Open Sorcery

Tag: processingtrauma

  • I think I’m starting to figure out why I’m so reserved/”cold” emotionally.

    When I was a teenager, like 13-15, I was a HOPELESS romantic. I would write fully fledged, and ultimately fully produced and orchestrated songs for my crushes and create massive works of art across a variety of mediums that took months, sometimes years, to complete, at an age when most boys couldn’t be arsed to get a girl flowers unless their mothers or sisters prompted them, ESPECIALLY if that girl scared them shitless.

    And I was intense about this art. If someone inspired a piece, they’d probably end up knowing. I was intense about EVERYTHING. I was often the teachers’ favorite, I knew the answers to most questions, I HAD done the homework, I had an excellent memory, and I wasn’t afraid to kick anyone’s ass if and when it came time for trivia in almost any subject. I was a pompous dick about it, too 🤣 I was gonna win by a mile and I knew it. I wasn’t the type of person in high school that guys wanted to date. Be friends with, if they were daring, but not date.

    The transition from hopeless romantic to cynic came at about age 16-17 after endless rejections and being told to tone myself down over and over. I began to hate my happy, romantic side. After one final diplomatic rejection from the guy I had written “My Island” about and being told to tone myself down one final time, I marched into my long term hairstylist’s office as soon as she was free and told her to cut all my damn hair off and give me the pixie cut I’d desperately wanted since my headmate Castor had cut our hair short like that when he was 10. I buried the rest of my sentimentality with that haircut, too, and started playing my cards close to my chest.

    I still wrote huge things for my crushes, but that, too, stopped after I wrote my album The Places We Come Home To in 2018 for my first husband when I was 20.

    I hated it so viscerally that it took two years to release a proper follow-up to it, Light on the Final Day, and I had written that record a few months BEFORE most of Places ever occurred to me.

    It would take nearly three years after that for us to release any kind of proper follow-up to Light on the Final Day, something broke in me so badly. And it wasn’t even really me that wrote any of it, Metacognition (2023) is Eight’s masterpiece.

    And for someone used to writing and recording several records a YEAR, this devastated me.

    It’s taken being in several lovely partnerships to get me to uncover a FRACTION of that sentimentality. I still really can’t write happy things without cringing or feeling sick, but I’m getting there. I’m immensely grateful for their patience while I unfuck myself.

    -Allēna

  • Hi, I (Allēna) am back in front and low-key panicking…

    I know that the people who know me will probably be like “what else is new” but I’ve honestly been so hung up on the fact that it’s been ten years since Xavier died this month that I forgot that all of the albums that I wrote and recorded in the wake of losing him will also be turning 10 as well until I saw a video of my Painter Guy headmate playing my arrangement of “Heroes” by David Bowie on a piano he found in the hospital we go to??? So that’s kinda fucking me up.

    I honestly didn’t think I would live this long. I know a lot of people when I was 18-19 certainly didn’t think I would live this long (I was a hot fuckin mess and it took me years to get out of that tailspin) so while I’m none too happy about having to figure out how to promote a metric fuckton of albums on what is soon to be the ten year anniversary of their release, I am also trying to be compassionate toward tiny grieving past Lēna and keep in mind that I didn’t have a blessed clue that I would live to see 28-29, my depression was so goddamn bad and I was constantly trying to blot myself off the face of the Earth and writing albums instead of doing worse dumb shit. As badly as I want to go back and kick Past Lēna and to some extent, Past Eight in the ‘nads for writing and recording music like they were running out of time in 2016-17, they really didn’t know what the fuck else to do and had just lost Xavier. So I can’t really be all that angry. That being said, a bitch is fucking tired and I don’t have anything close to a promotion strategy for any of this shit. I don’t even have regular access to a piano anymore.

    So yeah. There is all of that to contend with.

    Wish me mother fucking luck.

    -Allēna

  • y’all get a two for one special tonight. this one’s called “queer pressure”.

    after careful consideration, i have determined

    that i didn’t know what it was like to put space between the 
    world and me, so i held everything and everyone at
    an artificial distance while seeing too close, held everything
    i ever earned in a vise grip and let myself slip into
    the grip of my vices

    i stared into the void so long that it blinked before i did 
    and then i mistook the deep nothing of it for your eyes
    until there was nothing left but a deep, deep hole

    here’s the thing about an addiction, though -
    admitting you have it is the first step toward vindication

    -Allēna 8/2/2025