Lauren Sieben

Oct 31, 2024 | laurensieben.substack.com | Lauren Sieben

I came home on Saturday from a weeklong writing residency at Write On, Door County. A full week of space and time, largely unstructured, to cosplay as an art monster. I stayed in a big house on a country road with one other writer. Nature was way too fucking generous: fall colors at their peak, an embarrassment of blazing orange and red and yellow, sunsets over bluffs that could grace the covers of religious pamphlets.

Sep 26, 2024 | laurensieben.substack.com | Lauren Sieben

One of the dumbest things Iā€™ve googled in the past year is variations on a theme: ā€œfeels like lobotomy postpartum.ā€I donā€™t need to google that. And yet, I am always googling my feelings. What do I expect to learn from the search algorithm or an AI summary or a decade-old discussion on Netmums? I suppose Iā€™m looking for someone to tell me that this feeling is real. That itā€™s worthy. That itā€™s not stupid. Frankly, it doesnā€™t matter if it isnā€™t worthy or real, or if it is indeed stupid.

Aug 7, 2024 | laurensieben.substack.com | Lauren Sieben

I have become terribly susceptible to woo-woo. I talk about seasons—I say things like, “it’s just this season of life that I’m in.” I’ve gotten into yin yoga. My Google search history includes words like “chakras” and “alignment.” I started seeing a somatic therapist. I’m not sold on tapping, but I’ll fuck with it on occasion. This is at odds with my old self-identity as a skeptic. I partly blame that cynicism (among other personality defects) on being raised Catholic.

Jun 23, 2024 | laurensieben.substack.com | Lauren Sieben

I look down into the bathtub and oh, okay—that is shit. Brown bits of sediment spread around my 9-month-old who sits contentedly in the water. I lift him up and a full poop is crowning. I let it drop into the tub. I grab the baby’s hooded lion towel and place him on it. Then I get to work fishing poop from the tub, flushing it, scooping out the bath toys, throwing them in the sink to sanitize later. I drain the tub. I run the shower, pushing tiny bits of remaining fecal sediment down the drain.

Jun 6, 2024 | laurensieben.substack.com | Lauren Sieben

I miss having an outlet. I miss my old addiction to spending all morning hunched over the keyboard and tapping out an urgent thesis on my pet topic du jour. I miss being unabashedly heady and voicey and dumb and editing myself tirelessly, but not getting too hung up on anyone else’s feedback before I hit publish. I miss letting my ideas out into the ether, where maybe a person or two would read it and talk to me about it, but mostly nobody would. And that was okay.