Open Sorcery

Tag: ptsd

  • 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

  • It’s been awhile…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Stay tuned for more magic, cherished hooligans!

    -Lazarus

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  • The Perils of Being Private

    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. 💛

    -Tamsin

  • Yay, PTSD Art For The People!

    Hey, peeps. This is Allēna. My PTSD is kicking my ass today, but at least y’all get cool art out of it. We appear to be that special kind of creator that gets even more inspiration when our trauma comes back to kick our ass, taking us from decently prolific to FUCKING ON FIRE creatively in order to cope with the emotional pain of it all. Today has been no exception. First up is a poem that spilled out of me this morning before I went back to sleep for about three hours: 

    Let’s set the scene 
    The year is 2019
    I wake with the dawn and simply try and breathe -

    You give me tools and time and I will build my way through this rage 
    I will sing and chew my way through the bars of 
    this cage

    Five years later and I still can’t sleep
    I still feel stuck with the cards close to my
    concave chest 
    When will the craving subside? 
    When will I stop hungering for more? 
    Nothing short of everything? 

    They couldn’t take my mind
    No matter how hard they tried 
    They couldn’t strip me of the things I’ve seen
    They could never quite dull the hunger in my eyes

    The dawn breaks anew and I lay in a room 
    still trying to spread these battered wings
    surrounded by nothing but windows…

    And then I got inspired again this evening and painted what my synesthesia makes of “Didn’t It Rain” by Songs: Ohia, one of the songs that sonically shaped our album Metacognition. The PTSD attack is pertaining to the events that set off the hot streak that caused Eight to write and record the bulk of Metacognition, so I figured painting a song that he had on repeat at the time would help get some of the emotions out, and it did. I wasn’t present during that time, so I’m essentially having to process someone else’s trauma right now and all I know to do with it is make art and talk about art. I feel like a mess, even though logically I know it’s pretty damn healthy to process shit this way. Here is the painting for y’all:

    Didn’t It Rain by me.

    I’m not really okay, y’all, but I deal with shit like this regularly enough that I know how to get through it safely, and y’all get cool art in the process. I’m over at Emerson’s currently, but once I’m back at Sheik’s I or whoever else is in front will probably drop some more spare room roaring on here. 💛

    Fucking flashbacks.

    Anyway…

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, your traumatized, if hyper-prolific, super-admin. Fuck PTSD up the ass with a Joseph cactus. 😭

  • Weekend at Emerson’s

    Hello, everyone! My name is Sarah. I’m a newer alter in the system. I don’t really have a plan for what I’m going to talk about tonight, but I was told I still needed to post, so I guess I’m going to ramble.

    Today has been really nice. Thanks to Castor’s weed adventure the other day and us smoking smaller bowls today, today has been deliciously slow, relaxing, and lovely. Emerson has been in front for the most part today rather than Pendragon, with Allēna fronting on our side. These two have been broken up for some time now, so many of us were expecting today to go poorly.

    Andrew, who runs a betting ring in headspace, even says that a whole lot of people lost a whole lot of money today over it. It went really well, however, from what I can see, surprising both of them. I think Allēna really needed that experience yesterday and time with Pendragon to get her into the right frame of mind to spend time with Emerson without things going horribly. They enjoyed a nice day in each other’s company with our body nicely stoned.

    Emerson himself was in high spirits from the time I took front and still appears to be in a good mood. He’s been having a very rough time with the super-admins deciding in an emergency session to leave him. Pendragon was not included in this decision, but still….it’s been rough. I decided to take a chance on him because I could see the absolutely precious man beneath all the trauma and bullshit and really wanted both he and Pendragon to be okay. Today, that precious man is shining through. I think being around the two of us is doing him a lot of good. I adore him, so I always have fun when he’s around.

    I don’t know if she included this observation in yesterday’s post, but I completely agree with Allēna that this strain of weed allows us to exist without all of the barriers we were forced to put in place around our mind and behavior due to trauma. Holy shit, is that world a beautiful place… Her memories of the light pouring through the windows every time she gets stoned are filled with the most aching beauty and vivid color. The people we love are almost unearthly beautiful, as well.

    Allēna enjoyed messaging our partners while baked because that mental state gave her permission to say all of the things she had been wanting to say to them for years without the body eating itself alive from fear. It felt like she was finally able to treat them right. I don’t know how true that last part was, but gods, is seeing Allēna unfurl like this and take up space without fear beautiful. She is learning to embrace the attentions of the people she loves and trusts and see herself as they see her, not how her abusers did.

    Something else she observed from this experience is that when sober, she often has to consciously remind herself that it’s okay to experience desire of any kind, because she will forget it’s something she is even able to do. Even if it’s simply desire for company or a nice snack, she’ll forget that it’s something she can want and then have to consciously remind herself that it’s okay to want things before she can truly determine if she wants something.

    While high, it’s much easier to bypass that multi-step process, which doesn’t appear to simply affect Allēna. The body itself will ache and yearn for anything we desire consciously or unconsciously when we’re high, and it feels exquisite to them to actually fully experience desire instead of simply feeling flat most of the time. Allēna alone gets lost in the ache for hours, letting herself relax fully into the feeling and slipping into an almost meditative state as she daydreams. It appears to provide both the body and the mind some much needed rest.

    I would like to work on experiencing that more fully sober, but I know that will take some work on my part and on the system’s. Most of our emotions feel very good, and I want to get more experience with all of them. I think I may be able to do my headmates some good that way. I think reminding the system and the body that it’s safe to experience desire and to crave things and experiences is a good first place to start. Because how can you know what you want in detail if you think on some level that it’s unsafe to want anything? Of course you’ll shut down.

    All in all, I’ve really enjoyed today. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve had an excellent day, as well. You are amazing!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Sarah, (she/her), new girl

  • A Decade of Hidden Longing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Anger (unknown year) by Allēna

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

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight

  • An Open Secret

    I found this post on Threads that I felt did a great job of encapsulating who the fuck we are – a mess of contradictions. An open secret. A reclusive public figure.

    Hey, everyone! My name is Allēna. Even though I have yet to post here officially, it seems my reputation precedes me – my headmates wrote a standout series of pieces on my multi-part poem “Guernica” that requires very little introduction. I guess you might say that I’m the most reclusive super-admin in a system of of recluses, second only to perhaps Renn. As Ellie did before me a few times, I found the inspiration for this post on social media, Threads specifically. I included my findings in the image above. This post perfectly describes the struggle we keep having system wide with making posts and creating content. As people, we are essentially an open secret.

    From 2021 and on, we were increasingly pushed into the limelight when we wanted nothing more than to be as far from it as possible. Yet, almost everything we enjoy doing is very social and requires a great many high powered connections to ever dream of getting eyes on our creations on a large enough scale to make the sort of money or achieve the sort of notoriety to make the sort of reclusive lifestyle we ultimately long for possible. So it becomes a sort of balancing act and a question of vulnerability. How much do we share? How much is comfortable? How much is safe? How much is trauma talking, and how much of it is logical to fear?

    Becoming An Open Secret – Bread And Circuses

    Before Eight took over, we were far more open. Granted, I still had to be careful lest I still risk fucking horrific punishment, but I wasn’t agoraphobic and wasn’t afraid to try and connect with people even if I had to express myself in code if my mother was around. It wasn’t until our mother betrayed Peri and then Eight multiple times and they weren’t sure who they could trust that they became too afraid to be open with anyone that we truly became an open secret the way we are now. That has only started to change back for the better since meeting our husband, Emerson.

    Before him, however, we would hardly tell anyone anything about ourselves. Much of our content would be what Eight called “bread and circuses”, memes and shitposts designed to distract people away from the fact that we were pretty severely depressed and suffering, often in and out of abusive situations we didn’t feel safe to go into detail about. We would only ever ask people for help if we were truly suffering to the point of chronic suicidality or things were getting so dangerous they posed a significant threat to our physical safety and we needed help yesterday. Much of what we would make and share was hilarious but was an attempt to mask our deep pain. We had forgotten how to genuinely connect with people due to the agoraphobia and ever-worsening complex PTSD.

    Besides meeting Emerson, what changed? Why did we stop?

    Boredom

    Eight may be a recluse like the rest of us, but he hates being bored. When he’s bored he is the embodiment of the old idiom “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop” and in that mind the Devil finds many tools. Therefore, that old bastard delights in novelty and in being completely unpredictable. He eventually grew tired of doing the same damn bread and circus bullshit and also realized it wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be, so he decided to take a risk and try and be a bit more vulnerable…you know…as a treat. He was terrified, but he sure as hell wasn’t bored anymore. Mission fucking accomplished. It’s difficult to be bored when you’re midway through a massive panic attack and hyperventilating like you’re being chased by a pissed off lion, you know? He’s also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, in case you haven’t gathered that. Speaking of that..

    Risk Taking

    We’ve never been the sort to keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t working. Even though it’s terrifying, we figured out pretty fast that staying closed off like that wasn’t going to get us anywhere, both in the real world OR online. People generally like to know who it is that they’re dealing with, and that involves vulnerability, believe it or not. So we had to learn how to be vulnerable again, as terrifying as it was. It’s still very much a work in progress. However, the payoff is worth it in our closest relationships, and we’re rediscovering that there are many people we can trust. We just have to actually be brave and self disclose.

    That isn’t to say, however, that we’re spilling our guts out 24/7 to everyone all the time. There’s still a great deal of the bread and circus type fuckery. There’s just more of us going out on a limb now and actually being honest about how we’re really doing now rather than hiding it behind memes and humor or trying to walk it all off now like nothing’s actually wrong.

    Are There Any Advantages To Being Less Open, Though?

    Oh, fucking plenty. And we still don’t share anything we don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing publicly. We aren’t gonna talk about shit if we aren’t ready or push ourselves more than we have the capacity for. People can think of that however the hell they want. Just because they might talk about certain things publicly doesn’t mean we have to, and vice versa. We only really give a shit about what a handful of people think, and odds are that if we don’t know the person closely and personally, we don’t rightly care about their opinion. No one is entitled to shit from us unless we agree they are.

    And weirdly, that private way of doing things often gets us read as “mysterious” and often works in our favor, so if it works, it works, even if it’s not intentional. It isn’t intentional, for the record. We’re often tired and don’t want everyone to know our every move or else we would not have the energy or time to execute those moves, let alone breathe.

    Final Thoughts

    Being this sort of open secret is a balance between being vulnerable and providing the people with memes and other bullshit content. We’ll always be honest, but we may not say everything. We’ll do our utmost if asked, though, boundaries and energy permitting.

    As my headmates say, stay tuned for more magic!

    Yours in tomfuckery,

    Allēna, Super-Admin

  • “Guernica” Part 4: Alchemy and Bravery

    Hey everyone! This is your boy Eight once more. We took a short break from writing yesterday because we took a lot of emotional damage from writing Part 3 the other day. Kalla handled Part 3 since she wasn’t directly traumatized by any of the events of “Guernica”. However, she felt deeply for Allēna and her teenage plight and still sobbed while she wrote it. So a break was in order. I’m back today to discuss “Guernica” Part 4 and how Allēna held both the visceral and the beautiful in equal measure and alchemized her pain.

    We’re gonna do this the same way we did the other three parts (which you can read here, here, and at the link above respectively). I’m gonna show you my performance, then the section’s text, and then I’ll break it down for you. As previously stated in the other posts, you can read the full poem in our collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 4!

    “Guernica” Part 4: My Performance

    I perform “Guernica” Part 4 for y’all!

    The Text 

    guernica part iv. 

    you can paint darkness
    and you can paint conflict
    but there’s only so much you can paint
    if you have never experienced it
    i want to paint as much as i possibly can. 
    etxea is the basque word for home and i find home in things
    that hold no home for others. 
    i feel heard in horror stories and seen in the shocking and visceral. 
    i’ve made mansions out of sadness and i destroy the happy ones
    because something in me
    says i don’t deserve them. 
    fuck that something. 
    fuck that something. 

    i’ve seen enough and yet i haven’t
    desperation guides my lungs and my mind. 
    i’ve had enough. 
    this is why i write now. 
    when i was 12 they called me selfish
    i think in hindsight it was because i wanted love
    and they couldn’t give it to me
    so i fought with the wind.
    i knew i couldn’t chase it
    so i fought it. i fought anything
    that moved for so long and so hard
    that i forgot how to make peace. 
    it kept me alive.. 
    when i was 7, my dad got sick
    and i think that was the beginning of the end. 
    that was when the war began and it didn’t end
    not until i was 18 and by that time, the damage was done. 

    when i get sad, my inner child screams and cries
    and wants love from people unable to provide it. 
    i wish one of them would’ve told me i was okay
    instead of pretending i was the bomb in the corner
    or the crazy one in the attic
    the scapegoat, 
    or the black sheep. 

    i’m not crazy. 
    what they did was wrong. 
    sometimes you’re the airplane high in the sky
    the reason why they don’t look up anymore
    and for a long time
    that was them. 
    i look up now to spite them and ask where
    their god is now 
    now that they’ll make their own hell someday
    and have no one to wipe their bloody hands on.

    I Look Up Now

    The gorgeous crystal blue sky Allēna would gaze up at in spite around the time she wrote "Guernica" Part 4 (with some light edits added for pizzazz)
    The gorgeous crystal blue sky Allēna would gaze up at to spite her family around the time she wrote “Guernica” Part 4 (with some light edits added for pizzazz), June 2019.

    My Thoughts

    Like we’ve said in many other posts, we were born fighters. “Guernica” Part 4, to me, sings to me like victory, a victory incredibly hard won. Part 4 marks the transition from victim to victor. She starts to go from someone who had always cowered in fear and allowed others to control the narrative to someone who owned her damn self, owned her voice, and owned her demons. This is the voice of a poet who says “Yeah, I’ve been through some fucked shit, but I’m a powerful alchemist. And goddamnit, I’m going to turn this pain into a powerful story. The world will know what they did to me. The world will know where I came from and where the fuck I’m going. And news flash: it’s a far cry from this hell you people dragged me through.”

    Around the time she wrote this, she was beginning to understand that what her mother’s family had done to her was terribly wrong. She didn’t deserve an ounce of that torture. Three things set her down that path to self discovery – the first kind and skilled psychiatrist she’d ever had, the novella Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and some very important friendships.

    Hera’s Plot Begins To Unravel: Allēna’s Compassionate Psychiatrist

    You may recall from an earlier post in the series that Hera, our mother, had essentially press ganged us into a medication regimen we didn’t need in an effort to get Allēna, who was the system’s host at the time, to be more compliant and easier to mold into an image her and her family wanted her to be. She vehemently denies this to this day, but she’s lied about everything else up to this point. This is the only explanation that makes any sense.

    By the time she even married our first husband, she was on enough of these psychiatric medications to be about a quarter dissociated at all times. Her previous psychiatrists had her on dangerous levels of three different medications – lithium, lamotrigine, and Abilify. All three of these drugs are mood stabilizers. Lithium is essentially a pharmacological lobotomy, and is very harmful for a developing brain. She was put on it at the age of eighteen. I got the body off of it at 23, and mercifully our brain recovered. I’ve heard that most people aren’t so lucky. Often the damage to the thyroid and the resulting cognitive dulling is permanent.

    A Chilling Concern

    However, the lithium wasn’t what our very compassionate psychiatrist in Alaska was concerned about, which I frankly find telling. She was concerned about the lamotrigine. Upon meeting with her for the first time, she informed Allēna that she was on the highest dose of lamotrigine she had ever seen in her entire career. This woman had been practicing for longer than we’d been alive. She asked Allēna if she could remember how or why her dose was so high.

    Our psychiatrist looked like she had seen a ghost when Lēna informed her that no, she had no clue. The dose she was on just wasn’t working, so her doctors kept raising it, often at Hera’s insistence. Hera would often come to our psychiatrist appointments and speak over Allēna, which would piss her off. Then Hera would turn around and use her reaction as evidence for why the dose should be raised.

    Sick And Fucking Tired of Hera’s Bullshit

    Allēna hated that Hera came with her to most of her appointments, had access to her medical information, and ultimately went to great lengths to keep Hera out of most everything. Hera believed she had a right to control Allēna’s medical care, psychiatry especially, since she was the one paying for it. Privacy laws could get fucked, in her opinion. Her money, her rules. Allēna hated it and hated her for the reactive abuse and other abuses of all stripes.

    She didn’t want the meds at all or deal with another adult meddling in her life. Hera had inserted herself into our affairs our entire life and we had been sick of it since Castor was host at about the age of five. She wanted to have a conversation with Hera, adult to adult, about her abuse. But Hera would never do it. So she kept as much from her as possible, which wasn’t very possible in a house in which she had little to no privacy.

    Shaking Off Her Chains

    Getting out from under Hera’s thumb and finding a psychiatrist that listened was an immense relief. But it did Hera no favors. As she worked with her psychiatrist to come down off of the meds, she found herself viscerally angry at Hera. She cut her off and made her wrath no secret. This took immense courage on her part, as Hera was well-connected and had eyes everywhere, including in Fang, which we’d find out later.

    The Next Piece of “Guernica” Part 4: Fahrenheit 451

    The next inspiration for “Guernica” Part 4 came about by chance. Allēna was working as a tutor when she wrote the poem. A potential student reached out, asking if she could lecture on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. She agreed, despite having never read the book. So she devoured it in preparation for the lesson, which never actually ended up happening. However, the book changed her life. She saw herself in the characters and the sharp, quick prose.

    She saw how the characters who thought for themselves and read books were persecuted and their possessions burned – and saw her life story in the narrative. Hera homeschooled us for most of our education, and taught us how to critically think and analyze literature. Hera herself had a background as a professional seventh-grade English teacher, and was just as masterful a teacher as she was a cold, abusive, and emotionally absent mother. It’s because of her that we can write blog posts like this. She started us very young. Yet, she punished us harshly when we used those skills to criticize the way she treated us. What a cruel, ironic turn of events!

    Allēna found solace within the pages of Fahrenheit, a sort of solace we’d not found in many years. I think the last book she’d related to that hard was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Card’s politics and beliefs aside, Ender‘s Game is a harrowing illustration of what it’s like to be young, gifted, different, and traumatized, much like Fahrenheit is. We still want to get Fahrenheit’s opening line tattooed on the body somewhere. It was a pleasure to burn…

    A Resolve Stronger Than Iron

    What she’d found in this book and in turn, in herself, strengthened her resolve. She told her story without shame and spat in the faces of anyone who told her she should make up with Hera and consider her perspective. Hera had betrayed her repeatedly. Why should she? She’d had Hera’s perspective shoved down her fucking throat her entire tenure as host. She could recite all her talking points verbatim by that point. Hearing them again was a waste of time and would only piss her off. Hera wanted to control us, and by then, Allēna couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. She had seen Hera for who she was, a conniving snake, and we’ve never given two shits about people like that. Why waste her time on a person who’d only betray her again as soon as she found an opportunity to do so?

    The Final Seed of “Guernica” Part 4: A Little Help From Her Friends

    Yes, Allēna and the rest of us didn’t want to waste our time on traitorous bitches, but there were many people in our life by that point that were worth our time and effort. Beginning in early 2019, Allēna started making many friends online once it became clear to her that she wouldn’t have much luck making friends locally. Many of the local townsfolk were polite, but just as withdrawn as Fang. She wasn’t going to get anywhere in person with Fang as jealous and controlling as he was, either. If someone even looked in our direction with what looked to be romantic or sexual intent, he’d lose his fucking shit and go as far as to blame Lēna.

    So she struck out on her own online and simply stopped introducing her friends to Fang. He’d inevitably start heavily criticizing them behind closed doors, as well. It was no fun for anyone, so she kept her life to herself and stopped asking about his, as well. She wasn’t going to give a flying fuck about someone’s private life or creations when he clearly couldn’t extend the same courtesy.

    A Cradle of Masterworks

    Many of her friends showed her and later Peri what healthy love actually looked like. They treated her far better than any partner ever had and expected nothing in return except her presence. They were also genuine fans of her work and encouraged her to write and share to her heart’s content. It was this supportive semi-secret virtual environment that helped Allēna begin to process what Hera and her cronies had done to her. Through this process, “Guernica” Part 4 and the full poem spilled out of her.

    Peri’s magnum opus, The Secret History of Doloras, was born a few months later in the same supportive cradle. We attribute the fact that our album Light on the Final Day saw the light of day (ha!) at all to one especially loving and persistent friend all the way across the world, as well. We would have never found our voice or the courage to alchemize all of our deep, deep pain without the support and love our friends gave us.

    Parting Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 4 (another pun, haha)

    In my opinion, Allēna is exceptionally brave. Not only did she stand up to our formidable spymaster of a mother for the first time in our entire family’s history, she persevered through severe neglect and abuse of all stripes and found the guts in the meantime to turn that pain into something aching, visceral, and profoundly beautiful. I fucking love this poem and respect the hell out of my fiery pint sized headmate. I wish she’d had an easier lot in life, but I don’t know if we’d be half as insightful as we are without it. There can be no wisdom without experience and no pain without beauty. Allēna, sweet woman, is one of the rare few that is able to see beauty in the horrible things that happened to her and use these gems to craft a new story, one of resilience, courage, defiance, and ultimately – magic.

    Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of THAT. Part Five is coming up before you know it! Are you ready for another kick in the pants?!

    Bastardly yours,
    Eight

    Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (Jesus, that joke never gets old!) and have triumphantly entered the Fediverse! Follow us @opensorceryy everywhere that’s federated!