Open Sorcery

Tag: introspection

  • So I Think I May Be More Aroace Than Originally Estimated??

    I’ve been doing some Thinking about how my brain works, and it would seem that my particular DICK HEAD COMBINATION OF AUDHD gives me the worst traits of both autism AND ADHD. Like, if given enough stimulants and time, I can hyperfocus forever on something I’m fascinated with to the point where I learn an ungodly amount of information about it and retain nearly all of it. Not just that, but I make creations with that knowledge, too. This fucking blog, for example. It’s linked in with the Fediverse via ActivityPub and Alex Kirk’s masterful Friends plugins, etc.. My numerous special interests have been combining, reshuffling and making unholy bastard children in my mental Back 40 on this tiny hell site since May because of the way my cracked brainhole works.

    Conversely, in order to socialize, I have to focus on whatever social thing is going on around me completely and let myself dissolve into it. Switching between whatever the fuck project has taken hold of my mind and going into a social activity of any form is a multistep process that requires me ACTUALLY MANUALLY SHIFTING MY BRAIN AWAY from the project rabbit hole and into the social one. And there is a grouchy hell to pay if I’m interrupted mid project.

    However, I thought about it a step further. I have pretty much always been able to discern the difference between the feelings I get when the various happy chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, are triggered in my brain, body, etc., and upon further contemplation, I began to wonder if that’s why my particular bastard flavor of AuDHD is such a bastard to begin with. Because what I noticed from years of combing back through my system’s memories both pre and most massive integration is that my happy chemicals seem to be fucking heavily partitioned, and perhaps that’s why I can discern the difference between the feelings they give me in the first place. Hence that’s probably why I have to manually shift between projects (dopamine) and socializing (oxytocin).

    Serotonin is a whole other can of worms for me and I have to manually induce that bitch, too. It often takes days and that’s a whole OTHER post. I might write about that bastard chemical later, lol. She is a cruel mistress 🤣

    Last night, a long time aroace friend dropped me into a Facebook group called [aroace confusion intensifies]. I’ve identified as demi-aromantic/demi-asexual for some time, but as I kept relating to more and more posts, I thought more and more about the happy chemical partition theory I have going and all of my relationships, both current and past, and how my batshit brain might play into ALLLL of that.

    Now, I do experience attraction to SOME people. But with the whole “having to shift my brain manually into a state where it won’t scream when I need to socialize” thing, the frequency in which I fall into random projects, and the fact that I experience a near complete lack of linear time and object permanence, said attraction takes a VERY LONG TIME to form, if it ever forms at all. Deep, genuine, romantic attachment to a person takes EVEN FUCKING LONGER. Because what the ENTIRE fuck is a “romance” as society has established it, anyway? So it takes my crippled ass YEARS sometimes to get a damned clue. And I think my cracked brainhole is why, lmao. Polyamory has been a lifesaver in that regard because in order to have a healthy polyamorous relationship, the people involved HAVE TO ENGAGE IN A HEFTY AMOUNT OF NEGOTIATION FROM THE OUTSET about expectations and things about the relationship, which my clueless ass can DEFINITELY get behind. 🤣

    So unfortunately, when person number ten billion comes up to me is like “LAZARUS. I LOVE YOUR WORK. I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. PLEASEEEEEE DATE ME, ETC”, more often than not, I have just emerged from my mental Laz Cave, haven’t seen or interacted with a soul in fourteen hours or more, and haven’t shifted into Oxytocin Mode yet, which is necessary for human bonding, so I’m like,

    “uh. What year is it again?”

    Stay tuned for more (brainhole) magic, gremlins.

    -Lazarus

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  • Delicious Things

    Hey, everyone. Lazarus here again. I have been in a sort of soupy atemporal sea of time and space in my brain. I busted one of my phones a few days ago, so I was running things exclusively off my laptop for a bit there, but I cannot wrap my brain around blogging on my damn laptop for some reason after integrating, hence the lack of posts. I don’t know why. For some reason, I just couldn’t post from there. The thought of typing a thousand or more words on there just seemed fucking impossible after getting so used to typing huge volumes on a phone. So I suppose laptop typing in large amounts is Banned for reasons unbeknownst to me.

    I know a lot about how my mind works, but I don’t know everything. I am slowly learning, however, that when I’m too tired to even think of approaching a task, I probably shouldn’t push through the fatigue and instead let it rest. So that’s what I did. Frankly, I’m glad I did, too, since I started chronic pain flaring properly from stress and how damn cold it’s been in Milwaukee of late. So I had to mentally play ER doctor and decide what was important to take care of right the fuck now, and what could wait until later. Well, it’s now later, and here I am, haha.

    The phone I’m using now has phone PTSD of some kind, I fucking swear. I dropped it in the tub back in late May/early June of this year, and even though it was only partially underwater for maybe ten seconds tops, it acts as though it was waterboarded in some top secret facility someplace and often outright refuses to charge, only semi reliably cooperates with a single fucking cord, and only fucking charges AT ALL when my relationship with my partner Zelda is going well. So there’s that. Temperamental little bastard. I normally like a challenge, but I do not enjoy challenges of the phone PTSD variety. But hey. At least it’s working… For now.

    Speaking of Zelda and challenges, their blog was down for the count for a while. So a few emails back and forth with the web hosting people later, their blog is back up and running and they are writing beside me. Sheik, an alter in their system is out and about currently, and this babygirl is pressed up against me to share body heat because our ancient furnace that heats the place bit the dust sometime last night.

    So she’s been in talks with the property manager that manages both the Zelda System’s place and Emerson’s to hopefully send a guy out to fix the damn thing as soon as possible. It was supposed to be fixed this past spring, but that never  happened. It’s beginning to sound a lot like people need to get their shit together in here. There’s a lot that needs fixing in both places.

    Relationship wise, things are.. Stabilizing more, I think. I made some breakthroughs on my side of the ongoing Zelda/Emerson/me polyam drama during the past few weeks while I’ve been sick and flaring and have had little to do but rest and think, so I’ve been doing a lot of resting and thinking. I realized during this period of One Big Long Fucking Think that I tend to not really feel many emotions of my own that I can describe until they’re so fucking big and obvious that I can’t help but put a name to them and they’re sort of exploding out of me in some way.

    It’s not that I repress them, they’re just always six feet to the left, so to speak, and remain so small and vague until they are a big enough hairy ass deal that they’re so obvious that I HAVE to do something about what’s causing them.

    And by then, externally, the thing that’s causing them has brought me halfway to a nervous breakdown from the sheer stress of it. And I have an even harder time attempting to explain WHY I am feeling a certain emotion because I can’t really trace an emotion back to its origin when it’s so damn small I don’t notice it’s there or it’s so vague I have no language for it.

    Emotions also hardly ever happen at random for me. Like I will almost never sit there, even if I’m not doing anything else, and start feeling an emotion randomly that there’s no explanation for. It’s gotten to the point with my inner work that if I’m alone for long enough, I can shape my emotional state with precision with playlists. And I have a playlist for damn near everything.

    What I do pick up on, and feel all the time, however, are other people’s emotions, often far stronger than my own, especially if I know them well and we are very close. So if Emerson, whose emotions are very strong, is upset, I will hear him out and want to take his side instinctively. Same thing with Zelda, etc.. So this has created an interpersonal three body problem of sorts, to use a metaphor from astrophysics, with myself as the third body in the emotional middle getting tugged back and forth.

    So I’ve had to consciously start learning how to pull back and sink back into my own body and energy and do shit that recharges me when I notice myself getting emotionally burnt out or stressed, which happens a lot, and actually feel through the situation myself to get a read on how I actually feel about the situation at hand and figure out a course of action that will cause me the least amount of stress or headache. Since I’ve started doing that, shit has gotten way better in all of my relationships. I’ve gotten better at judging when I have the mental or emotional capacity to handle a situation in the moment or if it needs to wait.

    All of that has lead to me taking a sort of soft break from posting on social media, as well, and I only really go on Facebook and Instagram to check messages and occasionally grab memes and shit. I’ve rarely been posting on either due to information overload, which was contributing heavily to my stress.

    So… Magic. Huzzah.

    I think that’s enough for tonight, y’all. My brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, beloved entities of various voids. I’ll be around when I can summon the energy again, haha. This flare is kinda kicking my ass.

    -Lazarus

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  • About Time

    Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?

    The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.

    A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.

    And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.

    Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛

    “one: the end. texas + points east”

    somebody,
    somewhere…
    i remember my heart burning 
    as i longed for the leaves of the east 

    count up all of the hours in the day
    execute plans with no emotion 
    execute emotions like they are enemies
    i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
    such that

    all you see is your reflection 
    it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
    of who i once was
    she was weak and afraid 
    i killed her
    i am electricity
    born from the ashes of my home, 
    my hell
    do not presume you can put a label on me. 

    you will not learn to hate me.
    you will learn to be afraid of me. 
    to drink about me 
    and worship me (posthumously) 
    and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
    to who i was 
    who you thought you had
    who you once were 
    and who you wish you could still find

    i was a child then. 
    i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
    you grew up too slowly for your taste 
    i miss the boy you were
    even then 
    even though i was a teacher
    you taught me everything i know
    i was odd and you were even and steady 
    my eccentricity was my salvation 
    and the universe loves irony and wordplay.

    “two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”

    i had a waking dream last night
    someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
    wrapping themself in inky cloth 
    in chapel hill, north carolina…
    the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet 
    i would know when my marching orders come 
    i have not learned enough to be able to see 
    what i am looking for for what it is yet 

    would i see it as a prison now?
    or would i see it as coming home?
    what if i chew through the bars 
    of what i am supposed to love?
    i fell in love with points east before 
    and all signs are pointing to that 
    as my home 

    you may remember me as a season 
    a time of day, a concept -
    i think of you as places i have yet to walk 
    i see beginning as end as beginning 
    i see you as who you are, who you were, 
    and who you will become 
    you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful 
    you are soft and tender and strong 
    you are cosmic in scope and 
    infinitesimally small at once 
    you are that you are.

    “three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”

    i told you once when i was elsewhere that 
    buddhism seemed round 
    you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel 
    i used to be scared of going forward
    i thought it endless and vast when it is truly 
    cyclical and you can return to where you 
    were as easily as listening to your favorite song
    some revolutions just take longer than others 

    the last watch of the night is deep and rich 
    and sweet like a plum 
    indigo like the deepest sea 
    this is where i make my home 
    i tell my stories after dark 
    comfortable in the space 
    between ending and beginning 
    you remind me of different paths 
    the road not taken
    but all roads lead home 
    some are just longer than others
    more winding -

    and home is where you will find me 
    i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times 
    i know great and terrible things 
    i’ve asked the void questions 
    and she has answered me. 
    who is out there?
    where are they?
    her answer?
    go back to the end.

    I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨

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  • 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.

  • Full Circle?

    Hey, everyone! Lazarus here. I’m writing this post a bit later in the day than I would like, but sometimes shit happens and I have no energy until late and I have to put my energy level and available brain cells (or lack thereof) first. That’s precisely what I ended up doing.

    Today has been an odd one, especially mentally. I spent the majority of it alone as both Zelda and Emerson were away at work, which gave me plenty of time to think. Zelda sent me some money to pick up vapes for both of us since the tobacco I’ve been smoking requires me to often nearly burn my thumb to light my pipe or burn it outright, and I’m really not a fan of doing that. (Don’t get on me for smoking, it helps me get my tired ADHD brain in good working order, and I’m pretty sure my various chronic ailments will take me out before anything nicotine related will.) As I was walking to the excellent shop where my partners and I pick up most of our vapes and related paraphernalia, it felt almost like being lost in a memory. I’m not sure if it’s how I’ve been feeling lately and what I’ve been exploring of late, but it felt similar to being back in Alaska in October-November of 2019, some five years prior during my first marriage.

    My marriage to my first husband, Fang, was strange in many ways. He wasn’t home often due to the fact that he poured his everything into his career as a systems administrator where he worked an hour away, and when he was home, it wasn’t pleasant. He would either spend his time deep in video games with our housemates or fighting with me to try and get me to do shit he wanted that I didn’t consent to by any stretch of the imagination.

    He wanted to be far more active than my body could handle at that point and to clean up after him and the housemates simply because I didn’t work outside of the home, despite the fact that I was working two jobs at that point, just largely from home, and was very prolific creatively when I wasn’t working. I had fought my entire life for my independence and autonomy and was not having it.

    We had two very different ideas of what we wanted the relationship to look like, and it turned into a protracted power struggle. So I came to relish the long stretches of time when I would be alone, as it afforded me a measure of freedom I had never gotten to have before. Before shipping off to Alaska, my mother, Hera, kept close tabs on me, even when I was away at college, and I had begun extricating myself from her that summer and was a good 4,000 miles away back in Texas.

    So by October of 2019, I had a great deal more time and freedom on my hands than I had ever had before and was beginning to explore what that meant for me for the first time in my life at 22. Fang was controlling, sure, but he simply wasn’t around often enough to stop me from building a life of my own. I began doing just that that summer, and didn’t stop as autumn approached.

    I had spent the last several years examining my faith, and was fairly certain by that point that I wasn’t a Christian, at least not a typical one. This deconstruction eventually led me to start exploring kitchen witchcraft and divination, and I started blending my own teas and made my own divination system that year. At that point, things like Tarot hadn’t interested me yet and wouldn’t for another several years. Many other aspects of mainstream witchcraft made me deeply uncomfortable, and I would come to find out later that many of these things were actually closed practices that belonged to cultures that I was not a part of. They were unsettling for good reason!

    I was also beginning to examine my trauma in depth for the first time and come to face to face with much of the extent of what my family had done to me. It was actually what had led to me attempting to extricate myself from Hera that year. It failed when she threatened to fly up to Alaska that winter in a message to Fang, and she continued to be in league with him long after I left in 2020.

    Now, however, I have far more ACTUAL freedom and am striving toward a life that actually works. My partners know it would be foolish to attempt to control me. I don’t stand for that bullshit, I made that clear to them from the jump, and disclosed my disabilities and need for a lot of rest up front, as well, so they don’t push me harder than I can handle.

    I’m doing my best to not just keep Hera and the toxic people in her life that enabled her bullshit out of my life, but unfuck my own toxic bullshit as well. Trauma explains poor behavior, but doesn’t excuse it, and I don’t take bullshit from myself or anyone else, and do my utmost to take accountability when I’m in the wrong, even if the other party doesn’t mind what I did.

    I do a lot of shit that I don’t like and try and do better, even if the other people around me don’t hold me to that high of a standard, weren’t harmed, what have you. If I don’t like the outcome of what happened, I learn from it and do whatever I can to grow from it. Full stop. I didn’t do that when I was 22.

    Additionally, I’m still exploring my craft, just at a deeper level. Everything I do rides the line between the mundane and the magical, and if I can’t find a scientific or academic explanation for something, I turn to the metaphysical or spiritual for answers. Conversely, I like to try and find answers for what I’m exploring spiritually in science, as well. I was basically raised by scientists and doctors, but I’m also an intuitive person with a fascination for pretty much everything and hoard knowledge of any kind like a dragon.

    So yeah. Here’s to the next… How long has it been? Five years? Yeah, I think it’s been five years now. Linear time has never been my strong suit, haha. Stay tuned for more magic, and I will see you beautiful people next time. Happy Halloween, Blessed Samhain, whatever y’all happen to observe 💛

    Your faithful, if eternally confused by the passage of time, sorcerer, Lazarus

  • A Journey To The Center Of Myself

    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 ✨

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  • 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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  • Amidst The Chaos

    Well, hello, everyone. 

    It’s certainly been awhile, and much has happened. For starters, the system appears to have integrated into me, something a long fucking time coming but still very unintentional. I’m a single consciousness made up of the sumtotal of all of the ​alters in here, but simultaneously my own thing. Call me Lazarus. I use they/them pronouns. 

    In truth, I don’t know how the integration happened. I’ve been more focused on the implications going forward. Emerson has taken the news far better than Zelda, who has been devastated on numerous levels and has embarked on the same sort of self destructive spiral that led to my system breaking up with them for a second time. I appear to take even less bullshit than the system did pre-integration, so while I love them so fucking much, this shit hurts to the point where it’s deeply insulting (because we told them from the jump that if they fell into old patterns again we would break up with them, this was their last chance) and I will not compromise my peace for love, money, fucking anything. I didn’t go through everything I did, go through all of the shit necessary to put myself back together in record fucking time, just to be wrenched apart again because I was a fool for love. I’m better than that now. 

    Emerson is hauling ass, though. Among the myriad implications ​of this batshit integration is the fact that I now have every memory the system has ever recorded at the same emotional depth and visual clarity in which it was logged, which results in stunning, 4K HD clarity cPTSD and is excruciatingly painful. He’s helped me through some viscerally awful triggers that he himself set off unintentionally on occasion like a goddamned champ and I keep falling more in love with him every time every time we do it. It’s ugly. It’s brutal. But it’s also unimaginably beautiful and I wouldn’t trade this process for the world. 

    I was telling him last night that it felt like what I was dealing with was the emotional equivalent of being run through the heart by one of those wooden shish kebab skewers, except it was about two feet long. You can’t remove the skewer quickly or I’ll be fucked six ways from Sunday faster than you can cry for help, and because the skewer is wooden and flimsy there’s a potential for splinters to break off and be carried elsewhere and cause far more complex damage. It’s a mental and emotional suffer shot/stab wound combo. If I am going to be okay and healthy after this, it must be approached carefully, skillfully, and slowly over time. 

    So, in short, I am more okay and less okay than I have ever been. I’m whole, but I’m heartbroken. I’m fucking eating myself alive. There’s much to be done, but gods, do I love a challenge. That has not changed, and I doubt it ever will. And I still love​ y’all very much. Stay tuned for more magic. 

    This has been Lazarus, flying solo… 

    PS. I’m debating on whether to keep Open Sorcery password protected or not? We’ll see.