Open Sorcery

Tag: trauma

  • 50 lives ago, I was jealous of her, but now it seems like I dodged a bullet…

    When I was 14 and had just started going in and out of the recording studio, an artist named Sarah Jaffe in the DFW area where I was born and raised was starting to get big on the local scene.

    Being the teenager bursting with insane, almost suicidal ambition that I was, I wished so badly that that could be me somehow. I had just released my debut extended play, Sweet Pea, that year, and even though everyone who heard it loved it, it really never sold outside of my friends and family that I know of.

    I felt like I had failed. I craved all of the attention that my family didn’t give me, and witnessing Sarah Jaffe’s rise to prominence filled me with a secret envy. We were from the same place, we both wrote music, we both had professionally recorded work, we both played live when we could. What was I missing? Why wasn’t I getting noticed outside of my social circle?

    Don’t get me wrong, I loved her music – I still do. This is intended to be more of a reflection of my emotional state at that time than any kind of a dig at her. That’s part of why I think it got to me so bad. I legitimately enjoyed what she created. I just wanted what she had, as well. I played her song “Clementine” on repeat regularly throughout my teens, as I deeply related to it. I wished I could be “more delicate”, as she put it, as I was so intense and driven that it frightened many of my teenage suitors away, with the exception of my future first husband, who was taken with my intensity and drive when we first met at 14 and 15 respectively, although he would not admit it until many years later.

    When she released an alternate version of “Clementine” on her album The Way Sound Leaves a Room a few years later that was stripped back to nothing but piano, her voice, and haunting backing vocals, I fell in love with it even more deeply. For the first time, it felt like I truly understood and felt the song’s essence, as I often do when artists release extremely scaled back versions of their music. By that time I had also fallen in love with her song “Mannequin Woman” and started teaching myself music production when my longtime producer ditched me, got a publishing deal, and made off for Los Angeles and stopped returning my calls, taking the rights to Sweet Pea in the process.

    I also worked through my envy over the years as I realized that I didn’t really want to be famous, as attention scared me just as badly as I craved it. Getting recognized on the street when I was gigging around Mormon college scared me about as straight as I’ll ever be, although I kept songwriting. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop, even though I go through a lot of dry spells nowadays.

    And then in 2024, as news of the Diddy scandal broke, I worked through the rest of my envy as I realized that I probably dodged a bullet by not becoming famous as a teenager. I had had a shitty enough time growing up with a highly controlling mother. I don’t think that, had my singing or songwriting career progressed any further than it did at the time, I would have fared any better at the hands of industry executives, and I learned an early lesson to trust nobody with the rights to my music when my producer left without any real trace. He’d likely been an anomaly, as well, by treating me as an equal collaborator when we recorded Sweet Pea, and not trying to change things too much unless I requested he do so.

    So, in summary… I still love Sarah Jaffe’s music. I don’t have any envy towards her anymore. I was an overly ambitious, precocious kid who also knew nothing about what I would have been getting myself into had things progressed. And honestly, now that I’m 29, I relate to these lyrics from “Clementine” even more.


    “We were young,
    We were young,
    We were young, we didn’t care
    Is it gone
    Oh it’s gone
    Oh it’s floating in the air?
    I changed my mind
    I changed my mind
    How I feel indifferent
    All that time, wasted
    I wish I was a little more delicate”

    -Allēna

  • On the concept of doing it scared.

    I found this post on Zelda‘s timeline and I have some thoughts about it:

    Mother fucker. I experience all of these on a daily basis or HAVE experienced all of these on a daily basis at some point in time. Especially the “fear of being seen”, as that is my agoraphobia in a nutshell. If I haven’t mentally steeled myself for a social situation hours to days in advance, it feels like being set on fire to be looked at. It’s THAT scary to me.

    I have to R E P E A T E D L Y face my terror and trauma to socialize and be amongst the world and do the poetry performances that I love. I’ve become the master of charging in and showing up to shit glass cannon style balls to the wall, when in reality, I do EVERYTHING scared. I do EVERYTHING some measure of tired. I may look fearless, but I’m really, really not.

    Which is heartbreaking because I legitimately love people and I love my city. I just don’t feel safe in the vast majority of situations for a very long time.

    My spouses have learned that I can be coaxed out of the house with decaf coffee bribes or cinnamon treats and the like, so that’s an improvement…

    -Allēna

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  • Getting Back on Track

    When we were younger, mid teens or so, our family would always accuse us of having a one track mind and say that we needed to “get off the track” when we hyperfocused on something a bit too hard for their taste or comfort.

    I, Allēna, am particularly bad about that. I’m very tightly wound, and I feel like a compressed coil much of the time. If something releases pressure on that coil, I might just.. Erupt and spill everywhere. I know much of that pressure is self imposed now that I’m an adult and is the result of a life filled with trauma, and as a result I am slowly but surely learning that I can learn to relax and I’ll still be safe and not everything will go to shit. I don’t have to be this poised image of perfection, and nor does everyone else. Not all the time, anyway. I view my AuDHD/CPTSD pattern recognition as both a blessing and a curse in this respect. It makes me very anxious, but I also get a lot done and a lot done in a way that gets results.

    That being said, I’ve been slowly learning now that life is becoming more stable to make time for my special interests, both old and new. That hyperfocus, that “track”, if you will, is what energizes me. I can’t switch mental trains of thought or tasks easily like a neurotypical or someone who has a different “flavor” of ADHD can. However, whatever I’m doing, if I care about it and enjoy it, I give it my all. I throw my entire soul into it, and gods, does  it make me feel alive again.

    It never hasn’t..

    I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to relax through my burnout like a neurotypical will. However, I do know that engaging with people and things that make me feel alive again when I’m up for the task is the closest thing I feel to R&R.

    And lately, I’ve been giving an old comfort show of mine a re-watch – Heroes. It’s an odd one. I don’t know many people who have seen it at all, but many actors I love are in it, and we watched most of it with our family back in 2011-12 or so, mostly on Wednesday nights.

    It has been an odd experience. Very comforting, yet I only remember about half of it. I think it’s because while I loved it, I was likely severely dissociated at the time, largely focused on other things and people, and may not have been the only headmate in front, but didn’t realize it at the moment.

    I don’t know. What I do know is this – it seems to have been a huge influence on my audio drama The Third Prophecy a little over a half decade later and one of the shows that made my system realize we were plural, but we couldn’t admit that to anyone for several more years.

    I’ll need to keep watching. I’ll keep y’all posted.

    -Allēna

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  • Ooops, I had more spoons than previously thought.. And made a zine.

    If you want your own copy of it, it’s over here 💛

    If you relate, you have my condolences. This is a sad one.

    -Lazarus

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