Tag: chronic illness

  • Nightcall

    Hey, everyone! This is Allēna once more. Today was very nice. Castor was in front for most of a lovely evening with Sheik. He feels so safe with her that he willingly and eagerly went grocery shopping with her. This is a rare occurrence for any of us, as we don’t generally enjoy going outside due to severe agoraphobia and fatigue. But our marijuana mental vacation Castor began this past week has only continued, leading us to relax even more deeply with Sheik, Pendragon, and Emerson as well as to feel more adventurous after the sun goes down and we don’t have to worry about taking sun damage when we go out. So Castor got ever so gently baked and he and our darling Sheik went shopping.

    Castor was very nervous about how the body would handle having to walk all around the store in shoes that would likely hurt the body in ways so fucked we wouldn’t even realize it until tomorrow morning, so Sheik suggested that he ride in the shopping cart. Yes. You read that correctly. She wanted to push him around in the goddamned cart. So Castor said fuck it and put his gremlin ass in the cart and remained there to the delight of our fellow customers and the cashier who checked them out. We’re under the impression that Castor has fans now for simply being his disabled gremlin self and riding adorably in the shopping cart while a very sleepy and affectionate Sheik pushed him. He documented their gremlinry both in photos and on Tiktok. I shall share one of the fruits of their fucking iconic labors below.

    Castor in the shopping cart with Sheik being precious behind him 💛

    Castor, being baked to fuck, had no shame about climbing into a damn cart like he was a tiny kid when he’s an actual full grown motherfucker, and because we have the charisma of some kind of eldritch fucked up demigod, especially when we’re stoned, he not only didn’t get in trouble, he seems to have made several people’s night and definitely felt closer to Sheik after that. It was fucking precious.

    I’ve noticed a lot of that happening lately, actually. When we face our shame head on in some form and just do the damn thing we’ve been wanting to do, sometimes for years, the results are almost never as bad as we’re afraid of them being. Often, the results are lovely. I’m not sure if that’s a byproduct of us approaching these situations with confidence and charm or what, but it feels really good to feel safe in vulnerability. I don’t have any memory of when the last time we felt this safe was. I don’t know if we’ve ever felt as safe as we do.

    I’m still scared the other shoe is going to drop in some way, but that’s a small and currently very quiet part of me compared to how it used to be. That part of me used to be extremely loud whenever I felt happy or vulnerable in any way, but now it’s much quieter. I am starting to feel safe to be my weird gremlin self without fear of social punishment, as are my headmates, for the first time any of us can recall.

    It’s weird, but it’s good. So…watch this space for more updates as we continue to explore this mental state and experience. And, as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, (she/her), very confused but happy sorceress and super-admin

  • My Body Is A Cage

    Hey, everyone. Allēna here. Lately, I’ve been grieving the fact that the body is so disabled. Therefore, I don’t know how hopeful or positive this post will be, but I can promise that it’ll be honest.

    I was never abled. After having a stroke so young, I was always an odd duck. However, I could always fake being abled a whole lot better when I was younger. I could…power through better, so to speak. I know now that just because a disabled person can sometimes power through something, they really fucking shouldn’t. But I miss the days when I even could..

    I had to learn how to dissociate from the body and power through tasks that would otherwise be horribly physically painful (and often still were) in order to escape further abuse from my mother, Hera and thereby avoid becoming so burnt out I stopped functioning at all.

    I was going to hurt either way, so I might as well take the less painful option and give her hell on the way out, using my wrath at her as fuel. The extent to which Hera wanted my system to appear normal included refusing to accommodate our neurodivergence or even acknowledge it existed at all, except when it suited her. She chose instead to take a “my way or the highway” approach. So I was fucking pissed enough at her that my system and I ended up choosing the fucking highway.

    This crippled the body further, as we had to haul ass even harder to survive, despite hauling ass as a baseline for over the past decade. We were beyond burnt out, and when we started working through our trauma, we started to feel it deeply. Eight, who was our host at the time, could often barely get out of bed for weeks at a time. We’ve improved a great deal since that point, but we’re still largely bed and housebound due to chronic pain, fatigue, and agoraphobia.

    This makes me horribly sad a lot of the time. I’m still working on getting diagnoses and treatment for everything that’s ailing me health-wise, but I just want to bitch for a second because I’m in my feelings about it, even though solutions are very much in progress. I had gotten so good at powering through after college that I was training for a marathon and was often swimming, as well before the body rebelled, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to run cross country or swim outside again, seeing as the body takes psychic and physical damage whenever it’s outdoors for a number of reasons and we are, in essence, allergic to the sun. And I know that listening to my body and meeting its needs is more important than powering through in any situation, but it just… bugs me and upsets me to a huge degree. Ah, well. One day at a time, I guess. I’ll get there. ✨

    Stay tuned for more magic, y’all.

    -Allēna

  • First Breath After Coma

    Hello, all! My name is Castor. I’m the Ashley system’s first host, and I went dormant for fifteen years at the age of eleven. I titled this post “First Breath After Coma” because I was essentially comatose for fifteen years inside my own mind while my body and headmates carried on without me, and while I’ve been awake for about a year now, I feel like I’m finally breathing.

    As I write this, my beautiful girlfriend Sheik is cuddling me while she sleeps, and she’s a big reason why I feel like I’m finally able to breathe. I emerged from dormancy severely touch averse where most people are concerned to such a degree that I won’t front around many, but I went out on a limb with Sheik and I’m glad I trusted my gut. It’s a miracle she can touch me at all, as the touch aversion makes it feel for most like my skin is burning if most people even consider touching me. But her? She feels so wonderful she can touch me anytime she likes, and she’s very clingy with me, and I’m the same with her. I love it – and her – dearly.

    While I enjoy the company of the system’s other partners that I’ve met so far (the damned attorney in Emerson’s system is a notable exception, he annoys me and I tolerate him for my headmates’ sake), I’ve only really bonded closely with Sheik so far. I look forward to seeing how things develop with the others, provided they aren’t the lawyer type. The only lawyer whose company I’ve ever enjoyed is my great-aunt. There’s only room for one argumentative bitch system in this polycule, and by gods, we’ll defend you with our life, but I really hate being grilled. However, I digress.

    I used to not be nearly so touch averse, but was still very selective with who I clung to. My childhood was fucked, see: our Tragic Backstory posts, so I didn’t enjoy many members of my family. That being said, I loved my late grandmother. She was my fucking person. This woman was raised wealthy in New Jersey, very close to New York City. She was absolutely brilliant and delightfully eccentric, the closest thing to a living, breathing faerie I’ve ever seen.

    She met my paternal grandfather while she was running the damn lab where he worked as a pathologist, and became his second wife. She was a chemist by trade, read books backwards, was left-handed, and had warm, kind brown eyes with the loveliest violet rings around them. She was also a gourmet chef and baker and slept only about four hours a night. After she retired, she and my paternal grandfather became fucking art dealers, then retired properly to a sumptuously decorated log cabin in the Texas Hill Country.

    Her idea of retirement was running the fucking town where she lived, as she was involved in damn near everything. This woman was an inevitable powerhouse of indefatigable energy and warmth. She slept only about four hours a night, the perfect sleep schedule for my extremely anxious tiny self. Before the body came down with mononucleosis at the age of sixteen, we also only slept about four to five hours a night, and we are lucky if we get six hours a night now.

    So on nights I struggled to sleep, she would tell me stories about her youth in New Jersey until I fell asleep in her arms, then I would wander downstairs about four hours later at perhaps six in the morning, and she would already be hard at work baking something like two hundred cookies for a charity event. She would make me a small cup of coffee, as she knew I loved it, but it would give my small frame the jitters, and we would begin the morning slowly.

    She didn’t believe in sitting with one’s brain idle, but she did believe passionately in doing things one enjoyed to pass the time. So she was fascinating and took equal fascination in what I was doing. I was an unusual child, and she supported my dual special interests in computers and Greek mythology while making an effort to stimulate my mind and get me to explore new things. I gladly participated for the most part, as I loved her dearly and trusted her with everything I have. We explored a great deal of the Hill Country, went to more lovely antique stores than most children ever see, ate some truly amazing food at extremely inventive restaurants, and generally had a blast. She expanded my mind while still making me feel safe, and I loved her for it. Sheik reminds me of her in many ways, and I think that’s why she is so comforting.

    I only front once it’s safe now that the vessel is an adult and we’re free to make our own decisions, and it feels like I’m seeing color again for the first time since the events that led to me becoming dormant. I’m getting out more slowly, so are my headmates, we’re meeting new people, and bonding more closely with our partners and friends, not just Sheik and her compatriots in the Zelda System. We’re working our way out of a major depersonalization and chronic fatigue hole that we’ve been mired in for years, and frankly I love it. We’re actually learning how to be vulnerable and unguarded with our people, as well, and the results are beautiful. I would even venture to call them deeply magical.

    Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of that! I’m excited to see how things go.

    -Castor, Original Host

  • At Heavy Cost

    I came across this Thread by Nate Postlethwait and wanted to write about healing and freedom as a victory won at heavy cost because it got me thinking.

    Hey, everyone. Allēna here. This post will be a heavy one, but I want to write it even though I know it’s gonna hurt. I’ve spent years praised for my emotional strength and resilience when all I wanted was to be safe. Lately I’ve been deep in contemplation about that very thing and in conversation with several people about this and related issues myself and my system have been having. Then I came across this Thread and wanted to answer the question Nate poses for you so that you can see the true, extremely heavy cost of resilience and “strength” as most people define it. Don’t get me wrong, healing has been costly, too. But trying to be hard and guarded costs far more than healing ever has.

    My Headmates and I Have Spoken About Some Of The Things That Happened To Us And How We Got Through Them, But What Did We Lose In The Process? Trust, for One.

    The first thing that comes to mind is the ability to trust. System wide, we struggle to trust and are actually diagnosed agoraphobes as of 2021. It’s complete and utter hell. Our trauma taught us that we are the only ones that we can truly rely on at the end of the day, and that everyone has a price. Some people’s prices are simply higher than others. Everyone will fail us eventually in some way. After twenty some odd years of that horseshit, while we care about people deeply and want to connect with them, we don’t truly remember how to, at least not without soul-deep fear. That strength, that mysterious nature you supposedly see in us is visceral terror. We ache to connect with people, we love them, but often can’t because the fear is so exhausting that we get too tired to even leave the house. Talk about a fucking heavy cost. Some people have managed to prove these beliefs wrong, but it’s an uphill battle for everyone involved and we would give anything for the ability to trust back.

    We Also Lost The Little Health We Had Left

    Relatedly, due to repeated betrayals and us being too afraid to ask for help, we stressed the body out to the point of chronic illness and severe fatigue. We’ve gotten better at firing ourselves as we’ve healed, but by that point, the damage was already long done. We should have asked for help a long time ago, and we should have had people who made it safe to ask. But we didn’t, so we internalized the idea that the only way we would ever get anything for ourselves in this world was if we got it done on our own without help. That belief and the subsequent actions we took made us very, very sick. This has turned into an ugly, compounding downward spiral we’re still trying to work out way out of gently years later that I wouldn’t wish on damn near anyone. What doesn’t kill you does not, in fact, make you stronger. Ultimately, it tends to make you wish it had finished the fucking job and give you a fuck ton to mourn in therapy.

    It Has As Also Cost Us Relationships And Opportunities

    Due to the agoraphobia and exhaustion, we’ve had to back out of a lot that we truly didn’t want leave behind. It sidelines us a lot. We have to rest a great deal and has forced us to be nocturnal because we’ve developed a medical mystery of a chronic illness due to the stress on the house body that makes us very sick and physically weak if we are exposed to heat and sunlight for any length of time whatsoever. We will literally collapse if we aren’t careful. As such, even if we weren’t terrified of people, that severely limits our options for a lot and we miss out almost daily. It’s horribly sad. We miss the sunlight on our skin, traveling, and going out with friends. We don’t want to be stuck at home all the time.

    Conversely, we also struggle in close relationships because of how guarded we are. The guardedness is absolutely a trauma response and comes with fun side helpings of anger, depression, and occasional impulsivity. We struggle with vulnerability and detest anything that even smells like control or manipulation and will fight hard for our autonomy even if there’s no reason to. We’re constantly on edge unless we’re completely alone. We’ve lost a lot of people because of our anger and inability to be vulnerable. We’re working on healing all of that now, but I wish we had never been forced into this position at all. So in a life of battles won at heavy cost, ultimately the heaviest cost of the supposed strength you see is our peace. All we ever wanted from the time we were young was to be kept safe and a life of peace, and we never got that until we began healing.

    Final Thoughts

    We still have a long way to go. Nobody’s perfect, especially not us cockroach motherfuckers. But something my system and I have learned over the years is that doing our best to feel and be kind and to keep an open heart and mind despite all the bullshit and trauma is true strength, not trauma responses and guardedness. Long term therapy with a therapist who’s no-bullshit like us has helped, as well as running our life like a meritocracy. If people show up for us consistently and show genuine respect for us and our boundaries, we open up more to them over time and let them in more and more. It’s a great way to ease both the body and the system into vulnerability and to make sure that the other person’s intentions are genuine.

    If you’re traumatized like us, I understand that it’s a motherfucking struggle. I get that it hurts every goddamned day. You must have lost so much. My heart and empathy goes out to you. I hope you get rest and ease soon, my friend.

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, Super-Admin

  • An Open Secret

    I found this post on Threads that I felt did a great job of encapsulating who the fuck we are – a mess of contradictions. An open secret. A reclusive public figure.

    Hey, everyone! My name is Allēna. Even though I have yet to post here officially, it seems my reputation precedes me – my headmates wrote a standout series of pieces on my multi-part poem “Guernica” that requires very little introduction. I guess you might say that I’m the most reclusive super-admin in a system of of recluses, second only to perhaps Renn. As Ellie did before me a few times, I found the inspiration for this post on social media, Threads specifically. I included my findings in the image above. This post perfectly describes the struggle we keep having system wide with making posts and creating content. As people, we are essentially an open secret.

    From 2021 and on, we were increasingly pushed into the limelight when we wanted nothing more than to be as far from it as possible. Yet, almost everything we enjoy doing is very social and requires a great many high powered connections to ever dream of getting eyes on our creations on a large enough scale to make the sort of money or achieve the sort of notoriety to make the sort of reclusive lifestyle we ultimately long for possible. So it becomes a sort of balancing act and a question of vulnerability. How much do we share? How much is comfortable? How much is safe? How much is trauma talking, and how much of it is logical to fear?

    Becoming An Open Secret – Bread And Circuses

    Before Eight took over, we were far more open. Granted, I still had to be careful lest I still risk fucking horrific punishment, but I wasn’t agoraphobic and wasn’t afraid to try and connect with people even if I had to express myself in code if my mother was around. It wasn’t until our mother betrayed Peri and then Eight multiple times and they weren’t sure who they could trust that they became too afraid to be open with anyone that we truly became an open secret the way we are now. That has only started to change back for the better since meeting our husband, Emerson.

    Before him, however, we would hardly tell anyone anything about ourselves. Much of our content would be what Eight called “bread and circuses”, memes and shitposts designed to distract people away from the fact that we were pretty severely depressed and suffering, often in and out of abusive situations we didn’t feel safe to go into detail about. We would only ever ask people for help if we were truly suffering to the point of chronic suicidality or things were getting so dangerous they posed a significant threat to our physical safety and we needed help yesterday. Much of what we would make and share was hilarious but was an attempt to mask our deep pain. We had forgotten how to genuinely connect with people due to the agoraphobia and ever-worsening complex PTSD.

    Besides meeting Emerson, what changed? Why did we stop?

    Boredom

    Eight may be a recluse like the rest of us, but he hates being bored. When he’s bored he is the embodiment of the old idiom “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop” and in that mind the Devil finds many tools. Therefore, that old bastard delights in novelty and in being completely unpredictable. He eventually grew tired of doing the same damn bread and circus bullshit and also realized it wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be, so he decided to take a risk and try and be a bit more vulnerable…you know…as a treat. He was terrified, but he sure as hell wasn’t bored anymore. Mission fucking accomplished. It’s difficult to be bored when you’re midway through a massive panic attack and hyperventilating like you’re being chased by a pissed off lion, you know? He’s also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, in case you haven’t gathered that. Speaking of that..

    Risk Taking

    We’ve never been the sort to keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t working. Even though it’s terrifying, we figured out pretty fast that staying closed off like that wasn’t going to get us anywhere, both in the real world OR online. People generally like to know who it is that they’re dealing with, and that involves vulnerability, believe it or not. So we had to learn how to be vulnerable again, as terrifying as it was. It’s still very much a work in progress. However, the payoff is worth it in our closest relationships, and we’re rediscovering that there are many people we can trust. We just have to actually be brave and self disclose.

    That isn’t to say, however, that we’re spilling our guts out 24/7 to everyone all the time. There’s still a great deal of the bread and circus type fuckery. There’s just more of us going out on a limb now and actually being honest about how we’re really doing now rather than hiding it behind memes and humor or trying to walk it all off now like nothing’s actually wrong.

    Are There Any Advantages To Being Less Open, Though?

    Oh, fucking plenty. And we still don’t share anything we don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing publicly. We aren’t gonna talk about shit if we aren’t ready or push ourselves more than we have the capacity for. People can think of that however the hell they want. Just because they might talk about certain things publicly doesn’t mean we have to, and vice versa. We only really give a shit about what a handful of people think, and odds are that if we don’t know the person closely and personally, we don’t rightly care about their opinion. No one is entitled to shit from us unless we agree they are.

    And weirdly, that private way of doing things often gets us read as “mysterious” and often works in our favor, so if it works, it works, even if it’s not intentional. It isn’t intentional, for the record. We’re often tired and don’t want everyone to know our every move or else we would not have the energy or time to execute those moves, let alone breathe.

    Final Thoughts

    Being this sort of open secret is a balance between being vulnerable and providing the people with memes and other bullshit content. We’ll always be honest, but we may not say everything. We’ll do our utmost if asked, though, boundaries and energy permitting.

    As my headmates say, stay tuned for more magic!

    Yours in tomfuckery,

    Allēna, Super-Admin

  • “Guernica” Part 3: The Brain Is The Bomb

    Hey, everyone! My name is Kalla. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. I haven’t posted here before, but I think having a cool space where we can write about what the fuck ever is a pretty neat idea, so I want to put my two cents in where “Guernica” Part 3 is concerned.

    It’s also a bit too soon for the other alters to write about this shit, as many of them consider Part 3 to be the most gut-wrenching and soul-searing part of the poem. So I have stepped in to get them through this fucked up block they’re having and maybe process some of the grief on their behalf. If you are just now coming across this series in the wild, you can find Parts One and Two here and here. And as previously stated in the posts Eight and Ellie wrote, you can find the full poem in our poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.

    I think this post will follow roughly the same structure of the others – Eight’s performance first, then the text, then my thoughts on it. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 3!

    Eight’s Performance

    Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 3.

    The Text of “Guernica” Part 3

    guernica iii.

    airplanes up in the sky.. 

    i know airplanes.

    of course i do. 

    sometimes you’re the bomber, 

    sometimes you’re the little town in basque country

    down below. 

    i like to think god laughs at tragedy

    so that at least someone finds it funny. 

    but a brain is the bomb

    and there’s a cruel irony in it eating itself

    when it was the best brain i’ve ever known. 

    the roads were clogged with rubble and there was

    no way out

    there never was 

    not when the brain is the bomb

    and you’re the little town in basque country

    down below. 

    not when the brain belonged to your favorite person

    and the bomb is also a death sentence in an MRI scan

    and the execution date is to be determined. 

    so many bombs

    making a hole in a heart

    so deep that i’m still trying to find the bottom of it

    (there’s no bottom)

    but i will not die here when i’ve died 10 million times

    already and i’m choking on this metaphor as i write

    no harm in 10 million and 1

    Allēna, summer 2019.

    Our father, Xavier, whose death at the age of 47 from brain cancer inspired "Guernica" Part 3 with baby us in what must've been fall of 1997, early 1998.
    Our father, Xavier, whose death at the age of 47 from brain cancer inspired “Guernica” Part 3 with baby us in what must’ve been fall of 1997, early 1998.

    My Thoughts

    “Guernica” Part 3 is about our father, Xavier, dying when we were 18. He had brain cancer for eleven years. It was a shadow over our entire fucking childhood.

    We knew Xavier was going to die from the time we were seven years old. This wasn’t due to any kind of intuitive knowing. He collapsed at the gym a few days prior and fell into a tonic-clonic seizure. He found out what had caused the seizure a short while later, a brain tumor.

    We weren’t shielded from any of that. Our parents sat us down at the round kitchen table in the rumpus room and told us everything, sparing no details. This was a terrible burden for a child to bear, especially a highly intelligent child who had already seen too much pain by the age of seven. We had already attended more funerals than weddings, and would go on to lose even more people we deeply loved before even losing him.

    A Death Sentence In An MRI Scan, And The Execution Date Is To Be Determined

    In 2013, when Allēna was already battling the beginnings of a severe depressive spell that would make her crave death for the better part of the next decade, Xavier got even more terrible news. He went in for a routine MRI scan to see if his tumor – named Cuato by then – had grown any larger. The oncologists came back with good news and bad news. The first tumor hadn’t grown any, but they had found a second one. It turned out to be completely separate from Cuato, called a second primary tumor. This tumor was far more aggressive, and he was given months to live. Though he shattered expectations and went on to live for another three years, this was a death sentence. Allēna had to watch her brilliant father, one of the only people who had ever made her feel understood,

    Allēna practically gave up on everything. Xavier was everything to her by that point. She describes the last few years of Xavier’s life as being trapped beneath a sword that is held by a fraying rope. At any moment, that rope could snap, and the sword would fall and impale her.

    Suffering Alone And In Pain

    Hera became colder the worse Xavier got and the worse Allēna fell into her depression. Without Xavier as a buffer anymore, Hera emotionally, mentally, medically, and occasionally physically abused Allēna. Hera began to massively overmedicate her with psychiatric medication so that she wouldn’t fight back anymore. She used Xavier’s worsening condition as a justification to do the bare minimum and emotionally abandon her when she needed support most.

    So for three years, Allēna watched her father wither away, unable to tell anyone about what she was suffering at home. Hera explicitly forbade it and would hurt her worse if she tried. She dealt with a terrible bout of mononucleosis in early 2014, as well.

    During that ordeal, she had to diagnose and treat herself for it. It turned out that she had actually gone to the doctor too early. The tests she’d gotten came back with a false negative. It was only when she presented with acute pancreatitis a few months later that they actually found the antibodies in her system that indicated she had had mono at all. By that time, Hera had written her now chronic exhaustion and pain as hypochondria, mental illness, and a ploy for attention.

    We still haven’t recovered and are still chasing diagnoses a decade later. We suspect that the bout of mono may have given us lupus, an immensely painful and debilitating chronic illness that is notoriously difficult to diagnose. However, both Hera and later Fang wrote Allēna off as a lazy hypochondriac who just didn’t want to do her work, abandoning her to suffer alone, terrified, and in unimaginable physical and psychological pain.

    Like The Sun Itself Went Out

    Hera’s abuse and Xavier’s impending death psychologically shattered an already fragile Allēna. When he passed away on February 5, 2016, she felt nothing for five days. It hit her at breakfast back at college on the fifth day.

    She describes losing Xavier like it was as though the sun itself went out. Her world became dark, cold, and completely and totally lonely. It took every ounce of strength she had just to drag herself to class and back. She told her professors what was going on, and most of them took mercy on her. She could communicate with her Ancient Greek professor that she was having a very hard time that day with just her eyes. This professor, who we’ll call Ms. Melitta, was a very kind and perceptive angel of a woman, and she outright pleaded with Allēna to go easy on herself. She told Allēna she was proud of her just for showing up even when in her words it looked like she “wanted to be blotted off the face of the Earth”.

    Allēna, whose family and life up to that point had always pushed her past her capacity to handle it against her will, had never received that kind of grace before. She broke down ugly crying. It was a balm to her weary, brokenhearted soul. She credits Ms. Melitta and others that year for saving her life. She was seriously contemplating suicide at that point, was sick all the time, barely eating, and was an all around disaster. It’s a miracle in her mind that she still has friends from that college, she was such a disaster.

    I Will Not Die Here

    At the end of the year, when her professors all gathered to give her her closing remarks, they almost all agreed that they admired that she almost always showed up to class, even if she couldn’t manage to stay the whole time or say or do much at all. Even during one of the most painful times in her life, Allēna kept showing up and putting in an effort through tremendous difficulty, and many of them held her in high regard for that. She had never received that sort of kindness and praise before, and it helped her keep going and not give up.

    Showing up became a pattern for all of us. We joke that we “appear under mysterious circumstances”. If we say we’ll be someplace at some time, we will be there and early, come hell or high water. Xavier taught us that nothing less will do. Eight did this when he got his job in Philly – he said he would be there in Philly on Monday the Friday before that in Texas, and there the fuck he was on Philly on Monday, early. Nobody in the office thought he’d even show up, considering he’d have to travel over a thousand miles and move in less than a week to take this job. But that’s the way we were raised, and that’s what we do, obstacles be fucking damned.

    We will not die here, we keep saying. We have shit to do. And die we don’t, even though there are often close calls.

    Stay tuned for more magic and for Part 4! I’m gonna go to sleep soon, I cried my eyes out writing this.

    Love, Kalla


    One more thing…

    Wait! Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (haha, gottem) and we’ve joined the Fediverse. We’re opensorceryy@opensorceryy.co everywhere that’s federated. Give us a follow?