Open Sorcery

Category: Ellie’s Writing

  • Firing Ourselves

    I found this post on Threads by the user thewandereredit and it got me thinking about betrayal and ultimately how we betrayed ourselves for the longest time due to internalized ableism and things like that. So I wanted to write about firing ourselves and how that has lead to more balanced relationships and a better quality of life in this disabled vessel.

    Hey, everyone! This is Ellie. I hope you all are having a great night. I found this great post on Threads about how people can betray you and drop you when you become disabled. However, I feel the post stands pretty well on its own, so I don’t want to give my two cents on the post directly. Instead, I want to talk about the concept of self betrayal within the context of disability and how important firing ourselves from time to time is and that we live slowly and let others handle things.

    So What Even Is “Firing Yourself”? How And When Do You All Do It?

    My fellow super-admin, Eight, first heard the term “firing yourself” from his former best friend who’d heard it from a mentor of his. Essentially, firing yourself is when you recognize you need to step back from a project for whatever reason and turn it over to someone else who’s in a better position to take it on. You can fire yourself for any number of reasons – you’re sick, you’re in pain, you’re tired, you’ve got too many things on your plate, you simply need a vacation, you may know someone more qualified and less busy than you. It takes a great deal of self awareness, yet it’s essential for avoiding burnout and can help you build deeper connections with the people you love by achieving something together rather than carrying it all on your own. Their perspective can help make projects richer and get them completed much faster than if you’d done it on your own.

    Firing Ourselves From Hyperindependence

    Now, we are tragically hyper independent. We actively enjoy doing as much as we can on our own and enjoy staying busy and juggling as much as we can. We call the dopamine hit we get from completing a challenging, complicated project “work emotion”. However, we are very disabled in a number of areas, and have a tendency to push the body and mind far too hard in the pursuit of achieving our goals on our own. We also tend to not ask for help until we are absolutely certain we will not be able to complete what needs to get done in time on our own or if we’ve found ourselves in such a goddamned pickle we’ll never get out of it on our own. This got better after we learned about the concept of firing ourselves, but it is still a struggle.

    Our Non-Negotiable Boundaries With Ourselves

    That being said, we reliably fire ourselves from a few things. If we are tired enough that a few puffs of nicotine or a bit of caffeine won’t perk us up, it’s bedtime, do not pass go. Unless someone is dying or there is some other emergency, we are firing ourselves from consciousness until the body feels replenished. If there’s a task that needs to be done immediately, we ask for help, secure a willing party to take care of it, and then pass out.

    Second, if whomever is in front feels like they will scream at the next person who speaks to or messages them, the system is out of social energy and needs to fire themself from socializing and be alone for a bit until they want to socialize again. Hell, I fired myself from social time with Emerson to write this post and chill out a bit because while I love him, I needed some space to get my thoughts together and catch up on some work. We’ve spent most of the day together and even did some great brainstorming for future collaborative projects! By gently firing ourselves from social time when we need it, we are giving him the space to learn how to define himself as an individual within our marriage and work on his own brilliant endeavors, something he’s never learned how to do.

    Third, if the body is in pain, we are firing ourselves from whatever we are doing that is causing the pain, relieving the pain, and taking a break. We don’t push ourselves physically to the point of physical pain or injury unless it it absolutely necessary, like fucking life and death.

    Fourth and finally, if someone is better equipped than we are to handle something than we are in that moment, we fire ourselves from that project and give it to them if they’re willing to handle it. For example, Emerson does most of the cooking for the both of us. We can cook and cook really damn well, it simply takes everything out of us to do. Emerson loves to cook, and it energizes him to cook for the people he loves. So he handles the lion’s share of the cooking and meal planning here.

    These are hard boundaries we have with ourselves, and everyone who knows us knows they cross them at their peril. We communicate all of them with everyone we talk to regularly. These boundaries come after two decades and then some of repeated self betrayal and attempts to ignore our disabilities and exist to prevent further harm and self sabotage from ever happening again. Viewing the above as non negotiables have massively improved our quality of life.

    It’s Taken Years Of Practice To Make Firing Ourselves Look This Easy

    What we’re doing may look easy to an observer, but it kills us inside to fire ourselves and involve other people in anything we do. It’s taken a lot of healing to even ask Emerson for help with fuckall! It’s absolutely a practice and you can bet your ass it’s taken years and a fuckload of self awareness. We have to face years of internalized shame, guilt, and terror daily to do this.

    So if you’re disabled like us and are learning how to take it easy, fire yourself, and set boundaries, and you’re fucking terrified, please rest assured that you’re not alone. Your friends and partner(s) who genuinely care about you want to help, and they don’t think you’re a burden for asking for support and reassurances. A burden is something a person takes on unwillingly. Your people chose you. Therefore, you are not a burden to your people. And let me let you in on a little secret from psychology: asking for help actually helps people feel closer to you rather than pushing them away. So mind your boundaries, but keep working toward firing yourself and letting your people in! We’ll do the same.

    Much love, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Your faithful super-admin, Ellie

  • An East Coast Playlist Ramble

    Hey, everyone! This Ellie. It’s been a bit of a long day and a longer night, but things are quiet and calm as the sun is coming up. So I’ve put our cozy East Coast playlist on and am rambling here to get my thoughts out before I finally pass out for a while. I had an idea to write about the first song that comes up here and any associations that come up with it. The song that came on first was “I Wish I Was The Moon” by Neko Case, an exquisite and warm sounding folky song (I apologize for not being the most articulate at present). Fortunately, I have associations aplenty with this song via my headmate Allēna’s memories.

    Allēna with a rather frightening facial expression at age 17, about a decade before we made our East Coast playlist, but just around the time she discovered Neko Case.

    It All Started In Our Teens

    Allēna may have in fact wished she was the moon when she discovered Neko Case in the system’s teens (see: our Tragic Backstory and Lore) but we didn’t discover “I Wish I Was The Moon” first. Instead, Allēna heard a song of Case’s playing on our local public radio station back where we grew up in Texas, “Night Still Comes”. At the time, she was taking a break from writing the story that would later become her science fiction audio drama The Third Prophecy and preparing to revisit her post-apocalyptic novel 2029, which she had written entirely longhand some years prior when she couldn’t access the Internet during school days. As she reconstructed 2029 in her mind, she played “Night Still Comes” on a loop. She played the goddamn thing so many times, in fact, that our brother, Blue, loudly complained about it to anyone who would listen.

    2029 and Other Writings

    I will put it to you all bluntly, 2029 sucked ass the whole way down. There are no two ways about it. However, it was a fascinating concept she simply didn’t have the skill at the time to execute. Set in the nearish future in Central Texas after a massive solar storm takes out all of the power worldwide, it was chillingly prescient in a lot of ways, especially in light of the recent solar storms in the past few months, and considering that she began work on the story when she was only fourteen!

    She also later married a man she had based a character off of, Fang, who was an unhinged Doomsday prepper in the story. This ended up not being too far from the truth. When she revisited the story, however, she drew heavily from “Night Still Comes” and music like it, creating a very dark folk/alt country soundtrack for herself to listen to while she wrote. She followed this pattern for a lot of her later work, as well, using the music she loved to listen to as a tool to help with world building and to unblock her when she got stuck. I believe she made a grand total of four playlists while drafting the first Third Prophecy audio drama that we later combined into one huge playlist.

    With the first Third Prophecy audio drama, the musical tie ins went a bit deeper than simple musical accompaniment. While not necessary to understand the plot, several songs did play key roles in helping her shape the setting and determine where the story was going. One such example of this is a town called Sunday. She named the town Sunday in honor of a song she cherished, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2. Now, I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but if you listen to the song and read the script (or listen to it once we have a production of it ready), you’ll notice some, ah, key similarities. These are intentional.

    What About The East Coast Playlist Itself? What Is That One For?

    If you recall, we’re practicing sorcerers. This playlist is, in simplest terms, a spell. It’s intended to manifest a move back to the East Coast over time. Eight made a mad dash to Philadelphia in 2021 and had to leave pretty shortly thereafter, but we keep getting summoned out there for one reason or another about once yearly and we miss it every day in the interim. So we want to move back there and stay there. The East Coast is home, even though we were born and raised in Texas. We feel like we’re in exile living in the Midwest in the meantime, and we hate it here, to be entirely honest.

    Yet, while we’re stuck out here, we are determined to make the best of it to the fullest extent of our ability. And if we hadn’t moved out here, we would have never met our beloved Emerson, so good things come even from shitty situations sometimes. He feels even more like home than the East Coast does, and he makes this place with its overly friendly people tolerable. He’s a very sweet baby.

    So three cheers for a very slow acting spell in the form of this delightful East Coast playlist! Hip, hip, huzzah! You get the picture..

    In Closing

    I hope any of this made sense. Having a brain that feels like it is filled with 85% cotton balls and 15% water has its challenges. Mostly in the form of wet cotton. Oh, hey, “Angelina” by Pinegrove is on, but that’s a ramble for a different day. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a snake themed rager in the headspace to crash attend. I mean, attend. You didn’t see anything. It wasn’t me, I swear!

    Stay tuned for more magic (and strange rambles), as always!

    -Ellie, Your Faithful Super-Admin

  • “Guernica” Part 2: Allēna Declares War

    Hello, everyone! My name is Ellie. As you may have read, I am one of the super-admins our this disaster system. I am still sick, so this post may read as incredibly sleep deprived. Or loopy, take your pick. In any case, I am going to pick up where Eight left off and discuss Allēna’s harrowing “Guernica” Part 2. If you missed yesterday’s post and you’re looking for that, it’s right here. And as always, the poem in full is part of our second poetry collection, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.

    This section is a kick in the soul. I’m just going to be honest, we couldn’t read it aloud for years without crying. It made for some very odd performances. Allēna makes some very powerful declarations here and in many ways foreshadowed Eight’s Operation: Dead Hand. Both Eight and Allēna wanted to get away from Hera. However, it wasn’t until Dead Hand was complete that we completely broke away from her, and we haven’t had contact with her for the past year, thank the gods. However, she does directly tap into her rage here for one of the first times in her life, and the results are something else.

    In order to best show you these results, I think Eight’s approach yesterday was excellent, so I’m going to continue doing things his way. First, I’m going to show you a video of Eight performing “Guernica”, Part 2. Next, I’ll write the text of the poem out for you. Then, I’ll analyze it for you. Without further ado, let’s do this thing!

    “Guernica” Part 2

    Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 2.

    The Poem’s Text

    “Guernica” Part 2

    thresholds are for brides

    and i was a bride once

    but that was a moment and

    i wore a dress as red as blood

    people asked why i did that

    i know why i did that now

    i didn’t know how else to say i was angry

    when my mind was taped shut and i was

    kept in a fog 

    damn those pills!

    damn the nightmares!

    damn that house that should have caught fire

    with all inside!

    i am not the crazy child kept in the attic!

    not anymore

    i am the human unchained,

    i am the one that walks free!

    i have doors now

    i have miles in my pockets

    i can and will lock you out. 

    and there’s blood on their hands

    they kicked a child 

    they should have loved the child

    but when they dropped the bombs

    the empty house of my mind caved in. 

    but the structure is stronger than that

    i am stronger than that

    and this is me calling it what it is….

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the bombers

    i say to the horrors that i experienced

    some people see battlefields

    i have seen a mind turned inside out

    i have been trapped in my own body

    i have seen my innocence die before me

    and i’ve shouted into the hole of loss

    and i’m still hearing the infinite echo. 

    i don’t know which is worse.

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the demons i fight

    your hell is not mine, 

    your chains are not mine, 

    i am not your wall to punch.

    i’m not a pewter cup to drink from and laugh with

    your hell is not mine

    not anymore. 

    this is me calling what it is…

    hell. 

    and i enter it on my own terms. 

    not yours, 

    not anymore. 

    Allēna wearing her wedding dress "as red as blood" as was mentioned i "Guernica" Part 2.
    Allēna in her wedding dress red as blood, as mentioned in “Guernica” Part 2

    For Context, Allēna Is A Born Anticonventionalist

    Practically from birth, Allēna was a fighter who was determined to fight convention and expectations that were placed on her without her consent. She hated the fact that women had very little power in the church she joined when she was 14 after very thorough research (she is a Byzantinist and avid scholar of early Christian history, after all).

    So she charmed all of the men in power so thoroughly that I’m convinced they might have let her get away with anything she wanted to so long as she could explain well enough why she had done it. She charmed damn near everyone else in multiple congregations, as well, so much so that many people cities away would go to her if they needed anything.

    The Mormon Social Nexus

    Everything and everyone passed through her. Eventually she knew hundreds of people in five to ten states who would go to bat for her if she needed them to. All while committing what would be for most people in the Mormon Church tantamount to social suicide. But it wasn’t, not for her. She had hundreds of people in her pocket. And it wasn’t like she was using them, she genuinely loved them and many of them still love her, despite her now openly being a Pagan gremlin.

    “Guernica” Part 2’s Seeds

    Her wedding to her first husband, Fang, was no different. They were married in late 2018, and Xavier, our father, had been dead from an aggressive brain tumor for nearly two years at the time of the ceremony. In that time, Hera had completely lost it and had gotten tired of Allēna’s fiery nature and had subjected her to severe mental and emotional abuse and medical neglect. We aptly compare it to a DIY version of the now-declassified CIA experiment MKUltra in order to make us more compliant, easily suggestible, and weak. It very nearly worked. Fortunately, we are all very stubborn and have a very resilient brain.

    The pills Allēna mentioned in the poem were prescribed for bipolar I, which we didn’t even have. We were autistic, plural, and extremely traumatized. We later learned that we were on the highest dose of one of those meds that our excellent psychiatrist in Alaska had ever seen, and she’d been practicing at that point for longer than we’d been alive. Allēna, completely gutted by losing Xavier, and seeing no hope in living, fell into a deep suicidal depression, which she met Fang in the big fucking middle of.

    Rush Job

    She saw herself attempting suicide within the year if she stayed in Texas, Hera was hurting her so badly, and her fate in Alaska with Fang would be unknown, but at least she wouldn’t have to stay in Texas anymore. Allēna and Fang wanted to eventually marry, but not immediately, setting a wedding date of April 8, 2024 once they were engaged. However, Hera didn’t want us living in sin, so she threatened to cut off our lifesaving health insurance if we went to live with Fang unmarried. So, medicated into a fog and pushed into a marriage she was unsure if she even wanted yet, yet still mad as fucking hell, she settled for her favorite skillset, one she knew would drive everyone up the fucking wall – malicious compliance and bucking the hell out of convention.

    A Dress As Red As Blood

    The wedding came together in three months, during which time Hera and Allēna had an explosive argument in which Hera spat “you’ll be someone else’s problem in three months, anyway”, which inspired Allēna’s iconic folk-punk song “Someone Else’s Problem”. The result was a dark, almost cowgoth ceremony that Allēna dictated down to the last detail on a shoestring budget, since Hera had spent all but forty thousand of the millions of dollars she’d inherited upon Xavier’s death. Allēna and Fang were married beneath an Osage orange tree per her orders, a nod to Xavier, who had taught her all about them.

    Like the Osage orange tree, which we affectionately call the “offensive tree of the forest” for its stubborn nature and tendency to drop things on people who are beneath them at random, Allēna would not be moved and blindsided the guests with a few bold choices – a bright red wedding dress, the song she walked down the aisle to, and the song that she and Fang left after the ceremony to, though that was more her brother Blue’s choice. She walked down the aisle to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky, a band from Texas like her, and the newlyweds walked out to “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. Blue was the emcee, and he did a damn good job. That dress would later appear in “Guernica” Part 2.

    “Guernica” Part 2 As A Declaration of War

    Once she moved to Alaska, she was able to process more of what Hera had done to her and how fucked her childhood actually was. She reasoned that she should have every right to be angry, Hera had hurt and betrayed her repeatedly, violated her autonomy, and tried to neglect and abuse her into a blank slate that she could finally reshape in her own image.

    Hera and a large part of her family had destroyed any chance she had ever had at normalcy beyond what the stroke did to her. She wanted her innocence back. It was time to reclaim what was hers. Her voice, her power, her fucking birthright. So by the old gods, she was gonna fucking claim it. She boldly asserts herself and her autonomy with that iron will of hers,

    “I am the human unchained. I am the one who walks free. I have doors now. I can and will lock you out.”

    The “doors” line and the next few lines are significant. She was quite literally kept in an attic from 2017 until she married Fang The entrance to her sleeping space – I can hardly call it a bedroom – was merely a staircase that opened up to the rest of a very open-concept house. Allēna didn’t even have a bed. She had to sleep on a window seat. Hera wouldn’t allow her to do anything to make the space more private or even more personal. Blue had a room, however. He had a private bathroom – that Allēna had to use – and had all the autonomy and freedom he wanted. He didn’t even have a curfew, and Allēna did.

    I Have Doors Now

    When she got to Alaska, she fought Fang for a space of her own and won. The showdown occurred in the summer of 2019, around the time she wrote “Guernica”. This was fierce argument in which he threatened to take away her health insurance if she didn’t stand down. He was taking a leaf out of Hera’s playbook, and she was pissed and terrified. Fortunately, her friend told her to call his bluff and see what happened. He was indeed bluffing, and now Allēna had an office of her own. This was a profound relief. She could finally be herself in her own space and have a measure of her own life now. To me, that shows in the poem. Now, for what must have been the first time ever, she could enter hell on her own terms, if she chose to at all.

    She cut Hera off for a time around the time she started writing “Guernica”, and this was a profound relief. Finally, freedom was within her grasp. All that was left to do then was to heal the damage that had all of Hera’s bullshit had done.

    She also cut off most of Hera’s family, and this was a scandal for them. This is why I sort of subtitled this post “Allēna Declares War”. It ignited a powder keg of bullshit the family still wasn’t over by the time Peri left Fang in 2020. The first time Allēna cut off contact was such a big fucking stink for them and so out of the ordinary that it pushed Eight into creating and completing Dead Hand. Heaven forbid people have boundaries and autonomy! My gods, the world is going to shit!

    Final Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 2

    How’s that for a kick to the damn soul? “Guernica” Part 2 always hurts me so good. I love it when people actually dig deep and be real with the world. Pretense sucks. Anyone can put on a mask and play a role, that’s easy. It takes true strength to be honest and open with the world about your story, and those are the people I admire. I really think Allēna opens herself up to the world here, and in my opinion, that’s true beauty. That is good poetry.

    What do y’all think? The comments are yours as long as you be kind. And as always, stay tuned for more magic – and “Guernica” Part 3!

    -Ellie Ulvaard, Your Faithful, if Sleepy, Super-Admin

    Wait! Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (hahaha, that one never gets old to me) and have joined the ranks of the Fediverse! Follow us? We are @opensorceryy on every federated social platform.

  • What Excites Us These Days

    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!

    What Excites Us? A Good Soundtrack, Always

    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.

    One of Allēna’s song renderings, Love Comes Tumbling (2016) after “Love Comes Tumbling” by U2. Music definitely excites us, as do creative projects.

    Speaking of Music, Add Songwriting to the List

    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.”

    But Wait! There’s More

    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.

    Simple Fucking Alone Time

    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…

    A Good List, Not a Long List

    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.

    Final Thoughts

    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)

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