Open Sorcery

Tag: deconstruction

  • On Hooking ‘Em and Cooking ‘Em (Get Your Minds Out Of The Gutter, You Sinners)

    Hello, assembled host. Lazarus here once more with more bullshit for your viewing pleasure. The below prompt from the journaling app Day One looks interesting, so I shall answer it in due time, but before I get into the thick of it, have a fucking meme I cooked up last night that is tangentially related because I said so.

    Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

    Today’s prompt from Day One.
    An Occurrence from last night, January 4th, in the year of our Lord 2025.

    To answer the intriguing question the prompt posed, my answer is both. Why, you may ask? Because I’m an AuDHD gremlin with a fucking brainhole with a working knowledge of world history from my years spent as a tutor who happens to see the future on occasion due to a nifty combination of brain damage, annoyingly supercharged intuition, synesthesia, and neurodivergent pattern recognition. In short, my brain never shuts the fuck up, especially as I continue my inner work and find pockets of my mind that I have repressed for years. I have next to no sense of linear time or object permanence. Can I get a pretty damn accurate sense of who you are within five minutes of meeting you? Absolutely. Do I know where my cell phone is half the time? Oh gods no.

    And due to surviving a helluva lot of trauma, having a near perfect autobiographical memory, and being unusually well traveled due to being raised with an ass load of money and being so charismatic I annoy myself, I have many, many stories to tell on top of my knowledge of world history. I call these stories my Lore or my Tragic Backstory interchangeably depending on how I’m feeling that day. As demonstrated by the meme I shared above, people seem to like the stories that come out of my facehole.

    So yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about both. Time isn’t linear, anyway, so what the hell? Mentally I’m almost constantly relaxing on a huge plot of land in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania ten years from now, or trying to find various belongings of mine that have disappeared into the fucking ether again. Where are Y’ALL mentally?

    Anywho, it’s almost my naptime. Before I go, have more memes and a video of me voice acting for a kitten who I call Sean Connery Nugget with the Zelda System. 🤣

    Goodnight, lovely gremlins. Tell me of your many travels in the comments, throw a party, do whatever you want. Just be excellent to each other, that’s all I ask. 💛 Until next time, stay tuned for more magic. – Lazarus

    PS. 2011 or so called and it wants you to have this earworm back 🤣

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  • Tales From The Blanket Lump

    Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Sorry for going fucking dark for the last little while.

    Lumine visited this past week, during which time I was so goddamned stressed my body came inches from basically falling apart. It wasn’t his fault at all, and he was in fact a most excellent baby. If anyone is to blame, it’s Zelda for dropping the ball when it came to logistics and stressing Emerson and myself out so goddamn badly it started to take a physical toll on both of us. I ended up getting everything set up for Lumine’s arrival and picking him up from the train station pretty much single-handedly because if I hadn’t, he would have been marooned there for a couple hours at the very least, which would not have been Emerson’s fault, he had to work and could not escape early.

    Emerson and Lumine bonded quite well, and Lumine actually bonded so well with Zelda’s legendarily shy and skittish cat and made me happy stim so hard in the process that he got an invitation to move up here once more shit shakes out on all of our ends, so that’s absolutely and legitimately lovely.

    That leaves ongoing drama with Zelda, which sent me into a chronic pain flare across three body systems from which I am still recovering and now I have a chest cold to boot. I appear to have gotten so damn stressed that I started my menstrual cycle a week early, which most likely knocked out my immune system, allowing for this shit to happen. Oh, and Lumine is fucking sick, as well. I’m fucking sick of the interpersonal stress, and I’m sick and tired of it making me sick and tired.

    So, I’ve essentially dropped my weight where a lot of shit is concerned and have stuck myself in a lump of blankets to sleep off this chest cold most of the time. Sleep has always been my favorite alibi when I don’t want to get involved in interpersonal nonsense, as most of my close people know that my sleep is sacrosanct and I do not get much of it.

    When I haven’t been asleep, I have been watching Netflix, eating delicious food that Emerson made, or calling and hanging out with people that don’t stress me the fuck out. In other words, I am pretty intentionally being fucking useless to people who are causing a great deal of chronic stress because I quite simply do not have the energy to deal with this shit anymore. Like… I am so drained by this shit that my body will just make me pass the fuck out rather than deal with it. I quite literally physically can’t, and I’m going with my body’s cues here.

    Hell yeah for becoming ungovernable and unusable.

    Sometimes, though, my brain is tired and my body isn’t. That’s when I just shut my eyes for a bit and chill and let my brain rest and wander for a minute away from my phone or whatever the hell I’ve been doing that’s been making me so tired. It helps, and whenever I regain the capacity to get back to the task at hand, I get back to it.

    During one of those brain naps, I got the idea for what could turn into my sixteenth album once my executive dysfunction releases its hold on me. I haven’t been able to play my instruments or record anything for awhile due to being so damn tired and stressed, but I hope I’ll eventually get back to it by prioritizing energizing people and things. I always do. Sometimes I just need a brain nap. Or an actual nap.

    I’ve also discovered that watching Netflix helps get my brain in order when I want or need to spend long periods of time alone by acting as a sort of other presence or presences in the room so that it’s easier to both keep track of time (something I don’t have a concrete sense of without an anchor, like music or TV) and a semblance of human company without the pressure to engage back.

    It’s easier to eat, stay hydrated, and generally take care of myself with shows I enjoy as an external anchor point. And considering that most of my stress is interpersonal, sometimes it’s nice to just…be able to listen, watch, and get invested in shit without having to do something about it, you know?

    I also haven’t let myself really get invested in fiction in a long ass time (around a decade or longer) since I tend to get extremely deeply invested in anything I enjoy beyond my own fiction, so it feels wonderful to be a fucking fan of shit again. Emerson got me hooked on a show called The Magicians on a hunch that I would like it, and it’s honestly like what would happen if The Chronicles of Narnia and Doctor Who had a more dark, more fucked up baby than the both of them, and I am unfortunately quite invested in this bloodbath fuckshow. It reminds me a fair bit of my audio drama The Third Prophecy, and so a lot of the dark shit in it doesn’t really bother me, surprisingly. It’s the sort of thing I would write, and I am of the firm belief that real people are far scarier and more fucked up.

    If you can handle the extremely dark tomfuckery, I highly recommend it.

    Well, dearly beloved hooligans, I am getting tired again, so I must go rest my mind once more. Whee. I love y’all. Stay tuned for more magic ✨

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  • Lost In Time And Space

    Hey, everyone. This is Lazarus, once again. As I write this, I’m sitting on my apartment’s balcony space so that I can get a bit of fresh air. At Emerson’s suggestion, I took today largely away from the Internet to clear my head, but it seems to have made me sadder, albeit less anxious. I’ve spent a great portion of today deep in my head strategizing and things, but I feel disconnected from the world in a not so pleasant way, sort of like I’m lost in space and time. So if I am going to go all in on disconnecting, I think I need to make a better plan so that it doesn’t make me feel worse and adrift. So now I’m drafting a blog post in my notes app that I will post when I come back online again. 

    I shuffled through a deck of prompts that Emerson has, and found one that is going to be a doozy to contemplate and write about, but I think ought to be addressed head on anyway. It goes a bit like this: “Wonderland: You always have your imagination. What is something that you want to achieve, but probably never will?” I know I’m probably not quoting the prompt verbatim, as usual, but it gets the point across, I think. I’m also probably going to cry as I write this, in all honesty. 

    I would love to be abled, or at least accommodated to such an extent that I could function enough that I could do a great deal more. I know that’s probably the remainder of my hyper independence talking, but I grieve what I used to be able to do every day. I hold my need for rest and greater peace and my fervent wishes for greater independence, to contribute more, to push past what is holding me back, and to build bigger and greater things simultaneously and I try every day to let the peace and rest win because I know that ultimately that is the only way I will be able to contribute more. 

    I can’t do anything meaningful if I’m running on fumes and pushing myself to the point where I’m very nearly dead. It’s a strange paradox that I tend to ignore when I’m anxious, angry, and/or craving movement and release. I can only really see the nuance and appreciate the paradoxical nature of healing and the true way forward when I’m calm and able to recharge myself. But still, I grieve. I miss what I was able to do before illnesses, trauma, and injuries took all of my independence away from me, however unhealthy and against true human nature it actually was. 

    I keep having to remind myself through all of this that my rest and the creative work I’m doing is still an action, that even though it looks like I am doing nothing, it’s still an action, it’s still a choice. I’m still doing something. 

    Even when I’m doing research, writing, or art from bed or sitting down, I’m still doing something. I’m never doing nothing. Reframing my perspective around rest, art, and leisure from doing nothing to doing something has helped improve my quality of life and mental health a great deal. 

    And when I keep that perspective in mind, it has helped me relax a great deal more and make rest and leisure a much easier and less anxiety inducing choice to make, as I often have to fight my anxiety, which paralyzes me when it comes time to rest because I feel as though I have done nothing all day even when that simply isn’t true. I’m resting, an action. I’m making art, an action. I’m watching TV, an action. I’m talking to my partners and friends, an action. I am cuddling my cats, an action. I’m blogging, an action. I’m doing medical research, an action. When I think about my behavior that way, it becomes far less paralyzing to do…anything because in my mind, all actions start to carry equal weight, no matter what they are, because they all carry an element of conscious choice and autonomy, and none of them are nothing. 

    They may have different impacts and implications on the people and situations around me, and I can change my behavior accordingly based on what I observe, but none of it is meaningless. It also does wonders for my perfectionism when I keep that in mind, which is also rooted in anxiety. I just need to work on keeping that in mind… 

    Speaking of research, I may have made a breakthrough last night. I have been experiencing a great deal of numbness in my right hand and on the sides of my face particularly the right side, as well as fatigue, which drinking saltwater or eating salty food almost immediately resolves. I’ve also had shitty circulation for most of my life. So I started wondering due to a longtime suspicion that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or POTS, that my blood pressure might be low running low regardless of how my body is positioned due to severe and prolonged stress and heart damage. 

    So I did a bit of research last night that tentatively confirms that theory. It also gave me a new theory that my blood pressure dipping especially low in the mid to late afternoons into the nighttime is causing severe fatigue that’s gotten worse as the temperature has started falling as winter approaches. Time for new experiments! 

    That being said, the vitamin B is still massively improving my mental health at a baseline, and likely keeping my blood pressure at a lower level than it would be normally since it is normalizing my mental health and keeping me more stable than I would be without it. So I wonder if I need to start making feta cheese a staple of my diet like I did when I was younger. Feta is about the saltiest thing known to man, second only to a rock of salt itself or possibly brine. I love feta cheese. So let this be a public service announcement to any suitors or partners looking to win my heart or make our relationship even better – load me up with that good shit. It’s my favorite, and it may literally improve my health in the process 💛 

    Yay for doing health shit myself! I think that’s enough pondering the mysteries of the universe or at least the human body for the day. Stay tuned for more magic, y’all. I’ll be around. 

    Your (not salty enough) sorcerer, Lazarus 

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  • 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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  • 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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  • At Last, I’m Found

    Hey, all.

    This is Lazarus again.

    In 2021, I was talking with my friend Delta about all of the shit I was going through at the time while deep in survival mode and about being an Enneagram Eight largely geared toward self preservation, and I predicted that once I got out of survival mode and was safe, I would sort of… collapse. I would have no idea what the fuck to do with myself and kinda deflate and go more or less catatonic. That prediction has turned out to be more or less accurate most days.

    As my life has stabilized, I find myself with less and less to solve and fewer fires to put out, with many of the remaining problems largely outside of my control and completely outside of my power to fix or help with. In short, most days, despite having the stability I worked so hard for, I feel more lost and adrift than ever. I have been sleeping a lot. I just don’t have much desire to do much, and I do the rare activity when the mood or inspiration strikes. My general state reminds me a lot of when I lost my dad, Xavier, back in 2016.

    I wonder a lot if I’m subconsciously or somatically grieving all of the bullshit of the last three or four years or perhaps even longer because of how badly the wind has been knocked out of me. I barely even have energy to reply to a fraction of the dozens of messages on the various messaging apps I get daily, and I am trying to move away from feeling so bad about that because realistically I just can’t right now. That’s the plain and simple fact of the matter. I only really respond to people and reach out or have my phone nearby at all if I feel up to it, which is rare, and I have been trying to strike a balance between isolation and social time so that I don’t fall off the face of the Earth completely. I don’t want to fully withdraw or even withdraw at all, but my brain and body have been demanding that to some degree, and I’m going with that rather than fighting it so as to not make whatever this is longer and worse.

    On the subject of recovery, I did a bit more research on what the underlying cause of my symptoms might be that have been making my body and mind feel so damn out of whack, and came up with a decent theory that my thyroid might have gotten ever so slightly cooked due to Hera’s batshit DIY MKULTRA scheme she put me through, and the HRT I’m on combined with the years of stress has been making it go, ah, ever so slightly haywire.

    So I found some scholarly research that said that thyroid patients suffering from both hypothyroidism AND hyperthyroidism benefit from taking various forms of vitamin B and thiamine for their chronic fatigue especially. Luckily for me, a former friend of mine had send me a bunch of supplements she wasn’t gonna use late last year and among them was a B100 complex supplement. So I decided to test my theory and give this shit a try and see if it did anything for my fatigue and other symptoms.

    Well, it appears to be doing a fair bit. I’m about five days into the test and my brain fog and pain is leagues better. It appears to be helping my lack of object permanence and executive function, as well, giving me some semblance of both. I have also noticed that I’m not super overstimulated by huge amounts of sound, nor does silence understimulate me as badly. I can sit in silence for far longer without my mind itching for music or internally screaming. It may also be helping with the flashbacks, as well, but that’s to be determined. I will need to continue the test for longer to see if it has any significant effect there. So perhaps my fried thyroid theory holds water. I will need to address this with my doctors next time I can spare a brain cell, haha.

    I’m also far less angry and my headaches are gradually getting better as I work through my anxiety, as they appear to be triggered by anxiety and moments of emotional distress, which the B100 appears to be lessening as a baseline. Yay for House MD-ing myself at home! I just love being an AuDHDer with a special interest in weird ass branches of medicine who was practically raised by doctors, hahahaaaaa. (This is partly sarcastic, partly genuine. Specialized knowledge and deep somatic intuition saves lives, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s just annoying that my body is so weird and there are so many things that the medical field as we know it doesn’t explore without months of waiting or you have the charisma of a fucking god).

    Seeing as there are a lot of positive effects even through the semi-catatonia and the semi-catatonia predates the B100 test, I don’t think the B100 complex is the culprit here. If anything, the supplement appears to be helping. I’m just probably processing years of grief somatically that I’m not entirely consciously aware of.

    So that leaves a large amount of time to fill as I heal that would ordinarily be spent in agonizing mental or physical pain, parsing my way through interpersonal trashfires, or recovering from the aforementioned problems. That huge amount of time to fill raises some incredibly simple, yet profound questions that I’m currently exploring the answers to: what the fuck do I do now? What actually makes me happy now that I’m living more out of love than out of spite and my brain and my body aren’t fucking screaming 24/7?

    I know I love writing on here and writing in general. I am deeply proud of myself for having a space that is mine that I’ve maintained for months now even if I can’t post daily, and that does a lot for my quality of life. I like having spaces that are mine where I can express myself with the people that I love that would be very difficult to take from me or from them. I know research and engaging in my myriad special interests lights me the fuck up. Emerson raids the local Little Free Libraries like the adorable gremlin he is and often spoils me by bringing books back about topics that he either knows I’m fascinated with or that he thinks would catch my eye, and I do indeed feel very spoiled and lucky when he does that. That man is a catch and a half.

    I’ve seen the concept of “dopamine menus” floating around on the Internet for some time, as well, and I’ve started merging that concept with a sort of free form to do list before I go to bed if I’m not completely beat to fuck by the time I pass out and can spare a brain cell to dump all the things that might possibly bring me joy the next day even if things go to shit on paper. I often struggle in the moment to think of anything that would bring me a shred of happiness in the moment if I’m sad or bored or anxious and looking for a pick me up, and having all of that on hand and prepped the night before helps a LOT in those moments.

    I think all of those taken in tandem are a decent place to start. I’m trying to move away from the notion that I have to have a Grand Plan ™️ or a goal to accomplish at all times and I really think that teenage me had it right when they said that happiness was having good talks, good music, and good food with good people. That was really their goal in life, and I think they’d be proud of me for getting here. I do a LOT of all of the above.

    So stay tuned for more magic, horseshoes and weedwhackers (you decide what y’all are in the comments). See you fuckers next time.

    -Lazarus

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  • It’s been awhile…

    Hello, everyone! This is Lazarus again. I have been dealing with a mindfuck of a month that I can’t recall if I mentioned in my last post. However, the brunt of the mindfuckery is over and I’m just recuperating now. I have had no idea what to say and my brain has felt like a massive pile of goo, so the overwhelm has largely kept me from writing. However, I figure if I let the overwhelm and my guilt about the overwhelm continue to keep me from writing, I won’t ever write. So now I’m gonna put SOMETHING on paper for y’all because fuck perfection, in all honesty.

    The integration I mentioned in the last post has held. I am still just one guy in this mind, and the cPTSD is a bitch and a half. Combine that with AuDHD that’s an intrinsic part of my brain and well…. I constantly have to keep my anxiety and anger in check and make sure I’m in a decent place before socializing with anyone, really, or else I swear the ghost of my late great uncle speaks through me and it isn’t pretty. He was a cantankerous and iconic man who was widely speculated to be gay and everyone loved to poke him for his reactions. He would fucking explode, much to everyone’s delight. So I constantly have to keep THAT side of me in check. It’s a helluva time. I am about nine months sober from alcohol and I’ve largely quit using weed as well, and let me tell y’all… I have not wanted a drink more in the last month more than I have in this entire sobriety journey.

    Conversely, however, these cravings give me a solid cue as to what still needs work in my life. I crave a drink when I am stressed, and my chronic health issues often flare when I’m that stressed, too, and gods do I feel like an overworked manager at present. So when I get this way, I know I need to deal with the thing or things that are stressing me out that badly so that I can get peace/a break/what have you. I then deal with who or what is stressing me out head on and the cravings and often my physical pain and fatigue subside as well.

    One of the biggest stressors that is currently getting unfucked is Emerson and Zelda’s relationship. I’ve had to lay down the law with both of them and say with quite a bit of force “actually FUCKING talk to each other and unfuck your shit so that most of Emerson’s and my conversations aren’t him spiraling to me about how shit’s fucked with y’all and I’m stuck in the middle feeling like an overworked manager”. Both of them had been doing great work on their own getting their own shit together, but Zelda needed to know how their side of their relationship with Emerson was making BOTH of us feel. Things have been improving since Emerson and I gave them that metal chair of a conversation.

    Additionally, I love polyamory, but I’m coming to realize how badly I HATE getting caught in the middle of other relationships and having to serve as mediator of any kind. So I’ve been talking to everyone and letting them know – usually more gruffly than I would like – my feelings on the matter if things like this arise repeatedly. These aren’t my relationships, even if I’m dating everyone involved, and I’ve started running a tighter ship for my own mental health because I just can’t. I didn’t have that sort of freedom to speak up as a child or teenager or in previous relationships, but now that my relationships are healthier and my loves are receptive, I have started voicing my feelings point blank because ultimately that is my responsibility and shit won’t get any better unless I do. I used to live my life in the shadows where I knew the people around me didn’t look. As I heal and sort through my bullshit, I’m learning to take that scared 18-25 year old of the shadows and introduce them to the light. It’s terrifying. Viscerally terrifying. But the way my close people have responded is lovely.

    Now that shit is getting sorted locally, I have additional mental, physical, and emotional bandwidth to start connecting and reconnecting with people I haven’t been able to since shit has been such a trashfire here. I’ve been bonding more closely with my other partners – including a lovely new girlfriend whom we shall call Princess – and swapping memes and music and random rambles about our days. Hell, I just sent my girlfriend out East who is an avid reader of this blog when I actually post a random string of messages about the delicious trout I ate for lunch, haha. Vulnerability is AWESOME. We have been in talks to bring Lumine, who has posted here a few times, up for a visit, as well, as soon as he is able. I’m sure there will be much hilarious chaos and a great deal of laughter about lithium ion batteries and the like when we can make that happen! I have a cool as fuck suitor out in Michigan who is just lovely that I’m strongly considering dating at some point as well.

    Shit finally feels like it is looking the FUCK up and it is GOING to get better if I have to make it better with my BARE HANDS.

    Stay tuned for more magic, cherished hooligans!

    -Lazarus

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