Because this bit of Family Lore truly deserves to be preserved for posterity.
One time my maternal grandfather nearly burnt down a church. This was an impressive feat, considering the church was, if I had to guess, a quarter mile away? However, my granddad is un fucking hinged and loves to burn trash, regardless of the weather conditions. One summer day, he was doing his usual routine after my grandmother kicked him out of the house for the day because he was “bored” and “needed a project”, in her words, and his idea of a “project” was, of course, letting the intrusive thoughts win and burning trash during a severe drought and resulting burn ban. No burn ban has ever stopped this old pyro. In fact, I think the burn bans make him want to burn MORE shit because hehe, fire, or something.
He conveniently “forgot” that there were aerosol cans in the burn barrels. Naturally, they exploded. Two scorched properties and a raging fucking inferno that almost reached the church on the third property down later, the fire department was called. They were left with no choice but to issue this mother fucker a ticket. Yes, you read that right. The fire department had to issue him a ticket. When the fireman in question flipped through his ticket book, he said to my grandfather, “…the last ticket we had to issue was to you.”
Some people just want to see the world burn. Or at least see several burn barrels full of trash and aerosol cans blow sky fucking high.
For years, I’ve wanted to write a tongue in cheek memoir about my system’s misadventures called How To Win At Life. 🤣 -Allēna #Lore #Memoir #Autobiography
Hello, assembled host. Lazarus here once more with more bullshit for your viewing pleasure. The below prompt from the journaling app Day One looks interesting, so I shall answer it in due time, but before I get into the thick of it, have a fucking meme I cooked up last night that is tangentially related because I said so.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
Today’s prompt from Day One.
An Occurrence from last night, January 4th, in the year of our Lord 2025.
To answer the intriguing question the prompt posed, my answer is both. Why, you may ask? Because I’m an AuDHD gremlin with a fucking brainhole with a working knowledge of world history from my years spent as a tutor who happens to see the future on occasion due to a nifty combination of brain damage, annoyingly supercharged intuition, synesthesia, and neurodivergent pattern recognition. In short, my brain never shuts the fuck up, especially as I continue my inner work and find pockets of my mind that I have repressed for years. I have next to no sense of linear time or object permanence. Can I get a pretty damn accurate sense of who you are within five minutes of meeting you? Absolutely. Do I know where my cell phone is half the time? Oh gods no.
And due to surviving a helluva lot of trauma, having a near perfect autobiographical memory, and being unusually well traveled due to being raised with an ass load of money and being so charismatic I annoy myself, I have many, many stories to tell on top of my knowledge of world history. I call these stories my Lore or my Tragic Backstory interchangeably depending on how I’m feeling that day. As demonstrated by the meme I shared above, people seem to like the stories that come out of my facehole.
So yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about both. Time isn’t linear, anyway, so what the hell? Mentally I’m almost constantly relaxing on a huge plot of land in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania ten years from now, or trying to find various belongings of mine that have disappeared into the fucking ether again. Where are Y’ALL mentally?
Anywho, it’s almost my naptime. Before I go, have more memes and a video of me voice acting for a kitten who I call Sean Connery Nugget with the Zelda System. 🤣
Goodnight, lovely gremlins. Tell me of your many travels in the comments, throw a party, do whatever you want. Just be excellent to each other, that’s all I ask. 💛 Until next time, stay tuned for more magic. – Lazarus
PS. 2011 or so called and it wants you to have this earworm back 🤣
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.
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 ✨
Hey, everyone. This is Allēna. It’s been awhile, and I’m sorry about that – it’s been a bit of a mental trashfire for us of late and none of us quite knew how to talk about what was going on through the fatigue, confusion, and what appears to still be the mother of all flares. I’m still not feeling too hot and I still have to figure out where the fuck most of this month’s rent is going to come from, but things are starting to look up somewhat.
Emerson got a job after months of hunting, and after that we kinda crashed after the few months we’ve had. I’ve been more or less frontstuck since that point, seeing as I’m one of the only headmates with decision making power, the stamina to front more than a couple hours at a time, and love for both Emerson and the Zelda System. The majority of my headmates do not like Emerson, and so it’s less effort to have me front most of the time even though that means I never get a mental break and often am reduced to a puddle of tears by the end of the week. Cleaning up my headmates’ interpersonal messes would be worse.
I don’t want any more messes. I already have a full plate of stuff I’m working on, and enough interpersonal plot fuel from Eight alone to last a lifetime. That man’s friend group is the gift that keeps on giving. I may mean that sarcastically, I may not, that depends on the occasion. This week, however, the jury is out.
You may recall us mentioning in our last post that I’d gone through a PTSD wave of epic proportions recently because Zelda had gotten together with someone who is also a mutual friend of ours? Well, let’s call this mutual friend Helen. Helen is the sweetest person. I fucking adore them. However, I inherited them (and the extremely complicated shitfest they somehow got dragged into back in ‘22) from Eight via one of his myriad exes from the time he had uncontested control of the system from approximately late 2020 to early 2023. Eight is a cockroach if a cockroach were also a human being, and that human being were also a rockstar. So Helen met Eight first and was…put off at best all those years ago, then decided to attempt a friendship this year now that things are different, we’ve all grown as people, and things actually have been going much better. Well, until the PTSD bullshit happened. Now they’re going even better than they were before, which is the weird part to me.
I say this is weird because Helen and Eight weren’t very close when all the shit happened back in ‘22. Both of us have admitted that. So if we’d gone to them with a concern of this magnitude then, it likely wouldn’t have brought us closer together and would have driven us further apart, if we’d gone to them with that sort of thing at all. Now, I may be off, but I would say that we’re pretty damn close. Neither Helen nor my system wasted any time establishing that closeness this time around. We all meant fucking business, likely unconsciously. I certainly wasn’t meaning to get close to Helen for any particular reason, I never even thought it would happen given how guarded I knew them to be from Eight’s memories. But I was given openness, warmth, and kindness, and I enjoy Helen’s company and conversation, so I too opened up with time.
Here’s where that makes things complicated, though. Helen and Emerson barely talk and Emerson mostly initiates. Emerson and the Zelda System are now (back) together, as well. Em has been internally screaming of late because he’s terrified at a baseline that my system and Zelda are gonna fuck off and leave him behind, and now that Helen is in play, so to speak and barely talking to him, things have gotten even worse for him in that regard.
There’s also been a rash of speculation – because we are all bi/pan/queer disasters in some form – that Helen and I are crushing on each other, as well, but I don’t live in their brain and I don’t know where I stand with that fully yet, either. I don’t like not knowing, especially where my own emotions towards a person are concerned, so I’m watching my side and seeing how shit plays out there before I speak on anything with any degree of certainty.
All of this is in turn making me anxious because there’s not a whole lot I can do except watch the shitshow go down, because there’s not a whole lot that’s within my power to fix here. I am the sort of person who fixes things by nature when I get anxious or stressed out, and there’s nothing I can fix here, so theoretically I have nowhere to put the stress. Therefore, I’ve had to distract myself by pouring all of that jittery energy into other conversations and building other relationships and projects where I’m able. Emerson and I have been doing a great deal of work on our side of the internal screaming equation, but sadly there’s approximately fuckall I can do where Emerson relative to Helen and Zelda are concerned because ultimately I’m not them and can’t control their actions. So while all of this goes down in the moment I have to set boundaries with myself and put my own internal screaming somewhere ideally constructive in the meantime.
This, due to the degree of fatigue and mental fog, usually results in me sending Helen memes. Memes are Helen gold, and it is quite surreal to hear Zelda and Emerson in a heated discussion about the aforementioned Helen in the next room while sending them memes has turned into something like lighthearted banter and the heaviest conversation I’ve ever had in my life simultaneously while all of this is going down 🤣. I swear, this individual has more patience than I ever will because I live this day in and day out and I’m about to melt down from stress and there they are over on their end, being the sweetest person alive about allllll the fuckery in a single place occurring right here, right now.
I’m so tired, but everyone has been solid where they are able despite all of the numerous occurrences of the past 2 weeks or so and I still feel very loved and cared for despite all of this shitfuckery.
I love them, and I love y’all. Hopefully I’ll have more art magic for y’all once everything balances out a bit more, rent gets sorted, and Emerson starts work. Stay tuned for more magic (and nonsense), beautiful people!
-Allēna, Your Faithful, If Exhausted, Captain and Founder of the Polyamorous Dojo of Chaos
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Hey, everyone. My name is Tamsin (he/him). I was recently dormant for around a year, and it seems that I have emerged in the midst of a cascading shitshow and frankly I’m annoyed at Eight. Allēna alluded to a PTSD attack of epic proportions yesterday, and that’s due to Eight going through a whole lot of shit in approximately August-December 2022 and apparently not telling a goddamn soul about it. I have no fucking clue how he managed to go through all that fuckshit and not tell anyone about it, save for when he crafted and released our album Metacognition, but when it was triggered yesterday, much to the people involved’s horror, they heard about it for the first time.
I knew we were private, but I had no idea we were that private. So we ruined what would have been a happy moment for the Zelda System and a dear friend of ours by having several dozen flashbacks over the course of about ten hours as the full ramifications of what Eight had gone through hit Allēna with the force of a category five hurricane.
So yeah. I’m done being so private. The others in this trauma ridden brainhole can do whatever the fuck they want, but I hope they follow suit. And I’m going to be 100% honest with you here. We aren’t doing well. Before that set of fabulous PTSD breakdowns, Allēna was already one more goddamn thing away from a PTSD breakdown because last weekend, a friend of the Zelda System’s, who we shall call Midas, decided to simply Arrive in Milwaukee, giving those in the Zelda System no notice, expecting to stay at their place, trying to get them alone any chance he could, proceeding to drag them all around town, and dropping loads of cash on them when they were visibly tired and burnt out. Midas coordinated this with everyone who’s locally in their life but them, including their bosses, and when he got in, he arrived at their work first, completely blindsiding them.
Everyone we spoke to about the situation said it was fucking bizarre and we kept getting a fucking awful feeling about what he was doing and everyone in the Zelda System was massively uncomfortable, so eventually my headmate Tindwyl stepped in and made himself the bad guy, citing the absolutely true nature of our agoraphobia and sleep anxiety to try and politely get Midas to fucking go back to where he came from and stop being such a fucking creep. Suffice it to say that this didn’t go over well with Midas, and before he skittered off all the way back to whence he came, he called us controlling and has not contacted the Zelda System since. Mission accomplished, and they felt relieved after the fact. We can handle being seen as controlling by a guy we really didn’t like anyway if it (consensually) keeps our partner safe. However, that fuckshow threw everyone off for the next few days, and we’re still dealing with residual bullshit from it.
Additionally, Emerson is developing some pretty fucked heart issues and has a narrow window where he could get treatment once they’re bad enough to treat, but if he misses that window, he could die from any number of ways his heart could say “fuck this, I quit”. And she’s stressed out about having to make rent along with that because Emerson still has not found work when she’s struggling so bad herself and can barely muster the energy to reply to people, forget performing any kind of services for people or writing crowdfunding posts. Hell, I’m surprised she hasn’t spawned 30 new fucking alters with how stressed out she’s been these last couple weeks. She’s said on numerous occasions that what is going on with Emerson feels like watching our father die all over again.
Then what should have been a happy moment occurred when the Zelda System got with a mutual friend of ours, only to set off the breakdown because there was a whole lot of trauma there due to an interlocking shitshow involving all of them back in ‘22 that I can’t really blame any of them for because MY DAMN HEADMATE APPARENTLY DIDN’T SAY A FUCKING THING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE WAS HURTING?????? TO ANYONE???? So nobody did anything wrong here, except Eight, who is now fucking AWOL off gallivanting somewhere in the ether, which I’m not pleased about. He heard the news and peaced the fuck out. I haven’t a damn clue when he’ll be back. Allēna, for her part, is resting down near the replica of Lake Erie which we still have in our headspace. This has taken a great deal out of her.
Now, I’m trying to help Emerson work through some problems in his relationship with us, though I’m not dating him. It’s slow going and frankly I’m kind of aggravated with him, but we’re making headway slowly, so that’s good, at least. I’m taking a break to write here because I swear if I don’t put all of this down somewhere I’m gonna fucking explode. However, we’re gonna reconvene in about an hour so he can work through some sticky points in a writing project he’s doing. I don’t know how much help I’ll be, but I sure as fuck want to try.
Anyhoo… stay tuned for more magic, y’all. We’ll be around. 💛
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.
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.
Hey, everyone! My name is Kalla. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. I haven’t posted here before, but I think having a cool space where we can write about what the fuck ever is a pretty neat idea, so I want to put my two cents in where “Guernica” Part 3 is concerned.
It’s also a bit too soon for the other alters to write about this shit, as many of them consider Part 3 to be the most gut-wrenching and soul-searing part of the poem. So I have stepped in to get them through this fucked up block they’re having and maybe process some of the grief on their behalf. If you are just now coming across this series in the wild, you can find Parts One and Two here and here. And as previously stated in the posts Eight and Ellie wrote, you can find the full poem in our poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.
I think this post will follow roughly the same structure of the others – Eight’s performance first, then the text, then my thoughts on it. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 3!
Eight’s Performance
Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 3.
The Text of “Guernica” Part 3
guernica iii.
airplanes up in the sky..
i know airplanes.
of course i do.
sometimes you’re the bomber,
sometimes you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
i like to think god laughs at tragedy
so that at least someone finds it funny.
but a brain is the bomb
and there’s a cruel irony in it eating itself
when it was the best brain i’ve ever known.
the roads were clogged with rubble and there was
no way out
there never was
not when the brain is the bomb
and you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
not when the brain belonged to your favorite person
and the bomb is also a death sentence in an MRI scan
and the execution date is to be determined.
so many bombs
making a hole in a heart
so deep that i’m still trying to find the bottom of it
(there’s no bottom)
but i will not die here when i’ve died 10 million times
already and i’m choking on this metaphor as i write
no harm in 10 million and 1
Allēna, summer 2019.
Our father, Xavier, whose death at the age of 47 from brain cancer inspired “Guernica” Part 3 with baby us in what must’ve been fall of 1997, early 1998.
My Thoughts
“Guernica” Part 3 is about our father, Xavier, dying when we were 18. He had brain cancer for eleven years. It was a shadow over our entire fucking childhood.
We knew Xavier was going to die from the time we were seven years old. This wasn’t due to any kind of intuitive knowing. He collapsed at the gym a few days prior and fell into a tonic-clonic seizure. He found out what had caused the seizure a short while later, a brain tumor.
We weren’t shielded from any of that. Our parents sat us down at the round kitchen table in the rumpus room and told us everything, sparing no details. This was a terrible burden for a child to bear, especially a highly intelligent child who had already seen too much pain by the age of seven. We had already attended more funerals than weddings, and would go on to lose even more people we deeply loved before even losing him.
A Death Sentence In An MRI Scan, And The Execution Date Is To Be Determined
In 2013, when Allēna was already battling the beginnings of a severe depressive spell that would make her crave death for the better part of the next decade, Xavier got even more terrible news. He went in for a routine MRI scan to see if his tumor – named Cuato by then – had grown any larger. The oncologists came back with good news and bad news. The first tumor hadn’t grown any, but they had found a second one. It turned out to be completely separate from Cuato, called a second primary tumor. This tumor was far more aggressive, and he was given months to live. Though he shattered expectations and went on to live for another three years, this was a death sentence. Allēna had to watch her brilliant father, one of the only people who had ever made her feel understood,
Allēna practically gave up on everything. Xavier was everything to her by that point. She describes the last few years of Xavier’s life as being trapped beneath a sword that is held by a fraying rope. At any moment, that rope could snap, and the sword would fall and impale her.
Suffering Alone And In Pain
Hera became colder the worse Xavier got and the worse Allēna fell into her depression. Without Xavier as a buffer anymore, Hera emotionally, mentally, medically, and occasionally physically abused Allēna. Hera began to massively overmedicate her with psychiatric medication so that she wouldn’t fight back anymore. She used Xavier’s worsening condition as a justification to do the bare minimum and emotionally abandon her when she needed support most.
So for three years, Allēna watched her father wither away, unable to tell anyone about what she was suffering at home. Hera explicitly forbade it and would hurt her worse if she tried. She dealt with a terrible bout of mononucleosis in early 2014, as well.
During that ordeal, she had to diagnose and treat herself for it. It turned out that she had actually gone to the doctor too early. The tests she’d gotten came back with a false negative. It was only when she presented with acute pancreatitis a few months later that they actually found the antibodies in her system that indicated she had had mono at all. By that time, Hera had written her now chronic exhaustion and pain as hypochondria, mental illness, and a ploy for attention.
We still haven’t recovered and are still chasing diagnoses a decade later. We suspect that the bout of mono may have given us lupus, an immensely painful and debilitating chronic illness that is notoriously difficult to diagnose. However, both Hera and later Fang wrote Allēna off as a lazy hypochondriac who just didn’t want to do her work, abandoning her to suffer alone, terrified, and in unimaginable physical and psychological pain.
Like The Sun Itself Went Out
Hera’s abuse and Xavier’s impending death psychologically shattered an already fragile Allēna. When he passed away on February 5, 2016, she felt nothing for five days. It hit her at breakfast back at college on the fifth day.
She describes losing Xavier like it was as though the sun itself went out. Her world became dark, cold, and completely and totally lonely. It took every ounce of strength she had just to drag herself to class and back. She told her professors what was going on, and most of them took mercy on her. She could communicate with her Ancient Greek professor that she was having a very hard time that day with just her eyes. This professor, who we’ll call Ms. Melitta, was a very kind and perceptive angel of a woman, and she outright pleaded with Allēna to go easy on herself. She told Allēna she was proud of her just for showing up even when in her words it looked like she “wanted to be blotted off the face of the Earth”.
Allēna, whose family and life up to that point had always pushed her past her capacity to handle it against her will, had never received that kind of grace before. She broke down ugly crying. It was a balm to her weary, brokenhearted soul. She credits Ms. Melitta and others that year for saving her life. She was seriously contemplating suicide at that point, was sick all the time, barely eating, and was an all around disaster. It’s a miracle in her mind that she still has friends from that college, she was such a disaster.
I Will Not Die Here
At the end of the year, when her professors all gathered to give her her closing remarks, they almost all agreed that they admired that she almost always showed up to class, even if she couldn’t manage to stay the whole time or say or do much at all. Even during one of the most painful times in her life, Allēna kept showing up and putting in an effort through tremendous difficulty, and many of them held her in high regard for that. She had never received that sort of kindness and praise before, and it helped her keep going and not give up.
Showing up became a pattern for all of us. We joke that we “appear under mysterious circumstances”. If we say we’ll be someplace at some time, we will be there and early, come hell or high water. Xavier taught us that nothing less will do. Eight did this when he got his job in Philly – he said he would be there in Philly on Monday the Friday before that in Texas, and there the fuck he was on Philly on Monday, early. Nobody in the office thought he’d even show up, considering he’d have to travel over a thousand miles and move in less than a week to take this job. But that’s the way we were raised, and that’s what we do, obstacles be fucking damned.
We will not die here, we keep saying. We have shit to do. And die we don’t, even though there are often close calls.
Stay tuned for more magic and for Part 4! I’m gonna go to sleep soon, I cried my eyes out writing this.
Love, Kalla
One more thing…
Wait! Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (haha, gottem) and we’ve joined the Fediverse. We’re opensorceryy@opensorceryy.co everywhere that’s federated. Give us a follow?
