Tag: eight

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