diploma, despite finishing almost first and many of my friends still at uni.
I should have gotten a proper job by now.
Not the desk job at the publishers I got, and not the half in half out independent I am now.
Something real.

But I know the real things I could be doing with my diploma will never come. Every minute of the day, except maybe on the third day of Christmas, my mind is on something else.

Like Madonna said on MTV:
“I want to rule the world.”

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~Lauren95
An unexamined life is not worth living

Appetite  | 1995-1996 diary
is the fifth chapter to
1995-1996 diary 

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Archive:
“1994 A Performance Project”
and “1995-1996; book 2 of my performance project“.

Sunday December 27, 1995

In January he contacted me, and we picked it up where we had left off.
Neither one spoke of December.

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~Lauren95
An unexamined life is not worth living

When you’re talkin’ to yourself and nobody’s home  | 1995-1996 diary
is the fourth chapter to
1995-1996 diary 

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Archive:
“1994 A Performance Project”
and “1995-1996; book 2 of my performance project“.

Wednesday November 4, 1995
7.30 P.M.

I wanted to call him “The Collector”, before I reread this diary and judged otherwise.
Because in retrospect I had already determined, right from the first chapter* which I wrote in June ’94, what the new man in my love life was going to be.
It was going to be a Nikki Sixx.

Now I don’t know if the man I’m going to call Nikki, looks like Nikki Sixx because I don’t know him.
We only write.

The Collector, my first choice or idea on how to name him, is a reference to the man who bought Anais Nin’s stories.
They made a movie out of it, Delta of Venus, which revolves around this relationship where she wrote erotica and was paid per page by an anonymous collector who only answered through messengers what he wanted her to write next, or focus on more.
I think the movie gave another spin on it, but as far as I can remember in reality she never found out who he was.

The reason I decided to call him Nikki, and not The Collector, is twofold.
Firstly because the first chapter* already speaks of a desire to have a Nikki Sixx in my life; A dominant man, who would push me further than Bear ever had.
With whom I have to work harder.
Initially I thought, as is described in that chapter, that I was longing for someone who is more of a dominant in an S&M way. That he would hurt me physically as part of our sex life.
And I suspected that was not what I was really looking for, but at the time that was as close as I got to understanding why a fan fiction story where Nikki Sixx was a dominant who did hurt his submissive, was appealing to me.
Naturally I thought it was this obvious characteristic of physical pain that appealed to me, because all the other things were already in my relationship with Bear.
I already had “a dominant”.

That was June 1994. Since then, Bear has broken up with me, he’s now living with his girlfriend, and my aids phobia anxiety attacks have returned with a vengeance when Bear and me tried to have sex in a hotel room this summer.
A confession that was first given to Nikki, the man with whom I am in anonymous correspondence, before I could trust it to this diary.

I had even been actively lying in this diary, to avoid telling I had been with Bear. That’s how painful it was.
So contrary to when I wrote that very first chapter*, I no longer “have” a dominant.
Instead I have a vacancy, not just for a surplus to what Bear was offering, but an empty vacancy for everything that has to do with mental intimacy, physical intimacy, mind play, power play.
The days I dreamed about men who were able to add pain to that equation are long behind me.
Eleven months behind me to be exact.
I need to get the basics in place first.

I am no longer interested in a man who can go next level.
If I ever end up with a man in bed again, I m first going to need a really long cry.
Or two.

So that explains why I absolutely did not consider calling this new character “Nikki”.
The desires from that first chapter from summer 1994* seemed desires of another life. A life when things were still sweet and not rotten and lonely and with a lover who has chosen someone normal to live with and have children with, and ditch the girl that was his lover for five years.
Having a Nikki Sixx in my life, is the last thing I want.
1995 Has been miserable enough as it is.

And yet, when I reread that first chapter* from this book, I thought;
“I ll be damned. Let’s go for it.”
Because it really is his dominance that makes me thirst for more. It’s definitely not because he takes care of me, or comforts me for all the bad stuff that’s been happening.
The reason I told him first, about Bear and me meeting this year and how it all turned sour because I just froze up and couldn’t do it (be a mistress) is because he asked me when the last time was I had sex.
I had already told him my relationship with Bear had ended in December, but then when he asked when my last time sex was, I wrote him how we almost had sex.
Until my phobia kicked in.
And that I m now still licking my wounds.
His question brought me to face what had happened this summer, and that I could not lie about it.

Until then I had been telling the story as if it had happened with other men.
I was more honest with “Nikki”, than I had been in my own diary. 

Nikki lives in England, and although he does occasionally visit the Netherlands, I don’t consider him a physical threat nor a physical option.
First of all because I don’t know what he looks like, or what age he is. I refuse to start fantasizing about someone without knowing who he is.
And secondly, because even if he does look as good as Nikki Sixx, Jon Bon Jovi or Slash?
It’s way too dangerous.

Meeting strangers abroad, or from abroad, that’s how 23 year old women end up raped, killed, exploited, abused, blackmailed, or financially ruined.
Giving him a name as dangerous as Nikki Sixx, ensures that I never forget that.
Bear is called Bear because I trust him.
Bear is called Bear because even though he got us a hotel room, and wanted to make love to me like we always had, he stopped as soon as I started having second thoughts, and he never made me feel bad about it.

We don’t name British collectors of my erotic correspondence “Bear”.
We name them: Nikki Sixx.

So that’s already two good reasons to call him Nikki Sixx, really;
1. because my first chapter for this diary speaks of wanting “a Nikki Sixx’ in my life. A golden rule of cinema; If you introduce a gun in the beginning of a movie, you have to fire it later.
and
2. because I want to remind myself this is dangerous stuff and that I should never think lightly over seeing him, or engaging with him physically.

But there is a third reason, and this is by far the most interesting one:
Because I know now, that my desire for “a Nikki Sixx” in my life, didn’t have anything to do with wanting more pain during sex, or S&M.
Or that I found Bear’s cuteness factor too high, and wanted all the sex and dom stuff, without a man being just as vulnerable and goodhearted as I am.
It was something else;
I wanted to be challenged mentally. 
I wanted to be inspired.
I wanted to work…

I wanted a man, and adventures, that would inspire my writing and make for good storytelling – like I said.
And who would keep them coming!

Part of me has always known there was a limit to what Bear would be able to offer me. He would never agree to be the man of a wild, crazy, woman writer.
Not good for business, not good for his ego.
And also:
A disaster for my storytelling and books.

Even if Bear stayed the fun loving, mysterious womanizer, I had always loved, there was no way he would let me write about that.
And with that, the boundaries of what I would be able to write about were set. And most likely those boundaries would be forever closing in.
I would not be able to write about the things he did with other women, nor about the things I did with other men or the fantasies I had about other men.
I would not be allowed to write about our quarrels or how he would want me to go to family gatherings I didn’t want to go to because I felt too much and I felt judged.
Ultimately I would have to choose between writing and Bear.

And I would choose Bear and die inside.
Maybe I would wake up in my midlife crisis or something.

The longing for a Nikki Sixx in my life, was the longing for a muse that would not interfere with my writing. 
Someone who would inspire it, like Bear had, but who was not harmed by it.
The longing for a Nikki Sixx stood for a longing for someone who was not affected by my pen, by my fame, or simply by “me”.
It was a longing for someone I could not outgrow, nor outdo.

And that is exactly what the correspondence to the man I call Nikki does:
From an artistic perspective I have hit the jackpot.

Ever since I’m corresponding with Nikki, I am doing all the things I said I would always do when I was a writer and a publisher.
And it’s not perfect, my God, far from! 
So many weekdays go by without making the hours behind my desk, that I want. Or without doing the physical exercise, yoga and so on, that I want to do to get a killer body.
It’s very hard to be as disciplined, in any area, as an independent without colleagues, rhythm, deadlines.
But because of Nikki I’m getting there.

The pace of our correspondence dictates my work; Or I let it.
And I ll tell you in a sec how Nikki and me started writing, because I completely forgot to introduce him!  
But initially I just started writing immediately when I received a letter. But now I m using the letters as a way to do the things I want to do.
Before I allow myself to write back, I have to do yoga, I have to review a bootleg for the fan club, and I have to work on publishing my books.

And it’s not perfect, but beneath all the things I miss, or fail to achieve, I can detect new dreams, new realities, coming into vision.
Things I didn’t know or couldn’t see, at first.
An example is what happened with Bear and me this summer;
The correspondence, the simple question: “What was your last sexual experience?” made me realize, that it had been a sexual experience.
And that I needed to come to terms with it.
With my phobia, but also with me and Bear breaking up and him choosing someone else.

Another example was the realization that I need a muse, someone who inspires my art, and who is actually enhanced and nourished by my writing.
Instead of someone whose existence is threatened by it.
This is also something I now know, thanks to Nikki who offers me absolutely nothing, except for inspiration.
And me realizing that’s all I need.

And all the other examples are things like: Knowing in what type of house I want to live. What kind of money I want to make. Things about my independence; That I will never be “okay” with selling my hours or my services, although I can understand that I may temporarily have to go back to that to support myself.
I see my body, the way I want it, more clearly than ever before.

So now how we met;
In 1994 I bought a Bon Jovi VHS from a woman, who is actually part of a couple. Her husband is in the bootleg business, and I wanted to know if he could get me a bootleg from the 1988 Bon Jovi concert in Rotterdam.
He couldn’t, but he said he had a contact in England whom I could contact. It was a business I had seen in the European fan club magazine, but I never dared contacting such a business.
The only reason I had asked the husband, the Dutch bootleg trader, was because I already knew his wife and she had put a list of their bootlegs in with the video.
But that’s how I came into contact with the British trader, whom I now call Nikki.

I receive about two letters a week.

Our letters cross each other, so that means we’re having two separate conversations. One is sexual, and the other is about other things.
They’re both entertaining, they’re both intimate, and neither one is ever harsh or offensive. 
He’s very warm, funny, honest, and he doesn’t make any promises.

I often wonder what he gets out of corresponding with a 23 year old Dutch Bon Jovi fan, but that is not for me to say.

And who knows what diary he started, and what desires he had in June 1994;
Who knows what it is I do for him.
I don’t. 

All I know is what he does for me.
And that’s sheer magic.

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

* In this post I refer frequently to the first chapter of this series.
Which is this one:
A letter from a stranger | “1994”: fanfic inspired erotica episode 1

Monday October 19, 1995           
9.30 P.M.          

If you asked me what I did since my last diary entry, six weeks ago, I would not be able to tell you.  
Just like I would not have been able to tell you now, what my life looked like then.    
It’s all a haze, just like all the months before that.            
I just reread the pages, they are very positive.    
“On September 1st, I’m starting my new life!” it opens.  
Not a word about the headaches, which began this summer.

I thought the headaches had to do with my work at the publisher’s. That it was a sign the desk job was taking its toll on me, and that I needed to move on and start doing my own work, write and publish my own books.        
And become a yoga teacher to support this new uncertain future as an independent.

A friend of my mother’s has her own studio, and when I was 15 or so I started taking classes.  
When I was in college I was allowed to join her teacher training for a reduced fee, and it became a welcome diversion from the academic world.            
The weekly Saturdays in training became my sanctuary.

What I had not expected was that the headaches didn’t have anything to do with the desk job.          
Or maybe I did know, but just chose not to see. 
I still stand by my decision to become an independent, even now that I know I can’t teach yoga, because the headaches are unreliable.
They make me feel insecure about any commitment, but in particular teaching a yoga class which requires me to feel good.       
You can’t fake your way around it.

The headaches that I have been suffering from are stress related, and the stress came from my sex life.     
Not my desk job.            
I’m taking a deep breath now, because I am ashamed to admit that I lied in my last diary entry.       
I said the phobia for aids had returned, but I didn’t tell why.       

The essence, which was “I can’t have sex because of a returning hiv/aids phobia”, is the same.     
And that the phobia had returned as a response to Bear breaking up with me, was also still true.          

Yet what I did not write nor shared with anyone else, was that it was because I have been with Bear.  
As far as I have told people about it, I said it was a new man that sparked this renewal of my phobia.

It had not bothered me in the five years we were together, but I have always known its roots are still there. And that I have Bear to thank for finding a way to work around them.   
But being with him had been such a positive experience, I never expected  I would have to fight the same demon again.

And not that the fear would show up when the man I was with was in fact Bear!

He has moved in with his girlfriend, so this was the first time I was officially “the other woman”.       
Over the years I’ve suspected there were other women who might have thought he was faithful to them.
But I never knew.          
This was different.        
She was the reason he had broken up with me in December, so we both knew he had at least hoped he could have stayed faithful to her.           
We didn’t talk about that at any point.   
I didn’t ask, and he didn’t offer an explanation as to why he had changed his mind.   

I really thought I could do this. 
And the only reason I know how much this meant to me, that it hurts me, and that it is very relevant to the headaches, is because I can no longer remember the details.        
Not of our date.
Not of the sequence, the order of things.
May to August is one haze, starting at the point when flirting entered our friendship and ending that afternoon in the hotel, when I “just couldn’t”.             
And the weeks of anxiety attacks that followed.

The total despair of knowing I’m just so messed up, and meanwhile he is normal. He’s doing alright. He has a great job, a woman he loves.
I think they want children.         
And here I am, alone, phobic, and Oh! I forgot; The psychological help is off the table too.

Just like in 1989, they could not help me.            
A phobia for aids that ruins your sex life doesn’t exist any more today, than it did in the 80s.  

Bear responded so sweet.           
There we were. Almost as if it was the first time we met “as adults”, if that makes sense. We were in a hotel room, not a student dorm.        
He was taken, and no longer the guy who no one quite knew what he was up to.         
And I was there as a secret mistress.      
Or I would have been, if I had been successful.

I lay on the bed in my bra and my jeans. He sat in the window sill, also wearing jeans. Bare feet, bare chest.        
He was smoking a cigarette and blew his smoke out the window, because he knew I was trying to quit.           
He was entirely at ease being exactly where he was, one hand on his strong thigh, his elbow bent outwards. He smiled at me and blinked his eyes at me, that reassuring gesture I only know from my cats.
Nothing had happened, and yet everything had changed.            
My phobia had returned.           
I got migraines.

And Bear was no longer my lover.           
I have lost a lot more than six weeks.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Saturday August 29, 1995          
4 P.M.  

On September 1st, I’m starting my new life.        
I still can’t believe it, but here it is;         
I’m becoming a yoga teacher and starting my own publishing house.

There is no telling what the future will bring, and if it ultimately will be enough to sustain myself. But having lost a year of my life, the upcoming September certainly feels better than the last one, when I had just started working as a copy-editor for a publisher.       
It paid well, and I learned many things.
But it wasn’t satisfactory, and I knew I could do better. Both in terms of publishing as well as writing my own books, which mattered to me even more.

However, the decision to quit, and switch to work I adore, had ultimately become inevitable because I had been robbed from my only compensation, only sedation, the only thing that made the dullness of being a desk editor bearable:           
My love life.      
My phobia for aids/hiv has returned at a time when I no longer expected it. I’ve been with Bear for so long, and there’ve always been other girls so I thought I was able to enjoy my love life with the little risk of contracting something if the condoms were not enough, or not used well enough.     
The risk of safer sex not being safe enough.        
But as it turns out, I can’t.

It’s almost as if overcoming my hiv/aids phobia with Bear, meant exactly that: With Bear.        
And that’s where it stayed.         
Every new lover would be a whole new ballgame.

I’m getting psychological help, but I’m not counting on that to work miracles. At least not short term because there is a long waiting list.
I could overcome it by myself again. But then what? Face this demon again, with every new man? Or with every lover added?

When I move from one lover, to two, to three perhaps?  
I don’t know if I am able to be intimate with more than one man at a time. I know I can be in love with more than one man, so I think my default sexuality is to have more than one lover. 
Ideally I see one permanent lover, and that we live together.       
And from there we both have adventures, we both have other lovers.

This time I want a strong mental foundation for my new love life, and not a flying by the seat of my pants solution, that may or may not last.
That’s why I see myself addressing this with the proper mental help, and not hit rock bottom again so suddenly.        
It was as if I was given an exact number of days for which I would feel healed, or a partial healing that was only valid as long as it was with Bear, and after that the spell would be broken.
For the first time I felt I would have been better off, if I had tackled this with a psychotherapist at 17, instead of fixing it myself only to have to solve the exact same problem six years later.

The phobic attack was ugly. I forgot how ugly they were. How lonely, ghostly, numbing. How the coldness of the fear crept into your bones in the middle of the night. I had to forget it, to get over it.            
If I had lived on with that memory, I would not have mustered the courage to ask Bear to be my lover, and to have all those years we had.

This relapse may have been prevented, or at least I would have known the frailty of my ability to have affairs, if I had tried to have more lovers and not be so dependent on Bear. If my college years had been filled with more experiences with different men, would it then have been easier?
Would Bear’s presence, even from a distance since we didn’t see each other on a regular basis, have been a form of cushioning?
Would he have been available to catch me, even?                          
Would Bear have helped me through those nights, when I came home from another man and my body shook violently with fear?

It’s not that I blame myself, but it’s just such a big disappointment. I lost Bear in December when he broke up with me. He’s with his new girlfriend now. But I didn’t know I had also lost my nerve, my healing. And that the old fears would come back to haunt me, and make my life miserable.        
Or very productive, since I’ve become an independent yoga teacher, a writer and publisher.  
I’m going to throw myself at my work, and let the professionals take care of my mental health, and that will be “all” I will be investing in my own healing.             

There is however one perk, one aspect of my life that I had vetoed but that I had longed for, and that had taken me a lot of effort to talk myself out of. Because I can now keep a diary, without incriminating a lover!  
There is no one else, I am my own significant other.

Until I am able to deal with my fears, I have only one vacancy:   
For The One.    
Or at least I think that’s how you call someone who doesn’t mind being there for you the next day.     
Who sits by your bed when you don’t feel well, and fear robs you of your breath. The One who promises that you’ll get through this together.        
The One who accepts I am a 23 year old erotica writer, and that he’s the lover who came to me, when I needed him most.         
Both, sexually as well as literary.

.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

The reason I am using the click-baity 50 Shades up there in the title, is because that IS the reason I m going offline.
When I started writing, in 2006, I did so to reboot my love life.
My Dutch novella Mang0*, and the Dutch erotic stories*, helped me process my past and set myself up for everything that was tantalizing, intriguing and downright terrifying when it came to sex.
And the offline diary I kept during my first affair*, did nothing short to saving my life.

But in my fourth book, things had started to shift*.

It was the first autobiographical book I wrote online.
The erotic stories too, were written online; But because they were fictional, they did not impact the people around me, nor did they impact my life in the way my later work would.
With the fourth book, that changed.
From now on I was a blogger, and my diary – although still largely fictionalized to protect the innocent – was public.

In 2015 I got an affair with a married man, whom I called Mr.Big. The reason I could deal with that, was because I started keeping a diary and wrote my first autobiographical erotic stories*.
I had gone next level, in how I was using writing as a way to develop myself, and to lead a love life that I would never be able to sustain if it had not be for writing.

But now things have shifted again.

It’s 2020 and we’re in the middle of a Covid crisis and technically sex (even when someone is single) is forbidden for as long as we have a 1,5 meter social distancing rule.
If you do not live together, you should not have been seeing or touching each other since early March. On July 1st, our sex workers are allowed to go back to work, but people who do not belong to the same household are summoned by law to stay 1,5 meters apart.
In a way that is good news for me.
It is amusing that although I may have been depicted as “an evil woman” during the 5 years I was with Mr.Big, I could not be fined nor was what I did against advice from the World Health Organization nor were there any Dutch laws against it.
Provoking social morale: Yes.
Was it illegal: No.
So all the non-same householders people having sex; Welcome to the club of sinners who can just feel in their bones that rules are so outrageous and unjust, you have no choice but to ignore them.
Because that’s what they’ve been doing:
No one I know of has refrained from having sex with someone they did not live with, because of Covid.
Yet this makes my position even more difficult: Because now someone needs to be blamed for this.
And if people in LAT relationships, and new couples are apparently not the right ones to blame for it, I know who is:
Independent women, and in particular those who have sex.
The C. crisis has evaporated the last bit of reasonable conversation we could have about sex, because it’s maxed out all reason there ever was.
It’s all used up to justify “normal” dating routines, holidays, and social gatherings;
I see no room left to have a conversation about sexual autonomy in the upcoming 18 months.
Economy comes first.
Family lives and couples second.
And sexually independent women are not even on the list of people allowed to speak. I would not be surprised if they would find a way to blame us for Covid, which I hope do not become prophetic words.

The second reason things with regard to my writing have shifted, is that social media has gotten more strict with regard to sexual content.
I probably could not even write anymore, what I wrote in 2015, without receiving a warning.
And the times I could write those even more explicit and daring Dutch erotic stories, as I did around 2010: That time is definitely over.
Social media is no longer the place to share explicit content, making online writing/ blogging itself, no longer the right medium to do so.
Every time I considered going back to writing erotica, I soon realized that it was no longer possible, or at least advisable,  to write erotica online.
You could risk losing your social media accounts.

Before I go to the last (real) reason I m going offline – as sort of a matter of fact thingy; I know deep in my heart, that the only thing I find worth rereading and publishing into books, are my diaries and sex stories.
That although I have over 500 (long!) blog posts to edit and publish, if I m really honest?
It’s probably a hundred which I need to get out with all my heart.
Only the ones considering my love life.
All the others:
The struggle with my career, articles on movies, music, politics even;
If I am ever going to publish it, they will be under my real name or in a bundle with all my unpublished work.

The name LS Harteveld was started in 2006, to write about my love life, and that’s all that should ever make it to paper here, from the work I have not yet published;
And from now on, it’s also all that will ever be written. But offline.

So this brings me to the final and most exciting reason I m going offline, and after 10 years of being a blogger, I will no longer be writing online.
And that’s because I m every bit as committed to my love life, as I was in 2006, when I ended my long term relationship to find out what in God’s name it was I wanted and enjoyed.
I had the feeling there was something fundamentally wrong with me being in a steady, living together relationship, but still assumed that since everybody else seemed to be okay with it I would probably one day end up healed and choosing the exact type of relationship I was leaving behind.  

Little did I know that I would find out that I need a non-monogamous independent man, who keeps things extremely exciting because he runs away all the time and is emotionally entirely unavailable, so that I can spend time with my books and diary.
I didn’t know that.
I didn’t know that out of all the people in the world, I was probably going to end up being the unhappiest of them all, in what they refer to as a safe and healthy relationship.
That it would not so much be the death of me; “Just” the death of my entire sexuality.
I will never see any reason to have sex with someone who has chosen for you, is reliable, and wants to spend his life with you.
And to this day, I have not come across anybody else who has this strong feeling of mandatory non-monogamy for a partner, in order to even “get it up”.

But having said that, I need a new style of writing, in order to keep developing myself. And I think for Mr.Big too, things had become too predictable in terms of me being the secret mistress who writes. It could have been one of the reasons he broke up with me.
A non-monogamous partner may do the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping things exciting. I would love to say: “And faces the most scrutiny.” except that this is of course not true at all.
My ex-lover Mr.Big never faced the same scrutiny as I did. Even if it did came out he would never face questions how it makes him feel to betray his wife.
He’d get a pat on the back and a “shit happens” if she found out and divorced him.
That I embraced my role as the antagonist, the natural enemies of the married peoples, was a strategic choice.
It is not because I think it is fair by any standard, that we put this on my plate.
I do not seduce men. I do not lure them into my lair, with promises of secrecy and unbridled sexual escapades.
I keep my distance and have actively and deliberately been pursued by one man, with whom I had an affair for 5 years; an affair he took full responsibility for.
He never portrayed himself as innocent until I came along.
He relieved me from that.
I was very lucky to have met him, and I hope to start having affairs again, but I resist the idea that a mistress (as I see it) is a seductress.
She likes giving up control to him.
She likes him calling her.
She likes the pain, even of loneliness.
It is the very nature of who she is.

But having said that, I think even she, meaning I, ultimately comes at a point where it is her time to spice things up with her lover, and to stop calling herself mistress to everybody else.
Mistress was my antagonistic title.
It was my: “You want me bad? I ll give you bad, you judgmental *insert swearing*”
I m done with representing myself as a mistress, even though I know that men who are already taken make the best fit to my wish list because I can be certain that they understand the rules of not leaning onto me, and smothering me with social demands and boredom that are damaging to my sexuality.
Still: A single man may be able to do the same.
That’s what I mean by developing myself.
The mistress title is first of all no longer valid, because we stopped having sex a year ago, and are no longer together.
Secondly, in theory a single man could be my partner, as long as he knows how to keep things fresh.
But thirdly, and this is the part I was referring to in particular when I said a mistress should keep things exciting as well:
I need to uplevel. Not just because it might have prevented him from breaking up, but also just for me.
When I get a new partner I want to let things develop offline, this time. Without the escape to write an online erotic story, that makes him never forget and come back for more.
I want to make a lasting impression without!
And learn how to write and process, without blogging it.
That’s one part of upleveling: I no longer want to need the blog, as I have done since 2010, in order to support my sex life.
Secondly, I want to spice things up.
Like I should have done earlier.
This means that I will no longer be giving in to my monogamous tendencies, and favor multiple relationships instead. I will never be the one-night stand type, nor someone who can have sex without being head over heels and completely inconveniently, in love.
But I since I am usually in love with multiple men, this means that in theory I can also have multiple lovers. There is room to develop.

But this leap needs to be without the writing.

In 2006 I started writing offline, and it sustained me through the first years after breaking up a relationship of 14 years.
In 2010 I took it online and that helped me dating a series of guys. I became very independent and a good writer.
In 2015, my need to write about my affair was stronger than my desire to keep it secret and not say a word to anybody. I needed to start documenting our affair, in order to be able to do it.
And it worked, and I m happy I did.

But right now, in 2020, the time has come to take writing offline again.
Because the C. crisis has made my preferences more prone to scrutiny.
Because Facebook doesn’t allow for erotica anymore anyway.
Because I no longer want to need blogging, the way I have done the past 10 years.
Because I can see that things had gotten stale. That to keep blogging about my love life, is to repeat what I ve already done.
And lastly, because I want to develop my love life, to maybe a single man who can have me in his life and keep it fresh – and lovingly support me in seeing other men – or maybe my love life will be similar to what it was.
Just not blogged about.
Which to me, is already a huge difference.

How we stay in touch

This is by no means a goodbye.
I will stay present on my Facebook and Twitter, and behind the scenes I ll both be publishing my books, as well as writing new ones.
I hope to get a love life that is so fascinating and compelling, the words will simply flow out of me!
I ve already set the stage, in fact I did that last summer already.
I started a project called “1994”, but the story is stuck. To move “1994” forward, the story of a 22 year old Lauren, whose lover Bear broke up with her and who is now struggling to find herself again – simply needs to be taken offline.
I can’t concentrate on being her, and living as her (it’s mostly a performance project, the writing is just a side effect) if at the same time I keep being here in 2020.

So what you can expect from me in the upcoming years are:
– new books: 2010-2020
A selection of juicy books, based on unpublished stories from my blogs.
Titles are Reboot, Big Mistress, Blote Kont (Dutch) and I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW. I m also considering publishing a book called All The Things – with all the (English) blog posts in chronological order, and not leaving anything out, but I have not decided on that one.
I will keep in touch with what’s happening behind the scenes, so it’s always a good idea to subscribe to this blog. And who knows, maybe I will feel the need to leave 1995 and write entirely new stories here as well!
I have been known to break my own word.
– new book: 1994
I started writing 1994 last year, you can find it here.
But it’s very frail, it needs more action. By going offline, 22 year old Lauren can finally start living again.
– presence on social media
Twitter and Facebook

Thank you very much for reading.
I feel kind of excited, because the relationship between my love life and writing – and how I use one to influence the other, has always been the major theme of my life, since 2006.
For me to quit online writing after 10 years, is a biggie, it really is.

And although I m going to put a lot of love into creating the books, of the work I ve made so far, it’s my curiosity to how the rest of the story goes, that makes this so exciting.
What will happen if I turn back the clock, to before 2010, and the even to 1995?
What will happen in my life?

It’s that story, and that work, that I look forward to sharing with you one day.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

My diaries en erotica are available at my BOOK SHOP

*About my books

In this blog, I ve inserted several links to my books. 
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/LaurenandLulu

Lulu has gone through a reorganization: Dutch Lulu no longer exists, and the English website has some issue displaying the covers. The spine of the book is displayed with the book (after you ve clicked the description).
I have no idea how this plays out if you order it: I assume it will be fine, but I have not ordered books yet.
Now that I m no longer writing, I m going to publish more, and I will be become more hands-on with regard to my publishing and knowing all the ins and outs.

New books will be added to Lulu, as sites are being curated.

coming soon: new books

1. Reboot – a hero’s journey. Diary 2017-2020
2. I M NOT CHANGING MY FUCKING SHOW
3. Big Mistress – confessions, columns and sex advice from the other woman
4. Blote Kont- (Dutch)
5. ALL THE THINGS – unpublished work 2010 – 2020

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready is to follow this blog. The subscription button to this blog is on this page, probably on the right.
.
Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/

 

• A letter from a stranger  
  diary 1994 – 1996
  including book 2, Dear Nikki

Expected March 2024, in the  BOOK SHOP

You can follow this proces, including daily reveals of new chapters, on Facebook and Twitter.

My diaries en erotica are available at 
my BOOK SHOP

Sunday morning April 26, 1995
9.45 A.M.          

I know I shouldn’t be writing about my dream.  
At the publisher’s, it’s one of the first things I have to send back to the author, in the unlikely event one of our novelists gets it into their head to use a dream as a way to tell the story.            
I will defend myself, saying that it’s not a way to tell the story.    
This is my actual dream.            
This is my actual diary. 
And therefor this is final.

I dreamed I was in a huge building, which was supposed to be buzzing with cultural activities, but now it was closed to the public.
I was on their top floor, which had like a triangular shaped roof or contained a lot of geometrical lines.           
It was like an enormous tent; pitch black on one side, like the roof of a normal music venue, and bright glass on the other, like a museum.
But there was no one there, except me and two colleagues.         
Both guys.         
I don’t remember the exact dynamic, but we were all in different departments, neither one of us were directly working together.            
But I forgot what my own profession was, and I also forgot what the profession was of the first guy.

There was a huge statue or object in the middle of the room, and I remember it as an enormous wooden boat; like one carved out of wood by indigenous tribes, but extremely large.        
I had asked the first guy something, and he walked me in the direction of the statue, and told me the second guy would know.
The second guy was a DJ. He had been setting up his tables there, or had been rehearsing or practicing there.  
It wasn’t for a show.      
There would not be any shows for an indefinite period of time.

Yet he seemed happy, as if he had been doing something he liked and had achieved some sort of accomplishment. He was rolling up cables.
I think neither one of us were there doing our normal work (maybe the DJ was).    
We all seemed to be trying to find something to do, despite the venue being closed. 
In the dream I had a short conversation with the DJ, and then I had a final one with the first guy.   
And then something strange happened.

I knew I was standing too close, and that I wasn’t supposed to. I excused myself and stepped back. He said something like “It doesn’t matter” or something. There had not been any sexual tension between us, it (coming closer) had just happened naturally because of the conversation we were having, or because of the topic. Or because I was illustrating something with my body or so.  
I wasn’t deliberately coming close for personal reasons. 
It’s just that I lived in a time when there was a disease and standing close to each other was enough to catch it.

I woke up and stayed in bed longer than usual, thinking about what it meant.             
I have an aids phobia. Or I used to before I realized it was simply not an option to be safe all the time.   
You know: Get one boyfriend, both stay monogamous.  
Especially him staying faithful to me would become a problem, because I would find that too boring.        
Either way, to be really safe you’d either have to have all sex with protection, including oral; Or alternatively you’d both get tested and you can leave the condoms out.   
But then you’re stuck with this boring monogamous sex life that is never going to work.             
I knew I had the choice between getting over my fears, or settling for a love life that I didn’t want.   
And I don’t do settling. 
So I got over it.

But when I talk about sex with others, I can still feel so clearly that I think about sex in an entirely different way than they do.         
And it’s because of this phobia that once tried to force me into a life that wasn’t mine. It’s because of that, and because I conquered it, that I have a – I think you should call it “seriousness” – a certain seriousness and heaviness, that will always be tied to sex.    
If you have to overcome your fear of death, in order to give a blowjob to your lover, you’re in it for real.           
You’re not “fooling around” here.           
You’re making partner choices that revolve around:       
“Is this person worth taking the (small, calculated) risk of getting hiv, in the case a condom breaks or I give him a blowjob and that’s enough to do the trick?” 
I never had a guy come in my mouth, but again: It could happen. Even by accident.

Overcoming death does not make your sex life easier, but it does make it more powerful. It provides meaning to something others might claim “just happened”.       
With me, that is impossible.      
Realizing sex could get you killed, prevents it from being something you’re going to regret later.     
Having sex equals “I love you so much, or I want you so much, I’d die for it.”

I think what took me an hour of morning thoughts in bed, is realizing that in the time of the deserted venue and me and my two colleagues trying to have something to do, while not standing too close because of the danger;
I’d live in a time when everybody thought that.
I wouldn’t be the only one, who consciously took the risk of death;
Every man whom I had sex with, would have done the same.
And in its own, no doubt terrible fucked up way, that was an exciting thought.

Saturday evening April 25, 2020
9.45 P.M.
.
I’ve been here before.
I ve been here before numerous times.
The point when I realize staying in 2020 in the midst of this pandemic, is – firstly – not really an option.
It s going to drive me mad. But secondly, that it’s also not where I am supposed to be!
It is a sign that I need to go all-in on the project I started summer 2019, where I travel back in time to 1994.
By now it’s 1995.
.
I ve had numerous times, and I mean definitely even before the crisis gave me a REALLY good reason, multiple times when I knew:
I gotta leave.
I need to time travel to 1995 and only “visit” 2020, for example for work, or to post this blog post.
But that daily life needs to be designed around me being a 22 year old, working from home, and struggling with yoga, her love life, becoming a writer.
A life where I am tempted to start teaching yoga, at a local yoga studio with a super hot yoga teacher who looks like Jon Bon Jovi.
Try saying no to that.
By the way in real life, I have picked up teaching yoga; but it’s an online friends group.
.
I received a phone call tonight, someone I didn’t know asking to join. And it was exactly what I needed to firmly decide that I will not return to teaching public classes.
I have been toying with the thought of offering my online classes outside of the friends group, because obviously now would be a great time to attract a bigger audience. And theoretically, teaching online “should” allow for a broader range of students, than the former studio clients and friends I was teaching before C.
Even though the online classes started out as a substitute for that tiny inner-circle, it seems so very logical to make them more public.
Except of course, it’s not.
I was a yoga teacher for over 15 years and there is a reason I quit.
.
Whether online or in real life: I am not a yoga teacher teaching public classes. I retired from that officially in December, and the call tonight was a slap in the face to wake up from secretly dreaming of taking it bigger.
Having someone I didn’t know on the phone looking for a yoga class, caused a panic attack, which could only be soothed by frantically checking all my social media on my phone, when none of them had any notifications.
My “stimming” ( I still think panic attacks after social interaction occur because I m autistic) conflicted with my resolution to really finally go all-in on the 1995 project.
.
There was no reason at all to check my phone or scroll my feeds.
No reason, except from getting a panic attack from being called as a normal yoga teacher on a Saturday night and realizing that I do not want to be a professional yoga teacher ever again.
That if my small inner-circle groups generate enough money for me to live off, that’s great;
But I m not going to make myself available on the market as a yoga teacher.
I think it’s an extremely vulnerable, awful profession, for someone with my sensitivities.
I have no idea how I lasted 15+ years.
.
All I know is, if I had a chance to start all over, I would do it differently.
For example, if I was magically brought back to 1995, I would not become a yoga teacher.
.
Tomorrow I will travel to 1995, and tell them the news.
And that this time, I’m staying.

15 Years of Silence  | “1995” 
is the introduction to
1994 part 3: This Time I’m Staying