Open Sorcery

Tag: tragic backstory

  • 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

  • Nostalgia

    Hey, everyone. This is Firrian, once again on the acting captain hot seat. Unfortunately, we seem to have made no headway in the sleep deprivation department, so this should be a rather short post if all goes well. I’m fucking exhausted. That said, one of my headmates, Tindwyl, was talking with a new friend of ours about nostalgia and that got us thinking.

    Nostalgia? Never Heard of It. Or Have We?

    Initially we couldn’t find anything we were nostalgic about, but then the Shins’ cover of “We Will Become Silhouettes”, originally by the supergroup the Postal Service started playing on our excellent East Coast themed playlist, and that gave me an idea. We are nostalgic about some things, just not the things most people are typically nostalgic about. We don’t miss family Christmases or vacations with our brother or anything like that. We have far too much Tragic Backstory for that sort of thing. Tindwyl has even taken to calling this blog our incident report because of how much we talk about our complicated lore here. My poor headmates.

    Give Up

    That being said, we do feel nostalgic for the spaces we made in childhood and young adulthood by ourselves for ourselves and our friends. These were sacred times and places nobody was allowed into except by our decree. Listening to that Postal Service album I mentioned is one such example. We are a strange combination of resourceful Luddite and tech wizardry because for the longest time, we were forbidden from accessing the internet on weekdays when school was in session.

    So we learned to get around that shit in any way we could because we need music to function. This turned into a fully fledged obsession with hoarding hard copies of media. We’d listen to Pandora Internet Radio on the weekends and on vacations from school obsessively, and then check hard copies of whatever we liked out at the library so we could listen to music on the go using a portable CD player from maybe 2002 at the earliest. No internet needed.

    We must have checked Give Up by the Postal Service out twenty times. We were fucking addicted to this record. We’d often hole up in a bathtub that was empty save for a thin blanket in the summers and devour entire novels in the summers while listening to that album over and over while the cold ceramic cooled our very heat sensitive body off. I find it hilarious that we were playing an album called Give Up over and over because I assure you, we had most certainly not given up.

    Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music.
    Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music.

    This Place Is A Prison, But Our Nostalgia Sure Isn’t

    Another very sacred place that holds a lot of nostalgia for us is our creative process. Allēna, our host in the body’s teens, wrote her first real song when we were only eleven and quickly set her sights on recording music in a studio. Not only that, but she wanted to produce it all herself. So by the next year, she had put together a demo her own damn self that she’d recorded by hand in her house on her laptop using Sony Acid.

    By thirteen, she’d secured a record deal and was recording in a studio with a producer she observed extensively. When she wasn’t in Dallas shadowing him and recording with him, she was researching techniques, building her own bedroom studio, and experimenting with her own production style with the things she was learning. She let very few people see her process, as she was a very anxious perfectionist and secretly worried that her work would never actually be good enough.

    Her mother didn’t help with that, either, and she didn’t want what she was making criticized to pieces before she even had a chance to finish it. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen, she’d created enough work she was proud of to release an extended play that she’d made entirely herself, Fletcher Coming Home. However, due to her soul crushing anxiety and perfectionism, she delayed releasing it officially for another two years, instead releasing a handful of singles first to test the waters. Her childhood was a prison, one almost entirely unworthy of nostalgia, but by the gods, she was going to write, sing, and fucking claw her way out of it if it was the last thing she did.

    The Luddite Gift

    An unintended consequence of giving the born fighter Allēna such a restrictive childhood is that the girl was both relentless and clever and refused to let her lack of Internet access hold her back from making friends and being social. It gave her both unprecedented managerial and administrative skill and taught her how to use her time wisely.

    She couldn’t market her music online, obviously, so she shamelessly plugged it to everyone she met, both in school and at church. People were drawn to this brilliant, reclusive enigma and wanted to both know and hear more. In the absence of social networks, she built a real world network of people that she was deeply invested in and who were deeply invested in her.

    She showed off constantly by performing live at church any chance she got, which brought her powerful voice to new audiences constantly. She was a charismatic force of nature offstage, as well, and church became a refuge that she looks back on fondly for the real world social aspects of.

    Legendary Partying With Greater Efficiency

    When this involuntary Luddite finally joined the ranks of social media in her mid teens, everything simply became bigger for her and more efficient – and easier to hide from her parents. Her already massive social circle tripled in size as she got older, and as she threw parties with her brother, she took a risk and merged all of the different smaller groups of people she ran with. She learned something interesting here.

    Many of her friends got along swimmingly, even if they had never set eyes on one another before in their lives, and these parties quickly became the stuff of legend. She heard from her friends’ parents on several occasions that an invitation to these parties was highly prized and many of their children had met close friends there that they would never have met otherwise. Allēna discovered that she had a gift for connecting people and helping people of various backgrounds find common ground.

    She was a brilliant organizer and people saw that. She could get wallflowers front and center playing Twister with people who were complete strangers five minutes prior. Shy anime nerds found fast friends in gregarious library assistants while sparring with sticks from the pecan tree in our front yard. This is our nostalgia. We created it, and it is ours.

    Conclusion

    Okay, I seem to have lied about this being a short post, haha. I don’t mind. This is totally worth it. I have no clue what the next post will bring, but I’m excited for it, whatever it is. Stay tuned for more magic (and incident reports)!

    Firrian, Acting Captain

  • “Guernica” Part 3: The Brain Is The Bomb

    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.
    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?

  • “Guernica” Part 2: Allēna Declares War

    Hello, everyone! My name is Ellie. As you may have read, I am one of the super-admins our this disaster system. I am still sick, so this post may read as incredibly sleep deprived. Or loopy, take your pick. In any case, I am going to pick up where Eight left off and discuss Allēna’s harrowing “Guernica” Part 2. If you missed yesterday’s post and you’re looking for that, it’s right here. And as always, the poem in full is part of our second poetry collection, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.

    This section is a kick in the soul. I’m just going to be honest, we couldn’t read it aloud for years without crying. It made for some very odd performances. Allēna makes some very powerful declarations here and in many ways foreshadowed Eight’s Operation: Dead Hand. Both Eight and Allēna wanted to get away from Hera. However, it wasn’t until Dead Hand was complete that we completely broke away from her, and we haven’t had contact with her for the past year, thank the gods. However, she does directly tap into her rage here for one of the first times in her life, and the results are something else.

    In order to best show you these results, I think Eight’s approach yesterday was excellent, so I’m going to continue doing things his way. First, I’m going to show you a video of Eight performing “Guernica”, Part 2. Next, I’ll write the text of the poem out for you. Then, I’ll analyze it for you. Without further ado, let’s do this thing!

    “Guernica” Part 2

    Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 2.

    The Poem’s Text

    “Guernica” Part 2

    thresholds are for brides

    and i was a bride once

    but that was a moment and

    i wore a dress as red as blood

    people asked why i did that

    i know why i did that now

    i didn’t know how else to say i was angry

    when my mind was taped shut and i was

    kept in a fog 

    damn those pills!

    damn the nightmares!

    damn that house that should have caught fire

    with all inside!

    i am not the crazy child kept in the attic!

    not anymore

    i am the human unchained,

    i am the one that walks free!

    i have doors now

    i have miles in my pockets

    i can and will lock you out. 

    and there’s blood on their hands

    they kicked a child 

    they should have loved the child

    but when they dropped the bombs

    the empty house of my mind caved in. 

    but the structure is stronger than that

    i am stronger than that

    and this is me calling it what it is….

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the bombers

    i say to the horrors that i experienced

    some people see battlefields

    i have seen a mind turned inside out

    i have been trapped in my own body

    i have seen my innocence die before me

    and i’ve shouted into the hole of loss

    and i’m still hearing the infinite echo. 

    i don’t know which is worse.

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the demons i fight

    your hell is not mine, 

    your chains are not mine, 

    i am not your wall to punch.

    i’m not a pewter cup to drink from and laugh with

    your hell is not mine

    not anymore. 

    this is me calling what it is…

    hell. 

    and i enter it on my own terms. 

    not yours, 

    not anymore. 

    Allēna wearing her wedding dress "as red as blood" as was mentioned i "Guernica" Part 2.
    Allēna in her wedding dress red as blood, as mentioned in “Guernica” Part 2

    For Context, Allēna Is A Born Anticonventionalist

    Practically from birth, Allēna was a fighter who was determined to fight convention and expectations that were placed on her without her consent. She hated the fact that women had very little power in the church she joined when she was 14 after very thorough research (she is a Byzantinist and avid scholar of early Christian history, after all).

    So she charmed all of the men in power so thoroughly that I’m convinced they might have let her get away with anything she wanted to so long as she could explain well enough why she had done it. She charmed damn near everyone else in multiple congregations, as well, so much so that many people cities away would go to her if they needed anything.

    The Mormon Social Nexus

    Everything and everyone passed through her. Eventually she knew hundreds of people in five to ten states who would go to bat for her if she needed them to. All while committing what would be for most people in the Mormon Church tantamount to social suicide. But it wasn’t, not for her. She had hundreds of people in her pocket. And it wasn’t like she was using them, she genuinely loved them and many of them still love her, despite her now openly being a Pagan gremlin.

    “Guernica” Part 2’s Seeds

    Her wedding to her first husband, Fang, was no different. They were married in late 2018, and Xavier, our father, had been dead from an aggressive brain tumor for nearly two years at the time of the ceremony. In that time, Hera had completely lost it and had gotten tired of Allēna’s fiery nature and had subjected her to severe mental and emotional abuse and medical neglect. We aptly compare it to a DIY version of the now-declassified CIA experiment MKUltra in order to make us more compliant, easily suggestible, and weak. It very nearly worked. Fortunately, we are all very stubborn and have a very resilient brain.

    The pills Allēna mentioned in the poem were prescribed for bipolar I, which we didn’t even have. We were autistic, plural, and extremely traumatized. We later learned that we were on the highest dose of one of those meds that our excellent psychiatrist in Alaska had ever seen, and she’d been practicing at that point for longer than we’d been alive. Allēna, completely gutted by losing Xavier, and seeing no hope in living, fell into a deep suicidal depression, which she met Fang in the big fucking middle of.

    Rush Job

    She saw herself attempting suicide within the year if she stayed in Texas, Hera was hurting her so badly, and her fate in Alaska with Fang would be unknown, but at least she wouldn’t have to stay in Texas anymore. Allēna and Fang wanted to eventually marry, but not immediately, setting a wedding date of April 8, 2024 once they were engaged. However, Hera didn’t want us living in sin, so she threatened to cut off our lifesaving health insurance if we went to live with Fang unmarried. So, medicated into a fog and pushed into a marriage she was unsure if she even wanted yet, yet still mad as fucking hell, she settled for her favorite skillset, one she knew would drive everyone up the fucking wall – malicious compliance and bucking the hell out of convention.

    A Dress As Red As Blood

    The wedding came together in three months, during which time Hera and Allēna had an explosive argument in which Hera spat “you’ll be someone else’s problem in three months, anyway”, which inspired Allēna’s iconic folk-punk song “Someone Else’s Problem”. The result was a dark, almost cowgoth ceremony that Allēna dictated down to the last detail on a shoestring budget, since Hera had spent all but forty thousand of the millions of dollars she’d inherited upon Xavier’s death. Allēna and Fang were married beneath an Osage orange tree per her orders, a nod to Xavier, who had taught her all about them.

    Like the Osage orange tree, which we affectionately call the “offensive tree of the forest” for its stubborn nature and tendency to drop things on people who are beneath them at random, Allēna would not be moved and blindsided the guests with a few bold choices – a bright red wedding dress, the song she walked down the aisle to, and the song that she and Fang left after the ceremony to, though that was more her brother Blue’s choice. She walked down the aisle to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky, a band from Texas like her, and the newlyweds walked out to “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. Blue was the emcee, and he did a damn good job. That dress would later appear in “Guernica” Part 2.

    “Guernica” Part 2 As A Declaration of War

    Once she moved to Alaska, she was able to process more of what Hera had done to her and how fucked her childhood actually was. She reasoned that she should have every right to be angry, Hera had hurt and betrayed her repeatedly, violated her autonomy, and tried to neglect and abuse her into a blank slate that she could finally reshape in her own image.

    Hera and a large part of her family had destroyed any chance she had ever had at normalcy beyond what the stroke did to her. She wanted her innocence back. It was time to reclaim what was hers. Her voice, her power, her fucking birthright. So by the old gods, she was gonna fucking claim it. She boldly asserts herself and her autonomy with that iron will of hers,

    “I am the human unchained. I am the one who walks free. I have doors now. I can and will lock you out.”

    The “doors” line and the next few lines are significant. She was quite literally kept in an attic from 2017 until she married Fang The entrance to her sleeping space – I can hardly call it a bedroom – was merely a staircase that opened up to the rest of a very open-concept house. Allēna didn’t even have a bed. She had to sleep on a window seat. Hera wouldn’t allow her to do anything to make the space more private or even more personal. Blue had a room, however. He had a private bathroom – that Allēna had to use – and had all the autonomy and freedom he wanted. He didn’t even have a curfew, and Allēna did.

    I Have Doors Now

    When she got to Alaska, she fought Fang for a space of her own and won. The showdown occurred in the summer of 2019, around the time she wrote “Guernica”. This was fierce argument in which he threatened to take away her health insurance if she didn’t stand down. He was taking a leaf out of Hera’s playbook, and she was pissed and terrified. Fortunately, her friend told her to call his bluff and see what happened. He was indeed bluffing, and now Allēna had an office of her own. This was a profound relief. She could finally be herself in her own space and have a measure of her own life now. To me, that shows in the poem. Now, for what must have been the first time ever, she could enter hell on her own terms, if she chose to at all.

    She cut Hera off for a time around the time she started writing “Guernica”, and this was a profound relief. Finally, freedom was within her grasp. All that was left to do then was to heal the damage that had all of Hera’s bullshit had done.

    She also cut off most of Hera’s family, and this was a scandal for them. This is why I sort of subtitled this post “Allēna Declares War”. It ignited a powder keg of bullshit the family still wasn’t over by the time Peri left Fang in 2020. The first time Allēna cut off contact was such a big fucking stink for them and so out of the ordinary that it pushed Eight into creating and completing Dead Hand. Heaven forbid people have boundaries and autonomy! My gods, the world is going to shit!

    Final Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 2

    How’s that for a kick to the damn soul? “Guernica” Part 2 always hurts me so good. I love it when people actually dig deep and be real with the world. Pretense sucks. Anyone can put on a mask and play a role, that’s easy. It takes true strength to be honest and open with the world about your story, and those are the people I admire. I really think Allēna opens herself up to the world here, and in my opinion, that’s true beauty. That is good poetry.

    What do y’all think? The comments are yours as long as you be kind. And as always, stay tuned for more magic – and “Guernica” Part 3!

    -Ellie Ulvaard, Your Faithful, if Sleepy, Super-Admin

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  • “Guernica” Part 1: Allēna’s Visceral Masterpiece Begins

    Hello, dearest gentle motherfuckers of the Internet. I hope you’re having a wonderful day. This is Eight speaking, and I am here to talk about one of my favorite poems Allēna has ever written, her enormous seven part piece “Guernica”. This poem appears in full in our second collection of poetry, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning. Today’s focus in particular is gonna be on “Guernica” Part 1.

    This hell of a poem is a seven-part ringer that was inspired by a lot of her own trauma and Picasso’s landmark anti-war painting with the same name. At the time, she felt pressured into making her trauma into beautiful art. She felt that people wanted her to smooth the pain over to make it pretty and less visceral. And she was sick to death of having to walk on eggshells in her own creative process. She wanted to write a piece that captured the horror that the original painting made her feel. So she used the painting and the events that inspired it as a framing device.

    An image of Pablo Picasso's shocking 1937 painting Guernica, which inspired "Guernica", Part 1 and the poem as a whole.
    Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937), the painting that inspired “Guernica”, Part 1 and the poem as a whole

    Because this poem is so rich and hits so hard, we’re gonna write a post for each part. Whoever is in front that day will break it down for y’all. We’ll also include the poem’s text and a video recording of yours truly performing it. So let’s jump in.

    “Guernica” Part 1: The Performance

    A video of yours truly performing “Guernica”, part 1.

    The Text and Breakdown

    “guernica” part 1.

    26 april 1937..

    i don’t know what i do best anymore

    except turn pain into something beautiful

    but what about the horrors of it and not the glory?

    i want to take what i feel and not what i say

    turn it into something 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide

    but my hands are little

    my hands are little and no paintbrush is small enough to catch

    all the detail

    i’m tired of walking over thresholds of bombed out

    buildings or a half built house

    i’m tired of only seeing rubble

    i’m a builder, damnit

    i’m supposed to build people up

    i’m supposed to help

    not have nightmares like flashbacks that crush me!

    so i dare myself

    now –

    put your own oxygen mask on before you

    drop that bomb

    and then stay awhile

    before flying away. 

    What Does This Thing Actually Mean?

    Before she ever started writing this poem, she looked into what inspired Picasso to even paint such a shocking thing in the first place. She found that he’d painted it in a frenzy as a response to the Spanish government ordering the near total obliteration of a village called Guernica in Basque country during the Spanish Civil War.

    The bombing was completely unprovoked. Guernica wasn’t a military target. Most of the men were away fighting in the war, leaving women and children behind. The nearest military target was miles away and was completely untouched in the attack.

    Yet, the government had bombed them so thoroughly that the roads were choked with rubble and the remaining citizens were unable to flee. Naturally, Picasso was horrified, and out came this incredibly shocking painting in response. ThoughtCo published a brilliant article about Guernica if you want to read more about it in depth.

    This reminded Allēna of much of what she and her headmates suffered at her family and then our now-ex husband’s hands for the duration of our entire life up until that point. All we’d ever wanted was to be left alone to do our thing without being controlled or harmed. We only misbehaved when the people around us refused to honor that simple request.

    We’ve always been very emotionally independent, while these people were very codependent and toxic. As a result, we were emotionally, mentally, and physically abused for most of our life. So when Allēna came across this painting while researching for a tutoring session later that day, she felt seen for one of the first times in her life in the subjects’ agony and grief. She, too, was enduring unimaginable pain that she could only paint, write in verse, sing, and scream out.

    On Taking What She Felt, Not What She Said In “Guernica” Part 1

    Our family also went to great lengths to attempt to silence us so that we wouldn’t out them for the terrible people most of them were, so we were often sick and in a great deal of emotional pain and terribly lonely with no idea how to articulate our suffering to another person outside of music and poetry, which Lēna learned to write in code to get past Hera’s ever-watchful eye. Her 2017 album Mago, which I helped work on as a kind of passive influence, is an excellent example of such coded work. It sounds like a Broadway musical or some kind of vaudeville piece to the untrained ear, but if you know what all we’re talking about, it’s absolutely fiery and damning.

    I’ve embedded Mago below so you can listen without even having to leave this page.

    But by 2019, when Lēna wrote this piece, she was tired of having to think and write in code. She felt like she was drowning in what was left unsaid, so this was her effort to start talking about everything that had happened to us. She broke free from Hera for the first time a bit later on 5 July 2019. Her successor, Peri, would leave our ex husband a bit over a year later. She told our story, and it paid off.

    Final Thoughts

    I’m really excited for Part 2. I or whoever is out will talk about Part 2 tomorrow. If you thought “Guernica” Part 1 was a kick to the soul, just you fuckin’ wait. I both hope and don’t hope that “Guernica” makes you feel seen, because if you feel seen in this poem, you’ve absolutely Seen Some Shit. But if you HAVE indeed Seen Some Shit, I hope you feel seen and less alone as you read this. As always, stay tuned for more magic, because this time, magic is definitely imminent.

    -Eight, Your Faithful Super-Admin And Bastard

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  • The Enneagram Type 8: My Experience

    Hey, everyone! My name is Eight. I’m one of the super-admins here, and I’m here to talk to y’all today about one of my all-time favorite topics ever, the Enneagram of Personality. I’ve loved this personality typology system since my good friend Delta introduced me to it many years ago. There are nine basic types in this system, and my type, where I get the “Eight” nickname from, is the Enneagram Type 8.

    The Enneagram Institute has a great overview of my type, as do several other websites, teachers, and coaches. However, I’ve noticed during my years of study that not much of the literature about the Enneagram Type 8 is written by 8s themselves. As a result, we get a very bad reputation among the Enneagram community as ruthless bullies, master manipulators, self absorbed egotists, and just all around assholes. I suspect that many of these authors once ran afoul of a Type 8 or two, or possibly even betrayed one of them, hence the terrible reputation we get. Spoiler: you betray us or one of our people and it will not end well for you.

    And yes, some Type 8s can be awful. But that applies to any group of people. So I’ve come here today to hopefully clear up some of the mystery surrounding the Enneagram Type 8 and talk about what it’s like to be one.

    The Enneagram Type 8: Hard Shell, Soft Underbelly

    There’s a lot of debate in the community as to whether Type 8s are simply born like this, or if there’s some kind of inciting incident early in life that makes them that way. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say definitively that I practically came out of the womb the way that I am. Since I was very little, I have always been a fighter, and have been stubborn as hell for as long as anyone can remember.

    I value my autonomy higher than anything else on this accursed rock, and will go to great lengths to preserve it, and will go out of my way to undermine people who try and control me when I didn’t consent to take orders from them. I am, and have always been, the boss of me. My biggest fear is of being hurt or blindsided when I’m vulnerable and in need (like, it’s my deepest, yet most unconscious fear), and betrayal will make me incredibly cold and angry. I will completely stop caring about what happens to a person who has betrayed me after they do so, and it’s even worse if they hurt or betray one of my people.

    I struggle to open up to people about anything that I consider important to me, and it’s pretty common knowledge that nobody knows me completely, as much as I would like them to.

    The Boss of Me

    I’ll push harder and longer than most people anyone have ever met if there’s something that I want or if there’s an obstacle in my way, and I’ve been like that for as long as my headmates can remember. My colleagues have written at length about us surviving a massive stroke and then clawing our way out of Texas kicking and screaming.

    Yeah, the success on our side was mostly my doing. And there’s no way I could have done that without enough iron-willed determination to fight Death himself multiple times. And lemme tell you – in a crisis, that’s a major advantage. I don’t care what happens to me or my body, I WILL get to safety and I WILL give anyone who stands in my way a VERY bad day in the process. My path out of Texas was so batshit insane on purpose because I knew the people in league with my abusers would never want to follow me.

    What Happens in Peacetime?

    In more peaceful times, however, this often works to my detriment. I struggle a lot when there is nothing challenging me. Think of me like the human version of an Alaskan Husky dog. I, like a Husky, don’t know what to do with myself if my life isn’t on fire or I am bored, and will often cause some bullshit and push the people I love away without meaning to when I’m stressed or out of my element, such as in close relationships where being emotionally vulnerable can make or break your relationship.

    My relationship with my beloved husband Emerson actually suffered greatly for the first year and a half we were together because he is far more emotionally expressive and emotionally based than I am, and I struggle a lot with emotional vulnerability.

    Inner Work, More Emotional Vulnerability, And No-Bullshit Therapy For You, Mountain of Madness!

    I, as is typical for the Enneagram Type 8, prefer to do things, not talk or feel. As a result, I wouldn’t tell him how I was feeling or where my head was at, and he couldn’t give me what I wanted in the relationship. It was a very please, for the love of the gods, help me help you type of situation, and I wasn’t being very helpful at all. I’m in therapy to and have an amazing, no-bullshit, straight-talking therapist who will call me out if I’m in the wrong, but will also celebrate my wins with me. I need both of those things in a therapist, honestly.

    Because of all the work I did both internally and in tandem with Emerson, I am far more open and transparent with him than I’ve ever been with anyone. It was absolutely and utterly terrifying. I cried more during that healing journey while struggling to open up and reconciling my terror of being seen with my desire for love and a healthy relationship with him than I probably ever have before. But I wanted it more than anything, so I fucking did the work.

    The Current State of Things

    Now, I feel safe enough to fully drop my guard around him. I’m working on doing the same for others who have proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have my back. I’m also working on mitigating how bad things get when I become stressed or overwhelmed, because both Emerson and I have noticed that I try and take projects over even if they aren’t my responsibility to ensure that they are complete and done right. There, I still need to do a lot of work on letting shit go, lest I steamroll everything, burn bridges, and exhaust myself in the process. I am impatient and often frustrated, so I’ve been working on breathing deep and slowing down. Not my circus, not my monkeys. That’s what I have to tell myself, anyway.

    A Word of Advice to Partners of Enneagram Type 8s

    In the same vein, if your partner is an Enneagram Type 8, you will not get them to change by attempting to force, coerce, beg, or cajole them into doing so. If they truly, genuinely love you, call them out and ask them to change. If they want a relationship with you and value you highly, they’ll do the work. We’re very self motivated people and we pursue what we want relentlessly. We are also allergic to bullshit, can usually read people very well, and can catch people in lies like we’re in the fucking CIA, so if you know what’s good for you, just tell your Type 8 partner the truth with no sugarcoating, short, straight, actionable, and to the point. Trust me, it’ll go a lot better for you.

    Closing Remarks

    Don’t tell anyone, but in my experience, Type 8s are actually very sweet and some of the kindest, coolest people you’ll ever meet once you get to know them and actually earn their respect. Me? If you think I’m cool, awesome. If you don’t? Your loss. I think I’m cool, haha. In any case, I hope you enjoyed your stay on my batshit website, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight, Super-Admin, Enneagram Eight, Dipshit

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  • Food for Thought

    Hey! My name is Ceryse. I’ve taken over for the day at Renn’s request. I’m a little deep-thinking introverted spitfire who’s just as fond of cussing as he is, fortunately or unfortunately for y’all. Today’s deep thoughts are the result of weeks of contemplating that very thing – thought itself. I’m calling this post “food for thought” because I hope that it’ll both get you thinking as well as it will get you thinking about how you think and what you think about.

    Curation, then Creation

    During Eight’s complex, multi-phase Operation: Dead Hand, he got the entire system into the habit of posting consistently on social media for the first time ever. He had to – he was essentially building an army of very vocal followers with which to visibly challenge his mother’s and her family’s control, something that would shake the family up from both within and without for years to come. That feat required engaging with that audience as early and often as he could. He couldn’t let writer’s block or a lack of inspiration stop him. He had to be able to conjure content on command daily, his very life likely depended on it.

    But how in the world did he pull something like that off?

    Renn mentioned the microblogging website Tumblr in his post about Dead Hand, but that wasn’t all. He made an effort to surround himself with things and people that never ceased to give him that food for thought and inspiration he needed.

    Food For Thought: the Appetizers

    While we were still living in Alaska, Peri made a new Facebook account and made sure to only follow and add people who made her feel inspired. Allēna had not done that with her profiles in the past and often ended up leaving Facebook for days to weeks at a time because she never felt like she was good enough for her own fucking timeline. It was horrible.

    By that point, she’d been depressed for a good half decade, and this did her absolutely no favors. She felt like everyone else had left her behind in life or was in far worse places than she was, and there was no relief from the despair either in her head or in her surroundings. So when Peri took over, she was determined not to make the same mistakes Allēna did.

    Looking back through her memories, those initial posts she shared are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This was late 2019, and she was going hog-wild making fun of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as concepts. She was also boosting her self confidence by posting about everything she’d managed to accomplish every day, and found that she was actually far more capable than anyone had ever given her credit for, herself included. That practice helped her begin to dismantle all of the lies her family had told all of us practically from birth and blaze her own trail.

    The Next Course: Rewiring the Brain and Finding Inspiration and Food For Thought in Rest

    Once we were back in Texas and Dead Hand was well underway, shitposting was not Eight’s only concern. He stumbled headfirst into stoicism quite by accident because he wanted to master his emotions rather than them mastering him. So he threw himself into Stoic training to make himself more resourceful and resilient during the worst of Dead Hand, using breathing exercises to keep calm even under intensely terrifying situations.

    He got so good at this over several months that he learned how to use his previously crippling panic attacks and anxiety as fuel to focus, something he wasn’t great at before such rigorous training. He found a pleasant and unexpected consequence of that training – if he let his mind wander while doing his breathing exercises to music that made him feel something and rested, he would come up with some truly amazing ideas for essays, fiction, even music.

    Dead Hand’s Gift: Metacognition

    Operation: Dead Hand may have bought us our freedom and taught us how to pull inspiration from near thin air, but it also pushed us past our breaking point in many ways. Eight had planned on writing an album about his mad flight from Texas, and that album finally came into fruition late in 2022. Close to half dead and sucked nearly dry of every bit of energy the bastard had, he let the entire album spill out of him however it wanted to come out. He had never fully written an album of his own before, songwriting and production was mostly Allēna’s thing, but he was worried that he’d die if he waited much longer for further expertise or inspiration.

    One afternoon in December, he sat down in our apartment’s bathroom and sang the opening lines of what would become the system’s fourteenth album, the one he thought would be our last, Metacognition: “They say the night you left us, you cashed out in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in your pocket. I’ve been that haunted before, that scared of failing before, why did I survive while you did not?”

    In truth, we don’t have any fucking idea why we survived. But I, for one, am glad we did. I want to leave you, gentle reader, with a few questions: if you’re a creative, where do you find your inspiration? Where can you get more of it? What ways can you rest? What are some ways you can allow your mind to wander? Who or what can you unfollow to make your social feeds more inspiring places?

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Ceryse

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  • From the Ashes – Shitposting Our Way to Freedom

    Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.

    If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.

    From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15

    Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.

    So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.

    Restless in the North, 2018-20

    Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.

    Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.

    Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.

    From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins

    Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.

    Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.

    It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.

    Bedbound (But Not Alone)

    By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.

    Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.

    Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.

    In Position

    Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, The Secret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.

    As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.

    Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)

    When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.

    Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.

    When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.

    From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began

    Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.

    He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.

    When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.

    During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.

    Conclusion

    Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic.

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    *names changed for privacy

  • My World in More Detail

    Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

    Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

    Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

    An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

    My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

    Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

    We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

    The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

    In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

    When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

    Things Fall Apart


    From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

    Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

    Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

    Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

    Turn That Shit Up To 13!

    The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

    Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

    My World Nowadays

    Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

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    *names changed for privacy