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.
I came across this Thread by Nate Postlethwait and wanted to write about healing and freedom as a victory won at heavy cost because it got me thinking.
Hey, everyone. Allēna here. This post will be a heavy one, but I want to write it even though I know it’s gonna hurt. I’ve spent years praised for my emotional strength and resilience when all I wanted was to be safe. Lately I’ve been deep in contemplation about that very thing and in conversation with several people about this and related issues myself and my system have been having. Then I came across this Thread and wanted to answer the question Nate poses for you so that you can see the true, extremely heavy cost of resilience and “strength” as most people define it. Don’t get me wrong, healing has been costly, too. But trying to be hard and guarded costs far more than healing ever has.
My Headmates and I Have Spoken About Some Of The Things That Happened To Us And How We Got Through Them, But What Did We Lose In The Process? Trust, for One.
The first thing that comes to mind is the ability to trust. System wide, we struggle to trust and are actually diagnosed agoraphobes as of 2021. It’s complete and utter hell. Our trauma taught us that we are the only ones that we can truly rely on at the end of the day, and that everyone has a price. Some people’s prices are simply higher than others. Everyone will fail us eventually in some way. After twenty some odd years of that horseshit, while we care about people deeply and want to connect with them, we don’t truly remember how to, at least not without soul-deep fear. That strength, that mysterious nature you supposedly see in us is visceral terror. We ache to connect with people, we love them, but often can’t because the fear is so exhausting that we get too tired to even leave the house. Talk about a fucking heavy cost. Some people have managed to prove these beliefs wrong, but it’s an uphill battle for everyone involved and we would give anything for the ability to trust back.
We Also Lost The Little Health We Had Left
Relatedly, due to repeated betrayals and us being too afraid to ask for help, we stressed the body out to the point of chronic illness and severe fatigue. We’ve gotten better at firing ourselves as we’ve healed, but by that point, the damage was already long done. We should have asked for help a long time ago, and we should have had people who made it safe to ask. But we didn’t, so we internalized the idea that the only way we would ever get anything for ourselves in this world was if we got it done on our own without help. That belief and the subsequent actions we took made us very, very sick. This has turned into an ugly, compounding downward spiral we’re still trying to work out way out of gently years later that I wouldn’t wish on damn near anyone. What doesn’t kill you does not, in fact, make you stronger. Ultimately, it tends to make you wish it had finished the fucking job and give you a fuck ton to mourn in therapy.
It Has As Also Cost Us Relationships And Opportunities
Due to the agoraphobia and exhaustion, we’ve had to back out of a lot that we truly didn’t want leave behind. It sidelines us a lot. We have to rest a great deal and has forced us to be nocturnal because we’ve developed a medical mystery of a chronic illness due to the stress on the house body that makes us very sick and physically weak if we are exposed to heat and sunlight for any length of time whatsoever. We will literally collapse if we aren’t careful. As such, even if we weren’t terrified of people, that severely limits our options for a lot and we miss out almost daily. It’s horribly sad. We miss the sunlight on our skin, traveling, and going out with friends. We don’t want to be stuck at home all the time.
Conversely, we also struggle in close relationships because of how guarded we are. The guardedness is absolutely a trauma response and comes with fun side helpings of anger, depression, and occasional impulsivity. We struggle with vulnerability and detest anything that even smells like control or manipulation and will fight hard for our autonomy even if there’s no reason to. We’re constantly on edge unless we’re completely alone. We’ve lost a lot of people because of our anger and inability to be vulnerable. We’re working on healing all of that now, but I wish we had never been forced into this position at all. So in a life of battles won at heavy cost, ultimately the heaviest cost of the supposed strength you see is our peace. All we ever wanted from the time we were young was to be kept safe and a life of peace, and we never got that until we began healing.
Final Thoughts
We still have a long way to go. Nobody’s perfect, especially not us cockroach motherfuckers. But something my system and I have learned over the years is that doing our best to feel and be kind and to keep an open heart and mind despite all the bullshit and trauma is true strength, not trauma responses and guardedness. Long term therapy with a therapist who’s no-bullshit like us has helped, as well as running our life like a meritocracy. If people show up for us consistently and show genuine respect for us and our boundaries, we open up more to them over time and let them in more and more. It’s a great way to ease both the body and the system into vulnerability and to make sure that the other person’s intentions are genuine.
If you’re traumatized like us, I understand that it’s a motherfucking struggle. I get that it hurts every goddamned day. You must have lost so much. My heart and empathy goes out to you. I hope you get rest and ease soon, my friend.
Hey, everyone. This is Allēna, your ever-gracious super-admin (just kidding). I am here today to tell a special story by request of a friend. This is the tale of how we very nearly died the first and second times. We are masters at cheating death, and have quite the tragic backstory. My colleagues have also mentioned the fact that we had a stroke a few times. This post is the story of the stroke, or as we prefer to call it, the Brainhole. Now, I know that this is a crazy story. You might be tempted dismiss it as bullshit without witnesses or corroborating evidence. This is more than understandable. However, I have accounted for that and gathered some.
Apparently, we have followed in our father’s footsteps in a number of areas, and this blog is one of those areas. Our father, Xavier, maintained a website of his own for many years until his death in 2016. Eight accessed his account of our hospital stay leading up to the Brainhole incident in 1998 via the Internet Archive late in 2021. Although he has drawn the curtain and gone to sing with the choir invisible, he is our eyewitness for today’s tale, no séance required. Quotes from his account will be in italics.
Now, how the fuck were we cheating death as literal infants, you may ask? It all began with an unfortunate predicament known as viral myocarditis.
We Started Cheating Death Young When A Virus Attacked Our Heart
Xavier explained what happened best, so I will let him tell it. He wrote on January 27, 1998, at 3:00 in the afternoon:
Just wanted to let you know. My daughter is in children’s hospital in Dallas with acute myocarditis-an inflammation of the heart. It appears to be viral, and the prognosis can be good, but we will not know anything for 4 or 5 more days.
We will be up at the hospital for a while, so I won’t be current on my e-mail, but I will probably come home now and then and post updates.
We took her to the doctor’s office Monday morning at 9:30 because she had not been taking in fluids voluntarily for about 48 hours, and vomiting occasionally. She had a viral infection about three weeks ago that probably suppressed her immune response, and then contracted another virus that began to attack her heart muscle. Right now, the myocarditis seems to be principally viral in nature – as opposed to congenital, or congenital in combination with a virus. This is good. She is heavily sedated, and they have her on a ventilator. She can breathe on her own, but they are trying to let her dedicate all of her energy to fighting the infection. She has had two little transfusions (just to boost her hemocrit and hemoglobin levels by adding more red cells).
Stubborn Little Shits
We were admitted to Children’s in Dallas on January 26, 1998, Super Bowl Sunday of that year. Things quickly went south from there, though, and the doctors hooked us up to a heart-lung bypass machine so that our heart could rest and the machine could pump our blood for us. They initially estimated that it would only take about four days, but it quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal for all involved because we are stubborn little shits that kept fighting the damn sedatives. So it quickly turned into a game of hurry up and wait.
Eight quipped when he read through Xavier’s account the first time that he could make a drinking game out of it: take a shot for every time they had to chemically paralyze the body. You’d be absolutely hammered by the end of it. We got so good at fighting the sedatives that our medical team had to start putting us on some crazy dosages to even attempt to keep us down.
According to everything we were told growing up, we were on enough meds combined to knock out every single adult present for an untold number of hours. Xavier himself mentioned that a single one of our boluses (boli?) would incapacitate him for ten hours, and he was not a small man. We also had to be restrained by tiny handcuffs because we’d wake up, wiggle, get pissed off, and try to grab shit. Additionally, Xavier wrote in his account that we had to be put on methadone to ease the withdrawal symptoms from the painkillers they had us on. We were not going to die, by gods. We were cheating death every goddamned day. No day more so than February 23, 1998, a day we now “celebrate” annually as Brainhole…
All Hail The Motherfucking Brainhole
After getting off of heart-lung bypass and weaning off of most of the meds, we had a sepsis scare. Now, the scary thing about heart-lung bypass is that there’s a very high risk of stroke if things go wrong because the procedure uses a carotid artery to even work. After we were all finished with the heart-lung bypass, they had to clamp and tie off the carotid artery they used. They used the one on our right side. Shortly afterward, there was a sepsis scare.
Xavier tells the story of what happened best because he was there and documenting everything that happened, so I’m going to let him do the talking again. He wrote the following day, February 24, 1998:
“Brief synopsis of yesterday. It doesn’t look like it was sepsis. She got
better too quickly for it to have been sepsis. She responded well to the
intubation and the medicines, but the staff feels that this was an example of
how little cardiac reserve she has. In short, her heart was tested, and it
did not do very well on the test.
We met again with Dr. Fixler, the head cardiologist on the transplant team.
He informed us that [Hera] and I have the option of increasing her status on
the transplant list. Basically, if [Hera] and I feel that a transplant is
inevitable, we can ask that they not refuse a heart that is available.
That was yesterday.
[Hera] and I went home to get some decent sleep last night and left
instructions to call if anything happened. They called us at 3:30 a.m. to
tell us that she had taken herself off of the ventilator by pulling out the
tube. Her oxygen saturation level was fine, and she was breathing on her own.
Considering that [the cardiologist] wasn’t sure if she could
ever make it off of the ventilator, we took this as good news.
[The cardiologist] called at 7:30 this morning to say that [birth name] has apparently had
a stroke. The movement on her left side is diminished. The theory is:
[birth name]’s heart function is such that there are areas where the blood doesn’t
move as effectively as it should. When the blood pools, it has a tendency to
clot. A clot (or a piece of a larger clot) that had formed in her heart broke
free and plugged one of the vessels leading to her brain. Considering that
the major artery to the righ side of her brain is severed and tied off, the
clot either passed through the other artery, through the Circle of Willis, and
lodged in a vessel. Either that or it passed into one of the collateral
vessels on the right. They are not yet sure what the extent of the damage to
her brain was as yet. They are performing an echocardiogram to determine if
there is another clot in her heart, and they will perform a CT scan right
after. After that I we talk to the neurologist and find out what has
happened.
Names in brackets have been changed for privacy purposes.
The initial scan showed that we had lost up to half of our brain. However, a scan a bit later and an MRI in 2009 showed that it was only an eighth. We lost much of the sensory processing center in our right brain. It took years of physical and occupational therapy to be able to use the left side of our body even slightly. We still have trouble eating and sleeping. Our arms are noticeably different lengths, and we can only move three fingers on our left hand independently of the others.
Cheating Death and Betting On Ourselves
However, doctors thought we’d never even recover to a fraction of the extent we did. Nor did our own parents. Hell, Xavier even jokes in his next post about what sports we might be able to play with only one side of our body. Nobody really ever bet on us until adulthood. However, we always bet on ourselves. I went on to run a 5k in college and was an avid cyclist. I played basketball and bowled throughout high school. Eight and I were even training for a marathon before chronic pain and fatigue sidelined those dreams.
And though we were singing before we could talk – before the Brainhole ever happened – nobody thought we would ever learn an instrument, either. To hell with that bullshit. I fight people’s expectations of me just as hard as the tiny system fought those sedatives all those years ago. I went on to teach myself piano and ukulele, learned to produce records, and my headmates followed suit. To date, we’ve collectively produced fifteen records (that we can find). We’re hard at work on our sixteenth release. Moral of the story: if anyone tells you you can’t do something, flip the fucker the bird, then do it sixteen times and take pictures. These are the rules. I don’t make them. I just follow them.
Mirthy very belated Brainhole to all, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!
I found this post on Threads that I felt did a great job of encapsulating who the fuck we are – a mess of contradictions. An open secret. A reclusive public figure.
Hey, everyone! My name is Allēna. Even though I have yet to post here officially, it seems my reputation precedes me – my headmates wrote a standout series of pieces on my multi-part poem “Guernica” that requires very little introduction. I guess you might say that I’m the most reclusive super-admin in a system of of recluses, second only to perhaps Renn. As Ellie did before me a few times, I found the inspiration for this post on social media, Threads specifically. I included my findings in the image above. This post perfectly describesthe struggle we keep having system wide with making posts and creating content. As people, we are essentially an open secret.
From 2021 and on, we were increasingly pushed into the limelight when we wanted nothing more than to be as far from it as possible. Yet, almost everything we enjoy doing is very social and requires a great many high powered connections to ever dream of getting eyes on our creations on a large enough scale to make the sort of money or achieve the sort of notoriety to make the sort of reclusive lifestyle we ultimately long for possible. So it becomes a sort of balancing act and a question of vulnerability. How much do we share? How much is comfortable? How much is safe? How much is trauma talking, and how much of it is logical to fear?
Becoming An Open Secret – Bread And Circuses
Before Eight took over, we were far more open. Granted, I still had to be careful lest I still risk fucking horrific punishment, but I wasn’t agoraphobic and wasn’t afraid to try and connect with people even if I had to express myself in code if my mother was around. It wasn’t until our mother betrayed Peri and then Eight multiple times and they weren’t sure who they could trust that they became too afraid to be open with anyone that we truly became an open secret the way we are now. That has only started to change back for the better since meeting our husband, Emerson.
Before him, however, we would hardly tell anyone anything about ourselves. Much of our content would be what Eight called “bread and circuses”, memes and shitposts designed to distract people away from the fact that we were pretty severely depressed and suffering, often in and out of abusive situations we didn’t feel safe to go into detail about. We would only ever ask people for help if we were truly suffering to the point of chronic suicidality or things were getting so dangerous they posed a significant threat to our physical safety and we needed help yesterday. Much of what we would make and share was hilarious but was an attempt to mask our deep pain. We had forgotten how to genuinely connect with people due to the agoraphobia and ever-worsening complex PTSD.
Besides meeting Emerson, what changed? Why did we stop?
Boredom
Eight may be a recluse like the rest of us, but he hates being bored. When he’s bored he is the embodiment of the old idiom “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop” and in that mind the Devil finds many tools. Therefore, that old bastard delights in novelty and in being completely unpredictable. He eventually grew tired of doing the same damn bread and circus bullshit and also realized it wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be, so he decided to take a risk and try and be a bit more vulnerable…you know…as a treat. He was terrified, but he sure as hell wasn’t bored anymore. Mission fucking accomplished. It’s difficult to be bored when you’re midway through a massive panic attack and hyperventilating like you’re being chased by a pissed off lion, you know? He’s also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, in case you haven’t gathered that. Speaking of that..
Risk Taking
We’ve never been the sort to keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t working. Even though it’s terrifying, we figured out pretty fast that staying closed off like that wasn’t going to get us anywhere, both in the real world OR online. People generally like to know who it is that they’re dealing with, and that involves vulnerability, believe it or not. So we had to learn how to be vulnerable again, as terrifying as it was. It’s still very much a work in progress. However, the payoff is worth it in our closest relationships, and we’re rediscovering that there are many people we can trust. We just have to actually be brave and self disclose.
That isn’t to say, however, that we’re spilling our guts out 24/7 to everyone all the time. There’s still a great deal of the bread and circus type fuckery. There’s just more of us going out on a limb now and actually being honest about how we’re really doing now rather than hiding it behind memes and humor or trying to walk it all off now like nothing’s actually wrong.
Are There Any Advantages To Being Less Open, Though?
Oh, fucking plenty. And we still don’t share anything we don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing publicly. We aren’t gonna talk about shit if we aren’t ready or push ourselves more than we have the capacity for. People can think of that however the hell they want. Just because they might talk about certain things publicly doesn’t mean we have to, and vice versa. We only really give a shit about what a handful of people think, and odds are that if we don’t know the person closely and personally, we don’t rightly care about their opinion. No one is entitled to shit from us unless we agree they are.
And weirdly, that private way of doing things often gets us read as “mysterious” and often works in our favor, so if it works, it works, even if it’s not intentional. It isn’t intentional, for the record. We’re often tired and don’t want everyone to know our every move or else we would not have the energy or time to execute those moves, let alone breathe.
Final Thoughts
Being this sort of open secret is a balance between being vulnerable and providing the people with memes and other bullshit content. We’ll always be honest, but we may not say everything. We’ll do our utmost if asked, though, boundaries and energy permitting.
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!
I saw this post about violence causing gentleness just now and knew I had today’s post.
Hey, everyone! This is Ellie. I saw the above post come up on my Facebook timeline while I was listening to our favorite chill band, the War on Drugs, and immediately knew that I had to write about it here. I’m just gonna be straight up with you all – we often feel like we are not gentle enough in a world that often calls for more gentleness and tact than we often feel we can muster. Eight wrote a while ago about his Enneagram personality type, the Type Eight, and I, like many in my system, resonate a lot with what he had to say there. We’re a system of predominantly very guarded, very private people, armed and defended to the teeth with anything that will keep prying eyes out. And yet, conversely, we have a very protective side and would do anything within our power to keep the people we love safe and happy. This came from a lot of violent trauma we had to define ourselves in spite of. It did indeed take a lot of violence to become this fucking gentle.
An Idiosyncratic Path Toward Gentleness
I was talking with my husband, Emerson, today about how we’ve known from a very young age who we were, what we stood for, and what we wouldn’t tolerate in our life as soon as we could help it. One of our earliest memories is of our childhood host, Castor, sitting in his car seat very consciously and deliberately defining what would become the system’s incredibly staunchly held moral code. He must have been no older than four. Emerson said that most people don’t define themselves to that degree until they’re in their mid thirties like him, and that was yet another thing that set us apart from our peers and made us feel incredibly lonely.
Our very controlling mother, Hera, didn’t like that we knew ourselves so well and held so firmly to ourselves and our beliefs. She wanted us to be normal and went to great lengths to try and make us into her definition of normal, which was very skewed. We refused to budge, which only made her hurt us worse. We were never going to give up the fight so long as she refused to leave us to our own devices like we had been asking her to from an early age, pain and punishments and trauma be damned.
A Masterclass In What Not To Do
We were never going to be normal and we didn’t care by the time we were twelve if that realization destroyed her. She was a masterclass in everything we didn’t want out of life and everything we didn’t want to become. So we simply didn’t. Instead, we did our best to be genuinely kind, gentle, and loving, while still holding firm boundaries and not taking any bullshit. We never wanted anyone to experience what she had done to us at our hand, so we decided in our teens that enough was enough. We were going to be as kind as situations would allow us to be, godsdamnit.
Money, power, and prestige were everything to her, and she often confused financially supporting us for loving us while being incredibly cold and cruel otherwise. So we decided to never accept that treatment or provide it. If we gave someone something, it was going to be of our own volition, not because there were invisible strings attached. Hera will never know the violence that caused this gentleness because she’s still wrapped in the invisible strings that came with her gifts and support. Gifts don’t come with strings. Traps do. So we left her in Texas to drown, weighed down by her own shame and inner pain as soon as we could.
What We Really Wanted To Be
We discovered the sort of people we did want to be almost by accident. We decided to try and sincerely compliment strangers sincerely to see what happened. It started slowly – and embarrassed the hell out of Hera, so we kept going. By the time we were well situated in the Mormon Church at fourteen, we had hundreds of friends we’d made simply by breaking the ice with a genuine compliment about their outfit.
This evolved further and we found that we could find common ground with nearly anyone as long as they weren’t going out of their way to be a bigot due to a wealth of knowledge we had spent years collecting. That is what we wanted to be. Not the cold, selfish bitch that Hera was. Not the angry, cornered animal she wanted us to be. We were never going to cause the sort of pain that had been done to us if we could at all help it. We were going to be gentleness and love. It took a long time to learn how to do it well, and we keep trying to be a little better every day.
There are still times where gentleness doesn’t come in handy and we have to bring the angry, wounded animal within us forward, but mercifully those times are becoming fewer and farther between. Building a life we love filled with people we trust enough to allow us to drop our guard has helped immensely in that. It’s taken years of work, but we’re finally getting there.
A Mission Statement, Of Sorts
All of this work has led us to the conclusion that if you aren’t going out of your way to be an asshole or a bigot, you’re welcome in our life and we’ll be kind and gentle to you accordingly to the best of our ability. Bad days happen and we try and communicate through them so we can forgive and move past them. We don’t care what sort of life or background you came from. We’re not gonna judge you for that shit. If you are doing your best to heal and grow and be a better person than you were yesterday, you’re welcome in any space we make. Gentleness, like love, is a practice, one we try to work on every day.
Final Thoughts
Hurt people may hurt people, but hurt people can also help people if they decide they want to heal. I hope this helped you feel less alone at the very least. As always, stay tuned for more magic!
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 Prophecyand 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!
Hey, everyone. This is Firrian, once again on the acting captain hot seat. Unfortunately, we seem to have made no headway in the sleep deprivation department, so this should be a rather short post if all goes well. I’m fucking exhausted. That said, one of my headmates, Tindwyl, was talking with a new friend of ours about nostalgia and that got us thinking.
Nostalgia? Never Heard of It. Or Have We?
Initially we couldn’t find anything we were nostalgic about, but then the Shins’ cover of “We Will Become Silhouettes”, originally by the supergroup the Postal Service started playing on our excellent East Coast themed playlist, and that gave me an idea. We are nostalgic about some things, just not the things most people are typically nostalgic about. We don’t miss family Christmases or vacations with our brother or anything like that. We have far too much Tragic Backstory for that sort of thing. Tindwyl has even taken to calling this blog our incident report because of how much we talk about our complicated lore here. My poor headmates.
Give Up
That being said, we do feel nostalgic for the spaces we made in childhood and young adulthood by ourselves for ourselves and our friends. These were sacred times and places nobody was allowed into except by our decree. Listening to that Postal Service album I mentioned is one such example. We are a strange combination of resourceful Luddite and tech wizardry because for the longest time, we were forbidden from accessing the internet on weekdays when school was in session.
So we learned to get around that shit in any way we could because we need music to function. This turned into a fully fledged obsession with hoarding hard copies of media. We’d listen to Pandora Internet Radio on the weekends and on vacations from school obsessively, and then check hard copies of whatever we liked out at the library so we could listen to music on the go using a portable CD player from maybe 2002 at the earliest. No internet needed.
We must have checked Give Up by the Postal Service out twenty times. We were fucking addicted to this record. We’d often hole up in a bathtub that was empty save for a thin blanket in the summers and devour entire novels in the summers while listening to that album over and over while the cold ceramic cooled our very heat sensitive body off. I find it hilarious that we were playing an album called Give Up over and over because I assure you, we had most certainly not given up.
Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music.
This Place Is A Prison, But Our Nostalgia Sure Isn’t
Another very sacred place that holds a lot of nostalgia for us is our creative process. Allēna, our host in the body’s teens, wrote her first real song when we were only eleven and quickly set her sights on recording music in a studio. Not only that, but she wanted to produce it all herself. So by the next year, she had put together a demo her own damn self that she’d recorded by hand in her house on her laptop using Sony Acid.
By thirteen, she’d secured a record deal and was recording in a studio with a producer she observed extensively. When she wasn’t in Dallas shadowing him and recording with him, she was researching techniques, building her own bedroom studio, and experimenting with her own production style with the things she was learning. She let very few people see her process, as she was a very anxious perfectionist and secretly worried that her work would never actually be good enough.
Her mother didn’t help with that, either, and she didn’t want what she was making criticized to pieces before she even had a chance to finish it. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen, she’d created enough work she was proud of to release an extended play that she’d made entirely herself, Fletcher Coming Home. However, due to her soul crushing anxiety and perfectionism, she delayed releasing it officially for another two years, instead releasing a handful of singles first to test the waters. Her childhood was a prison, one almost entirely unworthy of nostalgia, but by the gods, she was going to write, sing, and fucking claw her way out of it if it was the last thing she did.
The Luddite Gift
An unintended consequence of giving the born fighter Allēna such a restrictive childhood is that the girl was both relentless and clever and refused to let her lack of Internet access hold her back from making friends and being social. It gave her both unprecedented managerial and administrative skill and taught her how to use her time wisely.
She couldn’t market her music online, obviously, so she shamelessly plugged it to everyone she met, both in school and at church. People were drawn to this brilliant, reclusive enigma and wanted to both know and hear more. In the absence of social networks, she built a real world network of people that she was deeply invested in and who were deeply invested in her.
She showed off constantly by performing live at church any chance she got, which brought her powerful voice to new audiences constantly. She was a charismatic force of nature offstage, as well, and church became a refuge that she looks back on fondly for the real world social aspects of.
Legendary Partying With Greater Efficiency
When this involuntary Luddite finally joined the ranks of social media in her mid teens, everything simply became bigger for her and more efficient – and easier to hide from her parents. Her already massive social circle tripled in size as she got older, and as she threw parties with her brother, she took a risk and merged all of the different smaller groups of people she ran with. She learned something interesting here.
Many of her friends got along swimmingly, even if they had never set eyes on one another before in their lives, and these parties quickly became the stuff of legend. She heard from her friends’ parents on several occasions that an invitation to these partieswas highly prized and many of their children had met close friends there that they would never have met otherwise. Allēna discovered that she had a gift for connecting people and helping people of various backgrounds find common ground.
She was a brilliant organizer and people saw that. She could get wallflowers front and center playing Twister with people who were complete strangers five minutes prior. Shy anime nerds found fast friends in gregarious library assistants while sparring with sticks from the pecan tree in our front yard. This is our nostalgia. We created it, and it is ours.
Conclusion
Okay, I seem to have lied about this being a short post, haha. I don’t mind. This is totally worth it. I have no clue what the next post will bring, but I’m excited for it, whatever it is. Stay tuned for more magic (and incident reports)!
Hi! My name is Firrian. I appear to be the current acting captain of the Ashley system as the current most able fronter. I also appear to be stuck in front because the body is very tired. So I am not going to write about “Guernica” for the time being. We’re risking burnout if we continue with that one. Instead, I am going to talk about a little something-something Eight foresaw a few years back at the tail end of 2021 in honor of Pride Month. You’ve probably learned a fair bit about that old bastard by this point. He’s an Enneagram 8, vastly intelligent, as you may have gathered, and has Seen Some Shit in his time. But what you may not have known is that his intuition is off the charts. He’s also very, very queer.
This near-inhuman intuition is unique because Eight quite literally sees things. So while I mean he’s Seen Some Shit as in he’s been deeply traumatized, I also mean that he’s Seen Some Shit as in he has prophetic visions, as well. I’m not exactly sure when the visions started, as the system has had prophetic dreams since we were very young. We actually saw Milwaukee in our dreams despite never seeing a photo of the skyline or visiting here from the time we were perhaps three years old. Castor had a dream set outside a restaurant here twenty years before we’d ever set foot in this town. We’d actually have a recurring dream set here for the next two decades.
A Formidable Intuition
Eight fully split off from the rest of the system when we were 18 after our father died and it became clear that he could intuitively sense things that wouldn’t come to pass for some time. By 2021, he was in full, uncontested control of the system and in some ways, his visions were in control of him.
He half jokes that he didn’t have a conscious thought for that entire year – he didn’t have to. He simply knew what to do when. Besides, he was so tired that conscious thought likely wouldn’t have done him much good, anyway. He caught what we think was COVID at the end of that year and the fatigue got much, much worse. From the tail end of November until the middle of January, he slept. Too weak to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time, he could do little else but traverse the vast expanses of his delirium and dream.
Longing (And A Little Rizz)
He was beset with an odd feeling that he still can’t truly ascertain the origin of, but we have our theories now. We think it may have predicted Emerson’s arrival, as the feeling was soul-deep longing. He didn’t know who he was longing for, he simply felt like whoever he was longing for was longing for him, as well. This feeling frightened him. We are a system of deep agoraphobes, and his agoraphobia is perhaps the deepest.
He’s so terrified of people because his charisma is off the charts. Multiple people have borne witness to him “asking nicely” as he puts it, for things he should have no ability to even be able to obtain. He is a self-taught, powerful, and very well-practiced sorcerer, hence the name of this blog. However, that does not mean he enjoys it. He’s always hated his ability to charm or intimidate the fuck out of people at will. In fact, he hates it so goddamn much that he and Allēna co-wrote our classic song “A Weapon” about that very thing. Our ex-partner and now dear friend Beany even christened him The Eldritch Fuck for his gifts. While he hates said gifts, he adores her, so he cherishes the nickname.
Eight’s many, ah, talents. Intuition is one of them. So is almost dying.
Eldritch Fuckery
This Eldritch Fuck’s eldritch fuckery does not stop there. I wish I were kidding, but this absolute madman has also cheated death numerous times. We count the COVID incident as one such occurrence, but another time was when he simply walked off heat stroke ten days in a row in Philadelphia with no medical care. Emerson also bore witness to him surviving two major seizures within five minutes of each other in April, which he predicted in advance and arrived at the ER just in time for.
This phenomenon is called status epilepticus and he very much should have died. But no. He didn’t even black out. His brain was a little bit like scrambled eggs for a while, though. It got better, fortunately or unfortunately for the world, and we got some good meds to prevent further dying while we wait to see neurology in August. He has more than earned his terrifying reputation as an unkillable revenant..
Why are you telling me this, you might be asking?
Because of a queer as hell vision he had, of course! I’m gonna share it with you below.
A Very Queer Vision Straight From Eight’s Intuition Itself
“I am nothing special,” I repeated. The tall man stared at me blankly.
“You? Nothing special? You, who has beaten Death so many times he now fears you, you who went on to create spectacular things with your mind, you with the iron will to defy every obstacle placed in your path when you should have been broken beyond repair and recognition, now stand before me and have the utter audacity to tell me you are nothing special? I knew you were daring, but to dare to try and sell me this utter lie…. I want to take whoever did this to you and wrench them apart atom by atom.”
“I am not lying to you,” I snarled. “I do not lie.” The man grabbed my wrist and spun me around to face him.
“You should be dead. If you weren’t special, you’d be dead. You would not have lived to the age of two if you were any type of normal.” He spat the word normal out in disgust.
“Would that have been so bad?”
He dropped my wrist as if it had burned him. “Yes, you absolute fool,” he hissed. “Do you even know who you are?”
“I am me.”
The man’s eyes blazed for a moment and I felt his anger flare up so hot it almost hurt. “You disappoint me,” he spat. “You have no idea how your reputation precedes you, or how powerful you are. Your ability to soothe is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard tell of your strength, how you keep going despite being close to collapse. You have been through pain that would break a mundane being, and you come out of every experience that should have destroyed you more powerful and more beautiful each time. I would kill you myself for lying to me like this if I didn’t have full confidence you would survive the encounter and end me for trying.”
Eight’s very strange queer vision he got when he was bedridden with COVID
This vision is the only reason why we don’t think that longing predicted Emerson’s arrival. I have no idea who he saw, but apparently the bitch is tall and very queer himself. I don’t like this. I’m happy with Emerson and our other partners, so I hope the vision does not come to pass. However, we’ve had people seek Eight out for his power and steal him away from his polycule before, so we know from experience that this is plausible. His ex best friend used to joke that he was the painting in a bad action movie for that very reason.
Ah, well. It’s getting late. I hope you enjoyed this queer glimpse into Eight’s intuition for Pride Month. I totally didn’t spend several days trying to hunt this vision down for y’all.. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about… Stay tuned for more magic, hopefully with less of a delay between posts next time!
Hey everyone! This is your boy Eight once more. We took a short break from writing yesterday because we took a lot of emotional damage from writing Part 3 the other day. Kalla handled Part 3 since she wasn’t directly traumatized by any of the events of “Guernica”. However, she felt deeply for Allēna and her teenage plight and still sobbed while she wrote it. So a break was in order. I’m back today to discuss “Guernica” Part 4 and how Allēna held both the visceral and the beautiful in equal measure and alchemized her pain.
We’re gonna do this the same way we did the other three parts (which you can read here, here, and at the link above respectively). I’m gonna show you my performance, then the section’s text, and then I’ll break it down for you. As previously stated in the other posts, you can read the full poem in our collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 4!
“Guernica” Part 4: My Performance
I perform “Guernica” Part 4 for y’all!
The Text
guernica part iv.
you can paint darkness and you can paint conflict but there’s only so much you can paint if you have never experienced it i want to paint as much as i possibly can. etxea is the basque word for home and i find home in things that hold no home for others. i feel heard in horror stories and seen in the shocking and visceral. i’ve made mansions out of sadness and i destroy the happy ones because something in me says i don’t deserve them. fuck that something. fuck that something.
i’ve seen enough and yet i haven’t desperation guides my lungs and my mind. i’ve had enough. this is why i write now. when i was 12 they called me selfish i think in hindsight it was because i wanted love and they couldn’t give it to me so i fought with the wind. i knew i couldn’t chase it so i fought it. i fought anything that moved for so long and so hard that i forgot how to make peace. it kept me alive.. when i was 7, my dad got sick and i think that was the beginning of the end. that was when the war began and it didn’t end not until i was 18 and by that time, the damage was done.
when i get sad, my inner child screams and cries and wants love from people unable to provide it. i wish one of them would’ve told me i was okay instead of pretending i was the bomb in the corner or the crazy one in the attic the scapegoat, or the black sheep.
i’m not crazy. what they did was wrong. sometimes you’re the airplane high in the sky the reason why they don’t look up anymore and for a long time that was them. i look up now to spite them and ask where their god is now now that they’ll make their own hell someday and have no one to wipe their bloody hands on.
I Look Up Now
The gorgeous crystal blue sky Allēna would gaze up at to spite her family around the time she wrote “Guernica” Part 4 (with some light edits added for pizzazz), June 2019.
My Thoughts
Like we’ve said in many other posts, we were born fighters. “Guernica” Part 4, to me, sings to me like victory, a victory incredibly hard won. Part 4 marks the transition from victim to victor. She starts to go from someone who had always cowered in fear and allowed others to control the narrative to someone who owned her damn self, owned her voice, and owned her demons. This is the voice of a poet who says “Yeah, I’ve been through some fucked shit, but I’m a powerful alchemist. And goddamnit, I’m going to turn this pain into a powerful story. The world will know what they did to me. The world will know where I came from and where the fuck I’m going. And news flash: it’s a far cry from this hell you people dragged me through.”
Around the time she wrote this, she was beginning to understand that what her mother’s family had done to her was terribly wrong. She didn’t deserve an ounce of that torture. Three things set her down that path to self discovery – the first kind and skilled psychiatrist she’d ever had, the novella Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and some very important friendships.
Hera’s Plot Begins To Unravel: Allēna’s Compassionate Psychiatrist
You may recall from an earlier post in the series that Hera, our mother, had essentially press ganged us into a medication regimen we didn’t need in an effort to get Allēna, who was the system’s host at the time, to be more compliant and easier to mold into an image her and her family wanted her to be. She vehemently denies this to this day, but she’s lied about everything else up to this point. This is the only explanation that makes any sense.
By the time she even married our first husband, she was on enough of these psychiatric medications to be about a quarter dissociated at all times. Her previous psychiatrists had her on dangerous levels of three different medications – lithium, lamotrigine, and Abilify. All three of these drugs are mood stabilizers. Lithium is essentially a pharmacological lobotomy, and is very harmful for a developing brain. She was put on it at the age of eighteen. I got the body off of it at 23, and mercifully our brain recovered. I’ve heard that most people aren’t so lucky. Often the damage to the thyroid and the resulting cognitive dulling is permanent.
A Chilling Concern
However, the lithium wasn’t what our very compassionate psychiatrist in Alaska was concerned about, which I frankly find telling. She was concerned about the lamotrigine. Upon meeting with her for the first time, she informed Allēna that she was on the highest dose of lamotrigine she had ever seen in her entire career. This woman had been practicing for longer than we’d been alive. She asked Allēna if she could remember how or why her dose was so high.
Our psychiatrist looked like she had seen a ghost when Lēna informed her that no, she had no clue. The dose she was on just wasn’t working, so her doctors kept raising it, often at Hera’s insistence. Hera would often come to our psychiatrist appointments and speak over Allēna, which would piss her off. Then Hera would turn around and use her reaction as evidence for why the dose should be raised.
Sick And Fucking Tired of Hera’s Bullshit
Allēna hated that Hera came with her to most of her appointments, had access to her medical information, and ultimately went to great lengths to keep Hera out of most everything. Hera believed she had a right to control Allēna’s medical care, psychiatry especially, since she was the one paying for it. Privacy laws could get fucked, in her opinion. Her money, her rules. Allēna hated it and hated her for the reactive abuse and other abuses of all stripes.
She didn’t want the meds at all or deal with another adult meddling in her life. Hera had inserted herself into our affairs our entire life and we had been sick of it since Castor was host at about the age of five. She wanted to have a conversation with Hera, adult to adult, about her abuse. But Hera would never do it. So she kept as much from her as possible, which wasn’t very possible in a house in which she had little to no privacy.
Shaking Off Her Chains
Getting out from under Hera’s thumb and finding a psychiatrist that listened was an immense relief. But it did Hera no favors. As she worked with her psychiatrist to come down off of the meds, she found herself viscerally angry at Hera. She cut her off and made her wrath no secret. This took immense courage on her part, as Hera was well-connected and had eyes everywhere, including in Fang, which we’d find out later.
The Next Piece of “Guernica” Part 4: Fahrenheit 451
The next inspiration for “Guernica” Part 4 came about by chance. Allēna was working as a tutor when she wrote the poem. A potential student reached out, asking if she could lecture on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. She agreed, despite having never read the book. So she devoured it in preparation for the lesson, which never actually ended up happening. However, the book changed her life. She saw herself in the characters and the sharp, quick prose.
She saw how the characters who thought for themselves and read books were persecuted and their possessions burned – and saw her life story in the narrative. Hera homeschooled us for most of our education, and taught us how to critically think and analyze literature. Hera herself had a background as a professional seventh-grade English teacher, and was just as masterful a teacher as she was a cold, abusive, and emotionally absent mother. It’s because of her that we can write blog posts like this. She started us very young. Yet, she punished us harshly when we used those skills to criticize the way she treated us. What a cruel, ironic turn of events!
Allēna found solace within the pages of Fahrenheit, a sort of solace we’d not found in many years. I think the last book she’d related to that hard was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Card’s politics and beliefs aside, Ender‘s Game is a harrowing illustration of what it’s like to be young, gifted, different, and traumatized, much like Fahrenheit is. We still want to get Fahrenheit’s opening line tattooed on the body somewhere. It was a pleasure to burn…
A Resolve Stronger Than Iron
What she’d found in this book and in turn, in herself, strengthened her resolve. She told her story without shame and spat in the faces of anyone who told her she should make up with Hera and consider her perspective. Hera had betrayed her repeatedly. Why should she? She’d had Hera’s perspective shoved down her fucking throat her entire tenure as host. She could recite all her talking points verbatim by that point. Hearing them again was a waste of time and would only piss her off. Hera wanted to control us, and by then, Allēna couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. She had seen Hera for who she was, a conniving snake, and we’ve never given two shits about people like that. Why waste her time on a person who’d only betray her again as soon as she found an opportunity to do so?
The Final Seed of “Guernica” Part 4: A Little Help From Her Friends
Yes, Allēna and the rest of us didn’t want to waste our time on traitorous bitches, but there were many people in our life by that point that were worth our time and effort. Beginning in early 2019, Allēna started making many friends online once it became clear to her that she wouldn’t have much luck making friends locally. Many of the local townsfolk were polite, but just as withdrawn as Fang. She wasn’t going to get anywhere in person with Fang as jealous and controlling as he was, either. If someone even looked in our direction with what looked to be romantic or sexual intent, he’d lose his fucking shit and go as far as to blame Lēna.
So she struck out on her own online and simply stopped introducing her friends to Fang. He’d inevitably start heavily criticizing them behind closed doors, as well. It was no fun for anyone, so she kept her life to herself and stopped asking about his, as well. She wasn’t going to give a flying fuck about someone’s private life or creations when he clearly couldn’t extend the same courtesy.
A Cradle of Masterworks
Many of her friends showed her and later Peri what healthy love actually looked like. They treated her far better than any partner ever had and expected nothing in return except her presence. They were also genuine fans of her work and encouraged her to write and share to her heart’s content. It was this supportive semi-secret virtual environment that helped Allēna begin to process what Hera and her cronies had done to her. Through this process, “Guernica” Part 4 and the full poem spilled out of her.
Peri’s magnum opus, The Secret History of Doloras, was born a few months later in the same supportive cradle. We attribute the fact that our album Light on the Final Day saw the light of day (ha!) at all to one especially loving and persistent friend all the way across the world, as well. We would have never found our voice or the courage to alchemize all of our deep, deep pain without the support and love our friends gave us.
Parting Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 4 (another pun, haha)
In my opinion, Allēna is exceptionally brave. Not only did she stand up to our formidable spymaster of a mother for the first time in our entire family’s history, she persevered through severe neglect and abuse of all stripes and found the guts in the meantime to turn that pain into something aching, visceral, and profoundly beautiful. I fucking love this poem and respect the hell out of my fiery pint sized headmate. I wish she’d had an easier lot in life, but I don’t know if we’d be half as insightful as we are without it. There can be no wisdom without experience and no pain without beauty. Allēna, sweet woman, is one of the rare few that is able to see beauty in the horrible things that happened to her and use these gems to craft a new story, one of resilience, courage, defiance, and ultimately – magic.
Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of THAT. Part Five is coming up before you know it! Are you ready for another kick in the pants?!
Bastardly yours, Eight
Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (Jesus, that joke never gets old!) and have triumphantly entered the Fediverse! Follow us @opensorceryy everywhere that’s federated!
Hey, everyone! My name is Kalla. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. I haven’t posted here before, but I think having a cool space where we can write about what the fuck ever is a pretty neat idea, so I want to put my two cents in where “Guernica” Part 3 is concerned.
It’s also a bit too soon for the other alters to write about this shit, as many of them consider Part 3 to be the most gut-wrenching and soul-searing part of the poem. So I have stepped in to get them through this fucked up block they’re having and maybe process some of the grief on their behalf. If you are just now coming across this series in the wild, you can find Parts One and Two here and here. And as previously stated in the posts Eight and Ellie wrote, you can find the full poem in our poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.
I think this post will follow roughly the same structure of the others – Eight’s performance first, then the text, then my thoughts on it. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 3!
Eight’s Performance
Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 3.
The Text of “Guernica” Part 3
guernica iii.
airplanes up in the sky..
i know airplanes.
of course i do.
sometimes you’re the bomber,
sometimes you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
i like to think god laughs at tragedy
so that at least someone finds it funny.
but a brain is the bomb
and there’s a cruel irony in it eating itself
when it was the best brain i’ve ever known.
the roads were clogged with rubble and there was
no way out
there never was
not when the brain is the bomb
and you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
not when the brain belonged to your favorite person
and the bomb is also a death sentence in an MRI scan
and the execution date is to be determined.
so many bombs
making a hole in a heart
so deep that i’m still trying to find the bottom of it
(there’s no bottom)
but i will not die here when i’ve died 10 million times
already and i’m choking on this metaphor as i write
no harm in 10 million and 1
Allēna, summer 2019.
Our father, Xavier, whose death at the age of 47 from brain cancer inspired “Guernica” Part 3 with baby us in what must’ve been fall of 1997, early 1998.
My Thoughts
“Guernica” Part 3 is about our father, Xavier, dying when we were 18. He had brain cancer for eleven years. It was a shadow over our entire fucking childhood.
We knew Xavier was going to die from the time we were seven years old. This wasn’t due to any kind of intuitive knowing. He collapsed at the gym a few days prior and fell into a tonic-clonic seizure. He found out what had caused the seizure a short while later, a brain tumor.
We weren’t shielded from any of that. Our parents sat us down at the round kitchen table in the rumpus room and told us everything, sparing no details. This was a terrible burden for a child to bear, especially a highly intelligent child who had already seen too much pain by the age of seven. We had already attended more funerals than weddings, and would go on to lose even more people we deeply loved before even losing him.
A Death Sentence In An MRI Scan, And The Execution Date Is To Be Determined
In 2013, when Allēna was already battling the beginnings of a severe depressive spell that would make her crave death for the better part of the next decade, Xavier got even more terrible news. He went in for a routine MRI scan to see if his tumor – named Cuato by then – had grown any larger. The oncologists came back with good news and bad news. The first tumor hadn’t grown any, but they had found a second one. It turned out to be completely separate from Cuato, called a second primary tumor. This tumor was far more aggressive, and he was given months to live. Though he shattered expectations and went on to live for another three years, this was a death sentence. Allēna had to watch her brilliant father, one of the only people who had ever made her feel understood,
Allēna practically gave up on everything. Xavier was everything to her by that point. She describes the last few years of Xavier’s life as being trapped beneath a sword that is held by a fraying rope. At any moment, that rope could snap, and the sword would fall and impale her.
Suffering Alone And In Pain
Hera became colder the worse Xavier got and the worse Allēna fell into her depression. Without Xavier as a buffer anymore, Hera emotionally, mentally, medically, and occasionally physically abused Allēna. Hera began to massively overmedicate her with psychiatric medication so that she wouldn’t fight back anymore. She used Xavier’s worsening condition as a justification to do the bare minimum and emotionally abandon her when she needed support most.
So for three years, Allēna watched her father wither away, unable to tell anyone about what she was suffering at home. Hera explicitly forbade it and would hurt her worse if she tried. She dealt with a terrible bout of mononucleosis in early 2014, as well.
During that ordeal, she had to diagnose and treat herself for it. It turned out that she had actually gone to the doctor too early. The tests she’d gotten came back with a false negative. It was only when she presented with acute pancreatitis a few months later that they actually found the antibodies in her system that indicated she had had mono at all. By that time, Hera had written her now chronic exhaustion and pain as hypochondria, mental illness, and a ploy for attention.
We still haven’t recovered and are still chasing diagnoses a decade later. We suspect that the bout of mono may have given us lupus, an immensely painful and debilitating chronic illness that is notoriously difficult to diagnose. However, both Hera and later Fang wrote Allēna off as a lazy hypochondriac who just didn’t want to do her work, abandoning her to suffer alone, terrified, and in unimaginable physical and psychological pain.
Like The Sun Itself Went Out
Hera’s abuse and Xavier’s impending death psychologically shattered an already fragile Allēna. When he passed away on February 5, 2016, she felt nothing for five days. It hit her at breakfast back at college on the fifth day.
She describes losing Xavier like it was as though the sun itself went out. Her world became dark, cold, and completely and totally lonely. It took every ounce of strength she had just to drag herself to class and back. She told her professors what was going on, and most of them took mercy on her. She could communicate with her Ancient Greek professor that she was having a very hard time that day with just her eyes. This professor, who we’ll call Ms. Melitta, was a very kind and perceptive angel of a woman, and she outright pleaded with Allēna to go easy on herself. She told Allēna she was proud of her just for showing up even when in her words it looked like she “wanted to be blotted off the face of the Earth”.
Allēna, whose family and life up to that point had always pushed her past her capacity to handle it against her will, had never received that kind of grace before. She broke down ugly crying. It was a balm to her weary, brokenhearted soul. She credits Ms. Melitta and others that year for saving her life. She was seriously contemplating suicide at that point, was sick all the time, barely eating, and was an all around disaster. It’s a miracle in her mind that she still has friends from that college, she was such a disaster.
I Will Not Die Here
At the end of the year, when her professors all gathered to give her her closing remarks, they almost all agreed that they admired that she almost always showed up to class, even if she couldn’t manage to stay the whole time or say or do much at all. Even during one of the most painful times in her life, Allēna kept showing up and putting in an effort through tremendous difficulty, and many of them held her in high regard for that. She had never received that sort of kindness and praise before, and it helped her keep going and not give up.
Showing up became a pattern for all of us. We joke that we “appear under mysterious circumstances”. If we say we’ll be someplace at some time, we will be there and early, come hell or high water. Xavier taught us that nothing less will do. Eight did this when he got his job in Philly – he said he would be there in Philly on Monday the Friday before that in Texas, and there the fuck he was on Philly on Monday, early. Nobody in the office thought he’d even show up, considering he’d have to travel over a thousand miles and move in less than a week to take this job. But that’s the way we were raised, and that’s what we do, obstacles be fucking damned.
We will not die here, we keep saying. We have shit to do. And die we don’t, even though there are often close calls.
Stay tuned for more magic and for Part 4! I’m gonna go to sleep soon, I cried my eyes out writing this.
Love, Kalla
One more thing…
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