Open Sorcery

Tag: catharsis

  • I did a truly badass thing tonight.

    Enjoy. I feel like I finally did it justice.

    If you’re interested in reading more, “to dance with a cyclone” is the opening ringer of my 2019 poetry collection of the same name.

    -Allēna

  • About Time

    Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?

    The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.

    A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.

    And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.

    Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛

    “one: the end. texas + points east”

    somebody,
    somewhere…
    i remember my heart burning 
    as i longed for the leaves of the east 

    count up all of the hours in the day
    execute plans with no emotion 
    execute emotions like they are enemies
    i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
    such that

    all you see is your reflection 
    it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
    of who i once was
    she was weak and afraid 
    i killed her
    i am electricity
    born from the ashes of my home, 
    my hell
    do not presume you can put a label on me. 

    you will not learn to hate me.
    you will learn to be afraid of me. 
    to drink about me 
    and worship me (posthumously) 
    and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
    to who i was 
    who you thought you had
    who you once were 
    and who you wish you could still find

    i was a child then. 
    i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
    you grew up too slowly for your taste 
    i miss the boy you were
    even then 
    even though i was a teacher
    you taught me everything i know
    i was odd and you were even and steady 
    my eccentricity was my salvation 
    and the universe loves irony and wordplay.

    “two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”

    i had a waking dream last night
    someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
    wrapping themself in inky cloth 
    in chapel hill, north carolina…
    the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet 
    i would know when my marching orders come 
    i have not learned enough to be able to see 
    what i am looking for for what it is yet 

    would i see it as a prison now?
    or would i see it as coming home?
    what if i chew through the bars 
    of what i am supposed to love?
    i fell in love with points east before 
    and all signs are pointing to that 
    as my home 

    you may remember me as a season 
    a time of day, a concept -
    i think of you as places i have yet to walk 
    i see beginning as end as beginning 
    i see you as who you are, who you were, 
    and who you will become 
    you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful 
    you are soft and tender and strong 
    you are cosmic in scope and 
    infinitesimally small at once 
    you are that you are.

    “three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”

    i told you once when i was elsewhere that 
    buddhism seemed round 
    you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel 
    i used to be scared of going forward
    i thought it endless and vast when it is truly 
    cyclical and you can return to where you 
    were as easily as listening to your favorite song
    some revolutions just take longer than others 

    the last watch of the night is deep and rich 
    and sweet like a plum 
    indigo like the deepest sea 
    this is where i make my home 
    i tell my stories after dark 
    comfortable in the space 
    between ending and beginning 
    you remind me of different paths 
    the road not taken
    but all roads lead home 
    some are just longer than others
    more winding -

    and home is where you will find me 
    i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times 
    i know great and terrible things 
    i’ve asked the void questions 
    and she has answered me. 
    who is out there?
    where are they?
    her answer?
    go back to the end.

    I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • 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

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

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

  • 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 ✨

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • 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

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • 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

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • For the Fairest

    Hey, everyone. This is Allēna. It’s been awhile, and I’m sorry about that – it’s been a bit of a mental trashfire for us of late and none of us quite knew how to talk about what was going on through the fatigue, confusion, and what appears to still be the mother of all flares. I’m still not feeling too hot and I still have to figure out where the fuck most of this month’s rent is going to come from, but things are starting to look up somewhat.

    Emerson got a job after months of hunting, and after that we kinda crashed after the few months we’ve had. I’ve been more or less frontstuck since that point, seeing as I’m one of the only headmates with decision making power, the stamina to front more than a couple hours at a time, and love for both Emerson and the Zelda System. The majority of my headmates do not like Emerson, and so it’s less effort to have me front most of the time even though that means I never get a mental break and often am reduced to a puddle of tears by the end of the week. Cleaning up my headmates’ interpersonal messes would be worse.

    I don’t want any more messes. I already have a full plate of stuff I’m working on, and enough interpersonal plot fuel from Eight alone to last a lifetime. That man’s friend group is the gift that keeps on giving. I may mean that sarcastically, I may not, that depends on the occasion. This week, however, the jury is out.

    You may recall us mentioning in our last post that I’d gone through a PTSD wave of epic proportions recently because Zelda had gotten together with someone who is also a mutual friend of ours? Well, let’s call this mutual friend Helen. Helen is the sweetest person. I fucking adore them. However, I inherited them (and the extremely complicated shitfest they somehow got dragged into back in ‘22) from Eight via one of his myriad exes from the time he had uncontested control of the system from approximately late 2020 to early 2023. Eight is a cockroach if a cockroach were also a human being, and that human being were also a rockstar. So Helen met Eight first and was…put off at best all those years ago, then decided to attempt a friendship this year now that things are different, we’ve all grown as people, and things actually have been going much better. Well, until the PTSD bullshit happened. Now they’re going even better than they were before, which is the weird part to me.

    I say this is weird because Helen and Eight weren’t very close when all the shit happened back in ‘22. Both of us have admitted that. So if we’d gone to them with a concern of this magnitude then, it likely wouldn’t have brought us closer together and would have driven us further apart, if we’d gone to them with that sort of thing at all. Now, I may be off, but I would say that we’re pretty damn close. Neither Helen nor my system wasted any time establishing that closeness this time around. We all meant fucking business, likely unconsciously. I certainly wasn’t meaning to get close to Helen for any particular reason, I never even thought it would happen given how guarded I knew them to be from Eight’s memories. But I was given openness, warmth, and kindness, and I enjoy Helen’s company and conversation, so I too opened up with time.

    Here’s where that makes things complicated, though. Helen and Emerson barely talk and Emerson mostly initiates. Emerson and the Zelda System are now (back) together, as well. Em has been internally screaming of late because he’s terrified at a baseline that my system and Zelda are gonna fuck off and leave him behind, and now that Helen is in play, so to speak and barely talking to him, things have gotten even worse for him in that regard.

    There’s also been a rash of speculation – because we are all bi/pan/queer disasters in some form – that Helen and I are crushing on each other, as well, but I don’t live in their brain and I don’t know where I stand with that fully yet, either. I don’t like not knowing, especially where my own emotions towards a person are concerned, so I’m watching my side and seeing how shit plays out there before I speak on anything with any degree of certainty.

    All of this is in turn making me anxious because there’s not a whole lot I can do except watch the shitshow go down, because there’s not a whole lot that’s within my power to fix here. I am the sort of person who fixes things by nature when I get anxious or stressed out, and there’s nothing I can fix here, so theoretically I have nowhere to put the stress. Therefore, I’ve had to distract myself by pouring all of that jittery energy into other conversations and building other relationships and projects where I’m able. Emerson and I have been doing a great deal of work on our side of the internal screaming equation, but sadly there’s approximately fuckall I can do where Emerson relative to Helen and Zelda are concerned because ultimately I’m not them and can’t control their actions. So while all of this goes down in the moment I have to set boundaries with myself and put my own internal screaming somewhere ideally constructive in the meantime.

    This, due to the degree of fatigue and mental fog, usually results in me sending Helen memes. Memes are Helen gold, and it is quite surreal to hear Zelda and Emerson in a heated discussion about the aforementioned Helen in the next room while sending them memes has turned into something like lighthearted banter and the heaviest conversation I’ve ever had in my life simultaneously while all of this is going down 🤣. I swear, this individual has more patience than I ever will because I live this day in and day out and I’m about to melt down from stress and there they are over on their end, being the sweetest person alive about allllll the fuckery in a single place occurring right here, right now.

    I’m so tired, but everyone has been solid where they are able despite all of the numerous occurrences of the past 2 weeks or so and I still feel very loved and cared for despite all of this shitfuckery.

    I love them, and I love y’all. Hopefully I’ll have more art magic for y’all once everything balances out a bit more, rent gets sorted, and Emerson starts work. Stay tuned for more magic (and nonsense), beautiful people!

    -Allēna, Your Faithful, If Exhausted, Captain and Founder of the Polyamorous Dojo of Chaos

    Enjoyed this post? Subscribe below to never miss another!

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • Two New Synesthetic Art Pieces + A Bit About Unmasking For Us

    Hi, everyone! This is Allēna. I don’t know if “synesthetic” is actually a word, but for the purposes of this post, it is now because I’m tired and I need a word for “pertaining to synesthesia” or else I’ll never get around to writing about a lot of the shit my system makes. I want to write about it sooner rather than later because we’ve been tapping into our synesthesia hard. We’ve also not really been able to write on here much these past few days and I missed it, so even though it’s the ass crack of dawn right now – 3:25 AM as I’m typing this – I’m making a point to write. Our sleep cycle is fucked and so I’m leaping on an idea while I have one.

    I joined a Discord server on a whim the other day that seems to cater pretty heavily towards fellow neurodivergent synesthetes. One of the things users could opt into were reminders to unmask their neurodivergence. I always need those, so I opted into all of them for the hell of it. It’s been working wonders for our creativity over time. Hell, it’s probably why we’ve been writing as much as we have, the server is full of reminders to intentionally tap into queer joy and synesthetic imagery. It feels like home.

    Consequently, these reminders have started getting us to make more visual art. Castor painted this abstract portrait of Sheik yesterday:

    Sheik (2024), by Castor

    And then today, I painted one of our friend Delta’s songs, “Return”:

    Return (2024), by me

    I’ve really missed painting. It’s one of those things that Fang never really understood during our marriage and made me feel like shit about. He couldn’t see the meaning in the colors and placements. It sucked, but I’m glad to be getting back into it now that we’re supported.

    In the coming weeks, we’re going to be playing around with ways to make DIY pen/paintbrush/pencil grips so that we can hopefully get back to writing longhand and creating traditional art without it fucking killing our joints. We’ve been stuck in executive dysfunction hell. I hope my doctors can get my ADHD meds refilled so that I can actually do things in a timely manner again instead of feeling like I blink and fourteen hours pass. At least I get to make cool art out of it..

    Anyway, stay tuned for more magic, y’all!

    -Allēna

  • “Numb” – Linkin Park Cover

    Hey, everyone! Allēna here. Eight mentioned awhile ago on here that I had recorded a cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park because I was in that sort of headspace. Well, Fen finally figured out how to upload audio, so I’m gonna FUCKING POST IT HERE for y’all! Enjoy!

    My very jazzy cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park. Play it, download it to your heart’s content, y’all can even remix it and add to it if you want. Just please don’t take credit for writing it (that honor goes to the late, great Chester Bennington and his band, I’m unsure of who all contributed) or performing it. Be kind 💛

    There’s more magic and BS to come, people! Stay tuned.

    -Allēna

  • First Breath After Coma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    -Castor, Original Host