I learned how to make a bootable USB drive in order to repair Emerson’s laptop. In other news, I better understand why my ex-husband, Fang, was so goddamn cranky all the time. I got very pissed off while doing this project and named a folder “fuckass bitch program”….
-Allēna
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
When I was 14 and had just started going in and out of the recording studio, an artist named Sarah Jaffe in the DFW area where I was born and raised was starting to get big on the local scene.
Being the teenager bursting with insane, almost suicidal ambition that I was, I wished so badly that that could be me somehow. I had just released my debut extended play, Sweet Pea, that year, and even though everyone who heard it loved it, it really never sold outside of my friends and family that I know of.
I felt like I had failed. I craved all of the attention that my family didn’t give me, and witnessing Sarah Jaffe’s rise to prominence filled me with a secret envy. We were from the same place, we both wrote music, we both had professionally recorded work, we both played live when we could. What was I missing? Why wasn’t I getting noticed outside of my social circle?
Don’t get me wrong, I loved her music – I still do. This is intended to be more of a reflection of my emotional state at that time than any kind of a dig at her. That’s part of why I think it got to me so bad. I legitimately enjoyed what she created. I just wanted what she had, as well. I played her song “Clementine” on repeat regularly throughout my teens, as I deeply related to it. I wished I could be “more delicate”, as she put it, as I was so intense and driven that it frightened many of my teenage suitors away, with the exception of my future first husband, who was taken with my intensity and drive when we first met at 14 and 15 respectively, although he would not admit it until many years later.
When she released an alternate version of “Clementine” on her album The Way Sound Leaves a Room a few years later that was stripped back to nothing but piano, her voice, and haunting backing vocals, I fell in love with it even more deeply. For the first time, it felt like I truly understood and felt the song’s essence, as I often do when artists release extremely scaled back versions of their music. By that time I had also fallen in love with her song “Mannequin Woman” and started teaching myself music production when my longtime producer ditched me, got a publishing deal, and made off for Los Angeles and stopped returning my calls, taking the rights to Sweet Pea in the process.
I also worked through my envy over the years as I realized that I didn’t really want to be famous, as attention scared me just as badly as I craved it. Getting recognized on the street when I was gigging around Mormon college scared me about as straight as I’ll ever be, although I kept songwriting. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop, even though I go through a lot of dry spells nowadays.
And then in 2024, as news of the Diddy scandal broke, I worked through the rest of my envy as I realized that I probably dodged a bullet by not becoming famous as a teenager. I had had a shitty enough time growing up with a highly controlling mother. I don’t think that, had my singing or songwriting career progressed any further than it did at the time, I would have fared any better at the hands of industry executives, and I learned an early lesson to trust nobody with the rights to my music when my producer left without any real trace. He’d likely been an anomaly, as well, by treating me as an equal collaborator when we recorded Sweet Pea, and not trying to change things too much unless I requested he do so.
So, in summary… I still love Sarah Jaffe’s music. I don’t have any envy towards her anymore. I was an overly ambitious, precocious kid who also knew nothing about what I would have been getting myself into had things progressed. And honestly, now that I’m 29, I relate to these lyrics from “Clementine” even more.
“We were young,
We were young,
We were young, we didn’t care
Is it gone
Oh it’s gone
Oh it’s floating in the air?
I changed my mind
I changed my mind
How I feel indifferent
All that time, wasted
I wish I was a little more delicate”
-Allēna
It was pretty fun although he kicked my ass.
I also saw this prompt about small spells to do on your birthday, and half of an enormous poem formed in my head while I was taking my 30 minutes of boredom based on the suggestion to write a letter to yourself a year ago even though it isn’t my birthday. So I’m going to post it here for posterity’s sake.
“annus epilepticus”
you don't know this yet
but the premonitions you've been having of
your own death are true
and a mere few weeks past your 28th birthday
you will die - just enough - to touch the
robe of any god you know
when the subtle fire you've always been
strikes you back
and strikes you back again
you will hang on for just long enough
for your kind partner to burst into the room
cradle you in his arms
and guide you, screaming in mortal terror, back into the light
you have never been good at dying
but this will take you a hair’s breadth from death
and you will bear the scars on your temporal lobe
(and speech pattern) long afterwards to prove it
and whether it is by fate or some wild magic
this will save your life in more ways than you will
know
for most of July, you will not be able to speak
coherently. you will eventually choke out
your suspicion that the seizures induced
Wernicke's aphasia, and everyone who knows
you will agree with you, a cruel fate for
you, but more importantly, you will come back…
changed.
you will start writing better poetry. something
about the way your brain burned and cracked
will allow you to see things from a different angle,
to look askance at language in a way you
never did before.
the partner that saved your life will convince you
to start attending a poetry workshop held in a coffeeshop that july. the rhythm of writing and
performing regularly amongst very talented
wordsmiths will help break you out of your
agoraphobia.
one of them will take notice of the way you
perform, noting its similarity
to Shakespearean acting and encourage you to attend the open mic he runs.
so you start performing at Linneman's Riverwest Inn again for the first time since 2023 at his
personal request.
you will somehow muddle through your divorce
proceedings on july 23, five years and 13 days
since leaving your ex husband, and it's a miracle
you will be able to do that since even getting
out of bed to use the bathroom still feels like running a marathon, but you're so hell-bound
and determined to get rid of this man that
when the judge asks if the marriage fell apart
due to incompatibility of temperament, you will
shout ABSOLUTELY loud and clear as day into
the microphone. (you will also show up hours
early to the hearing. you don't want to miss this
for the world.) when your ex husband replies, it's the most defeated you will ever hear him.
spite has always been your strong suit.
the judge will finalize your divorce, and
then the question arises of who you will
marry next.
you will leave the answer up to the two people
you consider yourself married to
already, a man who cannot lie
and a boy who cannot tell the truth.
in a rare show of generosity, the liar boy
will concede to the honest man.
he will live to regret that decision. you, however,
will not.
as the months progress, it will become increasingly clear that despite your love
for him, your relationship with the liar is built
on sand. surviving your seizures will leave
you with a new perspective on life and
precious little patience for wasted time or
undue stress, and the liar will waste your time
and mess with your head.
you will tell him he is killing you. he displays no
remorse. you will scream, beg, plead, and stop
short of borrowing and stealing to get him to
listen.
despite his damn near single-minded obsession
with you that will make you feel like you're
emotionally his hostage, he will not care about
the affect he's having on your other relationships
or your well being.
one very early fall morning, after you've spent the
entire night in the emergency room with him and
your fiancé, “heat above” by greta van fleet will
come on. your fiancé will remark that it feels as though you are driving into a different
timeline as dawn breaks. you, spiritual and full of subtle fire as ever, will respond that you feel it, too. your liar will
say nothing.
finally, in november, after
months of suspicion that he's cheating on you (despite being polyamorous!)
he will get sloppy and you'll catch him when he
forgets to turn his location off.
this is your red line and you will dump him over it.
to add insult to injury, he will tell you you're
overreacting.
you will know better than that by now.
despite your heartbreak, you will feel more
free after leaving him than you have in months.
you will compile a dossier of evidence against him
and publish it to the world.
this is when the mask and gloves come off and it
will spark
a months long battle of he-said-she said online.
he will slander both you and your future husband.
you will have even fewer regrets about leaving
him.
one of the final acts you will do before moving
out from the apartment you and your fiancé share with your liar
is a manifestation ritual that will make you feel
powerful beyond imagining - you will gaze into
a mirror with your future husband while “heat above” plays in the background. you will picture yourself in red sunglasses driving down water street with more money and fame
than sense, husband
next to you. you pass your former lying flame on
the street, roll down your window, wave to him like a queen, and ride on
as if he had never meant a thing to you in the
first place.
you will choose “heat above” as the song for your
intentions for the year to come after how that ritual made you
feel.
on January 5th, you will feature at Linneman's, your poetic home.
you will write a brilliant bespoke set for the
occasion, combining music, poetry, and
references to shakespeare at the
host’s request. the audience is small, but they are
so engaged that they offer you a standing ovation at the end.
you have nothing prepared for an encore, so you
will offer them a story about your eccentric
great uncle.
it will go over the time limit, but not a soul will
care.
you will marry your husband on January 23rd in the
same coffeeshop that helped you work through
your agoraphobia. the wedding will be incredibly
small, but it will be the finest wedding either of
you have ever attended. the poet who runs
the workshop that got you writing again will
write a special poem for the ceremony.
your friend and frequent collaborator will travel
all the way from Madison to attend. your
husband's best man will travel all the way from
iowa. your “gentleman of debauchery”, as they are called, is your dear friend who you will
date a few months later.
you will wake up the next day in the fabulous
hotel that your best man and
a friend of yours who you met
by chance arranged for you and your husband
to find that one of the videos you posted from
the wedding is going viral on instagram.
it is your first look video, and no one, friend or foe,
will quite know what to make of it.
within days, it will amass millions of views.
you will keep posting.
you will start to get inundated with direct messages from people who are fascinated with
your body after you get an idea to post videos of
yourself in lingerie that your husband found
for you at a clothing swap, and because you are
struggling financially, you will decide to start talking
about your Patreon more.
to no one’s surprise but your foes, you will get
subscribers, enough to make hundreds of dollars
in the first two months you talk about it.
in the meantime, you will keep going viral.
a few weeks before your next birthday, on
your regularly scheduled Internet travels,
you will come across a creator who found out
that she copes with mast cell activation syndrome
and that she has been taking H1 and H2 inhibitors
for it. you will tell your husband what you saw, and seeing as you've already been taking H1
inhibitors for some time, he will find you H2 inhibitors.
you will take them as an experiment, and the
difference is like night and day. you will feel as
though you are emerging from a decade in a
long, dark cave.
the change will frighten you.
you will keep going anyway.
you don't know it yet, but despite everything -
you will do more than your best this year.
Allēna 6/5/2026
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
“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
So here y’all go. She can yell at me later, I don’t care. It’s worth it.
I eat, I sleep, I feel my grief deep
I want to cry, I want to scream
But there are times it seems
I can't remember how to speak anymore
One time I dreamt you stared at me
Slack jawed as I was carried
On broad shoulders through a revolving door
And I hate to say it but I think
That's the kindest I can recall
Your eyes ever beholding me
And I don't ever want more than
The simple vindication of your
silent cry matching mine
All those nights years before
You don't know me, you never did
I never wanted you to
You were more in love with the bathroom mirror image of me
Than who I really was at my core
But I go on, I mock you now
The jokes practically write themselves
You're snowed in while I fly free
Not yours, never yours, not even close -
Not anymore
-unnamed notes app poem by Lēna, posted by me (Castor)
Hi, everyone! This is Allēna. I don’t know if “synesthetic” is actually a word, but for the purposes of this post, it is now because I’m tired and I need a word for “pertaining to synesthesia” or else I’ll never get around to writing about a lot of the shit my system makes. I want to write about it sooner rather than later because we’ve been tapping into our synesthesia hard. We’ve also not really been able to write on here much these past few days and I missed it, so even though it’s the ass crack of dawn right now – 3:25 AM as I’m typing this – I’m making a point to write. Our sleep cycle is fucked and so I’m leaping on an idea while I have one.
I joined a Discord server on a whim the other day that seems to cater pretty heavily towards fellow neurodivergent synesthetes. One of the things users could opt into were reminders to unmask their neurodivergence. I always need those, so I opted into all of them for the hell of it. It’s been working wonders for our creativity over time. Hell, it’s probably why we’ve been writing as much as we have, the server is full of reminders to intentionally tap into queer joy and synesthetic imagery. It feels like home.
Consequently, these reminders have started getting us to make more visual art. Castor painted this abstract portrait of Sheik yesterday:
And then today, I painted one of our friend Delta’s songs, “Return”:
I’ve really missed painting. It’s one of those things that Fang never really understood during our marriage and made me feel like shit about. He couldn’t see the meaning in the colors and placements. It sucked, but I’m glad to be getting back into it now that we’re supported.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to be playing around with ways to make DIY pen/paintbrush/pencil grips so that we can hopefully get back to writing longhand and creating traditional art without it fucking killing our joints. We’ve been stuck in executive dysfunction hell. I hope my doctors can get my ADHD meds refilled so that I can actually do things in a timely manner again instead of feeling like I blink and fourteen hours pass. At least I get to make cool art out of it..
Anyway, stay tuned for more magic, y’all!
-Allēna
Hey, everyone. This is Eight again. I’ve been feeling worse and weirder since I wrote last time, so I’m going to write about a topic many people have asked me about in the same sort of freeform, stream of consciousness style in the hopes that it will cheer me up a bit and maybe get me to follow my own advice, haha. I want to talk about how I built self-trust.
As you may know if you’ve been following this hell site for awhile, my system has quite the tragic backstory and deep lore. Allēna, the system’s host in our teens, was horribly psychologically tortured by our mother, Hera, to the point where she hated herself, in Hera’s effort to turn her and the system itself “normal”. It horribly backfired, because by the time I came to front as host in 2020, we saw through Hera’s bullshit completely and were done with her games. There was just one problem. We had no idea what the fuck we were doing. We had to get our fucking shit together. Fast. The body was pregnant, so I had nine months to learn how to not be a hot mess.
It was one hell of a crash course.
I barely had time to think or even breathe, but I had to make time or else I was gonna fucking lose it. My partner at the time, Delta, was in even worse straits, so a lot of the calm I found was for them as well as me, because I had to hold us both together during a horrible time in both of our lives.
So how did I build that self-trust? If you guessed deep-breathing to calm my body as the first step, you are correct. It was much needed to stave off a sense of near-constant terror. Hera and my estranged husband, Fang, put me through absolute hell during my pregnancy. There was a custody battle for my child before he was even born, and not knowing who I could trust outside of myself and a handful of others and numerous betrayals on Hera’s part resulted in a deep case of agoraphobia from which I haven’t recovered.
She owned the house I was living in with my beloved Chaos Nana, and her numerous abuses drove the system to the brink of attempting suicide because we saw no way out. Eventually, I decided around December that I wasn’t going to die, I was going to outlive all of my abusers who would disrespect me at my own funeral, and I was going to build a life that worked for me, fuck what anyone else thought.
So, armed with my reason to stay alive, I mastered deep breathing, and from there, determined that I was the only thing in this fuckshow of a pregnancy that I could rely on, so if I was upset about the state of things, I was going to change one (1) thing about either myself or my environment for the better, see how that made me feel, then move onto the next thing.
If I was sad and couldn’t figure out why, I would go find food. We determined early in the pregnancy that if we couldn’t go out to eat as often as we’d like, then goddamnit, we were going to get on food stamps and learn to cook the food we liked. Being raised rich gave us a very specific and refined palate, and Texas doesn’t skimp when it comes to food stamps for pregnant people.
When pregnancy put the body in so much fucking pain I could no longer walk, I swallowed my pride and rolled with the punches – and purchased my first wheelchair. If we didn’t like something, we’d take one step at a time to change it. I learned to accept my rage as a part of me that loved me due to a conversation with a very wise friend that winter, as well, and learned to trust it more than I trusted any human being, and learned to use it constructively.
I learned to set boundaries so that that rage didn’t consume me, and learned how to channel my enormous wrath into huge projects that got me through the harrowing next year of my life. I hated myself at the beginning of this process, but by changing one thing that I disliked about myself or about my environment and then moving on to the next thing, I didn’t get overwhelmed by looking at the whole picture all at once, and learned to accept myself in full in the process.
It wasn’t a perfect process, nor was I a perfect person. However, it worked, and it worked damn well. In moments where I felt insecure and alone, which happened often when I faced something I had never seen before, I reminded myself of all the times during this process that I’d figured extremely complicated things out that I’d never seen before and that I can and will find or make a way through this challenge, too. That approach helped me build a life that worked for me and mine without even realizing it, piece by piece. I only realized what I had done if I had the time and space to reflect, which wasn’t often. But over time, quietly, I began to trust myself because I had proven to myself that I was worthy of that honor time and again.
Because of that self-trust, which is now something close to implicit, I survived some of the worst years of my life. Nobody came to my rescue in major ways, but my friends and then partner came to my rescue in every way they could largely from a distance ten thousand smaller ways. In the process of cultivating that self-trust, ironically, I became the person that would have protected the system from the horrors they experienced when they were younger because I had the courage to save myself and begin to heal.
So if you’re struggling with self-trust, here’s my advice. First, take a few deep breaths. Six or seven will do well to start and will help you stave off your panic/anger/what have you. Next, change one thing for the better. Then, take a break, pat yourself on the back, what have you. Finally, once that’s done, rinse and repeat. Take it from a guy who had to build and rebuild this shit, piece by piece. The small changes are the pieces by which you build the life you want. They will snowball into bigger and bigger changes you’ll be able to make with greater changes once you’ve mastered the small ones. These changes are also a lot bigger than you think. The above is of the before and the below is of the above, so the changes you make will affect you profoundly in the long run. Godspeed, you lovely gremlin!
As always, stay tuned for more magic!
Eight, Chief Executive of Functioning ( am just kidding…or am I? Either way, I just made that title up)