https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5PBygMEBPCBqjjg2epjpYd?si=fVM6KQ9UQVGvE4PW9UsJJA&pi=IpBFB14HS_ueH
-Allēna
#chapbook #zine #readerswanted #poetry #poet #queerpoet #playlist #mixtape #inspiration #transpoet
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:g5qadbr42ljt3f2drk7lbua5/post/3lpd5it2xzk2p
How the eff it feels sometimes. I’m too tired to know where half of my ideas even COME from, they just hit me over the head with the poetic bonk stick and I compulsively HAVE to write them down. -Allēna #poetry #inspiration #channeling #amwriting #manifestation #automaticwriting #NEISvoid
A bit of context: my friend mk (it/its) posted an incredible thought piece on its Substack on feral anarchy, what it means, etc., and I found it very inspiring. I, too, am quite feral, a synesthete, have zero sense of linear time, and have built my very neuroqueer life from a place of loosely organized chaos. So I decided to make art that aimed to describe my experience a bit. Therefore… Have this!
Many of the words in this art piece are from my poetry, hehe.
I highly recommend reading mk’s work if you do not and following/subscribing! It’s doing great things.
-Lazarus ✨
Hey, everyone. A very sleepy Lazarus here. I am in dire need of a nap, but before I pass out, I wanted to write a bit. I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a suggested Reel by a creator named Kitty Knorr. This led me down a small rabbit hole through her account, and in one of her other posts she spoke about how it’s a lot easier to create and have a clear vision as an artist if you have a clear vision of your target audience. Let me see if I can go back and embed that particular Reel here..
This really got me thinking. A lot of people who connect with my work now are people who are in places I was in my life five to ten years ago, just like Kitty was saying. I hear a lot of people say that they connect with my album Mago now even though I released the damn thing in 2017 and it is one of the darkest, most harrowing things I’ve ever made in hindsight and I’m in a much better, more stable place now.
There’s a lot about the concept of my target audience being me from five to ten years ago that both terrifies me and gives me hope. My system from 2015-2020 in every area of our life was fucking broken and lost. As much as I would love to help people who are in places like I was back then, I worry that there is nothing productive I could offer them and I would end up making their lives worse and exhaust myself further in the process.
Conversely, however, I might be overthinking this, and better questions to focus on may be things like, “what would 2015-2020 me have loved to see in art or fiction that simply weren’t there yet”? “what representation were they longing for?” “what things could they have seen that would have freed them from shame?”
Perhaps if I focus on those questions and play around with those ideas, I could make some cool shit, audience or no audience.
Thank you, Kitty Knorr, wherever you may be. 💛 Now, I do believe it is naptime.
Gniiiiiiight!!
-Lazarus
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 ✨
Hey, everyone! Dria here. I’m Allēna’s cousin and a rather infrequent fronter, but I’m here today, so I figured I would scream into the void while I’m on deck for your viewing pleasure, because why not? We’ve challenged Sheik to write a blog post every day for the remainder of the week and I like participating in challenges. So I’m here, aboard the fucking bandwagon. Welcome to the shitshow, only Dria Edition today.
I came across this post (shown below) while making my Facebook rounds and it got me thinking.
I firmly believe that hope, like love, isn’t a feeling. Rather, it’s a practice. Sure, a person can feel hopeful or excited or optimistic about something, but it’s the practice of it, the action of it that gets them from that feeling to actually having the thing they’re hoping for in hand. So, by that logic, is perseverance through spite a substitute, or is it merely hope put into practice with a different motivation than blissful optimism? I would argue that it isn’t a substitute at all. Not by a long shot. Here’s why.
I’m not an optimist. Perhaps I’m an idealist, and a very angry one, and I belong to a system of very angry idealists who believe a better world is possible via widespread, hands on action and by people putting in the work to make the world a better, easier place for everyone, not just the rich fucks in power. And they’ve been putting in that work for years. They don’t stand for bullshit, Allēna especially, and they’ve worked very hard to heal and build a life that, at its core, prioritizes rest and care, fuck whatever the rest of the world has to say about it.
We were raised from a young age like many neurodivergent people socialized as women in Western culture, to be obedient, self-sacrificing for the good of everyone else around us at the expense of our own comfort and safety, to appear “normal”. There was one small problem there. We had gotten very sick as a tiny baby, had contracted heart failure due to a virus that attacked the body’s heart, and then had a stroke in quick succession, and had narrowly survived. This threw a wrench in the conditioning, because in order for us to appear normal, we had to be anywhere close to normal.
People who are anywhere close to normal do not survive near fatal heart failure without a goddamned transplant, fucking massive strokes, then go on to walk, talk, sing, and teach themselves how to play numerous musical instruments by fucking ear. We were fighters with a will stronger than goddamned diamond even before the age of a year old. Fuck iron. Anything less a will made from something stronger than the hardest stone on Earth and we would be dead. And by the fucking gods, we were not fucking dying. Not yet. We were fucking pissed.
Nobody believed we’d survive that objectively hopeless situation, but we fucking survived it and became goddamned polymaths to show for it. Forget normal. If we were normal, we would be long dead by now. We put hope into practice even when we didn’t realize that’s what we were doing simply because we didn’t give up the fight. Our mind broke into 1,700 pieces but our solid will did not, even after countless people wrote us off, mocked us, tortured us, abused us, and neglected us. We never fucking gave up.
We called what we were doing by a number of names – rage, spite, revenge, survival – but what it ultimately was was hope as a daily practice. By putting one foot in front of the other and choosing to move forward when we didn’t want to and could have given up, we were practicing hope. And now, we’re 27. We’re safe. We saved ourselves, goddamnit. I’m writing this from a cozy bed in Sheik’s apartment. Because of their mad hope, their courage, and their fucking indomitable will, my headmates’ work in a variety of disciplines has saved lives and they’ve built an honest to gods shitposting empire on social media, as well. I’m proud to be a part of this cockroach system that understands that hope isn’t a fucking emotion and puts it into practice every day even when the odds are stacked and the game is rigged.
So if you feel like your situation is hopeless, may you have the sheer guts to be spiteful for long enough to realize that you were practicing hope all along. ✨
Peace out, esteem’d sewer rat warriors. As always, stay tuned for more FUCKING magic.
-Dria (he/him), Rat Lord
Hey, everyone! My name is Allēna. Even though I have yet to post here officially, it seems my reputation precedes me – my headmates wrote a standout series of pieces on my multi-part poem “Guernica” that requires very little introduction. I guess you might say that I’m the most reclusive super-admin in a system of of recluses, second only to perhaps Renn. As Ellie did before me a few times, I found the inspiration for this post on social media, Threads specifically. I included my findings in the image above. This post perfectly describes the struggle we keep having system wide with making posts and creating content. As people, we are essentially an open secret.
From 2021 and on, we were increasingly pushed into the limelight when we wanted nothing more than to be as far from it as possible. Yet, almost everything we enjoy doing is very social and requires a great many high powered connections to ever dream of getting eyes on our creations on a large enough scale to make the sort of money or achieve the sort of notoriety to make the sort of reclusive lifestyle we ultimately long for possible. So it becomes a sort of balancing act and a question of vulnerability. How much do we share? How much is comfortable? How much is safe? How much is trauma talking, and how much of it is logical to fear?
Before Eight took over, we were far more open. Granted, I still had to be careful lest I still risk fucking horrific punishment, but I wasn’t agoraphobic and wasn’t afraid to try and connect with people even if I had to express myself in code if my mother was around. It wasn’t until our mother betrayed Peri and then Eight multiple times and they weren’t sure who they could trust that they became too afraid to be open with anyone that we truly became an open secret the way we are now. That has only started to change back for the better since meeting our husband, Emerson.
Before him, however, we would hardly tell anyone anything about ourselves. Much of our content would be what Eight called “bread and circuses”, memes and shitposts designed to distract people away from the fact that we were pretty severely depressed and suffering, often in and out of abusive situations we didn’t feel safe to go into detail about. We would only ever ask people for help if we were truly suffering to the point of chronic suicidality or things were getting so dangerous they posed a significant threat to our physical safety and we needed help yesterday. Much of what we would make and share was hilarious but was an attempt to mask our deep pain. We had forgotten how to genuinely connect with people due to the agoraphobia and ever-worsening complex PTSD.
Besides meeting Emerson, what changed? Why did we stop?
Eight may be a recluse like the rest of us, but he hates being bored. When he’s bored he is the embodiment of the old idiom “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop” and in that mind the Devil finds many tools. Therefore, that old bastard delights in novelty and in being completely unpredictable. He eventually grew tired of doing the same damn bread and circus bullshit and also realized it wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be, so he decided to take a risk and try and be a bit more vulnerable…you know…as a treat. He was terrified, but he sure as hell wasn’t bored anymore. Mission fucking accomplished. It’s difficult to be bored when you’re midway through a massive panic attack and hyperventilating like you’re being chased by a pissed off lion, you know? He’s also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, in case you haven’t gathered that. Speaking of that..
We’ve never been the sort to keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t working. Even though it’s terrifying, we figured out pretty fast that staying closed off like that wasn’t going to get us anywhere, both in the real world OR online. People generally like to know who it is that they’re dealing with, and that involves vulnerability, believe it or not. So we had to learn how to be vulnerable again, as terrifying as it was. It’s still very much a work in progress. However, the payoff is worth it in our closest relationships, and we’re rediscovering that there are many people we can trust. We just have to actually be brave and self disclose.
That isn’t to say, however, that we’re spilling our guts out 24/7 to everyone all the time. There’s still a great deal of the bread and circus type fuckery. There’s just more of us going out on a limb now and actually being honest about how we’re really doing now rather than hiding it behind memes and humor or trying to walk it all off now like nothing’s actually wrong.
Oh, fucking plenty. And we still don’t share anything we don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing publicly. We aren’t gonna talk about shit if we aren’t ready or push ourselves more than we have the capacity for. People can think of that however the hell they want. Just because they might talk about certain things publicly doesn’t mean we have to, and vice versa. We only really give a shit about what a handful of people think, and odds are that if we don’t know the person closely and personally, we don’t rightly care about their opinion. No one is entitled to shit from us unless we agree they are.
And weirdly, that private way of doing things often gets us read as “mysterious” and often works in our favor, so if it works, it works, even if it’s not intentional. It isn’t intentional, for the record. We’re often tired and don’t want everyone to know our every move or else we would not have the energy or time to execute those moves, let alone breathe.
Being this sort of open secret is a balance between being vulnerable and providing the people with memes and other bullshit content. We’ll always be honest, but we may not say everything. We’ll do our utmost if asked, though, boundaries and energy permitting.
As my headmates say, stay tuned for more magic!
Yours in tomfuckery,
Allēna, Super-Admin
Hey, everyone! This is Ellie here once more. It’s been a very long week, and I seem to be getting sick. As such, I was kinda feeling unmotivated to write on here today. So I decided to challenge myself after looking at some very cool journal prompts and write about what excites us as a system currently and what we’re looking forward to. Even though things are crazy over here and it feels like there’s barely enough time to breathe over here often, lots of exciting things still happen. Expect a short-ish post since I am so tired. I’m sorry!
First and foremost, music always excites us. Many of us in the system struggle to tap into my emotions without music playing. Every alter in the headspace that has fronted so far likes to create to music. We often struggle to identify what we’re feeling unless we can find music that sounds like the emotion we’re experiencing, as well. We build playlists for every mood. When we need a boost, we absolutely have playlists for that! Our headmate Chaos even crafted a playlist that helped us on our mad dash out of Texas in 2021 that was specifically designed to pump us up, keep us focused, and keep us moving. It’s called Songs To Implode Things To and you can listen to it on Spotify here. I hope it inspires you as much as it has my entire system.
We’re very neurodivergent, so music makes the body and the brain feel very good. Songs we like make every cell in our body feel alive. Many of us in the system are also synesthetes, and have strong associations between sound and color due to our stroke. One of my fellow super-admins, Allēna, actually painted music as she saw it in her synesthetic mind’s eye in college and wanted to create an entire multi-sensory modern art exhibit. I would love to create that exhibit at some point still.
We don’t just listen to music! We write and produce it, as well. It’s immensely cathartic to us as well as exciting to play, perform, and record our original songs and arrangements.
Performing is always a rush. It took many years for us to believe in our skills, but now that we do… oh damn, are we on fire. We were even doing some recording today for our sixteenth record. We’ve been recording for years, and the feeling of when a record starts to come together STILL never gets old. We know when we have a viable record at a definable point every time, and it’s different for each one. We wrote about how Eight knew his masterpiece Metacognition was ready to emerge a few days before he recorded the bulk of it a day after reading a single line. It’s stuff like that. We had a similar moment with #16, working title Australis, a few months ago with the lines “Every time we fight I imagine you leaving/It hurts less and less each time I fuckin’ see it.”
We’ve noticed that slowness and consistency have been exciting us more and more. Exhausting shit has been happening for years straight, and we’re increasingly attracted to things that give us the freedom to rest for once. You know that old stereotype that your body starts to hurt and you’re dog tired by the time you’re thirty? That happened to us by the time the body was fifteen or sixteen. So what excites us now is absolutely not what excited us in our teens and earlier twenties when we were still trying to pretend we were abled and superhuman and didn’t need help from a fucking soul.
One of the things we never thought would excite us and yet very much does is very simple – alone time. Eight is one of the only extroverts in the head, if not the only one, and so alone time or one on one company with someone we deeply love and trust absolutely excites us. Especially if we manage to get everything on our to-do list completed beforehand and we can unwind for the rest of the day. It’s lovely. We never stopped being very fast readers and can still devour entire novels in under a day if we have the energy to do so. Now, about that one-on-one time…
We don’t have many people we trust enough to hang out with in person, but if we do trust a person that much, odds are they’re very energizing and yet soothing to be around. We tend to meet people virtually first since we’re essentially housebound and are definitely agoraphobic, so it’s easier that way. Many of us can get a good sense of who a person is intuitively that way without having to deal with the terror of an initial in-person meeting. Plus, with COVID still going around, even if we weren’t disabled, we would still want to be cautious. These soothing, safe people excite us, and we love talking to them however we can. We love our people, chronic fatigue and disabilities aside.
This is a short list of some of the things that excite us. I want to come back and write more in depth about some of the things I wrote about here, but for now, brain fog demands that I wrap this post up. One of us do our best to post tomorrow, but depending on how we feel, we might not be able to. I hope you enjoyed this post nonetheless, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!
-Ellie Ulvaard, Super-Admin
Oh! Looks like Renn successfully got Open Sorcery WebFingered, hehehehe. Give us a follow on the federated social platform of your choice for INFINITE POSTS! (half joking)
