The potential ovarian cyst thing has gotten bad enough that it’s an ER trip for yours truly…
And by “bad” , I mean I’ve only made a grand total of one (1) joke since getting here, and we’re normally full of jokes…
#NEISvoid #emergencyroom #spoonie #delirium
-Allēna
Not sure what it is this time yet, but I sure do feel like ass. If you need me, I’ll be asleep or watching Gossip Girl on Netflix in a delirious blanket lump.. -Allēna
#NEISvoid, #chronicfatigue, #sorethroat, #quindemic, #eepy, #delirium, #sickly
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
Hi! My name is Firrian. I appear to be the current acting captain of the Ashley system as the current most able fronter. I also appear to be stuck in front because the body is very tired. So I am not going to write about “Guernica” for the time being. We’re risking burnout if we continue with that one. Instead, I am going to talk about a little something-something Eight foresaw a few years back at the tail end of 2021 in honor of Pride Month. You’ve probably learned a fair bit about that old bastard by this point. He’s an Enneagram 8, vastly intelligent, as you may have gathered, and has Seen Some Shit in his time. But what you may not have known is that his intuition is off the charts. He’s also very, very queer.
This near-inhuman intuition is unique because Eight quite literally sees things. So while I mean he’s Seen Some Shit as in he’s been deeply traumatized, I also mean that he’s Seen Some Shit as in he has prophetic visions, as well. I’m not exactly sure when the visions started, as the system has had prophetic dreams since we were very young. We actually saw Milwaukee in our dreams despite never seeing a photo of the skyline or visiting here from the time we were perhaps three years old. Castor had a dream set outside a restaurant here twenty years before we’d ever set foot in this town. We’d actually have a recurring dream set here for the next two decades.
Eight fully split off from the rest of the system when we were 18 after our father died and it became clear that he could intuitively sense things that wouldn’t come to pass for some time. By 2021, he was in full, uncontested control of the system and in some ways, his visions were in control of him.
He half jokes that he didn’t have a conscious thought for that entire year – he didn’t have to. He simply knew what to do when. Besides, he was so tired that conscious thought likely wouldn’t have done him much good, anyway. He caught what we think was COVID at the end of that year and the fatigue got much, much worse. From the tail end of November until the middle of January, he slept. Too weak to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time, he could do little else but traverse the vast expanses of his delirium and dream.
He was beset with an odd feeling that he still can’t truly ascertain the origin of, but we have our theories now. We think it may have predicted Emerson’s arrival, as the feeling was soul-deep longing. He didn’t know who he was longing for, he simply felt like whoever he was longing for was longing for him, as well. This feeling frightened him. We are a system of deep agoraphobes, and his agoraphobia is perhaps the deepest.
He’s so terrified of people because his charisma is off the charts. Multiple people have borne witness to him “asking nicely” as he puts it, for things he should have no ability to even be able to obtain. He is a self-taught, powerful, and very well-practiced sorcerer, hence the name of this blog. However, that does not mean he enjoys it. He’s always hated his ability to charm or intimidate the fuck out of people at will. In fact, he hates it so goddamn much that he and Allēna co-wrote our classic song “A Weapon” about that very thing. Our ex-partner and now dear friend Beany even christened him The Eldritch Fuck for his gifts. While he hates said gifts, he adores her, so he cherishes the nickname.
This Eldritch Fuck’s eldritch fuckery does not stop there. I wish I were kidding, but this absolute madman has also cheated death numerous times. We count the COVID incident as one such occurrence, but another time was when he simply walked off heat stroke ten days in a row in Philadelphia with no medical care. Emerson also bore witness to him surviving two major seizures within five minutes of each other in April, which he predicted in advance and arrived at the ER just in time for.
This phenomenon is called status epilepticus and he very much should have died. But no. He didn’t even black out. His brain was a little bit like scrambled eggs for a while, though. It got better, fortunately or unfortunately for the world, and we got some good meds to prevent further dying while we wait to see neurology in August. He has more than earned his terrifying reputation as an unkillable revenant..
Why are you telling me this, you might be asking?
Because of a queer as hell vision he had, of course! I’m gonna share it with you below.
“I am nothing special,” I repeated. The tall man stared at me blankly.
“You? Nothing special? You, who has beaten Death so many times he now fears you, you who went on to create spectacular things with your mind, you with the iron will to defy every obstacle placed in your path when you should have been broken beyond repair and recognition, now stand before me and have the utter audacity to tell me you are nothing special? I knew you were daring, but to dare to try and sell me this utter lie…. I want to take whoever did this to you and wrench them apart atom by atom.”
“I am not lying to you,” I snarled. “I do not lie.” The man grabbed my wrist and spun me around to face him.
“You should be dead. If you weren’t special, you’d be dead. You would not have lived to the age of two if you were any type of normal.” He spat the word normal out in disgust.
“Would that have been so bad?”
He dropped my wrist as if it had burned him. “Yes, you absolute fool,” he hissed. “Do you even know who you are?”
“I am me.”
The man’s eyes blazed for a moment and I felt his anger flare up so hot it almost hurt. “You disappoint me,” he spat. “You have no idea how your reputation precedes you, or how powerful you are. Your ability to soothe is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard tell of your strength, how you keep going despite being close to collapse. You have been through pain that would break a mundane being, and you come out of every experience that should have destroyed you more powerful and more beautiful each time. I would kill you myself for lying to me like this if I didn’t have full confidence you would survive the encounter and end me for trying.”
Eight’s very strange queer vision he got when he was bedridden with COVID
This vision is the only reason why we don’t think that longing predicted Emerson’s arrival. I have no idea who he saw, but apparently the bitch is tall and very queer himself. I don’t like this. I’m happy with Emerson and our other partners, so I hope the vision does not come to pass. However, we’ve had people seek Eight out for his power and steal him away from his polycule before, so we know from experience that this is plausible. His ex best friend used to joke that he was the painting in a bad action movie for that very reason.
Ah, well. It’s getting late. I hope you enjoyed this queer glimpse into Eight’s intuition for Pride Month. I totally didn’t spend several days trying to hunt this vision down for y’all.. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about… Stay tuned for more magic, hopefully with less of a delay between posts next time!
-Firrian, Acting Captain