Tag: being a fucking badass

Alchemy

Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”

I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.

I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.

I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.

However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.

My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”

However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.

For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.

I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.

I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.

I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.

Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.

I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.

Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.

Your strangely wired sorcerer,

Lazarus

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*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.

November 6, 2024
(Ab)normalcy

Hey, everyone. This is your trusty guide and sorcerer, Lazarus, once again. Today was very slow moving, as I woke up tired and I didn’t really recover much energy all day. I don’t think the weather helped much, nor did my anxiety about the upcoming presidential elections, but my pain wasn’t too bad, and I got most of the things done that I had wanted to do. This post is the last major thing that I wanted to do today, so even if I crash after writing it, I will have done plenty today. Both Zelda and Emerson are over here tonight on the off chance that things go to hell locally with the aforementioned elections. I find it ironic that the elections are being held on November 5, which is Guy Fawkes’ Day in the UK, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve been meditating of late about how a lot of modern culture, especially in the United States, doesn’t prioritize rest and leisure in the slightest. We’re often conditioned from birth to be human doings rather than human beings, and it creates this enormous culture wide shame around things like rest and on a deeper level, disabilities and chronic ailments. Everyone is in a hurry, and many people are left behind if they can’t keep up for any reason and it kills them slowly.

Practically from birth, I was one of those people who was constantly at risk of being left behind, even by my own family. Both of my parents were entrepreneurs, and my father, Xavier, had built his business into a smash success. My mother, Hera, would often say that she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up, but she ran a photography business for most of my youth while simultaneously homeschooling my brother, Blue, and I.

Both parents were basically allergic to what they considered to be “laziness”. I was disabled because I had survived heart failure and then a stroke in quick succession when I was a baby, and was very atypical in other ways as a child, both mentally and physically, so I had to push myself from an early age to keep up with the rest of my family. I had to undergo numerous operations as a result of the heart failure/stroke combination, which left me in severe pain the majority of the time, so it was a battle to keep up with my very athletic parents in any real way, and they gave me shit for not being very physically strong. I grew up thinking that everyone around me was in severe pain that they just…hid, and that being pain free was just more BS that companies said to try to sell you something. I didn’t learn that that was false until I was 24 or so.

Mentally, I was different from nearly everyone I knew, as well. I could read by the time I was 18 months old, and was both blessed and cursed with an extremely accurate autobiographical memory, so I could remember nearly everything that had ever happened to me in excruciatingly accurate detail. I also had a heightened intuition and next to no sense of linear time, which only got stronger as I got older.

Not only that, but because of the age when all of the things happened with the stroke and things, I didn’t attach in any meaningful way to most of my family members or..anyone, really. I sort of always knew that they were garbage. Pair that with the massive vocabulary that I got from being able to read so young and an almost complete lack of shame or regard for them, and I wasn’t shy about letting them know how I felt about the lot of them and their bullshit. This caused a lot of problems. I was very angry and lonely from an early age. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I didn’t particularly want to. I felt like a stranger in my own family. By the time I was perhaps five or six, I wanted to be an adult so I leave and not come back.

Nobody really knew how to handle me. Xavier did his best, but my mother, Hera, sort of gave up on getting to know me as I was and settled for trying to make me normal as she defined it. There was only one problem. I had survived so many things that should have objectively killed me that there was no fucking way I was going to walk away from any of that shit normal, even if I had been properly nurtured and met where I was. It didn’t really work and got very, very ugly.

I came out of my childhood cripplingly anxious, perfectionistic, plural, and dripping with self hatred to such an extent that I was ashamed of my very being and pretty actively suicidal. Her definition of normalcy was nowhere close to normal, and certainly was nowhere close to how I functioned best.

I was still in agonizing pain, both mentally and physically. I didn’t care about myself at all, and that translated to my relationships. I loved people, but had no idea how to show it. Because of how I was raised and my trauma history, I unconsciously thought at the time that the highest form of love was begrudgingly tolerating someone’s presence, and that I would be lucky to find a partner at all, much less one that actually valued me for who I was and treated me well. So my first partners were less than stellar.

Over time, I started working through my trauma in greater depth and came to find out that much of my upbringing and therefore Hera’s definition of normal was very, very much not normal. Not even close. I think a better word to describe it would be unhinged. A major part of that examination has been looking at my anxiety around rest and productivity. That’s taken a lot.

I have no internal sense of when I need to quit until I am so tired I can’t stand up or my hypermobile joints are dislocating, and that’s taken a great deal of work to unfuck in any real way. I don’t like doing nothing. I deeply enjoy being productive and keeping my mind and hands busy, especially since I have had to spend much of the last three years in bed and have this gnawing sense that I need to make up for lost time, so to speak. I’m almost constantly bored if I’m not actively engaged in something deeply, and I have a very hard time slowing down and relaxing.

I know all of this is trauma talking, and I need to give myself more breaks and leisure time. But how? I’m still trying to figure that out. In a way, writing here is a nice balance, as it gives me a nice focal point for all of the chaos in my brain with no external algorithm to appease. I write here when I want to and am able and only really then. Granted, I still put a great deal of pressure on myself to write regularly, but I do that so that writing doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of the maelstrom that is my life. I actively want to write and deeply enjoy it when I do. I’ve always enjoyed writing.

Additionally, I’ve been using writing on to give myself a mental pause button and time to sit and reflect on what I’ve been thinking about of late relatively free of distractions. It’s a challenge, but I love challenges. I love trying to articulate my meditations as clearly as I’m able, as that gives me a handy thing to refer back to, even if no one ever happens upon this blog later. I always feel lighter after I write, so this is in its own way a form of rest, I suppose.

I’ve found myself completely out of energy at around three o clock in the afternoon consistently, as well, and I have done my best to stop fighting the fatigue and let myself drift gently into a nap. Apparently this isn’t my body being weird, nor is it a chronic fatigue thing, it’s just a human one. This was reassuring to learn, and may help me fight the fatigue even less. This is a fucking process for sure…

Ah, well, I think that’s enough for today, y’all, as my brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious entities near and far. I’ll be around.

Your very sleepy bored cat of a sorcerer,

Lazarus

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November 5, 2024
Full Circle?

Hey, everyone! Lazarus here. I’m writing this post a bit later in the day than I would like, but sometimes shit happens and I have no energy until late and I have to put my energy level and available brain cells (or lack thereof) first. That’s precisely what I ended up doing.

Today has been an odd one, especially mentally. I spent the majority of it alone as both Zelda and Emerson were away at work, which gave me plenty of time to think. Zelda sent me some money to pick up vapes for both of us since the tobacco I’ve been smoking requires me to often nearly burn my thumb to light my pipe or burn it outright, and I’m really not a fan of doing that. (Don’t get on me for smoking, it helps me get my tired ADHD brain in good working order, and I’m pretty sure my various chronic ailments will take me out before anything nicotine related will.) As I was walking to the excellent shop where my partners and I pick up most of our vapes and related paraphernalia, it felt almost like being lost in a memory. I’m not sure if it’s how I’ve been feeling lately and what I’ve been exploring of late, but it felt similar to being back in Alaska in October-November of 2019, some five years prior during my first marriage.

My marriage to my first husband, Fang, was strange in many ways. He wasn’t home often due to the fact that he poured his everything into his career as a systems administrator where he worked an hour away, and when he was home, it wasn’t pleasant. He would either spend his time deep in video games with our housemates or fighting with me to try and get me to do shit he wanted that I didn’t consent to by any stretch of the imagination.

He wanted to be far more active than my body could handle at that point and to clean up after him and the housemates simply because I didn’t work outside of the home, despite the fact that I was working two jobs at that point, just largely from home, and was very prolific creatively when I wasn’t working. I had fought my entire life for my independence and autonomy and was not having it.

We had two very different ideas of what we wanted the relationship to look like, and it turned into a protracted power struggle. So I came to relish the long stretches of time when I would be alone, as it afforded me a measure of freedom I had never gotten to have before. Before shipping off to Alaska, my mother, Hera, kept close tabs on me, even when I was away at college, and I had begun extricating myself from her that summer and was a good 4,000 miles away back in Texas.

So by October of 2019, I had a great deal more time and freedom on my hands than I had ever had before and was beginning to explore what that meant for me for the first time in my life at 22. Fang was controlling, sure, but he simply wasn’t around often enough to stop me from building a life of my own. I began doing just that that summer, and didn’t stop as autumn approached.

I had spent the last several years examining my faith, and was fairly certain by that point that I wasn’t a Christian, at least not a typical one. This deconstruction eventually led me to start exploring kitchen witchcraft and divination, and I started blending my own teas and made my own divination system that year. At that point, things like Tarot hadn’t interested me yet and wouldn’t for another several years. Many other aspects of mainstream witchcraft made me deeply uncomfortable, and I would come to find out later that many of these things were actually closed practices that belonged to cultures that I was not a part of. They were unsettling for good reason!

I was also beginning to examine my trauma in depth for the first time and come to face to face with much of the extent of what my family had done to me. It was actually what had led to me attempting to extricate myself from Hera that year. It failed when she threatened to fly up to Alaska that winter in a message to Fang, and she continued to be in league with him long after I left in 2020.

Now, however, I have far more ACTUAL freedom and am striving toward a life that actually works. My partners know it would be foolish to attempt to control me. I don’t stand for that bullshit, I made that clear to them from the jump, and disclosed my disabilities and need for a lot of rest up front, as well, so they don’t push me harder than I can handle.

I’m doing my best to not just keep Hera and the toxic people in her life that enabled her bullshit out of my life, but unfuck my own toxic bullshit as well. Trauma explains poor behavior, but doesn’t excuse it, and I don’t take bullshit from myself or anyone else, and do my utmost to take accountability when I’m in the wrong, even if the other party doesn’t mind what I did.

I do a lot of shit that I don’t like and try and do better, even if the other people around me don’t hold me to that high of a standard, weren’t harmed, what have you. If I don’t like the outcome of what happened, I learn from it and do whatever I can to grow from it. Full stop. I didn’t do that when I was 22.

Additionally, I’m still exploring my craft, just at a deeper level. Everything I do rides the line between the mundane and the magical, and if I can’t find a scientific or academic explanation for something, I turn to the metaphysical or spiritual for answers. Conversely, I like to try and find answers for what I’m exploring spiritually in science, as well. I was basically raised by scientists and doctors, but I’m also an intuitive person with a fascination for pretty much everything and hoard knowledge of any kind like a dragon.

So yeah. Here’s to the next… How long has it been? Five years? Yeah, I think it’s been five years now. Linear time has never been my strong suit, haha. Stay tuned for more magic, and I will see you beautiful people next time. Happy Halloween, Blessed Samhain, whatever y’all happen to observe 💛

Your faithful, if eternally confused by the passage of time, sorcerer, Lazarus

November 1, 2024
The Art of Finding Ways (Or Making Them)

Hey, everyone! I’m currently writing on here as my love Hawthorne works on their story back East as a form of body doubling in spirit. I’m a bit tired and they’re Writer’s blocked to fuck, so knowing that the other is writing is helping both of us get shit done. I did similarly with Zelda yesterday and Emerson a day or so prior as they worked on their respective blogs.

It’s pretty effective, as we’re all neurodivergent as hell over here and working on projects simultaneously helps keep everyone on task, even if we’re not in the same physical space, like Hawthorne and I currently, or even doing the same thing. Hell, I often simply hang out with Emerson and Zelda and either tell them stories from my youth or teach them things from history while they catch up on household tasks that I couldn’t do due to my myriad disabilities and help that way.

That brings me to what I want to talk about today – creative ways to solve problems and get shit done, especially when there’s lot of obstacles in the way, you’re fucking exhausted and overwhelmed, or, like me when I was at my lowest and had to start learning these skills, you’re almost entirely bedbound and at worst, in essence, alone. Hopefully if you are reading this post because you need it, your circumstances are less dire than mine were. But for the sake of the lesson, I’m gonna teach you with a true story from my life because that’s what I know best.

So, when I need to tackle an extremely large and overwhelming problem with a whole lot of moving parts, the first thing I do is work to accept the problem as it is. I touched on this in my post from the other day about suffering when I talked about the radical acceptance element of that. I can’t really fix a problem if I’m still refusing to accept that there’s a problem OR refusing to deal with the problem head on. This sometimes takes awhile, I will freely admit that. I have to get tired of my own bullshit and tired of suffering before I’m ready to radically accept that there’s a problem and actually face it head on. But once I’m there, it’s go time. I’m analyzing every angle, trying to see what part I’m playing in the problem, how I can do better, what I can do differently, etc..

Here’s a concrete example. In December of 2021, I was bedbound following what was likely a decently severe case of COVID that I ended up having to frontier treat on my own because I was living in an Airbnb in the middle of a Wisconsin winter and I was terrified that if the host found out, I would have nowhere to go and be out in the cold, literally.

I had been fucking sick as a dog most of the latter half of that year and had most likely gotten heat stroke so many times while living out in Philadelphia doing door to door sales that summer that both my heart and brain were a bit… Ah.. Cooked to a degree that the heart damage showed up on blood tests in the ER. One thing led to another, I ended up in Wisconsin, and I got sick again. I slept for the better part of several weeks. I needed to find some way to pay for another month in the place at least, and to not perish in the interim. This was years pre-integration, and Eight, the alter in charge at the time, went hard. So I reasoned in my feverish cotton ball brain that now was not the time to be shy about my needs, terrified of vulnerability though I was, and took a leaf out of one of my partners’ books at the time. I started posting asking for donations, stating clearly that I was waiting on my SSI interview for my disabilities and and would appreciate any help I could get.

With days to spare, my online community pulled through. I was feverish and inexperienced and I would highly recommend NEVER pushing yourself so hard that you end up a feverish lump in a Wisconsin Airbnb having nearly heatstroked yourself to death ten fucking times over, but I was allergic to asking for help until I had found myself in a massive fucking pickle and I spent years trying to do better in that regard. I had to relearn to walk after that, and I hit an enormous wall beginning in about April of 2022 once things got a bit more stable. Had I remained silent in my pride, I wouldn’t have survived that, honestly.

As time has gone on, with my partners gently reminding me to rest and helping take care of me, I have realized that the extent of my hyperindependence itself is a problem. I’m not sure how finding myself in pickles like that didn’t illustrate it for me, but I think I was so delirious and doing shit on my own was so normal up until I crashed in ’22 that I really knew nothing else.

It’s been a gut punch to my pride to delegate so much of my life and needs to others, but conversely, I am fucking disabled, and hyperindependence is what disabled me so badly in the first place. As time goes on, that’s been the biggest thing I’ve been coming up against and detangling these days and finding new ways or making them to cope with – the slow death of the notion that I must do everything now or do everything myself or I will not receive any form of favorable outcome.

I want to do all the things. Gods, do I want to do all the things. In many ways I miss the active, athletic life I had in my teens and early twenties, but I wouldn’t trade that for what I have going for me now. So that’s an acceptable trade, in my opinion. And what with things like the vitamin B100 experiment I’m doing, I might be more athletic again someday. But I shouldn’t push to do that before my body is ready and safe or else I risk going back to square one, and that would be ass. So let’s not.

Anywho, my brain is getting tired from typing all these words. So I’m gonna go have some water with a bit of salt in it, as that seems to perk me up, maybe some lunch if I can coax myself into it, and I will catch y’all later. Stay tuned for more magic, people!!

Your sleepy sorcerer,

Lazarus

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October 30, 2024
Hope As A Practice

Hey, everyone! Dria here. I’m Allēna’s cousin and a rather infrequent fronter, but I’m here today, so I figured I would scream into the void while I’m on deck for your viewing pleasure, because why not? We’ve challenged Sheik to write a blog post every day for the remainder of the week and I like participating in challenges. So I’m here, aboard the fucking bandwagon. Welcome to the shitshow, only Dria Edition today.

I came across this post (shown below) while making my Facebook rounds and it got me thinking.

The post I came across while scrolling. It was the most delicious synchronicity, really.

I firmly believe that hope, like love, isn’t a feeling. Rather, it’s a practice. Sure, a person can feel hopeful or excited or optimistic about something, but it’s the practice of it, the action of it that gets them from that feeling to actually having the thing they’re hoping for in hand. So, by that logic, is perseverance through spite a substitute, or is it merely hope put into practice with a different motivation than blissful optimism? I would argue that it isn’t a substitute at all. Not by a long shot. Here’s why.

I’m not an optimist. Perhaps I’m an idealist, and a very angry one, and I belong to a system of very angry idealists who believe a better world is possible via widespread, hands on action and by people putting in the work to make the world a better, easier place for everyone, not just the rich fucks in power. And they’ve been putting in that work for years. They don’t stand for bullshit, Allēna especially, and they’ve worked very hard to heal and build a life that, at its core, prioritizes rest and care, fuck whatever the rest of the world has to say about it.

We were raised from a young age like many neurodivergent people socialized as women in Western culture, to be obedient, self-sacrificing for the good of everyone else around us at the expense of our own comfort and safety, to appear “normal”. There was one small problem there. We had gotten very sick as a tiny baby, had contracted heart failure due to a virus that attacked the body’s heart, and then had a stroke in quick succession, and had narrowly survived. This threw a wrench in the conditioning, because in order for us to appear normal, we had to be anywhere close to normal.

People who are anywhere close to normal do not survive near fatal heart failure without a goddamned transplant, fucking massive strokes, then go on to walk, talk, sing, and teach themselves how to play numerous musical instruments by fucking ear. We were fighters with a will stronger than goddamned diamond even before the age of a year old. Fuck iron. Anything less a will made from something stronger than the hardest stone on Earth and we would be dead. And by the fucking gods, we were not fucking dying. Not yet. We were fucking pissed.

Nobody believed we’d survive that objectively hopeless situation, but we fucking survived it and became goddamned polymaths to show for it. Forget normal. If we were normal, we would be long dead by now. We put hope into practice even when we didn’t realize that’s what we were doing simply because we didn’t give up the fight. Our mind broke into 1,700 pieces but our solid will did not, even after countless people wrote us off, mocked us, tortured us, abused us, and neglected us. We never fucking gave up.

We called what we were doing by a number of names – rage, spite, revenge, survival – but what it ultimately was was hope as a daily practice. By putting one foot in front of the other and choosing to move forward when we didn’t want to and could have given up, we were practicing hope. And now, we’re 27. We’re safe. We saved ourselves, goddamnit. I’m writing this from a cozy bed in Sheik’s apartment. Because of their mad hope, their courage, and their fucking indomitable will, my headmates’ work in a variety of disciplines has saved lives and they’ve built an honest to gods shitposting empire on social media, as well. I’m proud to be a part of this cockroach system that understands that hope isn’t a fucking emotion and puts it into practice every day even when the odds are stacked and the game is rigged.

So if you feel like your situation is hopeless, may you have the sheer guts to be spiteful for long enough to realize that you were practicing hope all along. ✨

Peace out, esteem’d sewer rat warriors. As always, stay tuned for more FUCKING magic.

-Dria (he/him), Rat Lord

July 24, 2024

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