In all honesty, I never really think about that holiday??
My sweet Danish partner reminded me it existed today and I told him that due to my time blindness I’m likely to find myself in a situation out of a sitcom where someone who has a crush on me invites me over or something, I have no fucking clue what day it is, everyone else gets extremely upset with me, and I just end up rolling with it and they confess their love for me with flowers and chocolate and I’m like “I’m so sorry… what year is it again” š
I’ve forgotten my own birthday before. I’m not fucking kidding. I tend to forget Valentine’s Day exists especially hard because I wasn’t exactly…. Desirable until well into adulthood, and even now it’s still a mindfuck to me that people want to date me at all? So wheee. AuDHD is a helluva thing.
The more I sit with the realization that what my system is dealing with is complex grief about the state of the world and life and things, the more it feels like I’m swimming in an ocean of just… Sadness. I’m safe, it’s just a lot to feel. Hence why I’m writing here. I don’t really know how else to begin deeply processing emotion beyond writing, and I’m feeling the grief so somatically that I don’t have the energy to talk to people individually about it. So I figure word vomiting here is a good place to start.
I have lost so much. We as a society could have had so much in this past election cycle (Kamala Harris wasn’t great but she sure as fuck wasn’t this) and while I’ve seen TRUE bone chilling right wing terror as an ex Mormon.. This is pretty fucking terrifying. Everyone was warned and they didn’t listen. My system actually foresaw much of this. So we’re just mourning what could have been while trying to do the work, trying to keep our heads above water… And I am tired, deep down in my soul.
And this realization has led me to sit with the grief and the pain of being chronically ill, psychologically tortured, and often isolated before the election, and I’m doing another round of processing that, too. It feels in a way like I’m falling down a bottomless well of pain and grief. Or maybe I never stopped falling down that fucking well.
I’m not sure. Either way, it seems to help me breathe a little easier to put words to it however I can. I want to cry. I feel like I need to cry. But I haven’t been able to yet. So I’m just gonna keep working through things in my mind until I’m able to open the floodgates, I suppose. Everything fucking physically hurts in the meantime.
I’m not going to give up the fight, though. I don’t see the situation here as hopeless. There’s a lot of good happening amidst the bad, and I’m not suicidal or anything. I’m just badly in need of rest and time to sit with this further, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
One of my crushes sent me this and it basically hit me in the damn soul and I started crying laughing and had to share it here.
If I don’t know you or trust you, I would rather do ANYTHING ELSE than acknowledge that you’ve just flirted with me, but believe me, I know, and believe me, I’m Fucking Panicking. Often for YEARS. OOOPS š¤£
I tend to complain a lot about anything that’s difficult or exhausting for me while in the process of doing it. It helps me bypass my executive dysfunction and my deeply rooted perfectionism, which often makes it damn near physically painful to get out of my blanket lump, so cussing about having to do the task makes the task doable.
It’s one of the joys I have discovered in adulthood, as when I was a child and teen, I was often made to do things without showing a hint of displeasure. My parents insisted that I did everything they wanted “with a cheerful heart”. So I often did, but gave them hell the rest of the time and would find ways to maliciously comply with that rule while doing the task. They learned pretty early that the only way to get me to do anything that I didn’t really give a shit about well was to pay me a king’s ransom š¤£. But now that I am away from them and better for it, I bitch about damn near everything that I have to do that doesn’t involve being cocooned in a blanket lump while in the process of getting shit done.
I don’t mind being productive, for the record. I actually quite enjoy it. It just hurts a lot of the time. Bitching about the task at hand gets me to start the process of being productive, and I highly recommend it.
I need a shower but my damn brain is not letting me do it. Instead, it is insisting that I do every damn thing else and taking me on infinite side quests.
A bit of context: my friend mk (it/its) posted an incredible thought piece on its Substack on feral anarchy, what it means, etc., and I found it very inspiring. I, too, am quite feral, a synesthete, have zero sense of linear time, and have built my very neuroqueer life from a place of loosely organized chaos. So I decided to make art that aimed to describe my experience a bit. Therefore… Have this!
Many of the words in this art piece are from my poetry, hehe.
I highly recommend reading mk’s work if you do not and following/subscribing! It’s doing great things.
I’ve been doing some Thinking about how my brain works, and it would seem that my particular DICK HEAD COMBINATION OF AUDHD gives me the worst traits of both autism AND ADHD. Like, if given enough stimulants and time, I can hyperfocus forever on something I’m fascinated with to the point where I learn an ungodly amount of information about it and retain nearly all of it. Not just that, but I make creations with that knowledge, too. This fucking blog, for example. It’s linked in with the Fediverse via ActivityPub and Alex Kirk’s masterful Friends plugins, etc.. My numerous special interests have been combining, reshuffling and making unholy bastard children in my mental Back 40 on this tiny hell site since May because of the way my cracked brainhole works.
Conversely, in order to socialize, I have to focus on whatever social thing is going on around me completely and let myself dissolve into it. Switching between whatever the fuck project has taken hold of my mind and going into a social activity of any form is a multistep process that requires me ACTUALLY MANUALLY SHIFTING MY BRAIN AWAY from the project rabbit hole and into the social one. And there is a grouchy hell to pay if I’m interrupted mid project.
However, I thought about it a step further. I have pretty much always been able to discern the difference between the feelings I get when the various happy chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, are triggered in my brain, body, etc., and upon further contemplation, I began to wonder if that’s why my particular bastard flavor of AuDHD is such a bastard to begin with. Because what I noticed from years of combing back through my system’s memories both pre and most massive integration is that my happy chemicals seem to be fucking heavily partitioned, and perhaps that’s why I can discern the difference between the feelings they give me in the first place. Hence that’s probably why I have to manually shift between projects (dopamine) and socializing (oxytocin).
Serotonin is a whole other can of worms for me and I have to manually induce that bitch, too. It often takes days and that’s a whole OTHER post. I might write about that bastard chemical later, lol. She is a cruel mistress š¤£
Last night, a long time aroace friend dropped me into a Facebook group called [aroace confusion intensifies]. I’ve identified as demi-aromantic/demi-asexual for some time, but as I kept relating to more and more posts, I thought more and more about the happy chemical partition theory I have going and all of my relationships, both current and past, and how my batshit brain might play into ALLLL of that.
Now, I do experience attraction to SOME people. But with the whole “having to shift my brain manually into a state where it won’t scream when I need to socialize” thing, the frequency in which I fall into random projects, and the fact that I experience a near complete lack of linear time and object permanence, said attraction takes a VERY LONG TIME to form, if it ever forms at all. Deep, genuine, romantic attachment to a person takes EVEN FUCKING LONGER. Because what the ENTIRE fuck is a “romance” as society has established it, anyway? So it takes my crippled ass YEARS sometimes to get a damned clue. And I think my cracked brainhole is why, lmao. Polyamory has been a lifesaver in that regard because in order to have a healthy polyamorous relationship, the people involved HAVE TO ENGAGE IN A HEFTY AMOUNT OF NEGOTIATION FROM THE OUTSET about expectations and things about the relationship, which my clueless ass can DEFINITELY get behind. š¤£
So unfortunately, when person number ten billion comes up to me is like “LAZARUS. I LOVE YOUR WORK. I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. PLEASEEEEEE DATE ME, ETC”, more often than not, I have just emerged from my mental Laz Cave, haven’t seen or interacted with a soul in fourteen hours or more, and haven’t shifted into Oxytocin Mode yet, which is necessary for human bonding, so I’m like,
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. š¤£
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. š Until next time, stay tuned for more magic. – Lazarus
PS. 2011 or so called and it wants you to have this earworm back š¤£
Hey, everyone! Dria here. Iām AllÄnaās cousin and a rather infrequent fronter, but Iām here today, so I figured I would scream into the void while Iām on deck for your viewing pleasure, because why not? Weāve challenged Sheik to write a blog post every day for the remainder of the week and I like participating in challenges. So Iām here, aboard the fucking bandwagon. Welcome to the shitshow, only Dria Edition today.
I came across this post (shown below) while making my Facebook rounds and it got me thinking.
The post I came across while scrolling. It was the most delicious synchronicity, really.
I firmly believe that hope, like love, isnāt a feeling. Rather, itās a practice. Sure, a person can feel hopeful or excited or optimistic about something, but itās the practice of it, the action of it that gets them from that feeling to actually having the thing theyāre hoping for in hand. So, by that logic, is perseverance through spite a substitute, or is it merely hope put into practice with a different motivation than blissful optimism? I would argue that it isnāt a substitute at all. Not by a long shot. Hereās why.
Iām not an optimist. Perhaps Iām an idealist, and a very angry one, and I belong to a system of very angry idealists who believe a better world is possible via widespread, hands on action and by people putting in the work to make the world a better, easier place for everyone, not just the rich fucks in power. And theyāve been putting in that work for years. They donāt stand for bullshit, AllÄna especially, and theyāve worked very hard to heal and build a life that, at its core, prioritizes rest and care, fuck whatever the rest of the world has to say about it.
We were raised from a young age like many neurodivergent people socialized as women in Western culture, to be obedient, self-sacrificing for the good of everyone else around us at the expense of our own comfort and safety, to appear ānormalā. There was one small problem there. We had gotten very sick as a tiny baby, had contracted heart failure due to a virus that attacked the bodyās heart, and then had a stroke in quick succession, and had narrowly survived. This threw a wrench in the conditioning, because in order for us to appear normal, we had to be anywhere close to normal.
People who are anywhere close to normal do not survive near fatal heart failure without a goddamned transplant, fucking massive strokes, then go on to walk, talk, sing, and teach themselves how to play numerous musical instruments by fucking ear. We were fighters with a will stronger than goddamned diamond even before the age of a year old. Fuck iron. Anything less a will made from something stronger than the hardest stone on Earth and we would be dead. And by the fucking gods, we were not fucking dying. Not yet. We were fucking pissed.
Nobody believed weād survive that objectively hopeless situation, but we fucking survived it and became goddamned polymaths to show for it. Forget normal. If we were normal, we would be long dead by now. We put hope into practice even when we didnāt realize thatās what we were doing simply because we didnāt give up the fight. Our mind broke into 1,700 pieces but our solid will did not, even after countless people wrote us off, mocked us, tortured us, abused us, and neglected us. We never fucking gave up.
We called what we were doing by a number of names – rage, spite, revenge, survival – but what it ultimately was was hope as a daily practice. By putting one foot in front of the other and choosing to move forward when we didnāt want to and could have given up, we were practicing hope. And now, weāre 27. Weāre safe. We saved ourselves, goddamnit. Iām writing this from a cozy bed in Sheikās apartment. Because of their mad hope, their courage, and their fucking indomitable will, my headmatesā work in a variety of disciplines has saved lives and theyāve built an honest to gods shitposting empire on social media, as well. Iām proud to be a part of this cockroach system that understands that hope isnāt a fucking emotion and puts it into practice every day even when the odds are stacked and the game is rigged.
So if you feel like your situation is hopeless, may you have the sheer guts to be spiteful for long enough to realize that you were practicing hope all along. āØ
Peace out, esteemād sewer rat warriors. As always, stay tuned for more FUCKING magic.
Hey, everyone. This is AllÄna, your ever-gracious super-admin (just kidding). I am here today to tell a special story by request of a friend. This is the tale of how we very nearly died the first and second times. We are masters at cheating death, and have quite the tragic backstory. My colleagues have also mentioned the fact that we had a stroke a few times. This post is the story of the stroke, or as we prefer to call it, the Brainhole. Now, I know that this is a crazy story. You might be tempted dismiss it as bullshit without witnesses or corroborating evidence. This is more than understandable. However, I have accounted for that and gathered some.
Now, how the fuck were we cheating death as literal infants, you may ask? It all began with an unfortunate predicament known as viral myocarditis.
We Started Cheating Death Young When A Virus Attacked Our Heart
Xavier explained what happened best, so I will let him tell it. He wrote on January 27, 1998, at 3:00 in the afternoon:
Just wanted to let you know. My daughter is in children’s hospital in Dallas with acute myocarditis-an inflammation of the heart. It appears to be viral, and the prognosis can be good, but we will not know anything for 4 or 5 more days.
We will be up at the hospital for a while, so I won’t be current on my e-mail, but I will probably come home now and then and post updates.
We took her to the doctor’s office Monday morning at 9:30 because she had not been taking in fluids voluntarily for about 48 hours, and vomiting occasionally. She had a viral infection about three weeks ago that probably suppressed her immune response, and then contracted another virus that began to attack her heart muscle. Right now, the myocarditis seems to be principally viral in nature – as opposed to congenital, or congenital in combination with a virus. This is good. She is heavily sedated, and they have her on a ventilator. She can breathe on her own, but they are trying to let her dedicate all of her energy to fighting the infection. She has had two little transfusions (just to boost her hemocrit and hemoglobin levels by adding more red cells).
Stubborn Little Shits
We were admitted to Children’s in Dallas on January 26, 1998, Super Bowl Sunday of that year. Things quickly went south from there, though, and the doctors hooked us up to a heart-lung bypass machine so that our heart could rest and the machine could pump our blood for us. They initially estimated that it would only take about four days, but it quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal for all involved because we are stubborn little shits that kept fighting the damn sedatives. So it quickly turned into a game of hurry up and wait.
Eight quipped when he read through Xavier’s account the first time that he could make a drinking game out of it: take a shot for every time they had to chemically paralyze the body. You’d be absolutely hammered by the end of it. We got so good at fighting the sedatives that our medical team had to start putting us on some crazy dosages to even attempt to keep us down.
According to everything we were told growing up, we were on enough meds combined to knock out every single adult present for an untold number of hours. Xavier himself mentioned that a single one of our boluses (boli?) would incapacitate him for ten hours, and he was not a small man. We also had to be restrained by tiny handcuffs because we’d wake up, wiggle, get pissed off, and try to grab shit. Additionally, Xavier wrote in his account that we had to be put on methadone to ease the withdrawal symptoms from the painkillers they had us on. We were not going to die, by gods. We were cheating death every goddamned day. No day more so than February 23, 1998, a day we now “celebrate” annually as Brainhole…
All Hail The Motherfucking Brainhole
After getting off of heart-lung bypass and weaning off of most of the meds, we had a sepsis scare. Now, the scary thing about heart-lung bypass is that there’s a very high risk of stroke if things go wrong because the procedure uses a carotid artery to even work. After we were all finished with the heart-lung bypass, they had to clamp and tie off the carotid artery they used. They used the one on our right side. Shortly afterward, there was a sepsis scare.
Xavier tells the story of what happened best because he was there and documenting everything that happened, so I’m going to let him do the talking again. He wrote the following day, February 24, 1998:
“Brief synopsis of yesterday. It doesn’t look like it was sepsis. She got
better too quickly for it to have been sepsis. She responded well to the
intubation and the medicines, but the staff feels that this was an example of
how little cardiac reserve she has. In short, her heart was tested, and it
did not do very well on the test.
We met again with Dr. Fixler, the head cardiologist on the transplant team.
He informed us that [Hera] and I have the option of increasing her status on
the transplant list. Basically, if [Hera] and I feel that a transplant is
inevitable, we can ask that they not refuse a heart that is available.
That was yesterday.
[Hera] and I went home to get some decent sleep last night and left
instructions to call if anything happened. They called us at 3:30 a.m. to
tell us that she had taken herself off of the ventilator by pulling out the
tube. Her oxygen saturation level was fine, and she was breathing on her own.
Considering that [the cardiologist] wasn’t sure if she could
ever make it off of the ventilator, we took this as good news.
[The cardiologist] called at 7:30 this morning to say that [birth name] has apparently had
a stroke. The movement on her left side is diminished. The theory is:
[birth name]’s heart function is such that there are areas where the blood doesn’t
move as effectively as it should. When the blood pools, it has a tendency to
clot. A clot (or a piece of a larger clot) that had formed in her heart broke
free and plugged one of the vessels leading to her brain. Considering that
the major artery to the righ side of her brain is severed and tied off, the
clot either passed through the other artery, through the Circle of Willis, and
lodged in a vessel. Either that or it passed into one of the collateral
vessels on the right. They are not yet sure what the extent of the damage to
her brain was as yet. They are performing an echocardiogram to determine if
there is another clot in her heart, and they will perform a CT scan right
after. After that I we talk to the neurologist and find out what has
happened.
Names in brackets have been changed for privacy purposes.
The initial scan showed that we had lost up to half of our brain. However, a scan a bit later and an MRI in 2009 showed that it was only an eighth. We lost much of the sensory processing center in our right brain. It took years of physical and occupational therapy to be able to use the left side of our body even slightly. We still have trouble eating and sleeping. Our arms are noticeably different lengths, and we can only move three fingers on our left hand independently of the others.
Cheating Death and Betting On Ourselves
However, doctors thought we’d never even recover to a fraction of the extent we did. Nor did our own parents. Hell, Xavier even jokes in his next post about what sports we might be able to play with only one side of our body. Nobody really ever bet on us until adulthood. However, we always bet on ourselves. I went on to run a 5k in college and was an avid cyclist. I played basketball and bowled throughout high school. Eight and I were even training for a marathon before chronic pain and fatigue sidelined those dreams.
And though we were singing before we could talk – before the Brainhole ever happened – nobody thought we would ever learn an instrument, either. To hell with that bullshit. I fight people’s expectations of me just as hard as the tiny system fought those sedatives all those years ago. I went on to teach myself piano and ukulele, learned to produce records, and my headmates followed suit. To date, we’ve collectively produced fifteen records (that we can find). We’re hard at work on our sixteenth release. Moral of the story: if anyone tells you you can’t do something, flip the fucker the bird, then do it sixteen times and take pictures. These are the rules. I don’t make them. I just follow them.
Mirthy very belated Brainhole to all, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!
