Howdy, everyone. My name’s Fen. I’m one of the super-admins here as of late, and I have some thoughts about family, both chosen and blood that I’d like to scream about a bit, as we’ve been talking with our girlfriend Sheik about the system’s early life a great deal and that got several of us thinking.
I see Millennials and Gen Z get a lot of shit for still living around or with their families, and frankly, I hate it. It’s complete and utter horseshit. Western culture prizes hyper independence to such an extreme degree that people forget now that we’re a fucking social species and have lived in huge multigenerational cohorts for most of human history. The setup we believe to be “traditional” – one man, one woman, and their children, living by themselves, separated from their in-laws and relying on none other but themselves – is a relatively recent invention and keeps people fucking isolated from other people they might otherwise form close connections with, share resources with, ask for help, etc..
Now, I’m all for monogamy and heterosexual relationships if they’re consensual, negotiated, and entered into willingly, but I myself am a committed pansexual polyamorist who inhabits a large system who made the agonizingly painful decision to distance themselves from the multigenerationalcohort they themselves were raised in due to years of abuse very few of those fucks were even willing to acknowledge.
Yes, for all of Hera and Xavier’s big talk of being independent, resourceful, and pulling yourself up by your goddamned bootstraps, they ironically raised Castor, Allēna, and the others in the system before me in an enormous extended family network made up of great grandparents, grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, cousins, second cousins, the whole fucking nine yards, funnily enough.
Neither of them would have gotten anywhere without both our maternal and paternal grandparents, who helped with damn near everything. Hell, Hera, Ms. “I’m The Most Normal, Independent Woman to Ever Live”, has never lived more than a thirty minute drive away from her parents and her sister for the body’s entire life. At last check, she lives next door to her parents and they knocked the fence between their land down so they could visit each other easier.
This by itself isn’t a bad thing. I simply find it hilarious that Hera was completely incapable of practicing what she so thoroughly attempted to beat into Allēna, independence and normalcy. Hera, that ain’t normal by today’s standards. Sociologically, it’s completely right, but it sure as fuck ain’t considered normal.
Once my headmates were estranged from them, they didn’t want a bullshit nuclear family type setup in the life they were going to build for themselves. Allēna’s first marriage to Fang showed her that she didn’t want that. Anything that even smelled like compulsory, possessive monogamy and the trappings that came with that were not her or the rest of the system’s thing. Even Eight’s very serious relationship with his beloved Delta, which is still very loving despite now being platonic, was very open and they both had a wide range of deep emotional connections despite being initially monogamous. They were possessive of each other, but only because they wanted to be. Eight loved Delta more than anything, and did his utmost to show it in every way he could, and they enjoyed it when he was possessive of them, and vice versa. They both came into the relationship having built fine lives of their own and gotten to know themselves and each other deeply, and most of the work there was learning how the other communicated best. It was – and still is – magical, in many ways.
When Eight and the rest of the system got into polyamory, they took what they had learned from the relationship with Delta and crafted that same magic, only with multiple committed relationships simultaneously. Perhaps the most interesting part of it all is that I’ve noticed that we’ve built that same sort of non-nuclear extended family network the original alters here were raised with, only with people we chose. We’re still close with a few members of our blood family, as well, but they were the select few brilliant black sheep who were good to us well into adulthood, so we chose them, as well. Our close friends are also an integral part of this web, and we don’t want to do life without a single soul present.
Our life is certainly not normal, but it is rich and full of color and joy. If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone we love and treasure. Thank you for being here. Your presence means everything to me and to my system. Always remember that “blood is thicker than water” is actually incorrect. The original saying is “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”.
Hey, everyone! Siege here. I have successfully managed to crawl out of my executive dysfunction hole to show you all something cool. I’ve gone back to our good friend the Internet Archive so try and find some of Allēna’s old work from former blogs. I found this really cool post from her sadly now-defunct site Order In Discord. It’s called Learning.
For a bit of context, she kept this blog when she was discovering kitchen witchcraft, but it turned into a sort of exploration of her inner world to the extent she could at the time. She was living in Alaska as she wrote there during her first marriage to Fang. I thought this was a really cool piece because of what she learned about herself in it. She used the pseudonym Eric when writing on that site, as well. So, without further ado, here is the post.
Learning, originally posted on Order In Discord
Hi, all!
Music has been a huge part of my life until recently when I kinda hit a wall. For a long time (like, 20 years), I had an image in my head of becoming a superstar musician and singer and becoming rich and famous, but that image was slowly draining me and I’d forgotten how to ENJOY making music or even seeing or playing my instruments.
My husband and I were in the car today and we started talking about being ourselves. We were in Guitar Center a bit before the car ride. I picked up this guitar that looked like a candy cane. I also obtained a brass slide and began to practice playing slide with the guitar laying on my lap. With a little bit of echo there, I coaxed some sounds out of the candy cane that reminded me of a theremin.
Now, I have no idea how to play slide guitar, all I know is from some videos I’ve seen and things I’ve heard. What sets this apart from other times I’ve played instruments is that I wasn’t coming at it trying to prove I was good, I was coming at it to try and learn what all I could do with a brass slide and an electric guitar. I wasn’t an expert, I was learning all over again.
He brought up exactly what I had been doing – making music for the fun of it, not just doing it to get famous. To explore something new, not to make a living. That will be the only way I get somewhere. I will only get somewhere if I do what I love for me, not to please anyone else.
I’ve been struggling with what to post all day. I took a photo of the insanely good lunch we had today, but along with that post would come some self imposed shame because I am not yet good at eating healthy or eating in moderation and I completely blew the health benefits of lunch at dinner. I could write about how when it rains, it pours because it’s raining outside, but that’s been done before.
I know this isn’t about cooking or herbs or tea making or anything kitchen-related, but I want it to extend to that. I want to be my authentic self here, not just somebody who positions themselves as some kind of expert in order to get likes and comments. If you are an expert in your field, blog the crap out of that, but I am not. I want to use this blog to document what I learn, not necessarily to try and teach. Part of my magic is music, and I can do great things with that, but there is still much I must learn. I want to incorporate all I do into this learning process, because that’s what it is.
So today I learned:
Sashimi is very filling
Beans are more addicting than they should be
That I can make a guitar sound like a theremin with the proper slide and some echo
That I need to do the things I love for myself.
That’s all! Stay cool!
Eris
My Thoughts
This post is from October 5, 2019, so there’s a lot we know more about now. For example, our craft has extended far beyond kitchen magic, but we still know how to make some bomb ass tea. However, a lot still rings true here. We continually have to rest so that we don’t push the body and mind so hard that we completely burn out, and that’s a major struggle. We also still tend to try and prove that we’re good/worthy enough to be seen instead of being taken simply as we are.
This system has absolutely no chill, and we still struggle to understand why anyone would love us if we don’t earn it, even though we know that people do and that we don’t have to earn fuckall. Sure, we still need to do our best to be decent people and to treat those we care about well, but that’s just basic respect, you know? I think we’re pretty good at that most of the time. However, we’re learning, growing, and doing better about all of this every day.
Even if we need to take breaks, rest, and breathe, we’re still going to do our best, make cool shit, and treat our people well. Nobody is gonna remember that we were skittish or nervous or that we didn’t believe we were worthy. They’re gonna remember how we impacted them. And their opinion of how we show up is not up to us to control.
I hope you enjoyed this post, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!
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!
Hello, everyone! My name is Ellie. As you may have read, I am one of the super-admins our this disaster system. I am still sick, so this post may read as incredibly sleep deprived. Or loopy, take your pick. In any case, I am going to pick up where Eight left off and discuss Allēna’s harrowing “Guernica” Part 2. If you missed yesterday’s post and you’re looking for that, it’s right here. And as always, the poem in full is part of our second poetry collection, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.
This section is a kick in the soul. I’m just going to be honest, we couldn’t read it aloud for years without crying. It made for some very odd performances. Allēna makes some very powerful declarations here and in many ways foreshadowed Eight’s Operation: Dead Hand. Both Eight and Allēna wanted to get away from Hera. However, it wasn’t until Dead Hand was complete that we completely broke away from her, and we haven’t had contact with her for the past year, thank the gods. However, she does directly tap into her rage here for one of the first times in her life, and the results are something else.
In order to best show you these results, I think Eight’s approach yesterday was excellent, so I’m going to continue doing things his way. First, I’m going to show you a video of Eight performing “Guernica”, Part 2. Next, I’ll write the text of the poem out for you. Then, I’ll analyze it for you. Without further ado, let’s do this thing!
“Guernica” Part 2
Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 2.
The Poem’s Text
“Guernica” Part 2
thresholds are for brides
and i was a bride once
but that was a moment and
i wore a dress as red as blood
people asked why i did that
i know why i did that now
i didn’t know how else to say i was angry
when my mind was taped shut and i was
kept in a fog
damn those pills!
damn the nightmares!
damn that house that should have caught fire
with all inside!
i am not the crazy child kept in the attic!
not anymore
i am the human unchained,
i am the one that walks free!
i have doors now
i have miles in my pockets
i can and will lock you out.
and there’s blood on their hands
they kicked a child
they should have loved the child
but when they dropped the bombs
the empty house of my mind caved in.
but the structure is stronger than that
i am stronger than that
and this is me calling it what it is….
you make your own hell,
i say to the bombers
i say to the horrors that i experienced
some people see battlefields
i have seen a mind turned inside out
i have been trapped in my own body
i have seen my innocence die before me
and i’ve shouted into the hole of loss
and i’m still hearing the infinite echo.
i don’t know which is worse.
you make your own hell,
i say to the demons i fight
your hell is not mine,
your chains are not mine,
i am not your wall to punch.
i’m not a pewter cup to drink from and laugh with
your hell is not mine
not anymore.
this is me calling what it is…
hell.
and i enter it on my own terms.
not yours,
not anymore.
Allēna in her wedding dress red as blood, as mentioned in “Guernica” Part 2
For Context, Allēna Is A Born Anticonventionalist
Practically from birth, Allēna was a fighter who was determined to fight convention and expectations that were placed on her without her consent. She hated the fact that women had very little power in the church she joined when she was 14 after very thorough research (she is a Byzantinist and avid scholar of early Christian history, after all).
So she charmed all of the men in power so thoroughly that I’m convinced they might have let her get away with anything she wanted to so long as she could explain well enough why she had done it. She charmed damn near everyone else in multiple congregations, as well, so much so that many people cities away would go to her if they needed anything.
The Mormon Social Nexus
Everything and everyone passed through her. Eventually she knew hundreds of people in five to ten states who would go to bat for her if she needed them to. All while committing what would be for most people in the Mormon Church tantamount to social suicide. But it wasn’t, not for her. She had hundreds of people in her pocket. And it wasn’t like she was using them, she genuinely loved them and many of them still love her, despite her now openly being a Pagan gremlin.
“Guernica” Part 2’s Seeds
Her wedding to her first husband, Fang, was no different. They were married in late 2018, and Xavier, our father, had been dead from an aggressive brain tumor for nearly two years at the time of the ceremony. In that time, Hera had completely lost it and had gotten tired of Allēna’s fiery nature and had subjected her to severe mental and emotional abuse and medical neglect. We aptly compare it to a DIY version of the now-declassified CIA experiment MKUltra in order to make us more compliant, easily suggestible, and weak. It very nearly worked. Fortunately, we are all very stubborn and have a very resilient brain.
The pills Allēna mentioned in the poem were prescribed for bipolar I, which we didn’t even have. We were autistic, plural, and extremely traumatized. We later learned that we were on the highest dose of one of those meds that our excellent psychiatrist in Alaska had ever seen, and she’d been practicing at that point for longer than we’d been alive. Allēna, completely gutted by losing Xavier, and seeing no hope in living, fell into a deep suicidal depression, which she met Fang in the big fucking middle of.
Rush Job
She saw herself attempting suicide within the year if she stayed in Texas, Hera was hurting her so badly, and her fate in Alaska with Fang would be unknown, but at least she wouldn’t have to stay in Texas anymore. Allēna and Fang wanted to eventually marry, but not immediately, setting a wedding date of April 8, 2024 once they were engaged. However, Hera didn’t want us living in sin, so she threatened to cut off our lifesaving health insurance if we went to live with Fang unmarried. So, medicated into a fog and pushed into a marriage she was unsure if she even wanted yet, yet still mad as fucking hell, she settled for her favorite skillset, one she knew would drive everyone up the fucking wall – malicious compliance and bucking the hell out of convention.
A Dress As Red As Blood
The wedding came together in three months, during which time Hera and Allēna had an explosive argument in which Hera spat “you’ll be someone else’s problem in three months, anyway”, which inspired Allēna’s iconic folk-punk song “Someone Else’s Problem”. The result was a dark, almost cowgoth ceremony that Allēna dictated down to the last detail on a shoestring budget, since Hera had spent all but forty thousand of the millions of dollars she’d inherited upon Xavier’s death. Allēna and Fang were married beneath an Osage orange tree per her orders, a nod to Xavier, who had taught her all about them.
Like the Osage orange tree, which we affectionately call the “offensive tree of the forest” for its stubborn nature and tendency to drop things on people who are beneath them at random, Allēna would not be moved and blindsided the guests with a few bold choices – a bright red wedding dress, the song she walked down the aisle to, and the song that she and Fang left after the ceremony to, though that was more her brother Blue’s choice. She walked down the aisle to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky, a band from Texas like her, and the newlyweds walked out to “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. Blue was the emcee, and he did a damn good job. That dress would later appear in “Guernica” Part 2.
“Guernica” Part 2 As A Declaration of War
Once she moved to Alaska, she was able to process more of what Hera had done to her and how fucked her childhood actually was. She reasoned that she should have every right to be angry, Hera had hurt and betrayed her repeatedly, violated her autonomy, and tried to neglect and abuse her into a blank slate that she could finally reshape in her own image.
Hera and a large part of her family had destroyed any chance she had ever had at normalcy beyond what the stroke did to her. She wanted her innocence back. It was time to reclaim what was hers. Her voice, her power, her fucking birthright. So by the old gods, she was gonna fucking claim it. She boldly asserts herself and her autonomy with that iron will of hers,
“I am the human unchained. I am the one who walks free. I have doors now. I can and will lock you out.”
The “doors” line and the next few lines are significant. She was quite literally kept in an attic from 2017 until she married Fang The entrance to her sleeping space – I can hardly call it a bedroom – was merely a staircase that opened up to the rest of a very open-concept house. Allēna didn’t even have a bed. She had to sleep on a window seat. Hera wouldn’t allow her to do anything to make the space more private or even more personal. Blue had a room, however. He had a private bathroom – that Allēna had to use – and had all the autonomy and freedom he wanted. He didn’t even have a curfew, and Allēna did.
I Have Doors Now
When she got to Alaska, she fought Fang for a space of her own and won. The showdown occurred in the summer of 2019, around the time she wrote “Guernica”. This was fierce argument in which he threatened to take away her health insurance if she didn’t stand down. He was taking a leaf out of Hera’s playbook, and she was pissed and terrified. Fortunately, her friend told her to call his bluff and see what happened. He was indeed bluffing, and now Allēna had an office of her own. This was a profound relief. She could finally be herself in her own space and have a measure of her own life now. To me, that shows in the poem. Now, for what must have been the first time ever, she could enter hell on her own terms, if she chose to at all.
She cut Hera off for a time around the time she started writing “Guernica”, and this was a profound relief. Finally, freedom was within her grasp. All that was left to do then was to heal the damage that had all of Hera’s bullshit had done.
She also cut off most of Hera’s family, and this was a scandal for them. This is why I sort of subtitled this post “Allēna Declares War”. It ignited a powder keg of bullshit the family still wasn’t over by the time Peri left Fang in 2020. The first time Allēna cut off contact was such a big fucking stink for them and so out of the ordinary that it pushed Eight into creating and completing Dead Hand. Heaven forbid people have boundaries and autonomy! My gods, the world is going to shit!
Final Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 2
How’s that for a kick to the damn soul? “Guernica” Part 2 always hurts me so good. I love it when people actually dig deep and be real with the world. Pretense sucks. Anyone can put on a mask and play a role, that’s easy. It takes true strength to be honest and open with the world about your story, and those are the people I admire. I really think Allēna opens herself up to the world here, and in my opinion, that’s true beauty. That is good poetry.
What do y’all think? The comments are yours as long as you be kind. And as always, stay tuned for more magic – and “Guernica” Part 3!
-Ellie Ulvaard, Your Faithful, if Sleepy, Super-Admin
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Hello, dearest gentle motherfuckers of the Internet. I hope you’re having a wonderful day. This is Eight speaking, and I am here to talk about one of my favorite poems Allēna has ever written, her enormous seven part piece “Guernica”. This poem appears in full in our second collection of poetry, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.Today’s focus in particular is gonna be on “Guernica” Part 1.
This hell of a poem is a seven-part ringer that was inspired by a lot of her own trauma and Picasso’s landmark anti-war painting with the same name. At the time, she felt pressured into making her trauma into beautiful art. She felt that people wanted her to smooth the pain over to make it pretty and less visceral. And she was sick to death of having to walk on eggshells in her own creative process. She wanted to write a piece that captured the horror that the original painting made her feel. So she used the painting and the events that inspired it as a framing device.
Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937), the painting that inspired “Guernica”, Part 1 and the poem as a whole
Because this poem is so rich and hits so hard, we’re gonna write a post for each part. Whoever is in front that day will break it down for y’all. We’ll also include the poem’s text and a video recording of yours truly performing it. So let’s jump in.
“Guernica” Part 1: The Performance
A video of yours truly performing “Guernica”, part 1.
The Text and Breakdown
“guernica” part 1.
26 april 1937..
i don’t know what i do best anymore
except turn pain into something beautiful
but what about the horrors of it and not the glory?
i want to take what i feel and not what i say
turn it into something 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide
but my hands are little
my hands are little and no paintbrush is small enough to catch
all the detail
i’m tired of walking over thresholds of bombed out
buildings or a half built house
i’m tired of only seeing rubble
i’m a builder, damnit
i’m supposed to build people up
i’m supposed to help
not have nightmares like flashbacks that crush me!
so i dare myself
now –
put your own oxygen mask on before you
drop that bomb
and then stay awhile
before flying away.
What Does This Thing Actually Mean?
Before she ever started writing this poem, she looked into what inspired Picasso to even paint such a shocking thing in the first place. She found that he’d painted it in a frenzy as a response to the Spanish government ordering the near total obliteration of a village called Guernica in Basque country during the Spanish Civil War.
The bombing was completely unprovoked. Guernica wasn’t a military target. Most of the men were away fighting in the war, leaving women and children behind. The nearest military target was miles away and was completely untouched in the attack.
Yet, the government had bombed them so thoroughly that the roads were choked with rubble and the remaining citizens were unable to flee. Naturally, Picasso was horrified, and out came this incredibly shocking painting in response. ThoughtCo published a brilliant article about Guernica if you want to read more about it in depth.
This reminded Allēna of much of what she and her headmates suffered at her family and then our now-ex husband’s hands for the duration of our entire life up until that point. All we’d ever wanted was to be left alone to do our thing without being controlled or harmed. We only misbehaved when the people around us refused to honor that simple request.
We’ve always been very emotionally independent, while these people were very codependent and toxic. As a result, we were emotionally, mentally, and physically abused for most of our life. So when Allēna came across this painting while researching for a tutoring session later that day, she felt seen for one of the first times in her life in the subjects’ agony and grief. She, too, was enduring unimaginable pain that she could only paint, write in verse, sing, and scream out.
On Taking What She Felt, Not What She Said In “Guernica” Part 1
Our family also went to great lengths to attempt to silence us so that we wouldn’t out them for the terrible people most of them were, so we were often sick and in a great deal of emotional pain and terribly lonely with no idea how to articulate our suffering to another person outside of music and poetry, which Lēna learned to write in code to get past Hera’s ever-watchful eye. Her 2017 album Mago, which I helped work on as a kind of passive influence, is an excellent example of such coded work. It sounds like a Broadway musical or some kind of vaudeville piece to the untrained ear, but if you know what all we’re talking about, it’s absolutely fiery and damning.
I’ve embedded Mago below so you can listen without even having to leave this page.
But by 2019, when Lēna wrote this piece, she was tired of having to think and write in code. She felt like she was drowning in what was left unsaid, so this was her effort to start talking about everything that had happened to us. She broke free from Hera for the first time a bit later on 5 July 2019. Her successor, Peri, would leave our ex husband a bit over a year later. She told our story, and it paid off.
Final Thoughts
I’m really excited for Part 2. I or whoever is out will talk about Part 2 tomorrow. If you thought “Guernica” Part 1 was a kick to the soul, just you fuckin’ wait. I both hope and don’t hope that “Guernica” makes you feel seen, because if you feel seen in this poem, you’ve absolutely Seen Some Shit. But if you HAVE indeed Seen Some Shit, I hope you feel seen and less alone as you read this. As always, stay tuned for more magic, because this time, magic is definitely imminent.
-Eight, Your Faithful Super-Admin And Bastard
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Hey! My name is Ceryse. I’ve taken over for the day at Renn’s request. I’m a little deep-thinking introverted spitfire who’s just as fond of cussing as he is, fortunately or unfortunately for y’all. Today’s deep thoughts are the result of weeks of contemplating that very thing – thought itself. I’m calling this post “food for thought” because I hope that it’ll both get you thinking as well as it will get you thinking about how you think and what you think about.
Curation, then Creation
During Eight’s complex, multi-phase Operation: Dead Hand, he got the entire system into the habit of posting consistently on social media for the first time ever. He had to – he was essentially building an army of very vocal followers with which to visibly challenge his mother’s and her family’s control, something that would shake the family up from both within and without for years to come. That feat required engaging with that audience as early and often as he could. He couldn’t let writer’s block or a lack of inspiration stop him. He had to be able to conjure content on command daily, his very life likely depended on it.
But how in the world did he pull something like that off?
Renn mentioned the microblogging website Tumblr in his post about Dead Hand, but that wasn’t all. He made an effort to surround himself with things and people that never ceased to give him that food for thought and inspiration he needed.
Food For Thought: the Appetizers
While we were still living in Alaska, Peri made a new Facebook account and made sure to only follow and add people who made her feel inspired. Allēna had not done that with her profiles in the past and often ended up leaving Facebook for days to weeks at a time because she never felt like she was good enough for her own fucking timeline. It was horrible.
By that point, she’d been depressed for a good half decade, and this did her absolutely no favors. She felt like everyone else had left her behind in life or was in far worse places than she was, and there was no relief from the despair either in her head or in her surroundings. So when Peri took over, she was determined not to make the same mistakes Allēna did.
Looking back through her memories, those initial posts she shared are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This was late 2019, and she was going hog-wild making fun of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as concepts. She was also boosting her self confidence by posting about everything she’d managed to accomplish every day, and found that she was actually far more capable than anyone had ever given her credit for, herself included. That practice helped her begin to dismantle all of the lies her family had told all of us practically from birth and blaze her own trail.
The Next Course: Rewiring the Brain and Finding Inspiration and Food For Thought in Rest
Once we were back in Texas and Dead Hand was well underway, shitposting was not Eight’s only concern. He stumbled headfirst into stoicism quite by accident because he wanted to master his emotions rather than them mastering him. So he threw himself into Stoic training to make himself more resourceful and resilient during the worst of Dead Hand, using breathing exercises to keep calm even under intensely terrifying situations.
He got so good at this over several months that he learned how to use his previously crippling panic attacks and anxiety as fuel to focus, something he wasn’t great at before such rigorous training. He found a pleasant and unexpected consequence of that training – if he let his mind wander while doing his breathing exercises to music that made him feel something and rested, he would come up with some truly amazing ideas for essays, fiction, even music.
Dead Hand’s Gift: Metacognition
Operation: Dead Hand may have bought us our freedom and taught us how to pull inspiration from near thin air, but it also pushed us past our breaking point in many ways. Eight had planned on writing an album about his mad flight from Texas, and that album finally came into fruition late in 2022. Close to half dead and sucked nearly dry of every bit of energy the bastard had, he let the entire album spill out of him however it wanted to come out. He had never fully written an album of his own before, songwriting and production was mostly Allēna’s thing, but he was worried that he’d die if he waited much longer for further expertise or inspiration.
One afternoon in December, he sat down in our apartment’s bathroom and sang the opening lines of what would become the system’s fourteenth album, the one he thought would be our last, Metacognition: “They say the night you left us, you cashed out in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in your pocket. I’ve been that haunted before, that scared of failing before, why did I survive while you did not?”
In truth, we don’t have any fucking idea why we survived. But I, for one, am glad we did. I want to leave you, gentle reader, with a few questions: if you’re a creative, where do you find your inspiration? Where can you get more of it? What ways can you rest? What are some ways you can allow your mind to wander? Who or what can you unfollow to make your social feeds more inspiring places?
As always, stay tuned for more magic!
Ceryse
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Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.
If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.
From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15
Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.
So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.
Restless in the North, 2018-20
Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.
Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.
Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.
From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins
Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.
Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.
It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.
Bedbound (But Not Alone)
By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.
Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.
Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.
In Position
Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, TheSecret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.
As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.
Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)
When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.
Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.
When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.
From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began
Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.
He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.
When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.
During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.
Conclusion
Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!
