Open Sorcery

Tag: cptsd

  • the moment hits you like a cannon blast

    // title taken from “vanish canvas” by erra

    Hi, all.

    I’m so sorry for my prolonged absence. This site has been down for an extended period of time and I’ve been unable to post. I’m making use of its uptime to post while I can, clean out spam comments, update plugins, what have you so that hopefully it’s down less frequently.

    It seems like nothing and everything has been happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a deep cocoon in my head since late June trying to make sense of who I am now after the last five years or so. I have been taking an extended hiatus from posting videos on social media due to burnout as well as explicit and detailed threats on my and my system’s life. Going viral like this in January was somewhat accidental, and I never truly intended to be a public figure of this magnitude, despite how inevitable it’s seemed since for pretty much our entire life.

    So we’ve been resting and trying to make sense of where our life has gone, as well as where as it’s going now. I love Milwaukee and I fully intend to stay here for as long as the city and its people will have me, something I would never have said back when we started this blog, and we have some interesting things in the works, like an interview on the radio on October, a workshop in November, and a feature already lined up around our birthday next year.

    I’m not sure when we’re going to get back into making short form content. When the time is right or we have something funny to say, we’ll jump back in. But now doesn’t feel like that time. I don’t feel funny anymore. I feel like a character in some lost Christopher Nolan footage, or something. (Hi, Mr. Nolan – if you read this, please consider setting and shooting a film in Milwaukee!!)

    Okay, maybe I feel darkly funny, at best – which is our specialty.

    Stay tuned for more magic, which is coming.

    -Allēna

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  • I’ve been so tired

    that I could barely respond to the wonderful  messages people have been sending me on a lovely new app that Emerson and Hawthorne put me onto called Roost, and I still couldn’t get to all of them. I feel bad, but resting is important. The emotional and physical toll of the past…yes must be catching up to me.

    It’s also been six years to the day since my headmate Peri left our ex-husband, Fang, although she wouldn’t leave for Texas until July 11 (Alaska time), so that may be also contributing to the exhaustion somewhat. July seems to be the month of life-altering decisions and plot twist insanity, whether it was Peri leaving Fang, Eight leaving for Philly a year and some later, him starting the relationship for the first time with Zelda the year after that (I can’t quite recall the date of their anniversary, though, but I know it was late July/early August), or my massive seizures that were a major contributing factor in us leaving Zelda that also happened a year ago today, not to mention me finally divorcing Fang officially last year on July 23. So it’s a heavy month for a lot of reasons, full of life changes and memories and grief.

    I will admit that I’m fully anticipating tragedy in some form this month given the seizures last year, or some other kind of major upheaval, but I don’t know what it will be and that scares me and that could also be contributing to my fatigue…

    We’ll see what happens, I guess. I’ll keep y’all posted, as always.

    -Allēna

  • I wish I could say I’ve been resting,

    and I have been, physically, for the most part.

    But things between Emerson and I have been a lot less tempestuous and a lot less stressful since he had his surgery, to such a degree that I’ve been able to work through my own emotional backlog for what feels like the first time in years, and I would LOVE to stop having soul crushing realizations for one day. Please.

    -Allēna

  • I think I’m starting to figure out why I’m so reserved/”cold” emotionally.

    When I was a teenager, like 13-15, I was a HOPELESS romantic. I would write fully fledged, and ultimately fully produced and orchestrated songs for my crushes and create massive works of art across a variety of mediums that took months, sometimes years, to complete, at an age when most boys couldn’t be arsed to get a girl flowers unless their mothers or sisters prompted them, ESPECIALLY if that girl scared them shitless.

    And I was intense about this art. If someone inspired a piece, they’d probably end up knowing. I was intense about EVERYTHING. I was often the teachers’ favorite, I knew the answers to most questions, I HAD done the homework, I had an excellent memory, and I wasn’t afraid to kick anyone’s ass if and when it came time for trivia in almost any subject. I was a pompous dick about it, too 🤣 I was gonna win by a mile and I knew it. I wasn’t the type of person in high school that guys wanted to date. Be friends with, if they were daring, but not date.

    The transition from hopeless romantic to cynic came at about age 16-17 after endless rejections and being told to tone myself down over and over. I began to hate my happy, romantic side. After one final diplomatic rejection from the guy I had written “My Island” about and being told to tone myself down one final time, I marched into my long term hairstylist’s office as soon as she was free and told her to cut all my damn hair off and give me the pixie cut I’d desperately wanted since my headmate Castor had cut our hair short like that when he was 10. I buried the rest of my sentimentality with that haircut, too, and started playing my cards close to my chest.

    I still wrote huge things for my crushes, but that, too, stopped after I wrote my album The Places We Come Home To in 2018 for my first husband when I was 20.

    I hated it so viscerally that it took two years to release a proper follow-up to it, Light on the Final Day, and I had written that record a few months BEFORE most of Places ever occurred to me.

    It would take nearly three years after that for us to release any kind of proper follow-up to Light on the Final Day, something broke in me so badly. And it wasn’t even really me that wrote any of it, Metacognition (2023) is Eight’s masterpiece.

    And for someone used to writing and recording several records a YEAR, this devastated me.

    It’s taken being in several lovely partnerships to get me to uncover a FRACTION of that sentimentality. I still really can’t write happy things without cringing or feeling sick, but I’m getting there. I’m immensely grateful for their patience while I unfuck myself.

    -Allēna

  • “18”

    about our experiences at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD 

    I was only 18 when you lost me 
    it was more than just a flesh wound 
    I had just lost my father, it was second semester 
    and everyone there was different, more liberal or
    left leaning than me 
    alcoholics alone in their dorms, trying to wash 
    away their sins and praying for whiskey and the pulsing of drums to absolve them. 

    they talked about God as though he were just 
    another thing to dismantle, unfathomable to 
    my sheltered, rubbed raw mind 
    and you dashed me open like I was an egg, 
    forgotten and left over after breakfast, 
    carelessly tossed over the railing 
    you mishandled all of me 
    when my friends told you that the same boy
    who'd used me up with empty promises 
    and then discarded me like I was nothing 
    had done it to at least 4 other women, 
    you did nothing, only sat there on your pedestal
    on your impenetrable hill, and allowed him to 
    continue. 
    I learned about it all and I never forgave you
    and I wanted to kill him. 
    I was only 18. 

    I was only 18 when I became a corporeal ghost
    barely breathing 
    barely eating, barely getting out of bed 
    haunted by the boy who'd raped me 
    haunted by my father's death 
    haunted by the fact that you'd still allow him 
    to share these halls with my friends. 
    haunted by the gaping void my life had become
    see, my friends talked about God and saints
    like they were dead. Little did they know that 
    I was becoming one of the bodies. all because you refused 
    to listen. 
    I was only 18. 

    I was only 18 when you saw me slipping away 
    and still you demanded more, more blood from 
    an already fragile stone. all the help you gave 
    only made it worse. 
    I'm still finding pieces of myself in the dark 10
    years later. I still grieve for all the time I lost. 
    how foolish of me to think that this was home. 
    how could I have known any better? 
    I was, after all, only 18...

    -Allēna 12/7/2025

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  • “salvo ii”

    last night I made you a promise 
    of a spiral staircase worth walking down 
    a poetically just sort of kick to the chest -

    your heart nearly stops on a good day
    screaming odd time flutters when you're distressed 
    well, I've got some words 
    that will keep it pounding 
    right from the box I keep 
    locked tight in my head 

    I don't know why I love you anymore
    I'm just as much a prisoner of the emotion 
    as I am a prisoner here 
    the confusing as fuck 
    fact of the matter is, I 
    just do 
    I feel like less than half the person
    than I did three years ago when this 
    began 
    and the time has come for me to 
    break these unseen chains for the last time 

    and I don't know what keeps me from exploding 
    spite, sheer force of will, practice, 
    compartmentalization?
    you say you want better for me, then deliver
    if you can
    otherwise I'm no better off than I was
    with the manipulative would be jailers 
    that attempted to control me before

    so sit with this, torture yourself like I know you will
    when you see it
    let it burn a hole clean through 
    and simultaneously cauterize 
    what's left of your mind
    I don't fight with guns, fists, or steel
    I fight with words and the silences between them
    and win 
    and frankly 
    that's much worse

    -Allēna 10/23/2025

  • y’all get a two for one special tonight. this one’s called “queer pressure”.

    after careful consideration, i have determined

    that i didn’t know what it was like to put space between the 
    world and me, so i held everything and everyone at
    an artificial distance while seeing too close, held everything
    i ever earned in a vise grip and let myself slip into
    the grip of my vices

    i stared into the void so long that it blinked before i did 
    and then i mistook the deep nothing of it for your eyes
    until there was nothing left but a deep, deep hole

    here’s the thing about an addiction, though -
    admitting you have it is the first step toward vindication

    -Allēna 8/2/2025

  • “a brief inquiry into the shape of time”

    “you can always say no” is the second oldest lie
    there is, up there with “you will always be mine”
    and if that seems wrong to you, consider the following -
    i left you because you were too close a mirror to all 
    the things i swore had claws and drank away to sleep at night
    and i will always elude you because you vowed to face me and never could
    -Allēna 8/1/2025
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  • I ran a round of my poetry TTRPG with Sheik and this was my result.

    Here’s the RPG!

    -Allēna

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  • This one is called “resurrection.” -Allēna

    ***

    #writingcommunity #amwriting #amwritingpoetry #punk #cripplepunk #disabilities #survivor #cptsd #spilledink #spilledwords #trans #poetsofmastodon #gay #queer #queerwriter #rebirth #healing #rest #NEISvoid

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