Open Sorcery

Tag: growth

  • the unediting (a love letter)

    I’ve had to spend my 20s – and most of my life – hiding parts of myself that other people didn’t like, found boring or weird, etc..

    It was soul crushing.

    My First Marriage Was A Mistake I Made at 21

    I entered my first marriage at 21 having made a grave mistake – we didn’t discuss politics or money or anything like that beforehand, and I think my family of origin was all too happy to have me be someone else’s problem, so the engagement was brief and my mother meddled the whole way down.

    I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found out that my ex husband was a Trump supporter on the first day of our honeymoon, and he found out that I wasn’t that day, as well. But that was arguably the least of our problems.

    The next 21 months were a slow unraveling of the image of me he had in his head as he saw who I actually was as it progressively became harder to hide those parts of me I’d suppressed, and it broke both of us. Like….you know what happens when you light an aerosol can on fire? We broke like that. Explosively, viscerally, irreparably.

    I was determined to never make that mistake again after my headmate Peri left him, but I didn’t know how…

    Polyamory? More Like Communication Boot Camp

    “..communication is like lube – if you think you’ve used enough, use some more. In other words, it’s better to over communicate than not tell your people enough.”

    Lazarus Halliwell

    Polyam has been our proving ground. It forced us to get somewhat good at communication or the whole arrangement would fall apart, to examine the power dynamics in our relationships, the role of privilege, and all of those sorts of things, and really address all of those things at the root.

    I am still not a “master communicator” by any means, but I am a hell of a lot better than when my headmate and bullshit grandmaster Eight started practicing polyam in ’21. Five years in the trenches will show you a lot of what NOT to do, that’s for sure, and if I had to give y’all any kind of advice, I’d say that communication is like lube – if you think you’ve used enough, use some more. In other words, it’s better to over communicate than not tell your people enough.

    The Unediting, Or Why I Stopped Self-Suppressing

    And in that same vein, it has forced me to no longer hide or suppress the sides of myself I did in my first marriage. A kind of unediting of self, if you will. Because in a relationship style built on authentic communication and informed, enthusiastic consent of all parties, it would make no goddamn sense to self-suppress.

    That and I’m chronically fucking ill. I am too tired for that shit.

    The people who love me long term love ME. Not some edited, curated simulacrum of me that I contorted myself into presenting for them. I don’t do that for people anymore. They get the hurricane force poet, visual artist, web tinker, techno-spiritual explorer, the cranky hermit who has to be bribed to leave the house with coffee and cinnamon treats, the nocturnal tomfuckery, graphic design atrocities, and every bit of worldbuilding I’ve been doing in my head and on the page I’ve been doing for the past decade.

    They get the prepper instinct, the “I don’t have an MD but I can give you a pretty decent guess as to what is wrong with you if you give me enough coffee and time, and if I’m stumped I know seven people I could call” raised by doctors chronic illness batshittery and excellence, and all the dry one liners and sarcasm and impassioned rants and rabbit holes I have to offer at 3 AM or whenever they want to know something weird or fucking awesome about European royalty or spy tradecraft or whatever the fuck I’m thinking about at that hour if they ask the right questions 😉

    Turning 30, Unedited

    I turn 30 next year. And of all the cool shit I’ve done, I think that takes the cake. Because this is six years in the making and it undoes 20 something years of the fuck shit before it.

    I love y’all. I couldn’t have done this without you 💛

    -Allēna

  • like an inkblot

    I attended St John’s College in Annapolis, MD for my freshman year of college. My dad died at the beginning of second semester. I was a young eighteen, already struggling deeply with depression. I didn’t think I would live to see my eighteenth year, and losing him fucking gutted me. I spent the remainder of the year an angry, lonely ghost. It broke me to such a degree that my headmate Eight took over as host for the first time in my system’s life, setting off a power struggle that would persist for many years to come.

    I would later write of that period in my life around a year later: 

    "my father
    they say
    i had a father once 
    i can’t forget his eyes
    green olives from the top down
    and this man i do not know
    may have created me 
    but i hope he won’t keep me 
    for his own
    i am not even my own
    and i keep telling the same
    old stories to new people

    i wish i could make myself new
    i wish i could bring him back
    i wish none of this shit would
    have ever happened
    i wish that the olives had never 
    gone 

    oh, stranger 
    take this cup from me
    will i die if i drink?
    blessed are the poor in spirit
    for they will inherit a life i
    do not want
    nonetheless
    not my will but yours"

    Now, the interesting thing about the way they do things at St John’s College is that there aren’t any final exams. Instead, all your instructors gather in a room at the end of the year and tell you what you did wrong and what you did well. They call this unique form of humiliation the “Don Rag”. It was fair to say that I was absolutely not a good student, especially considering the circumstances, and they did not go easy on me. That being said, my seminar instructors said something that’s stuck with me for the past decade. It was something to the effect of, “even if they can’t make it through a full class or can do nothing else, they show up.” Many of my instructors echoed the same thing, including my Greek instructor, who had told me earlier that year that I show up even when I look like I want to be blotted off the face of the earth.

    That’s something I take a lot of pride in. I do my utmost to show the fuck up, no matter what shape I’m in. I don’t give a flying fuck if I have to come up with 17,000 workarounds in the process, if I want something, I show the fuck up, I put in the work and I get it. And I love a challenge.

    Many people thought I would kill myself that year and in the years to come. My writing and my friends saved my life. I hated myself, and that was apparent in nearly everything I did. But I lived, despite not wanting to. My depression is much better now that I’ve gotten out of Texas, stopped pushing myself so damn hard, and I have better medical care. I’m tremendously thankful for that.

    So here’s to showing up, again and again.

    -Allēna

  • Self-Trust

    Hey, everyone. This is Eight again. I’ve been feeling worse and weirder since I wrote last time, so I’m going to write about a topic many people have asked me about in the same sort of freeform, stream of consciousness style in the hopes that it will cheer me up a bit and maybe get me to follow my own advice, haha. I want to talk about how I built self-trust.

    As you may know if you’ve been following this hell site for awhile, my system has quite the tragic backstory and deep lore. Allēna, the system’s host in our teens, was horribly psychologically tortured by our mother, Hera, to the point where she hated herself, in Hera’s effort to turn her and the system itself “normal”. It horribly backfired, because by the time I came to front as host in 2020, we saw through Hera’s bullshit completely and were done with her games. There was just one problem. We had no idea what the fuck we were doing. We had to get our fucking shit together. Fast. The body was pregnant, so I had nine months to learn how to not be a hot mess.

    Allēna with Chaos Nana in 2015 long before our journey towards self trust began.

    It was one hell of a crash course.

    I barely had time to think or even breathe, but I had to make time or else I was gonna fucking lose it. My partner at the time, Delta, was in even worse straits, so a lot of the calm I found was for them as well as me, because I had to hold us both together during a horrible time in both of our lives.

    So how did I build that self-trust? If you guessed deep-breathing to calm my body as the first step, you are correct. It was much needed to stave off a sense of near-constant terror. Hera and my estranged husband, Fang, put me through absolute hell during my pregnancy. There was a custody battle for my child before he was even born, and not knowing who I could trust outside of myself and a handful of others and numerous betrayals on Hera’s part resulted in a deep case of agoraphobia from which I haven’t recovered.

    She owned the house I was living in with my beloved Chaos Nana, and her numerous abuses drove the system to the brink of attempting suicide because we saw no way out. Eventually, I decided around December that I wasn’t going to die, I was going to outlive all of my abusers who would disrespect me at my own funeral, and I was going to build a life that worked for me, fuck what anyone else thought.

    So, armed with my reason to stay alive, I mastered deep breathing, and from there, determined that I was the only thing in this fuckshow of a pregnancy that I could rely on, so if I was upset about the state of things, I was going to change one (1) thing about either myself or my environment for the better, see how that made me feel, then move onto the next thing.

    If I was sad and couldn’t figure out why, I would go find food. We determined early in the pregnancy that if we couldn’t go out to eat as often as we’d like, then goddamnit, we were going to get on food stamps and learn to cook the food we liked. Being raised rich gave us a very specific and refined palate, and Texas doesn’t skimp when it comes to food stamps for pregnant people.

    When pregnancy put the body in so much fucking pain I could no longer walk, I swallowed my pride and rolled with the punches – and purchased my first wheelchair. If we didn’t like something, we’d take one step at a time to change it. I learned to accept my rage as a part of me that loved me due to a conversation with a very wise friend that winter, as well, and learned to trust it more than I trusted any human being, and learned to use it constructively.

    I learned to set boundaries so that that rage didn’t consume me, and learned how to channel my enormous wrath into huge projects that got me through the harrowing next year of my life. I hated myself at the beginning of this process, but by changing one thing that I disliked about myself or about my environment and then moving on to the next thing, I didn’t get overwhelmed by looking at the whole picture all at once, and learned to accept myself in full in the process.

    It wasn’t a perfect process, nor was I a perfect person. However, it worked, and it worked damn well. In moments where I felt insecure and alone, which happened often when I faced something I had never seen before, I reminded myself of all the times during this process that I’d figured extremely complicated things out that I’d never seen before and that I can and will find or make a way through this challenge, too. That approach helped me build a life that worked for me and mine without even realizing it, piece by piece. I only realized what I had done if I had the time and space to reflect, which wasn’t often. But over time, quietly, I began to trust myself because I had proven to myself that I was worthy of that honor time and again.

    Because of that self-trust, which is now something close to implicit, I survived some of the worst years of my life. Nobody came to my rescue in major ways, but my friends and then partner came to my rescue in every way they could largely from a distance ten thousand smaller ways. In the process of cultivating that self-trust, ironically, I became the person that would have protected the system from the horrors they experienced when they were younger because I had the courage to save myself and begin to heal.

    So if you’re struggling with self-trust, here’s my advice. First, take a few deep breaths. Six or seven will do well to start and will help you stave off your panic/anger/what have you. Next, change one thing for the better. Then, take a break, pat yourself on the back, what have you. Finally, once that’s done, rinse and repeat. Take it from a guy who had to build and rebuild this shit, piece by piece. The small changes are the pieces by which you build the life you want. They will snowball into bigger and bigger changes you’ll be able to make with greater changes once you’ve mastered the small ones. These changes are also a lot bigger than you think. The above is of the before and the below is of the above, so the changes you make will affect you profoundly in the long run. Godspeed, you lovely gremlin!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Eight, Chief Executive of Functioning ( am just kidding…or am I? Either way, I just made that title up)