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!
In 2021, I was talking with my friend Delta about all of the shit I was going through at the time while deep in survival mode and about being an Enneagram Eight largely geared toward self preservation, and I predicted that once I got out of survival mode and was safe, I would sort of… collapse. I would have no idea what the fuck to do with myself and kinda deflate and go more or less catatonic. That prediction has turned out to be more or less accurate most days.
As my life has stabilized, I find myself with less and less to solve and fewer fires to put out, with many of the remaining problems largely outside of my control and completely outside of my power to fix or help with. In short, most days, despite having the stability I worked so hard for, I feel more lost and adrift than ever. I have been sleeping a lot. I just don’t have much desire to do much, and I do the rare activity when the mood or inspiration strikes. My general state reminds me a lot of when I lost my dad, Xavier, back in 2016.
I wonder a lot if I’m subconsciously or somatically grieving all of the bullshit of the last three or four years or perhaps even longer because of how badly the wind has been knocked out of me. I barely even have energy to reply to a fraction of the dozens of messages on the various messaging apps I get daily, and I am trying to move away from feeling so bad about that because realistically I just can’t right now. That’s the plain and simple fact of the matter. I only really respond to people and reach out or have my phone nearby at all if I feel up to it, which is rare, and I have been trying to strike a balance between isolation and social time so that I don’t fall off the face of the Earth completely. I don’t want to fully withdraw or even withdraw at all, but my brain and body have been demanding that to some degree, and I’m going with that rather than fighting it so as to not make whatever this is longer and worse.
On the subject of recovery, I did a bit more research on what the underlying cause of my symptoms might be that have been making my body and mind feel so damn out of whack, and came up with a decent theory that my thyroid might have gotten ever so slightly cooked due to Hera’s batshit DIY MKULTRA scheme she put me through, and the HRT I’m on combined with the years of stress has been making it go, ah, ever so slightly haywire.
So I found some scholarly research that said that thyroid patients suffering from both hypothyroidism AND hyperthyroidism benefit from taking various forms of vitamin B and thiamine for their chronic fatigue especially. Luckily for me, a former friend of mine had send me a bunch of supplements she wasn’t gonna use late last year and among them was a B100 complex supplement. So I decided to test my theory and give this shit a try and see if it did anything for my fatigue and other symptoms.
Well, it appears to be doing a fair bit. I’m about five days into the test and my brain fog and pain is leagues better. It appears to be helping my lack of object permanence and executive function, as well, giving me some semblance of both. I have also noticed that I’m not super overstimulated by huge amounts of sound, nor does silence understimulate me as badly. I can sit in silence for far longer without my mind itching for music or internally screaming. It may also be helping with the flashbacks, as well, but that’s to be determined. I will need to continue the test for longer to see if it has any significant effect there. So perhaps my fried thyroid theory holds water. I will need to address this with my doctors next time I can spare a brain cell, haha.
I’m also far less angry and my headaches are gradually getting better as I work through my anxiety, as they appear to be triggered by anxiety and moments of emotional distress, which the B100 appears to be lessening as a baseline. Yay for House MD-ing myself at home! I just love being an AuDHDer with a special interest in weird ass branches of medicine who was practically raised by doctors, hahahaaaaa. (This is partly sarcastic, partly genuine. Specialized knowledge and deep somatic intuition saves lives, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s just annoying that my body is so weird and there are so many things that the medical field as we know it doesn’t explore without months of waiting or you have the charisma of a fucking god).
Seeing as there are a lot of positive effects even through the semi-catatonia and the semi-catatonia predates the B100 test, I don’t think the B100 complex is the culprit here. If anything, the supplement appears to be helping. I’m just probably processing years of grief somatically that I’m not entirely consciously aware of.
So that leaves a large amount of time to fill as I heal that would ordinarily be spent in agonizing mental or physical pain, parsing my way through interpersonal trashfires, or recovering from the aforementioned problems. That huge amount of time to fill raises some incredibly simple, yet profound questions that I’m currently exploring the answers to: what the fuck do I do now? What actually makes me happy now that I’m living more out of love than out of spite and my brain and my body aren’t fucking screaming 24/7?
I know I love writing on here and writing in general. I am deeply proud of myself for having a space that is mine that I’ve maintained for months now even if I can’t post daily, and that does a lot for my quality of life. I like having spaces that are mine where I can express myself with the people that I love that would be very difficult to take from me or from them. I know research and engaging in my myriad special interests lights me the fuck up. Emerson raids the local Little Free Libraries like the adorable gremlin he is and often spoils me by bringing books back about topics that he either knows I’m fascinated with or that he thinks would catch my eye, and I do indeed feel very spoiled and lucky when he does that. That man is a catch and a half.
I’ve seen the concept of “dopamine menus” floating around on the Internet for some time, as well, and I’ve started merging that conceptwith a sort of free form to do list before I go to bed if I’m not completely beat to fuck by the time I pass out and can spare a brain cell to dump all the things that might possibly bring me joy the next day even if things go to shit on paper. I often struggle in the moment to think of anything that would bring me a shred of happiness in the moment if I’m sad or bored or anxious and looking for a pick me up, and having all of that on hand and prepped the night before helps a LOT in those moments.
I think all of those taken in tandem are a decent place to start. I’m trying to move away from the notion that I have to have a Grand Plan ™️ or a goal to accomplish at all times and I really think that teenage me had it right when they said that happiness was having good talks, good music, and good food with good people. That was really their goal in life, and I think they’d be proud of me for getting here. I do a LOT of all of the above.
So stay tuned for more magic, horseshoes and weedwhackers (you decide what y’all are in the comments). See you fuckers next time.
Hi! Four here. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. WordPress suggested a prompt from a journaling app called Day One, which we are using for this post. Although the question is complicated for us, I’m gonna do my best to answer it. The question the prompt posed was “do you practice religion?”
We all have a very complicated and difficult relationship with religion. We’ve gone through numerous phases in our spiritual journey, and I would say that short that if someone asked me “do you practice religion”, yes. Yes, we do. However, that wasn’t always the case. We have gone from being atheists to Mormons to being a flavor of Christian we couldn’t define to being literally fucking deified to Pagan and a system of practicing sorcerers. I’ll talk about it all in sequence, then open the floor to questions at the end.
Do We Practice Religion? To Answer That, I’m Gonna Have To Tell You A Few Things First.
As you’ve probably gathered by now if you’ve been following our blog for some time, we have a LOT of Tragic Backstory and Lore. It’s like that on the spiritual/religious side of things, as well. We were raised in what my headmate Allēna calls a “house divided”.
A House Divided
Hera, our mother, was a quietly devout Methodist coming from a LOUDLY devout Southern Baptist family that converted to Methodism as a sort of compromise between our maternal grandmother (who is NOT a Baptist by any means) and our maternal grandfather, who is such a devout Southern Baptist that he’s more devoted to bigotry than the actual faith itself.
Our father, on the other hand, came from a a family of physicians, scientists and bohemian artists and was a militant atheist. Our first host, Castor, took after his father in everything, and as such was deeply skeptical of any form of religion from a young age. However, he had an enormous, all consuming special interest in Greek mythology, which ultimately turned into an appreciation for spirituality in every form he could find.
Castor’s Guiding Intuition
He was also deeply, innately spiritual. He was wary of most of his family and our close family friends for very good reason, as we’d find out later that many of them weren’t good people. Interestingly, all the people that we found bad things out about were people that Castor had avoided like the plague. The kid just wanted to do his own thing, read his books, listen to his own intuition, and mind his own business, and many of his family members found that odd. He didn’t conform to their ways or anyone else’s and wouldn’t follow orders blindly the way they wanted him to. He asked too many questions and spoke his mind in everything. It got him into heaps of trouble with his family and his teachers, but it also meant that he never lost access to his intuition or his identity.
Allēna, the First Among Us To Actually Practice Religion
When Allēna took over from Castor as host and primary fronter at eleven years old or so, she was just as tapped into her intuition as he was, with just as much devotion to seeking out the truth, asking questions, and speaking her mind if something was important to her.
Never Cross an Angry Byzantinist, and Don’t Invite One To Church, Either
One of Allēna’s great passions is studying history, and she loves the Byzantine Empire with all her heart. With that, she amassed a great deal of knowledge about early Christian history in high school and knew more than most that dear GODS it’s a hot mess.
She disliked many branches of Christianity because she thought that the Nicene Creed was bullshit and nothing more than a political compromise that an emperor made who had no fucking clue what he was doing and even less authority to do it. Not only that, but it had no basis in scripture whatsoever and therefore rendered the entire foundation of those faiths invalid. So when her friends at her very religious homeschool cooperative would invite her to church, she’d politely decline as best she knew how. (For better or worse, that woman has no tact now and had even less then).
Faith? What the Hell Is That?
But she was curious and still wanted to see if she could even believe in God, horseshit aside. Spoiler: it didn’t go well. She DID find a church that didn’t believe in the Nicene Creed, but unfortunately for her, it was the Mormon Church. When the missionaries taught her for the first time, she felt they’d finally portrayed God in a way she could understand.
To Practice Religion As An Autistic Academic
Before we go on, I should tell you that we are very autistic. Emerson refers to us as savants, it goes that deep and we are that rigid. As a result, we cannot do anything unless we are under the impression that we understand it completely. The Mormons asked a LOT of blind faith from Lēna, which is something neither she nor anyone else in our system have ever been okay with. We cannot operate on blind faith. We’ve tried multiple times and it frightens us so badly we shut down. We trust no one and nothing fully except ourselves and never have, and this quickly became a problem.
She asked so many damn questions during her Sunday school classes that I wouldn’t be surprised if her teachers had to draw straws when determining which teachers got which students. The teacher who drew the short straw got her and all of her miles of questions. She asked and asked all the questions she could because she approached a high control faith that expected a lot of blind trust from its followers like an academic. When she never found answers that satisfied her or even made sense to her, it broke her heart.
The Bright Side
Even though being left essentially empty-handed broke Lēna’s heart, it made deconstructing the religious trauma converting to Mormonism had left her with a whole helluva lot easier. Because she wasn’t fully emotionally and spiritually attached to the Church or their practices, she was better able to examine what she wanted to keep from their theology and what she didn’t really resonate with and leave it behind.
Did She Practice Religion As A Member of The Mormon Church? Up For Debate. Did She Practice Her Power Moves? Hell Yeah.
She also gained a lot of experience in playing the system as a member of the Mormon Church. Many alters in our system have an innate ability to see who is actually in charge wherever we are and the real hierarchy within an organization, and Lēna is no exception. She absolutely used that gift to her advantage here. Women have no real power in the Church, so she allied herself closely with men who were generally very smart like her and were second or third in command of her congregation or of her local group of congregations.
She charmed the HELL out of them as well as everyone else around her, and learned how to throw legendary parties that kids told all of their friends about. Everyone wanted an invitation to one of her parties. Because of all of that hard work, her reputation as a social connector and a hard, dedicated worker and innovator who knew how to get fucking RESULTS MASSIVELY preceded her, and I suspect that she could have gotten away with anything she wanted to if she’d so chosen.
An Unconventional Darling
These people gave her anything and everything she wanted. Even though she had no power on paper, she had power over the people in power and they owed her a lot of favors. She broke convention and barriers at every turn and they still loved her for it, which was practically unheard of in the Church. Most members are shunned for being different, while she was embraced for it.
While Allēna deconstructed her faith, she wrote a quadrilogy of haunting albums, one of which we recently recut. It’s called Primrose Path, and it’s equally a statement of doubt and of faith. I’ll embed it below:
By the time our first marriage ended, however, we were already setting off on a different path…
Open Sorcery
We fell heavily into divination practices during our first marriage in Alaska. Lēna designed her own set of oracle cards while half asleep based off of several symbols that meant a lot to her spiritually and had followed her throughout her life. She found that she had never lost that intuition fully throughout her time as a Mormon or while she was deconstructing her Christianity, and not only that – she had powerful psychic insight.
This only grew as the years went on. When Eight moved here to Milwaukee, he discovered witchcraft and chaos magic and that many of the things we’d been doing innately for years were actually established practices with names that witches and magic practitioners had been doing for centuries. And not only that, but he was good at it. He just needed to learn how to use it intentionally. In fact, we named our blog Open Sorcery and have a variant of that as our username in several places because we don’t see that our magic as a thing that we should hide. Instead, we try and share our gifts with magic and everything else. But we still thought something was missing.
Crowd-Sourced God Complex
We felt like some deity had been contacting us for years, but in the meantime, a joke Eight made backfired terribly and his followers on the Internet worshipped him as the one true God for years. So a possible answer to the question “do you practice religion” is BITCH! I AM RELIGION!
Jokes aside, it made Eight and many of us deeply uncomfortable and some people on the periphery of the cult accused him of having a god complex. He fired back, “if I do, it’s crowd-sourced!”
I wish I were kidding about this part, but alas, I am not. We did end up finding out which deities were trying to reach us about our destiny’s extended warranty, though.
Hello, This Is Bastet With Loki, Dionysus, And Associates. We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Destiny’s Extended Warranty
I find it very interesting that we had to claim our magic to some degree before any deities claimed us, but that’s been our experience with a LOT of Pagan deities. They’re collaborators. They expect respect, but they respect you in return and don’t judge. We work pretty closely with Bastet, Loki, and Dionysus, and keep the channels open in case anyone else wants to reach out. We also work closely with our recent ancestors who’ve passed on, especially our paternal uncle, paternal great aunt, several great-grandparents, a distant great aunt named Florence, and a few others when they make themselves known. Our ancestors like to talk shit about each other, which is pretty funny unless we’re trying to focus on reading our tarot or oracle cards. Then we need them to shut up for five minutes, please and thank you. But we love them and talk about them often.
What about y’all? Do you practice religion? Do you have a crazy spiritual journey like ours? The comments are yours to talk about this stuff, just please keep it respectful.
Much love, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!
-Four, That Guy of the Ashley system.
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