that I could barely respond to the wonderful messages people have been sending me on a lovely new app that Emerson and Hawthorne put me onto called Roost, and I still couldn’t get to all of them. I feel bad, but resting is important. The emotional and physical toll of the past…yes must be catching up to me.
It’s also been six years to the day since my headmate Peri left our ex-husband, Fang, although she wouldn’t leave for Texas until July 11 (Alaska time), so that may be also contributing to the exhaustion somewhat. July seems to be the month of life-altering decisions and plot twist insanity, whether it was Peri leaving Fang, Eight leaving for Philly a year and some later, him starting the relationship for the first time with Zelda the year after that (I can’t quite recall the date of their anniversary, though, but I know it was late July/early August), or my massive seizures that were a major contributing factor in us leaving Zelda that also happened a year ago today, not to mention me finally divorcing Fang officially last year on July 23. So it’s a heavy month for a lot of reasons, full of life changes and memories and grief.
I will admit that I’m fully anticipating tragedy in some form this month given the seizures last year, or some other kind of major upheaval, but I don’t know what it will be and that scares me and that could also be contributing to my fatigue…
We’ll see what happens, I guess. I’ll keep y’all posted, as always.
I added my NGL link to my Instagram story highlights and several people messaged me on them telling me that I had inspired them and things of that nature.
Y’all, it was such precious, tiny behavior that I just about started sobbing. One of them was from a local queer poet saying that I had inspired them to join the local poetry scene. Another person said that I was “a true beacon of light in a very dark world”.
Hawthorne sent me some lovely messages, as well. I am immensely grateful for them.
If you don’t hear from me for the next couple of days, I am hyperventilating while I shoot videos documenting this influx of precious behavior 💛😭
Eight’s ex, Juneau, resurfaced a few days ago. They broke up a whole bunch of times, most recently in early 2023 after a series of events beginning with what we now call Kiragate and ending with his polycule splitting in half over him dumping his ex, Leigh, and refusing to pick a side in the months-long conflict between his then-partner Sol and best friend at the time, whom we will call Birch. Juneau took the contingent who had bonded with Leigh and Sol in the divorce, as it were. You can read more about that situation here. We call all of this the Great Schism of 2022-23.
He’s popped up a few times since then, but given Eight’s history with him and the fact that they would break up, get back together, and break up again over the years over a variety of things, he ended up blocked on most everything. He reached out via a comment on our old LiveJournal blog that I had honestly half forgotten about since I mostly post here these days.
He didn’t know whether I was alive or not and he wasn’t sure if I was going to even respond. I responded because the fact that he’s popped back up after all this time made me laugh. He also added me on Snapchat. I despise that app, so I ended up giving him my number.
I asked Hawthorne if he’d also reached out to them, and weirdly enough, he had.
But I did discover some awesome country music courtesy of lovely friends on Facebook and I took a long nap and cuddled with Moonie and Véra. I also called Autumn and Hawthorne.
All of the socializing took a lot out of me, but I had a great time. I want to call Delta soon..
Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Thanks to a hefty dose of caffeine last night and apparent executive dysfunction surrounding sleep, I re-downloaded the Pinterest app in an attempt to express what the fuck my brainhole does when I feel emotions or encounter a fascinating or special person. As I’ve said before in some other posts, I’m a synesthete and stroke survivor, which leads to my brain doing some interesting shit especially around emotions that are difficult to put into words. Visual art, therefore, is a much more effective way of getting the point across. While I CAN draw, paint, and create other forms of visual art, the amount of imagery my brain produces in a single minute is damn near incomprehensible even to me, so it makes much more sense to curate existing imagery and create my own when I can’t find anything batshit enough to fit what I need. Pinterest comes in handy for this sort of large scale imagery curation, as it is a visual search engine and quite an efficient one!
Move over, Google Emoji Combiner. Pinterest to the rescue!
Here is just a mere sampling of what my brainhole does in response to three of my partners respectively, Zelda, Hawthorne, and Autumn. I’ll post links to their boards, as well. I apologize in advance if any of these images were generated with AI, as many of the Pin creators don’t specify whether or not they were, and I hate that. I’ll avoid posting any here that are clearly marked as such.
A small sampling of Zelda’s board. The full thing, thus far, is here.
A small sampling of Hawthorne’s board. The full board is here.
Last but certainly not least, here’s a small sampling of Autumn’s board. The full board is here.
I hope y’all enjoyed this peep into my brainhole. Stay tuned for more magic, esteemed gremlins, very soon…
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!!
Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:
What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.
I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.
So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?
Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.
Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.
I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.
In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.
I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.
Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.
And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.
Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.
Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.
I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨
