Open Sorcery

Tag: healing

  • Lost In Time And Space

    Hey, everyone. This is Lazarus, once again. As I write this, I’m sitting on my apartment’s balcony space so that I can get a bit of fresh air. At Emerson’s suggestion, I took today largely away from the Internet to clear my head, but it seems to have made me sadder, albeit less anxious. I’ve spent a great portion of today deep in my head strategizing and things, but I feel disconnected from the world in a not so pleasant way, sort of like I’m lost in space and time. So if I am going to go all in on disconnecting, I think I need to make a better plan so that it doesn’t make me feel worse and adrift. So now I’m drafting a blog post in my notes app that I will post when I come back online again. 

    I shuffled through a deck of prompts that Emerson has, and found one that is going to be a doozy to contemplate and write about, but I think ought to be addressed head on anyway. It goes a bit like this: “Wonderland: You always have your imagination. What is something that you want to achieve, but probably never will?” I know I’m probably not quoting the prompt verbatim, as usual, but it gets the point across, I think. I’m also probably going to cry as I write this, in all honesty. 

    I would love to be abled, or at least accommodated to such an extent that I could function enough that I could do a great deal more. I know that’s probably the remainder of my hyper independence talking, but I grieve what I used to be able to do every day. I hold my need for rest and greater peace and my fervent wishes for greater independence, to contribute more, to push past what is holding me back, and to build bigger and greater things simultaneously and I try every day to let the peace and rest win because I know that ultimately that is the only way I will be able to contribute more. 

    I can’t do anything meaningful if I’m running on fumes and pushing myself to the point where I’m very nearly dead. It’s a strange paradox that I tend to ignore when I’m anxious, angry, and/or craving movement and release. I can only really see the nuance and appreciate the paradoxical nature of healing and the true way forward when I’m calm and able to recharge myself. But still, I grieve. I miss what I was able to do before illnesses, trauma, and injuries took all of my independence away from me, however unhealthy and against true human nature it actually was. 

    I keep having to remind myself through all of this that my rest and the creative work I’m doing is still an action, that even though it looks like I am doing nothing, it’s still an action, it’s still a choice. I’m still doing something. 

    Even when I’m doing research, writing, or art from bed or sitting down, I’m still doing something. I’m never doing nothing. Reframing my perspective around rest, art, and leisure from doing nothing to doing something has helped improve my quality of life and mental health a great deal. 

    And when I keep that perspective in mind, it has helped me relax a great deal more and make rest and leisure a much easier and less anxiety inducing choice to make, as I often have to fight my anxiety, which paralyzes me when it comes time to rest because I feel as though I have done nothing all day even when that simply isn’t true. I’m resting, an action. I’m making art, an action. I’m watching TV, an action. I’m talking to my partners and friends, an action. I am cuddling my cats, an action. I’m blogging, an action. I’m doing medical research, an action. When I think about my behavior that way, it becomes far less paralyzing to do…anything because in my mind, all actions start to carry equal weight, no matter what they are, because they all carry an element of conscious choice and autonomy, and none of them are nothing. 

    They may have different impacts and implications on the people and situations around me, and I can change my behavior accordingly based on what I observe, but none of it is meaningless. It also does wonders for my perfectionism when I keep that in mind, which is also rooted in anxiety. I just need to work on keeping that in mind… 

    Speaking of research, I may have made a breakthrough last night. I have been experiencing a great deal of numbness in my right hand and on the sides of my face particularly the right side, as well as fatigue, which drinking saltwater or eating salty food almost immediately resolves. I’ve also had shitty circulation for most of my life. So I started wondering due to a longtime suspicion that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or POTS, that my blood pressure might be low running low regardless of how my body is positioned due to severe and prolonged stress and heart damage. 

    So I did a bit of research last night that tentatively confirms that theory. It also gave me a new theory that my blood pressure dipping especially low in the mid to late afternoons into the nighttime is causing severe fatigue that’s gotten worse as the temperature has started falling as winter approaches. Time for new experiments! 

    That being said, the vitamin B is still massively improving my mental health at a baseline, and likely keeping my blood pressure at a lower level than it would be normally since it is normalizing my mental health and keeping me more stable than I would be without it. So I wonder if I need to start making feta cheese a staple of my diet like I did when I was younger. Feta is about the saltiest thing known to man, second only to a rock of salt itself or possibly brine. I love feta cheese. So let this be a public service announcement to any suitors or partners looking to win my heart or make our relationship even better – load me up with that good shit. It’s my favorite, and it may literally improve my health in the process 💛 

    Yay for doing health shit myself! I think that’s enough pondering the mysteries of the universe or at least the human body for the day. Stay tuned for more magic, y’all. I’ll be around. 

    Your (not salty enough) sorcerer, Lazarus 

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  • 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.

  • Would You Still Be Here Suffering?

    Hey, everyone. This is your ever faithful guide, Lazarus, once more. I was looking through my Facebook memories from last year and Jesus Christ… the system was not okay. I believe they were nearly blackout drunk most of the time to cope with the chaos around them, stoned to fuck, or both, and were entering the thick of the recording process of our fifteenth album, Hardshell. That album was a fucking doozy.

    I still have no idea what inspired a good half of those lyrics, one of the songs on the album appears to have predicted someone’s death, and the entire damn record plays like some cursed swamp blues thing where two of my former headmates that later integrated into me tried to out-blues each other the whole way down. In short, around this time last year was not fucking fun for anyone. I can’t say I’m having the best time right now, but I’m more or less rolling with the damned punches and figuring shit out and I can’t really say I’m suffering.

    I want to make an important distinction here. When I say “I’m not suffering”, I don’t mean “I’m not in pain” or “shit doesn’t suck and it’s all sunshine and rainbows over here.” I’m still hurting and there’s a lot that’s still objectively bad. However, there’s still a difference between pain and suffering as I understand it as a practicing Stoic.

    My ex best friend was a practicing Buddhist and we had a conversation in 2021 that changed my brain chemistry around pain and suffering. He explained it this way: “Pain is when you are hit with an arrow. The arrow can be anything that hurts you, a breakup, debt, your car breaks down, what have you. Suffering is when you shoot yourself with another arrow by resisting the existing pain in your mind by saying ‘oh woe is me, why is this happening to me, this shouldn’t be happening to me’, etc. rather than accepting with the first arrow as it is and treating the pain.”

    I had a conversation with my wonderfully cranky and sarcastic therapist a few weeks ago that made me realize that I was fucking suffering rather than just dealing with the pain. I have been seeing him for three years because he is phenomenal at getting me to sit the fuck down and see some goddamn sense when I’m freaking the fuck out and well, suffering, and that was one of Those Sessions. We have a LOT of Those Sessions, and I rely on him heavily for that sort of biting, humbling realism and practical, applicable advice that makes my life far better.

    This conversation was about, in essence, radical acceptance, a portion of dialectical behavioral therapy that I finally fucking understood in 2021 after I was pressganged into going into group therapy by Hera and her family after they found out I was suicidal. I did objectively want to get better and get better skills to help me improve my life, I just despised the circumstances in which I had gotten there because they weren’t of my own choosing, so I approached group with an open mind.

    This group changed my life, especially the portion about radical acceptance, and eventually led me to my interest in Stoicism and ultimately led me to practice it. Radical acceptance as I understand it holds that other people and often large portions of situations are outside of your control or even your influence. All you can do is choose how you are going to respond to them. It doesn’t mean that you have to go along with everything, it just means you release the need to control everything and instead find ways to protect your peace and master yourself.

    We got to talking about this because I was bitching about Emerson being further behind in his inner work than I was, and my therapist cut me off and told me that I should start to instead focus on meeting him where he was and choosing how I was going to respond to him rather than bemoaning the fact that he was so damn far behind and attempting to maintain control of every tiny detail of every situation. He cited radical acceptance as part of this conversation and I desperately needed that reminder.

    This got my ass back in gear and I had a big old “remember your training” moment and started working on letting a lot of shit go that was outside of my control and getting back more into the Stoic mindset of “the only thing I can truly control is myself and how I respond to things and people”. This has helped me suffer a lot less. Cue the cinematic hero theme music, I suppose. Sometimes, like all people, I need to be told to sit the fuck down by the people I trust, and this was no exception. I struggle a lot with letting shit go, especially if I hate the aforementioned shit, so this has been a very useful exercise. I’ve missed this. I’m doing a lot better and I’m honestly proud of myself for getting this far.

    Well, y’all, I have the remainder of a lunch to demolish, so I’d best wander off. Stay tuned for more magic! Enjoy your day, night, what have you.

    -Lazarus

  • At Last, I’m Found

    Hey, all.

    This is Lazarus again.

    In 2021, I was talking with my friend Delta about all of the shit I was going through at the time while deep in survival mode and about being an Enneagram Eight largely geared toward self preservation, and I predicted that once I got out of survival mode and was safe, I would sort of… collapse. I would have no idea what the fuck to do with myself and kinda deflate and go more or less catatonic. That prediction has turned out to be more or less accurate most days.

    As my life has stabilized, I find myself with less and less to solve and fewer fires to put out, with many of the remaining problems largely outside of my control and completely outside of my power to fix or help with. In short, most days, despite having the stability I worked so hard for, I feel more lost and adrift than ever. I have been sleeping a lot. I just don’t have much desire to do much, and I do the rare activity when the mood or inspiration strikes. My general state reminds me a lot of when I lost my dad, Xavier, back in 2016.

    I wonder a lot if I’m subconsciously or somatically grieving all of the bullshit of the last three or four years or perhaps even longer because of how badly the wind has been knocked out of me. I barely even have energy to reply to a fraction of the dozens of messages on the various messaging apps I get daily, and I am trying to move away from feeling so bad about that because realistically I just can’t right now. That’s the plain and simple fact of the matter. I only really respond to people and reach out or have my phone nearby at all if I feel up to it, which is rare, and I have been trying to strike a balance between isolation and social time so that I don’t fall off the face of the Earth completely. I don’t want to fully withdraw or even withdraw at all, but my brain and body have been demanding that to some degree, and I’m going with that rather than fighting it so as to not make whatever this is longer and worse.

    On the subject of recovery, I did a bit more research on what the underlying cause of my symptoms might be that have been making my body and mind feel so damn out of whack, and came up with a decent theory that my thyroid might have gotten ever so slightly cooked due to Hera’s batshit DIY MKULTRA scheme she put me through, and the HRT I’m on combined with the years of stress has been making it go, ah, ever so slightly haywire.

    So I found some scholarly research that said that thyroid patients suffering from both hypothyroidism AND hyperthyroidism benefit from taking various forms of vitamin B and thiamine for their chronic fatigue especially. Luckily for me, a former friend of mine had send me a bunch of supplements she wasn’t gonna use late last year and among them was a B100 complex supplement. So I decided to test my theory and give this shit a try and see if it did anything for my fatigue and other symptoms.

    Well, it appears to be doing a fair bit. I’m about five days into the test and my brain fog and pain is leagues better. It appears to be helping my lack of object permanence and executive function, as well, giving me some semblance of both. I have also noticed that I’m not super overstimulated by huge amounts of sound, nor does silence understimulate me as badly. I can sit in silence for far longer without my mind itching for music or internally screaming. It may also be helping with the flashbacks, as well, but that’s to be determined. I will need to continue the test for longer to see if it has any significant effect there. So perhaps my fried thyroid theory holds water. I will need to address this with my doctors next time I can spare a brain cell, haha.

    I’m also far less angry and my headaches are gradually getting better as I work through my anxiety, as they appear to be triggered by anxiety and moments of emotional distress, which the B100 appears to be lessening as a baseline. Yay for House MD-ing myself at home! I just love being an AuDHDer with a special interest in weird ass branches of medicine who was practically raised by doctors, hahahaaaaa. (This is partly sarcastic, partly genuine. Specialized knowledge and deep somatic intuition saves lives, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s just annoying that my body is so weird and there are so many things that the medical field as we know it doesn’t explore without months of waiting or you have the charisma of a fucking god).

    Seeing as there are a lot of positive effects even through the semi-catatonia and the semi-catatonia predates the B100 test, I don’t think the B100 complex is the culprit here. If anything, the supplement appears to be helping. I’m just probably processing years of grief somatically that I’m not entirely consciously aware of.

    So that leaves a large amount of time to fill as I heal that would ordinarily be spent in agonizing mental or physical pain, parsing my way through interpersonal trashfires, or recovering from the aforementioned problems. That huge amount of time to fill raises some incredibly simple, yet profound questions that I’m currently exploring the answers to: what the fuck do I do now? What actually makes me happy now that I’m living more out of love than out of spite and my brain and my body aren’t fucking screaming 24/7?

    I know I love writing on here and writing in general. I am deeply proud of myself for having a space that is mine that I’ve maintained for months now even if I can’t post daily, and that does a lot for my quality of life. I like having spaces that are mine where I can express myself with the people that I love that would be very difficult to take from me or from them. I know research and engaging in my myriad special interests lights me the fuck up. Emerson raids the local Little Free Libraries like the adorable gremlin he is and often spoils me by bringing books back about topics that he either knows I’m fascinated with or that he thinks would catch my eye, and I do indeed feel very spoiled and lucky when he does that. That man is a catch and a half.

    I’ve seen the concept of “dopamine menus” floating around on the Internet for some time, as well, and I’ve started merging that concept with a sort of free form to do list before I go to bed if I’m not completely beat to fuck by the time I pass out and can spare a brain cell to dump all the things that might possibly bring me joy the next day even if things go to shit on paper. I often struggle in the moment to think of anything that would bring me a shred of happiness in the moment if I’m sad or bored or anxious and looking for a pick me up, and having all of that on hand and prepped the night before helps a LOT in those moments.

    I think all of those taken in tandem are a decent place to start. I’m trying to move away from the notion that I have to have a Grand Plan ™️ or a goal to accomplish at all times and I really think that teenage me had it right when they said that happiness was having good talks, good music, and good food with good people. That was really their goal in life, and I think they’d be proud of me for getting here. I do a LOT of all of the above.

    So stay tuned for more magic, horseshoes and weedwhackers (you decide what y’all are in the comments). See you fuckers next time.

    -Lazarus

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  • It’s been awhile…

    Hello, everyone! This is Lazarus again. I have been dealing with a mindfuck of a month that I can’t recall if I mentioned in my last post. However, the brunt of the mindfuckery is over and I’m just recuperating now. I have had no idea what to say and my brain has felt like a massive pile of goo, so the overwhelm has largely kept me from writing. However, I figure if I let the overwhelm and my guilt about the overwhelm continue to keep me from writing, I won’t ever write. So now I’m gonna put SOMETHING on paper for y’all because fuck perfection, in all honesty.

    The integration I mentioned in the last post has held. I am still just one guy in this mind, and the cPTSD is a bitch and a half. Combine that with AuDHD that’s an intrinsic part of my brain and well…. I constantly have to keep my anxiety and anger in check and make sure I’m in a decent place before socializing with anyone, really, or else I swear the ghost of my late great uncle speaks through me and it isn’t pretty. He was a cantankerous and iconic man who was widely speculated to be gay and everyone loved to poke him for his reactions. He would fucking explode, much to everyone’s delight. So I constantly have to keep THAT side of me in check. It’s a helluva time. I am about nine months sober from alcohol and I’ve largely quit using weed as well, and let me tell y’all… I have not wanted a drink more in the last month more than I have in this entire sobriety journey.

    Conversely, however, these cravings give me a solid cue as to what still needs work in my life. I crave a drink when I am stressed, and my chronic health issues often flare when I’m that stressed, too, and gods do I feel like an overworked manager at present. So when I get this way, I know I need to deal with the thing or things that are stressing me out that badly so that I can get peace/a break/what have you. I then deal with who or what is stressing me out head on and the cravings and often my physical pain and fatigue subside as well.

    One of the biggest stressors that is currently getting unfucked is Emerson and Zelda’s relationship. I’ve had to lay down the law with both of them and say with quite a bit of force “actually FUCKING talk to each other and unfuck your shit so that most of Emerson’s and my conversations aren’t him spiraling to me about how shit’s fucked with y’all and I’m stuck in the middle feeling like an overworked manager”. Both of them had been doing great work on their own getting their own shit together, but Zelda needed to know how their side of their relationship with Emerson was making BOTH of us feel. Things have been improving since Emerson and I gave them that metal chair of a conversation.

    Additionally, I love polyamory, but I’m coming to realize how badly I HATE getting caught in the middle of other relationships and having to serve as mediator of any kind. So I’ve been talking to everyone and letting them know – usually more gruffly than I would like – my feelings on the matter if things like this arise repeatedly. These aren’t my relationships, even if I’m dating everyone involved, and I’ve started running a tighter ship for my own mental health because I just can’t. I didn’t have that sort of freedom to speak up as a child or teenager or in previous relationships, but now that my relationships are healthier and my loves are receptive, I have started voicing my feelings point blank because ultimately that is my responsibility and shit won’t get any better unless I do. I used to live my life in the shadows where I knew the people around me didn’t look. As I heal and sort through my bullshit, I’m learning to take that scared 18-25 year old of the shadows and introduce them to the light. It’s terrifying. Viscerally terrifying. But the way my close people have responded is lovely.

    Now that shit is getting sorted locally, I have additional mental, physical, and emotional bandwidth to start connecting and reconnecting with people I haven’t been able to since shit has been such a trashfire here. I’ve been bonding more closely with my other partners – including a lovely new girlfriend whom we shall call Princess – and swapping memes and music and random rambles about our days. Hell, I just sent my girlfriend out East who is an avid reader of this blog when I actually post a random string of messages about the delicious trout I ate for lunch, haha. Vulnerability is AWESOME. We have been in talks to bring Lumine, who has posted here a few times, up for a visit, as well, as soon as he is able. I’m sure there will be much hilarious chaos and a great deal of laughter about lithium ion batteries and the like when we can make that happen! I have a cool as fuck suitor out in Michigan who is just lovely that I’m strongly considering dating at some point as well.

    Shit finally feels like it is looking the FUCK up and it is GOING to get better if I have to make it better with my BARE HANDS.

    Stay tuned for more magic, cherished hooligans!

    -Lazarus

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  • 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

  • A Decade of Hidden Longing

    Hey, everyone! This is Eight. I haven’t been out in a bit, as I’ve been taking a much needed rest, and it seems like our people and the blog have been fucking hopping! I love to see it!

    We’re at the Zelda System’s place again this week, and Sheik herself is cradling me and taking a day nap. She deserves the rest, sweet thing. She works extremely hard and deserves to rest and play as hard as she works, so I’m happy to be held while she sleeps. It feels like a sacred honor to be a soothing and protective presence while our lovely partner sleeps so she gets good rest.

    We often think quite deeply when we’re over here to the point that it becomes almost meditative. It’s deeply restful for us to be around her and the others in her system as much as it is for her to be around us. Sheik is so gentle and tender with Allēna that Allēna ends up deeply processing and working through her deepest fears due to Sheik’s mere empathetic presence. It’s scary because Allēna must face these fears head on in order to communicate them with Sheik, but Sheik has never shamed or judged her for her fears and often responds in such a way that sharing is easier for her by the day.

    We deeply fear vulnerability as a system, but Sheik and her current headmates’ kind presences have made them safe to share with. Something that came up today that Sheik responded extremely kindly to was Allēna feeling guilty for asking for a favor. In a moment that should be a fucking case study for top notch communication, Allēna noticed she was feeling guilty and anxious for asking Sheik for that favor, so she told Sheik outright what she was feeling and asked point blank for reassurance, which Sheik willingly gave.

    From there, this uncorked a second wave of emotion and memories as Allēna explored the root of why she felt so guilty and afraid of asking for help while Sheik stood as witness. This is what she found.

    As a child and young adult, we were abused and neglected into keeping our needs and desires invisible and only meet or attain them on our own. Our mother, Hera, was very emotionally withdrawn, and had little tolerance for our – at the time – enormous emotions we had no idea what to do with. So we were severely emotionally abused out of expressing them in a way most people could recognize. However, Allēna resisted.

    She is far more emotional than she lets on to most, and turned to art as a means to express herself and protest in the midst of a family who had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned her. She became a highly skilled multidisciplinary artist, creating an enormous volume of work most people, even people who have known our system for years, have never seen. For a decade, she kept a journal not unlike this blog which she, Castor, and occasionally myself wrote in almost daily. It reverberates with the full spectrum of human emotion, sadness, punctuated with joy, with deep currents of rage and willpower most people don’t attain until midlife. And that’s just the journals.

    She was also an accomplished visual artist, turning to a brush and canvas when words failed her. She created a series of paintings in which she documented her various emotional states. Anger, her most common emotion – and the most forbidden to express during the time we were under Hera’s thumb – was her favorite piece. Its very existence was an act of rebellion. Slashes of black paint against large swaths of white space, which she knew Hera hated.

    Anger (unknown year) by Allēna

    The longer we work on our communication with like minded friends and partners, the more we unpick the years of trauma that kept the mountain of exquisite longing beneath the surface. We are very logical, yes, but we also have a treasure trove of emotion often stored in the body. The more we’re able to safely communicate it with people who can hold it with respect, the deeper we’re able to process and feel it. It’s deeply healing and freeing, and we’re eternally grateful to those who witness us. Thank you.

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight

  • 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

  • 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)

  • Of Two Minds Or More

    Hey, everyone. This is Eight.

    I don’t think I will be sharing this post on my main socials so that I can write more freely. Siege didn’t share the last one on our main channels, either. So I suppose that whoever comes across these next few posts is meant to see them and whatever happens happens.

    Truth be told, we haven’t been doing great. We have been very stressed since moving out of Zelda’s place and into our own place with Emerson across the street. The move has put a lot of strain on our relationship with Emerson, as well, and we’ve found ourselves on the business end of a lot of verbal violence from him and dishing a fair bit out in return. None of it has been okay, and Allēna has been in front for the better part of the past week and then some trying to make sure the vessel continues to function and the bills are paid on time. She’s also been hard at work reopening a dialogue with Zelda after the nasty falling out that led to us moving out in the first place.

    In many ways, we feel caught between two houses, two paths, and are of two minds about a lot of shit. Lēna has spent most of this time extremely depersonalized, and has felt little to nothing but anger, muted anger at that. Mostly she just felt nothing. Emerson has been terrified that we were going to leave him and mourning us and everything we bring with us, while our depersonalization has gotten so bad it’s showing the early signs of depression, something that haunted us for a fucking decade with no reprieve and that I am not pleased seems to be darkening my mental doorstep once more. Additionally, we have been showing signs of the most dangerous element of our depression spells – what we call a “hot streak”.

    These hot streaks are depression fueled periods of intense creative output, often when we feel trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of reprieve anytime in the near future. Launching this blog and the frantic flurry of initial posts is absolutely hot streak territory. If I had to estimate we hammered out at least thirty thousand words – over half of the minimum word count needed for a novel as it is traditionally defined – in a bit over a month, and that wasn’t anywhere close to all we did. I have taken up visual art once more in an attempt to communicate what my kicked hornet’s nest of a brain is doing when I’m so tired words fail me, and Allēna appears to have followed in my footsteps. We’ve created a pair of pieces, Desperation and Agoraphobia. I’ll post them below:

    Desperation (2024), by me
    Agoraphobia (2024), by Allēna

    And this isn’t everything. We’ve been recording music here and there, as well. Allēna, fittingly, recorded a strange cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park, which seems like startling fare for musicians known for work that makes its home in the intersection between folk, jazz, and blues. I think that was the point. She got the idea from a conversation with Zelda and was feeling…well, numb, and was in the mood for a challenge. We all enjoy a good opportunity to shock and awe people, too. Nobody expects Linkin Park out of the feral blues system.

    Today was a bit less numb but still painful. The depersonalization floodgates broke open and Allēna ended up crying at Emerson for a good long while and telling him how not okay we’ve fucking been. It ended up being really vulnerable on both of our sides and honestly quite productive.

    However, the conversation took a darker turn when Emerson and Allēna started talking about the death of the mutual ex that I had actually met Emerson through. This ex died on my system’s birthday, and it’s increasingly suspected that it was a suicide. From everything Emerson can tell, his depression and already ailing physical health had gotten worse in the year and a quarter since I’d gotten sick of his bullshit and left him, taking Emerson and a whole virtual village’s worth of power, prestige, and everything he’d ever wanted with me in the process. Emerson suspects that by doing so, that loss killed him slowly.

    This is the same reason why Emerson had been in mourning. He was worried he was going to lose everything if we packed up and headed out, too. This floored Allēna because she had never considered that by doing something as simple – to her – as leaving and removing assholes from her life and various social circles and organizations, it can destroy lives. Her mindset is very much that of “If they can’t be bothered to treat me with respect, what happens after I leave is not my problem”.

    She’s secure enough in herself to not let her love for someone stop her from maintaining her boundaries and boot a person from our life if they’re being an ass and refuse to take accountability for their bullshit, but it did help her get a better sense of responsibility for the position she’s in. Those sorts of situations make me far more anxious than they do her, as I can often see how things might play out months before anything actually happens, so good on her, honestly.

    Speaking of watching things play out, I have no idea how things are going to go from here. I am going to try and get some rest, though. We’ll just take this one day at a time, I guess.

    Much love, everyone. Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight