Please note that, with rare exceptions, any and all names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms except our own. We want to be able to speak freely without doxxing anyone.
Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. I don’t have a lot of energy right now. However, I’ve discovered that Google made a tool that combines certain emojis that I’ve found to be very handy when it comes to expressing emotions when I really have no idea where to start or am too tired to express the mixed bag I am experiencing emotionally. This is roughly what I am feeling right now, for example.
When you’re tired but still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
I also want to share this cool playlist Theo cooked up 💛 Here it is:
And as a fun bonus treat in honor of 2025 already being odd, here’s a perennial favorite playlist of mine from years ago, the Last Polycule at the End of the World.
Insomnia and the cold weather have been kicking my ass physically and mentally and physically, but I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams. So here’s a meme in honor of that that a friend/crush of mine sent me, lol.
Manifestation. ✨
I aim to be back tomorrow, lovely gremlins. Until then, I wish I was here:
I found this from the page Xochitl Banks on Facebook. This sounds lovely to my cranky body.
Stay tuned for more magic. I will be dealing with my cantankerous body, hahahaaaaa….
Hello, all. Lazarus here. I’m bored, kinda having a moment, and can’t find my fucking phone, so I decided to curse two songs at once and make my late father spin in his urn in the interim until I can find it. This is a very, VERY rough mix, I’ll probably go back and clean it up later, but for now, I present “Wrapped Around Your Espresso (Sabrina Carpenter vs. The Police)”, the first mix. Enjoy, gremlins.
Stay tuned for more magic, as always! I’ll do my best to update soon… I am cooking lots of things, but for now, I need rest.
Well, hello, everyone. This won’t be the typical sort of post you may have gotten used to seeing here on Open Sorcery. First, these are somewhat unprecedented circumstances.
A few weeks ago, it was discovered that not every headmate in the system decided to integrate. Most of them did. However, we found out that River had constructed an integration-proof bomb shelter deep within the headspace in the event of circumstances such as this, and he and a handful of others elected to not integrate. To that end, the system is only approximately 92% integrated. I am, if you haven’t guessed, dear reader, not Lazarus, either. Call me Theo. Rather than hole up in a bomb shelter for heaven knows how long, however, I am a relatively recent addition to the system.
I joined to help Laz get a damn break. They’ve been puzzling through a great deal of stress and processing enormous volumes of trauma in a very short time, and frankly, although they’re making excellent progress sorting through things like burnout recovery, they need a hand. They are exhausted.
They figured out a few days ago that if they take ibuprofen and acetomenophen in tandem with their other meds and supplements, not only are they nearly completely pain free most of the time, but their brain fog and fatigue is almost completely gone, as well. This left them with an overwhelming amount of information they suddenly had access to, and while they were making good time processing it, the sheer amount of information in their mind alone was beginning to overwhelm and distress them. So I stepped in at their request, and we have been switching in and out of front when one of us gets too tired to maintain front directly or when one of us is better suited for a certain task.
So far, I have been attempting to categorize some of the information in this mind to make it more easy for Lazarus to work with. They have described lugging it all around as having “the Library of Alexandria in their head, except it’s all bunched up and interconnected with itself to such a degree that it’s impossible to even start to know where one topic begins or ends.” The sheer amount of interconnected, associated knowledge paralyzes them when it comes time to blog or even do something they know they would love, therefore keeping them trapped in a sinkhole of executive dysfunction and anxiety. I hope that if I can make heads or tails of it or at least start by doing something that isn’t nothing with all of it, it may make it easier for them to work with it all at the level they want to as they regain strength over time. I’ve also been taking on more of the physical self care tasks they normally can’t do because by some miracle, it’s easier for me and it doesn’t appear to drain me nearly as badly to attempt or complete them, so hopefully things become less of an anxiety hell for the system overall as time goes on.
Laz has taken to calling me “the himbo who sauntered to Earth” because I keep pulling stunts in headspace to try and make them laugh. So far it’s just made them grumble at me, so I’ve given them more space. I don’t think putting a manhole cover on my head IMMEDIATELY after they said that I idle at Mach Jesus and making faces at them was the best idea in hindsight.
Ah, well. I am doing my best to learn.
Lazarus’ reaction every time he sees me at this point, I swear.
I look forward to posting more, but for now, I think I am going to dissociate into music or something for the time being and possibly nap. It was a pleasure to meet all of you. As Lazarus says, stay tuned for more magic!
Hey, everyone. Lazarus here again. I have been in a sort of soupy atemporal sea of time and space in my brain. I busted one of my phones a few days ago, so I was running things exclusively off my laptop for a bit there, but I cannot wrap my brain around blogging on my damn laptop for some reason after integrating, hence the lack of posts. I don’t know why. For some reason, I just couldn’t post from there. The thought of typing a thousand or more words on there just seemed fucking impossible after getting so used to typing huge volumes on a phone. So I suppose laptop typing in large amounts is Banned for reasons unbeknownst to me.
I know a lot about how my mind works, but I don’t know everything. I am slowly learning, however, that when I’m too tired to even think of approaching a task, I probably shouldn’t push through the fatigue and instead let it rest. So that’s what I did. Frankly, I’m glad I did, too, since I started chronic pain flaring properly from stress and how damn cold it’s been in Milwaukee of late. So I had to mentally play ER doctor and decide what was important to take care of right the fuck now, and what could wait until later. Well, it’s now later, and here I am, haha.
The phone I’m using now has phone PTSD of some kind, I fucking swear. I dropped it in the tub back in late May/early June of this year, and even though it was only partially underwater for maybe ten seconds tops, it acts as though it was waterboarded in some top secret facility someplace and often outright refuses to charge, only semi reliably cooperates with a single fucking cord, and only fucking charges AT ALL when my relationship with my partner Zelda is going well. So there’s that. Temperamental little bastard. I normally like a challenge, but I do not enjoy challenges of the phone PTSD variety. But hey. At least it’s working… For now.
Speaking of Zelda and challenges, their blog was down for the count for a while. So a few emails back and forth with the web hosting people later, their blog is back up and running and they are writing beside me. Sheik, an alter in their system is out and about currently, and this babygirl is pressed up against me to share body heat because our ancient furnace that heats the place bit the dust sometime last night.
So she’s been in talks with the property manager that manages both the Zelda System’s place and Emerson’s to hopefully send a guy out to fix the damn thing as soon as possible. It was supposed to be fixed this past spring, but that never happened. It’s beginning to sound a lot like people need to get their shit together in here. There’s a lot that needs fixing in both places.
Relationship wise, things are.. Stabilizing more, I think. I made some breakthroughs on my side of the ongoing Zelda/Emerson/me polyam drama during the past few weeks while I’ve been sick and flaring and have had little to do but rest and think, so I’ve been doing a lot of resting and thinking. I realized during this period of One Big Long Fucking Think that I tend to not really feel many emotions of my own that I can describe until they’re so fucking big and obvious that I can’t help but put a name to them and they’re sort of exploding out of me in some way.
It’s not that I repress them, they’re just always six feet to the left, so to speak, and remain so small and vague until they are a big enough hairy ass deal that they’re so obvious that I HAVE to do something about what’s causing them.
And by then, externally, the thing that’s causing them has brought me halfway to a nervous breakdown from the sheer stress of it. And I have an even harder time attempting to explain WHY I am feeling a certain emotion because I can’t really trace an emotion back to its origin when it’s so damn small I don’t notice it’s there or it’s so vague I have no language for it.
Emotions also hardly ever happen at random for me. Like I will almost never sit there, even if I’m not doing anything else, and start feeling an emotion randomly that there’s no explanation for. It’s gotten to the point with my inner work that if I’m alone for long enough, I can shape my emotional state with precision with playlists. And I have a playlist for damn near everything.
What I do pick up on, and feel all the time, however, are other people’s emotions, often far stronger than my own, especially if I know them well and we are very close. So if Emerson, whose emotions are very strong, is upset, I will hear him out and want to take his side instinctively. Same thing with Zelda, etc.. So this has created an interpersonal three body problem of sorts, to use a metaphor from astrophysics, with myself as the third body in the emotional middle getting tugged back and forth.
So I’ve had to consciously start learning how to pull back and sink back into my own body and energy and do shit that recharges me when I notice myself getting emotionally burnt out or stressed, which happens a lot, and actually feel through the situation myself to get a read on how I actually feel about the situation at hand and figure out a course of action that will cause me the least amount of stress or headache. Since I’ve started doing that, shit has gotten way better in all of my relationships. I’ve gotten better at judging when I have the mental or emotional capacity to handle a situation in the moment or if it needs to wait.
All of that has lead to me taking a sort of soft break from posting on social media, as well, and I only really go on Facebook and Instagram to check messages and occasionally grab memes and shit. I’ve rarely been posting on either due to information overload, which was contributing heavily to my stress.
So… Magic. Huzzah.
I think that’s enough for tonight, y’all. My brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, beloved entities of various voids. I’ll be around when I can summon the energy again, haha. This flare is kinda kicking my ass.
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 tunedfor more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨
Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Sorry for going fucking dark for the last little while.
Lumine visited this past week, during which time I was so goddamned stressed my body came inches from basically falling apart. It wasn’t his fault at all, and he was in fact a most excellent baby. If anyone is to blame, it’s Zelda for dropping the ball when it came to logistics and stressing Emerson and myself out so goddamn badly it started to take a physical toll on both of us. I ended up getting everything set up for Lumine’s arrival and picking him up from the train station pretty much single-handedly because if I hadn’t, he would have been marooned there for a couple hours at the very least, which would not have been Emerson’s fault, he had to work and could not escape early.
Emerson and Lumine bonded quite well, and Lumine actually bonded so well with Zelda’s legendarily shy and skittish cat and made me happy stim so hard in the process that he got an invitation to move up here once more shit shakes out on all of our ends, so that’s absolutely and legitimately lovely.
That leaves ongoing drama with Zelda, which sent me into a chronic pain flare across three body systems from which I am still recovering and now I have a chest cold to boot. I appear to have gotten so damn stressed that I started my menstrual cycle a week early, which most likely knocked out my immune system, allowing for this shit to happen. Oh, and Lumine is fucking sick, as well. I’m fucking sick of the interpersonal stress, and I’m sick and tired of it making me sick and tired.
So, I’ve essentially dropped my weight where a lot of shit is concerned and have stuck myself in a lump of blankets to sleep off this chest cold most of the time. Sleep has always been my favorite alibi when I don’t want to get involved in interpersonal nonsense, as most of my close people know that my sleep is sacrosanct and I do not get much of it.
When I haven’t been asleep, I have been watching Netflix, eating delicious food that Emerson made, or calling and hanging out with people that don’t stress me the fuck out. In other words, I am pretty intentionally being fucking useless to people who are causing a great deal of chronic stress because I quite simply do not have the energy to deal with this shit anymore. Like… I am so drained by this shit that my body will just make me pass the fuck out rather than deal with it. I quite literally physically can’t, and I’m going with my body’s cues here.
Hell yeah for becoming ungovernable and unusable.
Sometimes, though, my brain is tired and my body isn’t. That’s when I just shut my eyes for a bit and chill and let my brain rest and wander for a minute away from my phone or whatever the hell I’ve been doing that’s been making me so tired. It helps, and whenever I regain the capacity to get back to the task at hand, I get back to it.
During one of those brain naps, I got the idea for what could turn into my sixteenth album once my executive dysfunction releases its hold on me. I haven’t been able to play my instruments or record anything for awhile due to being so damn tired and stressed, but I hope I’ll eventually get back to it by prioritizing energizing people and things. I always do. Sometimes I just need a brain nap. Or an actual nap.
I’ve also discovered that watching Netflix helps get my brain in order when I want or need to spend long periods of time alone by acting as a sort of other presence or presences in the room so that it’s easier to both keep track of time (something I don’t have a concrete sense of without an anchor, like music or TV) and a semblance of human company without the pressure to engage back.
It’s easier to eat, stay hydrated, and generally take care of myself with shows I enjoy as an external anchor point. And considering that most of my stress is interpersonal, sometimes it’s nice to just…be able to listen, watch, and get invested in shit without having to do something about it, you know?
I also haven’t let myself really get invested in fiction in a long ass time (around a decade or longer) since I tend to get extremely deeply invested in anything I enjoy beyond my own fiction, so it feels wonderful to be a fucking fan of shit again. Emerson got me hooked on a show called The Magicians on a hunch that I would like it, and it’s honestly like what would happen if The Chronicles of Narnia and Doctor Who had a more dark, more fucked up baby than the both of them, and I am unfortunately quite invested in this bloodbath fuckshow. It reminds me a fair bit of my audio drama The Third Prophecy, and so a lot of the dark shit in it doesn’t really bother me, surprisingly. It’s the sort of thing I would write, and I am of the firm belief that real people are far scarier and more fucked up.
If you can handle the extremely dark tomfuckery, I highly recommend it.
Well, dearly beloved hooligans, I am getting tired again, so I must go rest my mind once more. Whee. I love y’all. Stay tuned for more magic ✨
Preface: I was listening to one of my favorite songs, “Love in my Pocket” by Rich Brian, this morning, when I conceived a shitpost idea about an imaginary essay on this very thing. I posted the shitpost (which I’ll include a screenshot of below). I knew I would probably get at least one person jokingly asking “where’s the essay, OP??”, in the comments. So I decided that even if no one asked, I would give them the goddamned essay whether they wanted it or not, because I am bored and miss writing essays. I also love this song. It will likely be genuinely academic in nature but conversational in tone, with direct links to citations rather than a formal bibliography because I’M TIRED. However, if this genuinely attracts attention, I will go back and make a formal bibliography. So, without further ado, here’s the essay.
The shitpost in question.
“Love In My Pocket”: How Using Modern, Accessible Language Connects Contemporary Audiences with Timeless Ideas
When you hear a modern pop song or hear young adults making jokes or talking politics on social media, what is your first reaction? Do you scoff and think, “ugh, people these days can’t write anymore?” Don’t worry, gentle readers. I used to react that way, as well, before I realized that these modern writers and jokesters have a lot in common with master writers of old such as Chaucer and Boccaccio. Now, you’re probably thinking, what these could the catchy songs full of modern language you hear on YouTube and TikTok, teens discussing big ideas on social media, and masterworks of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance such as the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron possibly have in common? I’m glad you asked. I’m going to put it all together for you, gentle readers, but first, you need some historical context.
For centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire at the hands of Odoacer in 476 AD, the only semblance of law, order, and knowledge in Europe came at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church kept Latin alive in their services and texts, and it became the language of the rich and educated. Much of the poor population never learned to read in their mother tongues, much less Latin, as before Johannes Gutenberg brought the printing press to Europe around 1440, books were painstakingly written and copied by hand in monasteries and were prohibitively time consuming and expensive to make. As a result, knowledge, and therefore power, was almost exclusivelyin the hands of the wealthy and powerful and entirely outside of the hands of the lower classes. This created a system of government known as feudalism, with the Pope, the head of the Church, as the most powerful force in the land, the kings subservient to him, various lords and knights subservient to the kings, clergy to enforce the Pope’s will, and an entire set of classes of people beneath all of them who couldn’t own land, who were the property of the lords, and were deliberately kept from knowledge so that they could be easier to control. Is any of this starting to sound familiar to you, dear readers? Does it perhaps resemble our modern system? Don’t worry, I’m getting to my point.
All of this started to change when a few things happened. First, there was a devastating pandemic that swept through Europe that became known as the Black Death. A particularly nasty strain of the bubonic plague that was transmitted initially by infected flea bites, it quickly hopped from fleas to rats that had stowed away on Asian ships that were on their way to besiege key European ports, to the infected corpses themselves that were then used as biological weapons against the besieged ports.
The Black Death then swept through Europe, killing millions and causing an enormous labor shortage. The surviving peasants quickly realized that they had an advantage over the surviving landowners, and banded together to form guilds to leverage their skills and collectively bargain for better wages, treatment, and power. This tactic worked, as the landowners really had no defense against the peasants at this point, as everyone they knew was dead, there was no one left to back them up, and they had to bargain with the guilds to get anything done. The guilds then enabled the peasants to get rich and powerful for the first time in centuries of European history, giving rise to what is now known as the middle class as they soon got wealthy enough to own land of their own without the previous requirement of a title. Welcome to the early Renaissance, people.
Then, something else happened. Remember that Gutenberg guy? He was a goldsmith and he wanted to make books faster and easier to make. Improving on screw presses already available, he made a commercially viable movable type printing press around 1440. Boom. Books. Books galore. Now the people didn’t have to copy books by hand. They could simply print them and they were in business.
However, that wasn’t the only interesting thing happening. The common people weren’t just interested in breaking away from the lords. They were giving the Church the finger, as well. Remember, many people didn’t understand Latin, the language of the rich and educated. So they figured, “We’re not clergymen or princes. Why should we write in Latin?” When these mass produced books started coming into fashion, people started writing in their local language about what was going on around them. This phenomenon is called “writing in the vernacular”.
Two very popular stories at the time that the common people connected with were about people hanging out in the Black Plague and written in the common people’s respective vernacular. One, written in the form of English spoken at the time, was the Canterbury Tales, written by the poet, diplomat, and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer from 1387 to 1400. It technically predates the printing press by about 40 years, but it’s bawdy, it’s sad, it’s high drama for the ages. It connected the common people with themes that they could relate to in language they could understand and it entertained them during a very dark time.
Another, the Decameron, was written in Italian by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, for Italians. It’s another high drama vernacular story intended to completely make fun of the city-state of Florence in a wickedly black comedy style and tone. Yet again, the vernacular connected the people of the time with ideas they resonated with using accessible language with a healthy dose of dark humor and wit.
Similar things are happening today. We may not have a printing press, but we saw similar things happening during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns with people connecting on apps such as TikTok over people, topics, and music, in a format and language that was accessible to them for perhaps the first time in their lives. They were learning and connecting in their vernacular, just as the peasants did with literature written in their vernacular hundreds of years prior during the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.
Much of academia and literature is written and taught to young people in a way that is inaccessible to them, and many educators don’t know, don’t care, or do not have the means to connect with their students, as the public school system in the United States is ill equipped to prepare students to be anything different than the modern equivalent of the peasants of the Middle Ages, and teachers are burnt out and exhausted.
Therefore, I would argue that modern music that uses language that is accessible to the young people of today is no different than the authors of the early Renaissance who wrote in their local vernacular, and they are following in that proud, rebellious tradition. An excellent example of an artist who connects with his audience using modern vernacular is the singer and social media star Rich Brian. He was discovered via various social media platforms, and his music took off. He blends shock, awe, comedy, relatable themes and lyrics, and catchy hooks to create a distinct sound that sounds like he’s having fun. He has made mistakes in creating a name for himself just like any human being, but has apologized and taken accountability for those mistakes. He’s also an immigrant and overall I love his music and his story.
Take his song “Love in My Pocket,” for example. When he sings, “I’ve got love up in my pocket, and I don’t know what to do with it,” he is making the concepts of unrequited love and grief accessible to a modern, common audience just as the early vernacular writers of the Renaissance did when they stopped writing in Latin and started writing in their native tongues.
In conclusion, the next time you’re tempted to scoff at modern popular music and social media culture, ask yourself what themes these creators are trying trying to convey to their audience in the artist’s (and the audience’s) vernacular instead. Unrequited love? Grief? Wonder? Anger? Language changes and the way information is shared changes, people, and writing in one’s own vernacular as well as the free spread of information itself is a proud, rebellious tradition that helps the common people break free from oppression and fear.
QED, or as they would say in the modern vernacular, mic drop.
Stay tuned for more magic, people. I love y’all immensely. ✨
Your now very brain fogged sorcerer (I chugged a Red Bull to make this essay happen), Lazarus.
Hey, everyone. I have very little brain power right now, but I wanted to drop a mental image/vision I had in the sort of twilight state between sleeping and waking earlier while I was trying to nap. That failed miserably, as this image freaked me out so badly that I haven’t really been able to calm myself down since. I saw the phrase “mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” written in red on a public bathroom wall in a nearby grocery store. This phrase originally appeared in the book of Daniel in the Bible as a warning to the king Nebuchadnezzar that his days as ruler were about to come to an end. I believe it’s also the origin of the modern phrase “the writing is on the wall”. I often see things in that sort of twilight state, but this was not the sort of thing I was expecting my brain to conjure up. I’m an ex Mormon who had a special interest in the Bible for many years, but I haven’t thought about the Book of Daniel with any degree of seriousness since before my first marriage, and given world events, this is a strange thing to see/start thinking about suddenly.
I don’t like this, and have a splitting headache now, which often accompanies the times I See Shit. So I’m going to attempt to pass out now. Happy early 11/11 portal day to all who plan on observing it tomorrow, and here’s hoping there’s no more weird shit in my brain for the time being. I need a good night’s sleep.
Hey, everyone. This is Lazarus, once again. As I write this, I’m sitting on my apartment’s balcony space so that I can get a bit of fresh air. At Emerson’s suggestion, I took today largely away from the Internet to clear my head, but it seems to have made me sadder, albeit less anxious. I’ve spent a great portion of today deep in my head strategizing and things, but I feel disconnected from the world in a not so pleasant way, sort of like I’m lost in space and time. So if I am going to go all in on disconnecting, I think I need to make a better plan so that it doesn’t make me feel worse and adrift. So now I’m drafting a blog post in my notes app that I will post when I come back online again.
I shuffled through a deck of prompts that Emerson has, and found one that is going to be a doozy to contemplate and write about, but I think ought to be addressed head on anyway. It goes a bit like this: “Wonderland: You always have your imagination. What is something that you want to achieve, but probably never will?” I know I’m probably not quoting the prompt verbatim, as usual, but it gets the point across, I think. I’m also probably going to cry as I write this, in all honesty.
I would love to be abled, or at least accommodated to such an extent that I could function enough that I could do a great deal more. I know that’s probably the remainder of my hyper independence talking, but I grieve what I used to be able to do every day. I hold my need for rest and greater peace and my fervent wishes for greater independence, to contribute more, to push past what is holding me back, and to build bigger and greater things simultaneously and I try every day to let the peace and rest win because I know that ultimately that is the only way I will be able to contribute more.
I can’t do anything meaningful if I’m running on fumes and pushing myself to the point where I’m very nearly dead. It’s a strange paradox that I tend to ignore when I’m anxious, angry, and/or craving movement and release. I can only really see the nuance and appreciate the paradoxical nature of healing and the true way forward when I’m calm and able to recharge myself. But still, I grieve. I miss what I was able to do before illnesses, trauma, and injuries took all of my independence away from me, however unhealthy and against true human nature it actually was.
I keep having to remind myself through all of this that my rest and the creative work I’m doing is still an action, that even though it looks like I am doing nothing, it’s still an action, it’s still a choice. I’m still doing something.
Even when I’m doing research, writing, or art from bed or sitting down, I’m still doing something. I’m never doing nothing. Reframing my perspective around rest, art, and leisure from doing nothing to doing something has helped improve my quality of life and mental health a great deal.
And when I keep that perspective in mind, it has helped me relax a great deal more and make rest and leisure a much easier and less anxiety inducing choice to make, as I often have to fight my anxiety, which paralyzes me when it comes time to rest because I feel as though I have done nothing all day even when that simply isn’t true. I’m resting, an action. I’m making art, an action. I’m watching TV, an action. I’m talking to my partners and friends, an action. I am cuddling my cats, an action. I’m blogging, an action. I’m doing medical research, an action. When I think about my behavior that way, it becomes far less paralyzing to do…anything because in my mind, all actions start to carry equal weight, no matter what they are, because they all carry an element of conscious choice and autonomy, and none of them are nothing.
They may have different impacts and implications on the people and situations around me, and I can change my behavior accordingly based on what I observe, but none of it is meaningless. It also does wonders for my perfectionism when I keep that in mind, which is also rooted in anxiety. I just need to work on keeping that in mind…
Speaking of research, I may have made a breakthrough last night. I have been experiencing a great deal of numbness in my right hand and on the sides of my face particularly the right side, as well as fatigue, which drinking saltwater or eating salty food almost immediately resolves. I’ve also had shitty circulation for most of my life. So I started wondering due to a longtime suspicion that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or POTS, that my blood pressure might be low running low regardless of how my body is positioned due to severe and prolonged stress and heart damage.
So I did a bit of research last night that tentatively confirms that theory. It also gave me a new theory that my blood pressure dipping especially low in the mid to late afternoons into the nighttime is causing severe fatigue that’s gotten worse as the temperature has started falling as winter approaches. Time for new experiments!
That being said, the vitamin B is still massively improving my mental health at a baseline, and likely keeping my blood pressure at a lower level than it would be normally since it is normalizing my mental health and keeping me more stable than I would be without it. So I wonder if I need to start making feta cheese a staple of my diet like I did when I was younger. Feta is about the saltiest thing known to man, second only to a rock of salt itself or possibly brine. I love feta cheese. So let this be a public service announcement to any suitors or partners looking to win my heart or make our relationship even better – load me up with that good shit. It’s my favorite, and it may literally improve my health in the process 💛
Yay for doing health shit myself! I think that’s enough pondering the mysteries of the universe or at least the human body for the day. Stay tuned for more magic, y’all. I’ll be around.
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
*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.
