Open Sorcery

Tag: backstory

  • Alchemy

    Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”

    I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.

    I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.

    I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.

    However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.

    My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”

    However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.

    For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.

    I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.

    I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.

    I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.

    Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.

    I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:

    “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

    Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.

    Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.

    Your strangely wired sorcerer,

    Lazarus

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    *the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.

  • (Ab)normalcy

    Hey, everyone. This is your trusty guide and sorcerer, Lazarus, once again. Today was very slow moving, as I woke up tired and I didn’t really recover much energy all day. I don’t think the weather helped much, nor did my anxiety about the upcoming presidential elections, but my pain wasn’t too bad, and I got most of the things done that I had wanted to do. This post is the last major thing that I wanted to do today, so even if I crash after writing it, I will have done plenty today. Both Zelda and Emerson are over here tonight on the off chance that things go to hell locally with the aforementioned elections. I find it ironic that the elections are being held on November 5, which is Guy Fawkes’ Day in the UK, but that’s neither here nor there.

    I’ve been meditating of late about how a lot of modern culture, especially in the United States, doesn’t prioritize rest and leisure in the slightest. We’re often conditioned from birth to be human doings rather than human beings, and it creates this enormous culture wide shame around things like rest and on a deeper level, disabilities and chronic ailments. Everyone is in a hurry, and many people are left behind if they can’t keep up for any reason and it kills them slowly.

    Practically from birth, I was one of those people who was constantly at risk of being left behind, even by my own family. Both of my parents were entrepreneurs, and my father, Xavier, had built his business into a smash success. My mother, Hera, would often say that she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up, but she ran a photography business for most of my youth while simultaneously homeschooling my brother, Blue, and I.

    Both parents were basically allergic to what they considered to be “laziness”. I was disabled because I had survived heart failure and then a stroke in quick succession when I was a baby, and was very atypical in other ways as a child, both mentally and physically, so I had to push myself from an early age to keep up with the rest of my family. I had to undergo numerous operations as a result of the heart failure/stroke combination, which left me in severe pain the majority of the time, so it was a battle to keep up with my very athletic parents in any real way, and they gave me shit for not being very physically strong. I grew up thinking that everyone around me was in severe pain that they just…hid, and that being pain free was just more BS that companies said to try to sell you something. I didn’t learn that that was false until I was 24 or so.

    Mentally, I was different from nearly everyone I knew, as well. I could read by the time I was 18 months old, and was both blessed and cursed with an extremely accurate autobiographical memory, so I could remember nearly everything that had ever happened to me in excruciatingly accurate detail. I also had a heightened intuition and next to no sense of linear time, which only got stronger as I got older.

    Not only that, but because of the age when all of the things happened with the stroke and things, I didn’t attach in any meaningful way to most of my family members or..anyone, really. I sort of always knew that they were garbage. Pair that with the massive vocabulary that I got from being able to read so young and an almost complete lack of shame or regard for them, and I wasn’t shy about letting them know how I felt about the lot of them and their bullshit. This caused a lot of problems. I was very angry and lonely from an early age. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I didn’t particularly want to. I felt like a stranger in my own family. By the time I was perhaps five or six, I wanted to be an adult so I leave and not come back.

    Nobody really knew how to handle me. Xavier did his best, but my mother, Hera, sort of gave up on getting to know me as I was and settled for trying to make me normal as she defined it. There was only one problem. I had survived so many things that should have objectively killed me that there was no fucking way I was going to walk away from any of that shit normal, even if I had been properly nurtured and met where I was. It didn’t really work and got very, very ugly.

    I came out of my childhood cripplingly anxious, perfectionistic, plural, and dripping with self hatred to such an extent that I was ashamed of my very being and pretty actively suicidal. Her definition of normalcy was nowhere close to normal, and certainly was nowhere close to how I functioned best.

    I was still in agonizing pain, both mentally and physically. I didn’t care about myself at all, and that translated to my relationships. I loved people, but had no idea how to show it. Because of how I was raised and my trauma history, I unconsciously thought at the time that the highest form of love was begrudgingly tolerating someone’s presence, and that I would be lucky to find a partner at all, much less one that actually valued me for who I was and treated me well. So my first partners were less than stellar.

    Over time, I started working through my trauma in greater depth and came to find out that much of my upbringing and therefore Hera’s definition of normal was very, very much not normal. Not even close. I think a better word to describe it would be unhinged. A major part of that examination has been looking at my anxiety around rest and productivity. That’s taken a lot.

    I have no internal sense of when I need to quit until I am so tired I can’t stand up or my hypermobile joints are dislocating, and that’s taken a great deal of work to unfuck in any real way. I don’t like doing nothing. I deeply enjoy being productive and keeping my mind and hands busy, especially since I have had to spend much of the last three years in bed and have this gnawing sense that I need to make up for lost time, so to speak. I’m almost constantly bored if I’m not actively engaged in something deeply, and I have a very hard time slowing down and relaxing.

    I know all of this is trauma talking, and I need to give myself more breaks and leisure time. But how? I’m still trying to figure that out. In a way, writing here is a nice balance, as it gives me a nice focal point for all of the chaos in my brain with no external algorithm to appease. I write here when I want to and am able and only really then. Granted, I still put a great deal of pressure on myself to write regularly, but I do that so that writing doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of the maelstrom that is my life. I actively want to write and deeply enjoy it when I do. I’ve always enjoyed writing.

    Additionally, I’ve been using writing on to give myself a mental pause button and time to sit and reflect on what I’ve been thinking about of late relatively free of distractions. It’s a challenge, but I love challenges. I love trying to articulate my meditations as clearly as I’m able, as that gives me a handy thing to refer back to, even if no one ever happens upon this blog later. I always feel lighter after I write, so this is in its own way a form of rest, I suppose.

    I’ve found myself completely out of energy at around three o clock in the afternoon consistently, as well, and I have done my best to stop fighting the fatigue and let myself drift gently into a nap. Apparently this isn’t my body being weird, nor is it a chronic fatigue thing, it’s just a human one. This was reassuring to learn, and may help me fight the fatigue even less. This is a fucking process for sure…

    Ah, well, I think that’s enough for today, y’all, as my brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious entities near and far. I’ll be around.

    Your very sleepy bored cat of a sorcerer,

    Lazarus

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  • Chrysalyzed

    Hi, everyone! I’m sorry for going kinda dark for these past couple days. My brain has been kind of tired from this past week, so I have been resting until I felt up to writing again. I went to Emerson and told him about how bad I felt that I hadn’t been writing due to exhaustion, and he gently reminded me that we had a standing agreement to blog together on Sundays, so a post would happen today, at the very least.

    This is indeed happening as I write this, he is sitting beside me eating some leftover pasta from last night’s dinner and working on a post of his own. I think we may be using the same prompt, in fact. Our mutual prompt question, if we are in fact using the same one, is something to the effect of “what was a time that you learned something about a loved one that changed your perception of them?” I’m sure I’m not quoting the prompt question verbatim, I’m still very tired, but you get the picture.

    There are many occurrences I could think of with others, too many to count. The majority of these were profoundly negative, as well. Both myself and my former headmates have written enough about my tragic fucking backstory for y’all to get the point, I think. So instead of doing that and pointing fingers for the umpteenth time, I want to write about crashing and burning in 2022 like I mentioned in this post. Because ultimately, I am starting to love myself, making myself a loved one by technicality, and this massively changed my perception of my abilities, what a beautiful life looked like, and what sorts of things were possible for me.

    In 2022, I was a dead person walking who didn’t realize it at the time. I was largely bedbound from that bout of COVID the past winter, and had surrounded myself with people who consistently expected more from me than I was able to provide, which just threw me further and further into burnout.

    I had committed fully to polyamory in autumn of 2021 before getting sick for a month, and my polycule was just as messy or even messier than I was. At its largest point, I was dating twenty people simultaneously.

    My mind was shattered from two and a half decades of trauma, I was somewhat openly plural, I was in excruciating mental and emotional pain, and I was in the thick of the final act of the  infamous Operation: Dead Hand, as well, wherein my mother, Hera, was plotting to steal my biological child from both myself and my best friend using Texas’ court system. I couldn’t realistically manage any of it. Despite being surrounded by people who claimed to have my best interests at heart, I had never really felt more alone.

    I did my best to appear to the outside world like I was holding myself together, afraid that Hera would take anything I posted or any information that got back to her through the grapevine and use it against me to further her case and maintain control. I was deeply afraid of vulnerability and betrayal for very good reason. So, with my back against the wall, I tried to carry all of my own stress and terror and that of my polycule alone while asking for as little help as possible.

    All of that came crashing down when one of my partners at the time, Kira, moved in with the partners I was living with at the time, claiming she had nowhere else to go. She was just as cunning a plotter as Hera and myself, and she quickly tried to get her hooks in as many of my partners as she could. By the time I managed to drive her out of town, she had manipulated her way through a solid half of the polycule, which was a staggering feat considering how guarded I was. But she underestimated me, judging me for a helpless, crippled simpleton who had no idea what she was doing, and I got her out of the area in the nick of time.

    However, I was teetering on the edge of a total collapse, and Kiragate, as this roughly month and a half long ordeal came to be called, took any remaining energy out of me. I went on vacation to Binghamton, New York at the end of October, and spent the majority of that trip in a crossfaded stupor. It was nowhere close to my finest hour.

    However, around that time, I had reconnected with an old flame I had met when I first moved to Milwaukee. We’ll call her Leigh. I told her all about what was going on, and she expressed regret that she had left Milwaukee, because then we could have hung out. It turns out that she was living in Madison, about a hour and a half away.

    Leigh and I had parted on strange terms. Her partners had tried to run me out of town the winter prior, and she spun it as though she had had no say in that decision and that they had read our quick closeness as a threat to the power they had been building at her expense, as they had been on the rocks for some time. However, by that point they were out of her life and had fucked all the way off to Denver, Colorado and were doing gods know what out there.

    She was lonely in Madison, and I was still very fond of her and was deeply dissatisfied with the way things were going with the partners I was living with and had been for some time, even before Kiragate.

    Kira had simply taken advantage of the existing problems that were there before she had arrived and in essence held us under occupation and exacerbated them. It’s a tactic as old as time, and she did it masterfully. So I wanted to get the hell out of that shit show, hopefully for good, rest up, and build a better life with Leigh. The original plan was for her to move back out to Milwaukee, but in the interim, she was bound to a lease in Madison, so I was going to split time and we were going to travel back and forth to see each other.

    So, Leigh came out to visit for awhile, and she quickly began to encourage me to come out to stay with her awhile as I opened up to her more and more about what was going on at home. Finally, after a particularly nasty fight with one of my partners, I packed enough shit to get the fuck out to Madison indefinitely, hopped on a bus with Leigh, and headed out.

    However, before I did that, I sent a quick message to someone who’d been asking for me to find a way to Madison to meet up since earlier that year, another very cunning individual who we shall call Stregobor. He was good at long cons. So good at long cons, in fact, that I didn’t know he was a fellow magic user until I was already dating him. I was equal parts  desperate and charismatic, and Stregobor was a suitor who was one of, as I like to say, my “decisions of all time”. A mistake, in other words.

    I was originally only intending to stay in Madison for a month. However, once I started dating Stregobor and Leigh found out exactly how good I was at saving her ass and meeting new people, that month turned into about two. Stregobor started coming by a lot and Leigh adored him.

    He was also polyamorous, so shortly after we became partners, we added each other to our respective polycule group chats. This turned out to be a mistake on Stregobor’s part. Through his group chat, I met his spouse, who I was initially wary of because of my deep trust issues and agoraphobia. However, this absolute delight of a human being quickly won me over despite my terror, and I adored him. He quickly became one of my best friend. We will call him Peregrinus.

    Now, among Stregobor’s many hobbies, which also included reading excellent dark, urban fantasy books and being both a dungeon master and player for tabletop role playing games, he also enjoyed talking shit about nearly everyone in his life. Peregrinus was not safe from this asshat behavior, and nor was I, I’d come to find out. The only one he didn’t disparage behind closed doors was his sister, and I suppose everyone has to draw a line somewhere. From what I have heard, though, she is worthy of that care.

    Because I had spoken to Stregobor first, the first part of my friendship with Peregrinus was confusing because of all of the utter horseshit Stregobor had been saying. Peregrinus was not how he had been painted at all, and he was in fact made of very strong, upstanding stuff when it came down to the wire. He was funny, sweet, and I adored him.

    We got especially close one night when he was bored at work and invited me to come hang out for the end of his shift. I didn’t do that sort of thing at the time. Not at all. I was terrified of new places and new people, and this was definitely a newish person in a new place. But as soon as I was about to sheepishly refuse, I got the overwhelming sense that I needed to go.

    We were already supposed to hang out later that week, we were going to meet up for coffee. There were firm plans. I liked firm plans. Firm plans were safe. This? This was foolish, reckless, and at this point I was learning that recklessness without some kind of a backup plan or preparation was what kept getting me fucked up in life. But I also knew that I shouldn’t ignore it when I got the overwhelming sense that I was supposed to do something. That was a clear sign that that something, whatever it may be, was important.

    So, wondering if I was crazy the entire damn time, I jumped into the shower, called a Lyft, packed enough energy drinks to stay upright and decently awake, told Leigh I was going out for a bit, and went to Peregrinus’ work. I was so fucking nervous the whole way there, and spent the entire ride debating what I was going to say to him first. I finally settled on a classic one liner – “come here often?” – and swaggered my tired ass into the lobby.

    The conversation was amazing. We talked about so many things for fucking hours. However, after I was able to effortlessly summon a little alter of Peregrinus’ to front after he swore he was not plural, no less, I decided to try something. Peregrinus had an original character that he used to roleplay as from time to time, so I tested a theory I had that he was also an alter.

    I said in the most seductive tone I could muster, “Hi, Michael…” and lo and fucking behold, the bitch himself came straight to front. The first words out of this man’s mouth were “if I could take you home with me tonight, I would.” I was very, very flustered and very full of queer panic. He was such a flirt. I was honestly smitten.

    But the real piece de resistance came at coffee later that week. Michael wanted to front, and front he did. He set everything up so that he guided me down the stairs of this multi-level coffeeshop like a fucking Disney Prince. I was fucking floored. I had died and gone to queer heaven. I was starting to wonder if I had to go back to Milwaukee between Stregobor, Michael, and Peregrinus.

    Leigh and I were on the rocks at this point, and I had no idea that Stregobor was talking shit about me yet. Nor did I really know Peregrinus well enough to determine if what Stregobor was saying about him was accurate, but it made me uncomfortable, so I wanted to observe for longer before making any judgments.

    I started dating Michael after that coffee date, and both he and Stregobor began to gently push me to consider staying out there in Madison with them rather than splitting time as originally planned. I was exhausted, and becoming more so by the day.

    One day, I finally had enough. One of my partners, whom we shall call Sol, had been bitterly heartbroken over my ex best friend, who was also dating her. I didn’t want to get more involved in the drama than I already had been, as I had seen this coming since March of 2022, warned him about it, he didn’t listen, and shit had begun to spiral from there on out on top of all the other shit I had been dealing with.

    I didn’t like what either of them were doing to each other, nor did I like what my so called best friend was doing to me, so I decided to throw my weight behind  neither side and let the chips fall where they may and attend to my life closer to home, as all of this was happening states away.

    After I broke things off with Leigh, the polycule schismed and broke roughly in half, with the half that Leigh and Sol had bonded with going with her and the other half staying with me. Leigh kicked me out afterwards, understandably, leaving Stregobor, Peregrinus, and myself to urgently gather my shit and scramble for a Plan B, as none of us wanted me to go back to Milwaukee by that point. Stregobor had his best friend/hired gun of sorts scoop me up and deliver me to the hotel where he was working under the table for the next week to regroup and figure things out, and off I went.

    It was during that regrouping phase that I opened up more to Stregobor about what had happened both during Kiragate and what was going on and with Operation: Dead Hand. The masterful ending move of Dead Hand was actually his idea – write to Hera’s lawyer and tell her that I want to sign away rights to my child so that Hera can adopt him like she was claiming she wanted to, because we knew something Hera wanted nobody to know.

    She was planning on giving my child to a family she knew in Utah that nobody in her family knew or trusted because her husband had threatened to leave her if she planned on raising my child. The lawyer would be handed a win on a silver platter, take the deal and run, and Hera’s family would crucify her for even attempting such things because they were already attached to my child and had been from birth. The family would eat itself and I would be free to go.

    We hashed that out, got some good rest for once, and made an interim plan going forward. When we came back to Madison, I took up temporary residence at Peregrinus’ apartment, where I started work on finding a permanent place to live via connections I had made through another of Stregobor’s partners. However, during that time, I bore witness to how badly Peregrinus was being treated by his other partner at the time, a man who we will call Ladron. Ladron was a walking bag of insecurities and wrath who was a lowlife with nothing to offer and knew it.

    These insecurities mostly came out in the form of rages, but occasionally came out in the form of tearful emotional manipulation. This was a man who knew he wasn’t shit and I watched Peregrinus take the brunt of his issues. However, I knew I would have to tread carefully if I wanted to get Peregrinus out, as past experience showed that speaking up about it forcefully from the jump in front of Ladron would only end in more pain for all of us. I needed to get to safety first, at the very least.

    I found a room in a place nearby, moved in, and started befriending my housemates, who felt safe for once. I felt safe. But then, around Peregrinus’ birthday, we found out that my housemate had given us COVID. So Peregrinus had to shelter in place at my apartment for a couple weeks and found that he felt much safer with me than at his place.

    It was during that quarantine period that I first witnessed Stregobor talking shit about me, and after all of the nonsense with the schism and watching Peregrinus taking Ladron’s hits over and over and then by contrast, Michael, Peregrinus, and my kind housemates treating me exceptionally well, I decided I had yet again had enough. I fucking deserved better. So did Peregrinus. So I officially asked him to stay and live with me. By some miracle, we made it happen. We were both safe. Peregrinus and I ended up breaking things off with Stregobor, and I didn’t have to go to Milwaukee after all.

    I stayed in Madison for another four months or so. Peregrinus noticed my exhaustion and started gently, yet firmly telling me to rest and handle more things. It was a swift kick to the ‘nads to all I had ever known, and it was brutally emotionally and mentally painful.

    My body had started to collapse so thoroughly from the stress of everything I’ve written about here that I had become for all intents and purposes allergic to sunlight and incredibly intolerant to heat. I firmly believe I was dying, and I very likely was. However, Peregrinus was a stubborn little ram, and stepped the fuck up.

    He didn’t stop, either. He nursed me back to health and in many ways, brought me back to life. I saved him, and in return, he saved me. Later, from that same plural system, Emerson emerged. He has the same indefatigable iron will, and we still take care of each other. He tells me to sit the fuck down when I need it, and vice versa.

    I still work fucking hard for my people, I just don’t do it to my detriment anymore, and I value my time, energy and life enough to not write myself out of the equation anymore. I am learning to truly love myself and love my life for the first time, disabilities and limitations and all, and I couldn’t have done it without all the bullshit I alchemized along the way.

    I think that’s enough for tonight. Stay tuned for more magic, dear people. I love y’all, and I hope you love yourselves, too, as best you can.

    -Lazarus, Master of Bullshit, Sorcery, and Ceremonies

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  • Full Circle?

    Hey, everyone! Lazarus here. I’m writing this post a bit later in the day than I would like, but sometimes shit happens and I have no energy until late and I have to put my energy level and available brain cells (or lack thereof) first. That’s precisely what I ended up doing.

    Today has been an odd one, especially mentally. I spent the majority of it alone as both Zelda and Emerson were away at work, which gave me plenty of time to think. Zelda sent me some money to pick up vapes for both of us since the tobacco I’ve been smoking requires me to often nearly burn my thumb to light my pipe or burn it outright, and I’m really not a fan of doing that. (Don’t get on me for smoking, it helps me get my tired ADHD brain in good working order, and I’m pretty sure my various chronic ailments will take me out before anything nicotine related will.) As I was walking to the excellent shop where my partners and I pick up most of our vapes and related paraphernalia, it felt almost like being lost in a memory. I’m not sure if it’s how I’ve been feeling lately and what I’ve been exploring of late, but it felt similar to being back in Alaska in October-November of 2019, some five years prior during my first marriage.

    My marriage to my first husband, Fang, was strange in many ways. He wasn’t home often due to the fact that he poured his everything into his career as a systems administrator where he worked an hour away, and when he was home, it wasn’t pleasant. He would either spend his time deep in video games with our housemates or fighting with me to try and get me to do shit he wanted that I didn’t consent to by any stretch of the imagination.

    He wanted to be far more active than my body could handle at that point and to clean up after him and the housemates simply because I didn’t work outside of the home, despite the fact that I was working two jobs at that point, just largely from home, and was very prolific creatively when I wasn’t working. I had fought my entire life for my independence and autonomy and was not having it.

    We had two very different ideas of what we wanted the relationship to look like, and it turned into a protracted power struggle. So I came to relish the long stretches of time when I would be alone, as it afforded me a measure of freedom I had never gotten to have before. Before shipping off to Alaska, my mother, Hera, kept close tabs on me, even when I was away at college, and I had begun extricating myself from her that summer and was a good 4,000 miles away back in Texas.

    So by October of 2019, I had a great deal more time and freedom on my hands than I had ever had before and was beginning to explore what that meant for me for the first time in my life at 22. Fang was controlling, sure, but he simply wasn’t around often enough to stop me from building a life of my own. I began doing just that that summer, and didn’t stop as autumn approached.

    I had spent the last several years examining my faith, and was fairly certain by that point that I wasn’t a Christian, at least not a typical one. This deconstruction eventually led me to start exploring kitchen witchcraft and divination, and I started blending my own teas and made my own divination system that year. At that point, things like Tarot hadn’t interested me yet and wouldn’t for another several years. Many other aspects of mainstream witchcraft made me deeply uncomfortable, and I would come to find out later that many of these things were actually closed practices that belonged to cultures that I was not a part of. They were unsettling for good reason!

    I was also beginning to examine my trauma in depth for the first time and come to face to face with much of the extent of what my family had done to me. It was actually what had led to me attempting to extricate myself from Hera that year. It failed when she threatened to fly up to Alaska that winter in a message to Fang, and she continued to be in league with him long after I left in 2020.

    Now, however, I have far more ACTUAL freedom and am striving toward a life that actually works. My partners know it would be foolish to attempt to control me. I don’t stand for that bullshit, I made that clear to them from the jump, and disclosed my disabilities and need for a lot of rest up front, as well, so they don’t push me harder than I can handle.

    I’m doing my best to not just keep Hera and the toxic people in her life that enabled her bullshit out of my life, but unfuck my own toxic bullshit as well. Trauma explains poor behavior, but doesn’t excuse it, and I don’t take bullshit from myself or anyone else, and do my utmost to take accountability when I’m in the wrong, even if the other party doesn’t mind what I did.

    I do a lot of shit that I don’t like and try and do better, even if the other people around me don’t hold me to that high of a standard, weren’t harmed, what have you. If I don’t like the outcome of what happened, I learn from it and do whatever I can to grow from it. Full stop. I didn’t do that when I was 22.

    Additionally, I’m still exploring my craft, just at a deeper level. Everything I do rides the line between the mundane and the magical, and if I can’t find a scientific or academic explanation for something, I turn to the metaphysical or spiritual for answers. Conversely, I like to try and find answers for what I’m exploring spiritually in science, as well. I was basically raised by scientists and doctors, but I’m also an intuitive person with a fascination for pretty much everything and hoard knowledge of any kind like a dragon.

    So yeah. Here’s to the next… How long has it been? Five years? Yeah, I think it’s been five years now. Linear time has never been my strong suit, haha. Stay tuned for more magic, and I will see you beautiful people next time. Happy Halloween, Blessed Samhain, whatever y’all happen to observe 💛

    Your faithful, if eternally confused by the passage of time, sorcerer, Lazarus

  • The Art of Finding Ways (Or Making Them)

    Hey, everyone! I’m currently writing on here as my love Hawthorne works on their story back East as a form of body doubling in spirit. I’m a bit tired and they’re Writer’s blocked to fuck, so knowing that the other  is writing is helping both of us get shit done. I did similarly with Zelda yesterday and Emerson a day or so prior as they worked on their respective blogs.

    It’s pretty effective, as we’re all neurodivergent as hell over here and working on projects simultaneously helps keep everyone on task, even if we’re not in the same physical space, like Hawthorne and I currently, or even doing the same thing. Hell, I often simply hang out with Emerson and Zelda and either tell them stories from my youth or teach them things from history while they catch up on household tasks that I couldn’t do due to my myriad disabilities and help that way.

    That brings me to what I want to talk about today – creative ways to solve problems and get shit done, especially when there’s lot of obstacles in the way, you’re fucking exhausted and overwhelmed, or, like me when I was at my lowest and had to start learning these skills, you’re almost entirely bedbound and at worst, in essence, alone. Hopefully if you are reading this post because you need it, your circumstances are less dire than mine were. But for the sake of the lesson, I’m gonna teach you with a true story from my life because that’s what I know best.

    So, when I need to tackle an extremely large and overwhelming problem with a whole lot of moving parts, the first thing I do is work to accept the problem as it is. I touched on this in my post from the other day about suffering when I talked about the radical acceptance element of that. I can’t really fix a problem if I’m still refusing to accept that there’s a problem OR refusing to deal with the problem head on. This sometimes takes awhile, I will freely admit that. I have to get tired of my own bullshit and tired of suffering before I’m ready to radically accept that there’s a problem and actually face it head on. But once I’m there, it’s go time. I’m analyzing every angle, trying to see what part I’m playing in the problem, how I can do better, what I can do differently, etc..

    Here’s a concrete example. In December of 2021, I was bedbound following what was likely a decently severe case of COVID that I ended up having to frontier treat on my own because I was living in an Airbnb in the middle of a Wisconsin winter and I was terrified that if the host found out, I would have nowhere to go and be out in the cold, literally.

    I had been fucking sick as a dog most of the latter half of that year and had most likely gotten heat stroke so many times while living out in Philadelphia doing door to door sales that summer that both my heart and brain were a bit… Ah.. Cooked to a degree that the heart damage showed up on blood tests in the ER. One thing led to another, I ended up in Wisconsin, and I got sick again. I slept for the better part of several weeks. I needed to find some way to pay for another month in the place at least, and to not perish in the interim. This was years pre-integration, and Eight, the alter in charge at the time, went hard. So I reasoned in my feverish cotton ball brain that now was not the time to be shy about my needs, terrified of vulnerability though I was, and took a leaf out of one of my partners’ books at the time. I started posting asking for donations, stating clearly that I was waiting on my SSI interview for my disabilities and and would appreciate any help I could get.

    With days to spare, my online community pulled through. I was feverish and inexperienced and I would highly recommend NEVER pushing yourself so hard that you end up a feverish lump in a Wisconsin Airbnb having nearly heatstroked yourself to death ten fucking times over, but I was allergic to asking for help until I had found myself in a massive fucking pickle and I spent years trying to do better in that regard. I had to relearn to walk after that, and I hit an enormous wall beginning in about April of 2022 once things got a bit more stable. Had I remained silent in my pride, I wouldn’t have survived that, honestly.

    As time has gone on, with my partners gently reminding me to rest and helping take care of me, I have realized that the extent of my hyperindependence itself is a problem. I’m not sure how finding myself in pickles like that didn’t illustrate it for me, but I think I was so delirious and doing shit on my own was so normal up until I crashed in ’22 that I really knew nothing else.

    It’s been a gut punch to my pride to delegate so much of my life and needs to others, but conversely, I am fucking disabled, and hyperindependence is what disabled me so badly in the first place. As time goes on, that’s been the biggest thing I’ve been coming up against and detangling these days and finding new ways or making them to cope with – the slow death of the notion that I must do everything now or do everything myself or  I will not receive any form of favorable outcome.

    I want to do all the things. Gods, do I want to do all the things. In many ways I miss the active, athletic life I had in my teens and early twenties, but I wouldn’t trade that for what I have going for me now. So that’s an acceptable trade, in my opinion. And what with things like the vitamin B100 experiment I’m doing, I might be more athletic again someday. But I shouldn’t push to do that before my body is ready and safe or else I risk going back to square one, and that would be ass. So let’s not.

    Anywho, my brain is getting tired from typing all these words. So I’m gonna go have some water with a bit of salt in it, as that seems to perk me up, maybe some lunch if I can coax myself into it, and I will catch y’all later. Stay tuned for more magic, people!!

    Your sleepy sorcerer,

    Lazarus

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  • A Journey To The Center Of Myself

    Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:

    What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

    Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.

    I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.

    So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?

    Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.

    Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.

    I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.

    In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.

    I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.

    Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.

    And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.

    Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.

    Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.

    I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨

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    Fediverse Reactions

  • A Decade of Hidden Longing

    Hey, everyone! This is Eight. I haven’t been out in a bit, as I’ve been taking a much needed rest, and it seems like our people and the blog have been fucking hopping! I love to see it!

    We’re at the Zelda System’s place again this week, and Sheik herself is cradling me and taking a day nap. She deserves the rest, sweet thing. She works extremely hard and deserves to rest and play as hard as she works, so I’m happy to be held while she sleeps. It feels like a sacred honor to be a soothing and protective presence while our lovely partner sleeps so she gets good rest.

    We often think quite deeply when we’re over here to the point that it becomes almost meditative. It’s deeply restful for us to be around her and the others in her system as much as it is for her to be around us. Sheik is so gentle and tender with Allēna that Allēna ends up deeply processing and working through her deepest fears due to Sheik’s mere empathetic presence. It’s scary because Allēna must face these fears head on in order to communicate them with Sheik, but Sheik has never shamed or judged her for her fears and often responds in such a way that sharing is easier for her by the day.

    We deeply fear vulnerability as a system, but Sheik and her current headmates’ kind presences have made them safe to share with. Something that came up today that Sheik responded extremely kindly to was Allēna feeling guilty for asking for a favor. In a moment that should be a fucking case study for top notch communication, Allēna noticed she was feeling guilty and anxious for asking Sheik for that favor, so she told Sheik outright what she was feeling and asked point blank for reassurance, which Sheik willingly gave.

    From there, this uncorked a second wave of emotion and memories as Allēna explored the root of why she felt so guilty and afraid of asking for help while Sheik stood as witness. This is what she found.

    As a child and young adult, we were abused and neglected into keeping our needs and desires invisible and only meet or attain them on our own. Our mother, Hera, was very emotionally withdrawn, and had little tolerance for our – at the time – enormous emotions we had no idea what to do with. So we were severely emotionally abused out of expressing them in a way most people could recognize. However, Allēna resisted.

    She is far more emotional than she lets on to most, and turned to art as a means to express herself and protest in the midst of a family who had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned her. She became a highly skilled multidisciplinary artist, creating an enormous volume of work most people, even people who have known our system for years, have never seen. For a decade, she kept a journal not unlike this blog which she, Castor, and occasionally myself wrote in almost daily. It reverberates with the full spectrum of human emotion, sadness, punctuated with joy, with deep currents of rage and willpower most people don’t attain until midlife. And that’s just the journals.

    She was also an accomplished visual artist, turning to a brush and canvas when words failed her. She created a series of paintings in which she documented her various emotional states. Anger, her most common emotion – and the most forbidden to express during the time we were under Hera’s thumb – was her favorite piece. Its very existence was an act of rebellion. Slashes of black paint against large swaths of white space, which she knew Hera hated.

    Anger (unknown year) by Allēna

    The longer we work on our communication with like minded friends and partners, the more we unpick the years of trauma that kept the mountain of exquisite longing beneath the surface. We are very logical, yes, but we also have a treasure trove of emotion often stored in the body. The more we’re able to safely communicate it with people who can hold it with respect, the deeper we’re able to process and feel it. It’s deeply healing and freeing, and we’re eternally grateful to those who witness us. Thank you.

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight

  • First Breath After Coma

    Hello, all! My name is Castor. I’m the Ashley system’s first host, and I went dormant for fifteen years at the age of eleven. I titled this post “First Breath After Coma” because I was essentially comatose for fifteen years inside my own mind while my body and headmates carried on without me, and while I’ve been awake for about a year now, I feel like I’m finally breathing.

    As I write this, my beautiful girlfriend Sheik is cuddling me while she sleeps, and she’s a big reason why I feel like I’m finally able to breathe. I emerged from dormancy severely touch averse where most people are concerned to such a degree that I won’t front around many, but I went out on a limb with Sheik and I’m glad I trusted my gut. It’s a miracle she can touch me at all, as the touch aversion makes it feel for most like my skin is burning if most people even consider touching me. But her? She feels so wonderful she can touch me anytime she likes, and she’s very clingy with me, and I’m the same with her. I love it – and her – dearly.

    While I enjoy the company of the system’s other partners that I’ve met so far (the damned attorney in Emerson’s system is a notable exception, he annoys me and I tolerate him for my headmates’ sake), I’ve only really bonded closely with Sheik so far. I look forward to seeing how things develop with the others, provided they aren’t the lawyer type. The only lawyer whose company I’ve ever enjoyed is my great-aunt. There’s only room for one argumentative bitch system in this polycule, and by gods, we’ll defend you with our life, but I really hate being grilled. However, I digress.

    I used to not be nearly so touch averse, but was still very selective with who I clung to. My childhood was fucked, see: our Tragic Backstory posts, so I didn’t enjoy many members of my family. That being said, I loved my late grandmother. She was my fucking person. This woman was raised wealthy in New Jersey, very close to New York City. She was absolutely brilliant and delightfully eccentric, the closest thing to a living, breathing faerie I’ve ever seen.

    She met my paternal grandfather while she was running the damn lab where he worked as a pathologist, and became his second wife. She was a chemist by trade, read books backwards, was left-handed, and had warm, kind brown eyes with the loveliest violet rings around them. She was also a gourmet chef and baker and slept only about four hours a night. After she retired, she and my paternal grandfather became fucking art dealers, then retired properly to a sumptuously decorated log cabin in the Texas Hill Country.

    Her idea of retirement was running the fucking town where she lived, as she was involved in damn near everything. This woman was an inevitable powerhouse of indefatigable energy and warmth. She slept only about four hours a night, the perfect sleep schedule for my extremely anxious tiny self. Before the body came down with mononucleosis at the age of sixteen, we also only slept about four to five hours a night, and we are lucky if we get six hours a night now.

    So on nights I struggled to sleep, she would tell me stories about her youth in New Jersey until I fell asleep in her arms, then I would wander downstairs about four hours later at perhaps six in the morning, and she would already be hard at work baking something like two hundred cookies for a charity event. She would make me a small cup of coffee, as she knew I loved it, but it would give my small frame the jitters, and we would begin the morning slowly.

    She didn’t believe in sitting with one’s brain idle, but she did believe passionately in doing things one enjoyed to pass the time. So she was fascinating and took equal fascination in what I was doing. I was an unusual child, and she supported my dual special interests in computers and Greek mythology while making an effort to stimulate my mind and get me to explore new things. I gladly participated for the most part, as I loved her dearly and trusted her with everything I have. We explored a great deal of the Hill Country, went to more lovely antique stores than most children ever see, ate some truly amazing food at extremely inventive restaurants, and generally had a blast. She expanded my mind while still making me feel safe, and I loved her for it. Sheik reminds me of her in many ways, and I think that’s why she is so comforting.

    I only front once it’s safe now that the vessel is an adult and we’re free to make our own decisions, and it feels like I’m seeing color again for the first time since the events that led to me becoming dormant. I’m getting out more slowly, so are my headmates, we’re meeting new people, and bonding more closely with our partners and friends, not just Sheik and her compatriots in the Zelda System. We’re working our way out of a major depersonalization and chronic fatigue hole that we’ve been mired in for years, and frankly I love it. We’re actually learning how to be vulnerable and unguarded with our people, as well, and the results are beautiful. I would even venture to call them deeply magical.

    Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of that! I’m excited to see how things go.

    -Castor, Original Host

  • Nostalgia

    Hey, everyone. This is Firrian, once again on the acting captain hot seat. Unfortunately, we seem to have made no headway in the sleep deprivation department, so this should be a rather short post if all goes well. I’m fucking exhausted. That said, one of my headmates, Tindwyl, was talking with a new friend of ours about nostalgia and that got us thinking.

    Nostalgia? Never Heard of It. Or Have We?

    Initially we couldn’t find anything we were nostalgic about, but then the Shins’ cover of “We Will Become Silhouettes”, originally by the supergroup the Postal Service started playing on our excellent East Coast themed playlist, and that gave me an idea. We are nostalgic about some things, just not the things most people are typically nostalgic about. We don’t miss family Christmases or vacations with our brother or anything like that. We have far too much Tragic Backstory for that sort of thing. Tindwyl has even taken to calling this blog our incident report because of how much we talk about our complicated lore here. My poor headmates.

    Give Up

    That being said, we do feel nostalgic for the spaces we made in childhood and young adulthood by ourselves for ourselves and our friends. These were sacred times and places nobody was allowed into except by our decree. Listening to that Postal Service album I mentioned is one such example. We are a strange combination of resourceful Luddite and tech wizardry because for the longest time, we were forbidden from accessing the internet on weekdays when school was in session.

    So we learned to get around that shit in any way we could because we need music to function. This turned into a fully fledged obsession with hoarding hard copies of media. We’d listen to Pandora Internet Radio on the weekends and on vacations from school obsessively, and then check hard copies of whatever we liked out at the library so we could listen to music on the go using a portable CD player from maybe 2002 at the earliest. No internet needed.

    We must have checked Give Up by the Postal Service out twenty times. We were fucking addicted to this record. We’d often hole up in a bathtub that was empty save for a thin blanket in the summers and devour entire novels in the summers while listening to that album over and over while the cold ceramic cooled our very heat sensitive body off. I find it hilarious that we were playing an album called Give Up over and over because I assure you, we had most certainly not given up.

    Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music.
    Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music.

    This Place Is A Prison, But Our Nostalgia Sure Isn’t

    Another very sacred place that holds a lot of nostalgia for us is our creative process. Allēna, our host in the body’s teens, wrote her first real song when we were only eleven and quickly set her sights on recording music in a studio. Not only that, but she wanted to produce it all herself. So by the next year, she had put together a demo her own damn self that she’d recorded by hand in her house on her laptop using Sony Acid.

    By thirteen, she’d secured a record deal and was recording in a studio with a producer she observed extensively. When she wasn’t in Dallas shadowing him and recording with him, she was researching techniques, building her own bedroom studio, and experimenting with her own production style with the things she was learning. She let very few people see her process, as she was a very anxious perfectionist and secretly worried that her work would never actually be good enough.

    Her mother didn’t help with that, either, and she didn’t want what she was making criticized to pieces before she even had a chance to finish it. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen, she’d created enough work she was proud of to release an extended play that she’d made entirely herself, Fletcher Coming Home. However, due to her soul crushing anxiety and perfectionism, she delayed releasing it officially for another two years, instead releasing a handful of singles first to test the waters. Her childhood was a prison, one almost entirely unworthy of nostalgia, but by the gods, she was going to write, sing, and fucking claw her way out of it if it was the last thing she did.

    The Luddite Gift

    An unintended consequence of giving the born fighter Allēna such a restrictive childhood is that the girl was both relentless and clever and refused to let her lack of Internet access hold her back from making friends and being social. It gave her both unprecedented managerial and administrative skill and taught her how to use her time wisely.

    She couldn’t market her music online, obviously, so she shamelessly plugged it to everyone she met, both in school and at church. People were drawn to this brilliant, reclusive enigma and wanted to both know and hear more. In the absence of social networks, she built a real world network of people that she was deeply invested in and who were deeply invested in her.

    She showed off constantly by performing live at church any chance she got, which brought her powerful voice to new audiences constantly. She was a charismatic force of nature offstage, as well, and church became a refuge that she looks back on fondly for the real world social aspects of.

    Legendary Partying With Greater Efficiency

    When this involuntary Luddite finally joined the ranks of social media in her mid teens, everything simply became bigger for her and more efficient – and easier to hide from her parents. Her already massive social circle tripled in size as she got older, and as she threw parties with her brother, she took a risk and merged all of the different smaller groups of people she ran with. She learned something interesting here.

    Many of her friends got along swimmingly, even if they had never set eyes on one another before in their lives, and these parties quickly became the stuff of legend. She heard from her friends’ parents on several occasions that an invitation to these parties was highly prized and many of their children had met close friends there that they would never have met otherwise. Allēna discovered that she had a gift for connecting people and helping people of various backgrounds find common ground.

    She was a brilliant organizer and people saw that. She could get wallflowers front and center playing Twister with people who were complete strangers five minutes prior. Shy anime nerds found fast friends in gregarious library assistants while sparring with sticks from the pecan tree in our front yard. This is our nostalgia. We created it, and it is ours.

    Conclusion

    Okay, I seem to have lied about this being a short post, haha. I don’t mind. This is totally worth it. I have no clue what the next post will bring, but I’m excited for it, whatever it is. Stay tuned for more magic (and incident reports)!

    Firrian, Acting Captain

  • My World in More Detail

    Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

    Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

    Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

    An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

    My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

    Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

    We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

    The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

    In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

    When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

    Things Fall Apart


    From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

    Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

    Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

    Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

    Turn That Shit Up To 13!

    The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

    Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

    My World Nowadays

    Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

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    *names changed for privacy