Open Sorcery

Tag: Zelda

  • Chrysalyzed

    Hi, everyone! I’m sorry for going kinda dark for these past couple days. My brain has been kind of tired from this past week, so I have been resting until I felt up to writing again. I went to Emerson and told him about how bad I felt that I hadn’t been writing due to exhaustion, and he gently reminded me that we had a standing agreement to blog together on Sundays, so a post would happen today, at the very least.

    This is indeed happening as I write this, he is sitting beside me eating some leftover pasta from last night’s dinner and working on a post of his own. I think we may be using the same prompt, in fact. Our mutual prompt question, if we are in fact using the same one, is something to the effect of “what was a time that you learned something about a loved one that changed your perception of them?” I’m sure I’m not quoting the prompt question verbatim, I’m still very tired, but you get the picture.

    There are many occurrences I could think of with others, too many to count. The majority of these were profoundly negative, as well. Both myself and my former headmates have written enough about my tragic fucking backstory for y’all to get the point, I think. So instead of doing that and pointing fingers for the umpteenth time, I want to write about crashing and burning in 2022 like I mentioned in this post. Because ultimately, I am starting to love myself, making myself a loved one by technicality, and this massively changed my perception of my abilities, what a beautiful life looked like, and what sorts of things were possible for me.

    In 2022, I was a dead person walking who didn’t realize it at the time. I was largely bedbound from that bout of COVID the past winter, and had surrounded myself with people who consistently expected more from me than I was able to provide, which just threw me further and further into burnout.

    I had committed fully to polyamory in autumn of 2021 before getting sick for a month, and my polycule was just as messy or even messier than I was. At its largest point, I was dating twenty people simultaneously.

    My mind was shattered from two and a half decades of trauma, I was somewhat openly plural, I was in excruciating mental and emotional pain, and I was in the thick of the final act of the  infamous Operation: Dead Hand, as well, wherein my mother, Hera, was plotting to steal my biological child from both myself and my best friend using Texas’ court system. I couldn’t realistically manage any of it. Despite being surrounded by people who claimed to have my best interests at heart, I had never really felt more alone.

    I did my best to appear to the outside world like I was holding myself together, afraid that Hera would take anything I posted or any information that got back to her through the grapevine and use it against me to further her case and maintain control. I was deeply afraid of vulnerability and betrayal for very good reason. So, with my back against the wall, I tried to carry all of my own stress and terror and that of my polycule alone while asking for as little help as possible.

    All of that came crashing down when one of my partners at the time, Kira, moved in with the partners I was living with at the time, claiming she had nowhere else to go. She was just as cunning a plotter as Hera and myself, and she quickly tried to get her hooks in as many of my partners as she could. By the time I managed to drive her out of town, she had manipulated her way through a solid half of the polycule, which was a staggering feat considering how guarded I was. But she underestimated me, judging me for a helpless, crippled simpleton who had no idea what she was doing, and I got her out of the area in the nick of time.

    However, I was teetering on the edge of a total collapse, and Kiragate, as this roughly month and a half long ordeal came to be called, took any remaining energy out of me. I went on vacation to Binghamton, New York at the end of October, and spent the majority of that trip in a crossfaded stupor. It was nowhere close to my finest hour.

    However, around that time, I had reconnected with an old flame I had met when I first moved to Milwaukee. We’ll call her Leigh. I told her all about what was going on, and she expressed regret that she had left Milwaukee, because then we could have hung out. It turns out that she was living in Madison, about a hour and a half away.

    Leigh and I had parted on strange terms. Her partners had tried to run me out of town the winter prior, and she spun it as though she had had no say in that decision and that they had read our quick closeness as a threat to the power they had been building at her expense, as they had been on the rocks for some time. However, by that point they were out of her life and had fucked all the way off to Denver, Colorado and were doing gods know what out there.

    She was lonely in Madison, and I was still very fond of her and was deeply dissatisfied with the way things were going with the partners I was living with and had been for some time, even before Kiragate.

    Kira had simply taken advantage of the existing problems that were there before she had arrived and in essence held us under occupation and exacerbated them. It’s a tactic as old as time, and she did it masterfully. So I wanted to get the hell out of that shit show, hopefully for good, rest up, and build a better life with Leigh. The original plan was for her to move back out to Milwaukee, but in the interim, she was bound to a lease in Madison, so I was going to split time and we were going to travel back and forth to see each other.

    So, Leigh came out to visit for awhile, and she quickly began to encourage me to come out to stay with her awhile as I opened up to her more and more about what was going on at home. Finally, after a particularly nasty fight with one of my partners, I packed enough shit to get the fuck out to Madison indefinitely, hopped on a bus with Leigh, and headed out.

    However, before I did that, I sent a quick message to someone who’d been asking for me to find a way to Madison to meet up since earlier that year, another very cunning individual who we shall call Stregobor. He was good at long cons. So good at long cons, in fact, that I didn’t know he was a fellow magic user until I was already dating him. I was equal parts  desperate and charismatic, and Stregobor was a suitor who was one of, as I like to say, my “decisions of all time”. A mistake, in other words.

    I was originally only intending to stay in Madison for a month. However, once I started dating Stregobor and Leigh found out exactly how good I was at saving her ass and meeting new people, that month turned into about two. Stregobor started coming by a lot and Leigh adored him.

    He was also polyamorous, so shortly after we became partners, we added each other to our respective polycule group chats. This turned out to be a mistake on Stregobor’s part. Through his group chat, I met his spouse, who I was initially wary of because of my deep trust issues and agoraphobia. However, this absolute delight of a human being quickly won me over despite my terror, and I adored him. He quickly became one of my best friend. We will call him Peregrinus.

    Now, among Stregobor’s many hobbies, which also included reading excellent dark, urban fantasy books and being both a dungeon master and player for tabletop role playing games, he also enjoyed talking shit about nearly everyone in his life. Peregrinus was not safe from this asshat behavior, and nor was I, I’d come to find out. The only one he didn’t disparage behind closed doors was his sister, and I suppose everyone has to draw a line somewhere. From what I have heard, though, she is worthy of that care.

    Because I had spoken to Stregobor first, the first part of my friendship with Peregrinus was confusing because of all of the utter horseshit Stregobor had been saying. Peregrinus was not how he had been painted at all, and he was in fact made of very strong, upstanding stuff when it came down to the wire. He was funny, sweet, and I adored him.

    We got especially close one night when he was bored at work and invited me to come hang out for the end of his shift. I didn’t do that sort of thing at the time. Not at all. I was terrified of new places and new people, and this was definitely a newish person in a new place. But as soon as I was about to sheepishly refuse, I got the overwhelming sense that I needed to go.

    We were already supposed to hang out later that week, we were going to meet up for coffee. There were firm plans. I liked firm plans. Firm plans were safe. This? This was foolish, reckless, and at this point I was learning that recklessness without some kind of a backup plan or preparation was what kept getting me fucked up in life. But I also knew that I shouldn’t ignore it when I got the overwhelming sense that I was supposed to do something. That was a clear sign that that something, whatever it may be, was important.

    So, wondering if I was crazy the entire damn time, I jumped into the shower, called a Lyft, packed enough energy drinks to stay upright and decently awake, told Leigh I was going out for a bit, and went to Peregrinus’ work. I was so fucking nervous the whole way there, and spent the entire ride debating what I was going to say to him first. I finally settled on a classic one liner – “come here often?” – and swaggered my tired ass into the lobby.

    The conversation was amazing. We talked about so many things for fucking hours. However, after I was able to effortlessly summon a little alter of Peregrinus’ to front after he swore he was not plural, no less, I decided to try something. Peregrinus had an original character that he used to roleplay as from time to time, so I tested a theory I had that he was also an alter.

    I said in the most seductive tone I could muster, “Hi, Michael…” and lo and fucking behold, the bitch himself came straight to front. The first words out of this man’s mouth were “if I could take you home with me tonight, I would.” I was very, very flustered and very full of queer panic. He was such a flirt. I was honestly smitten.

    But the real piece de resistance came at coffee later that week. Michael wanted to front, and front he did. He set everything up so that he guided me down the stairs of this multi-level coffeeshop like a fucking Disney Prince. I was fucking floored. I had died and gone to queer heaven. I was starting to wonder if I had to go back to Milwaukee between Stregobor, Michael, and Peregrinus.

    Leigh and I were on the rocks at this point, and I had no idea that Stregobor was talking shit about me yet. Nor did I really know Peregrinus well enough to determine if what Stregobor was saying about him was accurate, but it made me uncomfortable, so I wanted to observe for longer before making any judgments.

    I started dating Michael after that coffee date, and both he and Stregobor began to gently push me to consider staying out there in Madison with them rather than splitting time as originally planned. I was exhausted, and becoming more so by the day.

    One day, I finally had enough. One of my partners, whom we shall call Sol, had been bitterly heartbroken over my ex best friend, who was also dating her. I didn’t want to get more involved in the drama than I already had been, as I had seen this coming since March of 2022, warned him about it, he didn’t listen, and shit had begun to spiral from there on out on top of all the other shit I had been dealing with.

    I didn’t like what either of them were doing to each other, nor did I like what my so called best friend was doing to me, so I decided to throw my weight behind  neither side and let the chips fall where they may and attend to my life closer to home, as all of this was happening states away.

    After I broke things off with Leigh, the polycule schismed and broke roughly in half, with the half that Leigh and Sol had bonded with going with her and the other half staying with me. Leigh kicked me out afterwards, understandably, leaving Stregobor, Peregrinus, and myself to urgently gather my shit and scramble for a Plan B, as none of us wanted me to go back to Milwaukee by that point. Stregobor had his best friend/hired gun of sorts scoop me up and deliver me to the hotel where he was working under the table for the next week to regroup and figure things out, and off I went.

    It was during that regrouping phase that I opened up more to Stregobor about what had happened both during Kiragate and what was going on and with Operation: Dead Hand. The masterful ending move of Dead Hand was actually his idea – write to Hera’s lawyer and tell her that I want to sign away rights to my child so that Hera can adopt him like she was claiming she wanted to, because we knew something Hera wanted nobody to know.

    She was planning on giving my child to a family she knew in Utah that nobody in her family knew or trusted because her husband had threatened to leave her if she planned on raising my child. The lawyer would be handed a win on a silver platter, take the deal and run, and Hera’s family would crucify her for even attempting such things because they were already attached to my child and had been from birth. The family would eat itself and I would be free to go.

    We hashed that out, got some good rest for once, and made an interim plan going forward. When we came back to Madison, I took up temporary residence at Peregrinus’ apartment, where I started work on finding a permanent place to live via connections I had made through another of Stregobor’s partners. However, during that time, I bore witness to how badly Peregrinus was being treated by his other partner at the time, a man who we will call Ladron. Ladron was a walking bag of insecurities and wrath who was a lowlife with nothing to offer and knew it.

    These insecurities mostly came out in the form of rages, but occasionally came out in the form of tearful emotional manipulation. This was a man who knew he wasn’t shit and I watched Peregrinus take the brunt of his issues. However, I knew I would have to tread carefully if I wanted to get Peregrinus out, as past experience showed that speaking up about it forcefully from the jump in front of Ladron would only end in more pain for all of us. I needed to get to safety first, at the very least.

    I found a room in a place nearby, moved in, and started befriending my housemates, who felt safe for once. I felt safe. But then, around Peregrinus’ birthday, we found out that my housemate had given us COVID. So Peregrinus had to shelter in place at my apartment for a couple weeks and found that he felt much safer with me than at his place.

    It was during that quarantine period that I first witnessed Stregobor talking shit about me, and after all of the nonsense with the schism and watching Peregrinus taking Ladron’s hits over and over and then by contrast, Michael, Peregrinus, and my kind housemates treating me exceptionally well, I decided I had yet again had enough. I fucking deserved better. So did Peregrinus. So I officially asked him to stay and live with me. By some miracle, we made it happen. We were both safe. Peregrinus and I ended up breaking things off with Stregobor, and I didn’t have to go to Milwaukee after all.

    I stayed in Madison for another four months or so. Peregrinus noticed my exhaustion and started gently, yet firmly telling me to rest and handle more things. It was a swift kick to the ‘nads to all I had ever known, and it was brutally emotionally and mentally painful.

    My body had started to collapse so thoroughly from the stress of everything I’ve written about here that I had become for all intents and purposes allergic to sunlight and incredibly intolerant to heat. I firmly believe I was dying, and I very likely was. However, Peregrinus was a stubborn little ram, and stepped the fuck up.

    He didn’t stop, either. He nursed me back to health and in many ways, brought me back to life. I saved him, and in return, he saved me. Later, from that same plural system, Emerson emerged. He has the same indefatigable iron will, and we still take care of each other. He tells me to sit the fuck down when I need it, and vice versa.

    I still work fucking hard for my people, I just don’t do it to my detriment anymore, and I value my time, energy and life enough to not write myself out of the equation anymore. I am learning to truly love myself and love my life for the first time, disabilities and limitations and all, and I couldn’t have done it without all the bullshit I alchemized along the way.

    I think that’s enough for tonight. Stay tuned for more magic, dear people. I love y’all, and I hope you love yourselves, too, as best you can.

    -Lazarus, Master of Bullshit, Sorcery, and Ceremonies

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  • The Art of Finding Ways (Or Making Them)

    Hey, everyone! I’m currently writing on here as my love Hawthorne works on their story back East as a form of body doubling in spirit. I’m a bit tired and they’re Writer’s blocked to fuck, so knowing that the other  is writing is helping both of us get shit done. I did similarly with Zelda yesterday and Emerson a day or so prior as they worked on their respective blogs.

    It’s pretty effective, as we’re all neurodivergent as hell over here and working on projects simultaneously helps keep everyone on task, even if we’re not in the same physical space, like Hawthorne and I currently, or even doing the same thing. Hell, I often simply hang out with Emerson and Zelda and either tell them stories from my youth or teach them things from history while they catch up on household tasks that I couldn’t do due to my myriad disabilities and help that way.

    That brings me to what I want to talk about today – creative ways to solve problems and get shit done, especially when there’s lot of obstacles in the way, you’re fucking exhausted and overwhelmed, or, like me when I was at my lowest and had to start learning these skills, you’re almost entirely bedbound and at worst, in essence, alone. Hopefully if you are reading this post because you need it, your circumstances are less dire than mine were. But for the sake of the lesson, I’m gonna teach you with a true story from my life because that’s what I know best.

    So, when I need to tackle an extremely large and overwhelming problem with a whole lot of moving parts, the first thing I do is work to accept the problem as it is. I touched on this in my post from the other day about suffering when I talked about the radical acceptance element of that. I can’t really fix a problem if I’m still refusing to accept that there’s a problem OR refusing to deal with the problem head on. This sometimes takes awhile, I will freely admit that. I have to get tired of my own bullshit and tired of suffering before I’m ready to radically accept that there’s a problem and actually face it head on. But once I’m there, it’s go time. I’m analyzing every angle, trying to see what part I’m playing in the problem, how I can do better, what I can do differently, etc..

    Here’s a concrete example. In December of 2021, I was bedbound following what was likely a decently severe case of COVID that I ended up having to frontier treat on my own because I was living in an Airbnb in the middle of a Wisconsin winter and I was terrified that if the host found out, I would have nowhere to go and be out in the cold, literally.

    I had been fucking sick as a dog most of the latter half of that year and had most likely gotten heat stroke so many times while living out in Philadelphia doing door to door sales that summer that both my heart and brain were a bit… Ah.. Cooked to a degree that the heart damage showed up on blood tests in the ER. One thing led to another, I ended up in Wisconsin, and I got sick again. I slept for the better part of several weeks. I needed to find some way to pay for another month in the place at least, and to not perish in the interim. This was years pre-integration, and Eight, the alter in charge at the time, went hard. So I reasoned in my feverish cotton ball brain that now was not the time to be shy about my needs, terrified of vulnerability though I was, and took a leaf out of one of my partners’ books at the time. I started posting asking for donations, stating clearly that I was waiting on my SSI interview for my disabilities and and would appreciate any help I could get.

    With days to spare, my online community pulled through. I was feverish and inexperienced and I would highly recommend NEVER pushing yourself so hard that you end up a feverish lump in a Wisconsin Airbnb having nearly heatstroked yourself to death ten fucking times over, but I was allergic to asking for help until I had found myself in a massive fucking pickle and I spent years trying to do better in that regard. I had to relearn to walk after that, and I hit an enormous wall beginning in about April of 2022 once things got a bit more stable. Had I remained silent in my pride, I wouldn’t have survived that, honestly.

    As time has gone on, with my partners gently reminding me to rest and helping take care of me, I have realized that the extent of my hyperindependence itself is a problem. I’m not sure how finding myself in pickles like that didn’t illustrate it for me, but I think I was so delirious and doing shit on my own was so normal up until I crashed in ’22 that I really knew nothing else.

    It’s been a gut punch to my pride to delegate so much of my life and needs to others, but conversely, I am fucking disabled, and hyperindependence is what disabled me so badly in the first place. As time goes on, that’s been the biggest thing I’ve been coming up against and detangling these days and finding new ways or making them to cope with – the slow death of the notion that I must do everything now or do everything myself or  I will not receive any form of favorable outcome.

    I want to do all the things. Gods, do I want to do all the things. In many ways I miss the active, athletic life I had in my teens and early twenties, but I wouldn’t trade that for what I have going for me now. So that’s an acceptable trade, in my opinion. And what with things like the vitamin B100 experiment I’m doing, I might be more athletic again someday. But I shouldn’t push to do that before my body is ready and safe or else I risk going back to square one, and that would be ass. So let’s not.

    Anywho, my brain is getting tired from typing all these words. So I’m gonna go have some water with a bit of salt in it, as that seems to perk me up, maybe some lunch if I can coax myself into it, and I will catch y’all later. Stay tuned for more magic, people!!

    Your sleepy sorcerer,

    Lazarus

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  • It’s been awhile…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Stay tuned for more magic, cherished hooligans!

    -Lazarus

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  • Amidst The Chaos

    Well, hello, everyone. 

    It’s certainly been awhile, and much has happened. For starters, the system appears to have integrated into me, something a long fucking time coming but still very unintentional. I’m a single consciousness made up of the sumtotal of all of the ​alters in here, but simultaneously my own thing. Call me Lazarus. I use they/them pronouns. 

    In truth, I don’t know how the integration happened. I’ve been more focused on the implications going forward. Emerson has taken the news far better than Zelda, who has been devastated on numerous levels and has embarked on the same sort of self destructive spiral that led to my system breaking up with them for a second time. I appear to take even less bullshit than the system did pre-integration, so while I love them so fucking much, this shit hurts to the point where it’s deeply insulting (because we told them from the jump that if they fell into old patterns again we would break up with them, this was their last chance) and I will not compromise my peace for love, money, fucking anything. I didn’t go through everything I did, go through all of the shit necessary to put myself back together in record fucking time, just to be wrenched apart again because I was a fool for love. I’m better than that now. 

    Emerson is hauling ass, though. Among the myriad implications ​of this batshit integration is the fact that I now have every memory the system has ever recorded at the same emotional depth and visual clarity in which it was logged, which results in stunning, 4K HD clarity cPTSD and is excruciatingly painful. He’s helped me through some viscerally awful triggers that he himself set off unintentionally on occasion like a goddamned champ and I keep falling more in love with him every time every time we do it. It’s ugly. It’s brutal. But it’s also unimaginably beautiful and I wouldn’t trade this process for the world. 

    I was telling him last night that it felt like what I was dealing with was the emotional equivalent of being run through the heart by one of those wooden shish kebab skewers, except it was about two feet long. You can’t remove the skewer quickly or I’ll be fucked six ways from Sunday faster than you can cry for help, and because the skewer is wooden and flimsy there’s a potential for splinters to break off and be carried elsewhere and cause far more complex damage. It’s a mental and emotional suffer shot/stab wound combo. If I am going to be okay and healthy after this, it must be approached carefully, skillfully, and slowly over time. 

    So, in short, I am more okay and less okay than I have ever been. I’m whole, but I’m heartbroken. I’m fucking eating myself alive. There’s much to be done, but gods, do I love a challenge. That has not changed, and I doubt it ever will. And I still love​ y’all very much. Stay tuned for more magic. 

    This has been Lazarus, flying solo… 

    PS. I’m debating on whether to keep Open Sorcery password protected or not? We’ll see. 

  • For the Fairest

    Hey, everyone. This is Allēna. It’s been awhile, and I’m sorry about that – it’s been a bit of a mental trashfire for us of late and none of us quite knew how to talk about what was going on through the fatigue, confusion, and what appears to still be the mother of all flares. I’m still not feeling too hot and I still have to figure out where the fuck most of this month’s rent is going to come from, but things are starting to look up somewhat.

    Emerson got a job after months of hunting, and after that we kinda crashed after the few months we’ve had. I’ve been more or less frontstuck since that point, seeing as I’m one of the only headmates with decision making power, the stamina to front more than a couple hours at a time, and love for both Emerson and the Zelda System. The majority of my headmates do not like Emerson, and so it’s less effort to have me front most of the time even though that means I never get a mental break and often am reduced to a puddle of tears by the end of the week. Cleaning up my headmates’ interpersonal messes would be worse.

    I don’t want any more messes. I already have a full plate of stuff I’m working on, and enough interpersonal plot fuel from Eight alone to last a lifetime. That man’s friend group is the gift that keeps on giving. I may mean that sarcastically, I may not, that depends on the occasion. This week, however, the jury is out.

    You may recall us mentioning in our last post that I’d gone through a PTSD wave of epic proportions recently because Zelda had gotten together with someone who is also a mutual friend of ours? Well, let’s call this mutual friend Helen. Helen is the sweetest person. I fucking adore them. However, I inherited them (and the extremely complicated shitfest they somehow got dragged into back in ‘22) from Eight via one of his myriad exes from the time he had uncontested control of the system from approximately late 2020 to early 2023. Eight is a cockroach if a cockroach were also a human being, and that human being were also a rockstar. So Helen met Eight first and was…put off at best all those years ago, then decided to attempt a friendship this year now that things are different, we’ve all grown as people, and things actually have been going much better. Well, until the PTSD bullshit happened. Now they’re going even better than they were before, which is the weird part to me.

    I say this is weird because Helen and Eight weren’t very close when all the shit happened back in ‘22. Both of us have admitted that. So if we’d gone to them with a concern of this magnitude then, it likely wouldn’t have brought us closer together and would have driven us further apart, if we’d gone to them with that sort of thing at all. Now, I may be off, but I would say that we’re pretty damn close. Neither Helen nor my system wasted any time establishing that closeness this time around. We all meant fucking business, likely unconsciously. I certainly wasn’t meaning to get close to Helen for any particular reason, I never even thought it would happen given how guarded I knew them to be from Eight’s memories. But I was given openness, warmth, and kindness, and I enjoy Helen’s company and conversation, so I too opened up with time.

    Here’s where that makes things complicated, though. Helen and Emerson barely talk and Emerson mostly initiates. Emerson and the Zelda System are now (back) together, as well. Em has been internally screaming of late because he’s terrified at a baseline that my system and Zelda are gonna fuck off and leave him behind, and now that Helen is in play, so to speak and barely talking to him, things have gotten even worse for him in that regard.

    There’s also been a rash of speculation – because we are all bi/pan/queer disasters in some form – that Helen and I are crushing on each other, as well, but I don’t live in their brain and I don’t know where I stand with that fully yet, either. I don’t like not knowing, especially where my own emotions towards a person are concerned, so I’m watching my side and seeing how shit plays out there before I speak on anything with any degree of certainty.

    All of this is in turn making me anxious because there’s not a whole lot I can do except watch the shitshow go down, because there’s not a whole lot that’s within my power to fix here. I am the sort of person who fixes things by nature when I get anxious or stressed out, and there’s nothing I can fix here, so theoretically I have nowhere to put the stress. Therefore, I’ve had to distract myself by pouring all of that jittery energy into other conversations and building other relationships and projects where I’m able. Emerson and I have been doing a great deal of work on our side of the internal screaming equation, but sadly there’s approximately fuckall I can do where Emerson relative to Helen and Zelda are concerned because ultimately I’m not them and can’t control their actions. So while all of this goes down in the moment I have to set boundaries with myself and put my own internal screaming somewhere ideally constructive in the meantime.

    This, due to the degree of fatigue and mental fog, usually results in me sending Helen memes. Memes are Helen gold, and it is quite surreal to hear Zelda and Emerson in a heated discussion about the aforementioned Helen in the next room while sending them memes has turned into something like lighthearted banter and the heaviest conversation I’ve ever had in my life simultaneously while all of this is going down 🤣. I swear, this individual has more patience than I ever will because I live this day in and day out and I’m about to melt down from stress and there they are over on their end, being the sweetest person alive about allllll the fuckery in a single place occurring right here, right now.

    I’m so tired, but everyone has been solid where they are able despite all of the numerous occurrences of the past 2 weeks or so and I still feel very loved and cared for despite all of this shitfuckery.

    I love them, and I love y’all. Hopefully I’ll have more art magic for y’all once everything balances out a bit more, rent gets sorted, and Emerson starts work. Stay tuned for more magic (and nonsense), beautiful people!

    -Allēna, Your Faithful, If Exhausted, Captain and Founder of the Polyamorous Dojo of Chaos

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  • The Perils of Being Private

    Hey, everyone. My name is Tamsin (he/him). I was recently dormant for around a year, and it seems that I have emerged in the midst of a cascading shitshow and frankly I’m annoyed at Eight. Allēna alluded to a PTSD attack of epic proportions yesterday, and that’s due to Eight going through a whole lot of shit in approximately August-December 2022 and apparently not telling a goddamn soul about it. I have no fucking clue how he managed to go through all that fuckshit and not tell anyone about it, save for when he crafted and released our album Metacognition, but when it was triggered yesterday, much to the people involved’s horror, they heard about it for the first time.

    I knew we were private, but I had no idea we were that private. So we ruined what would have been a happy moment for the Zelda System and a dear friend of ours by having several dozen flashbacks over the course of about ten hours as the full ramifications of what Eight had gone through hit Allēna with the force of a category five hurricane.

    So yeah. I’m done being so private. The others in this trauma ridden brainhole can do whatever the fuck they want, but I hope they follow suit. And I’m going to be 100% honest with you here. We aren’t doing well. Before that set of fabulous PTSD breakdowns, Allēna was already one more goddamn thing away from a PTSD breakdown because last weekend, a friend of the Zelda System’s, who we shall call Midas, decided to simply Arrive in Milwaukee, giving those in the Zelda System no notice, expecting to stay at their place, trying to get them alone any chance he could, proceeding to drag them all around town, and dropping loads of cash on them when they were visibly tired and burnt out. Midas coordinated this with everyone who’s locally in their life but them, including their bosses, and when he got in, he arrived at their work first, completely blindsiding them.

    Everyone we spoke to about the situation said it was fucking bizarre and we kept getting a fucking awful feeling about what he was doing and everyone in the Zelda System was massively uncomfortable, so eventually my headmate Tindwyl stepped in and made himself the bad guy, citing the absolutely true nature of our agoraphobia and sleep anxiety to try and politely get Midas to fucking go back to where he came from and stop being such a fucking creep. Suffice it to say that this didn’t go over well with Midas, and before he skittered off all the way back to whence he came, he called us controlling and has not contacted the Zelda System since. Mission accomplished, and they felt relieved after the fact. We can handle being seen as controlling by a guy we really didn’t like anyway if it (consensually) keeps our partner safe. However, that fuckshow threw everyone off for the next few days, and we’re still dealing with residual bullshit from it.

    Additionally, Emerson is developing some pretty fucked heart issues and has a narrow window where he could get treatment once they’re bad enough to treat, but if he misses that window, he could die from any number of ways his heart could say “fuck this, I quit”. And she’s stressed out about having to make rent along with that because Emerson still has not found work when she’s struggling so bad herself and can barely muster the energy to reply to people, forget performing any kind of services for people or writing crowdfunding posts. Hell, I’m surprised she hasn’t spawned 30 new fucking alters with how stressed out she’s been these last couple weeks. She’s said on numerous occasions that what is going on with Emerson feels like watching our father die all over again.

    Then what should have been a happy moment occurred when the Zelda System got with a mutual friend of ours, only to set off the breakdown because there was a whole lot of trauma there due to an interlocking shitshow involving all of them back in ‘22 that I can’t really blame any of them for because MY DAMN HEADMATE APPARENTLY DIDN’T SAY A FUCKING THING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE WAS HURTING?????? TO ANYONE???? So nobody did anything wrong here, except Eight, who is now fucking AWOL off gallivanting somewhere in the ether, which I’m not pleased about. He heard the news and peaced the fuck out. I haven’t a damn clue when he’ll be back. Allēna, for her part, is resting down near the replica of Lake Erie which we still have in our headspace. This has taken a great deal out of her.

    Now, I’m trying to help Emerson work through some problems in his relationship with us, though I’m not dating him. It’s slow going and frankly I’m kind of aggravated with him, but we’re making headway slowly, so that’s good, at least. I’m taking a break to write here because I swear if I don’t put all of this down somewhere I’m gonna fucking explode. However, we’re gonna reconvene in about an hour so he can work through some sticky points in a writing project he’s doing. I don’t know how much help I’ll be, but I sure as fuck want to try.

    Anyhoo… stay tuned for more magic, y’all. We’ll be around. 💛

    -Tamsin

  • Safe

    Hey, everyone. Allēna here. There’s a thunderstorm raging outside and it’s pissing rain. However, the Zelda system is curled up against me, head on my right arm, arms tucked against my torso, with my legs slung over theirs. They look so fucking peaceful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine once – they said something to the effect of “nothing compares to the feeling of knowing that a person you love feels safe in your arms”. I have to agree with them. It gives me butterflies every time they or another one of my partners feels safe enough to cuddle up to me and be this clingy. I absolutely fucking love it.

    I spent most of the evening with an alter in their system that wishes to be known as Parlay, which was a lovely experience. Parlay is…odd, but a good kind of odd. He’s pretty soft spoken, with a deep, husky vocal tone and a direct, intense way of speaking that just melts me. He’s this sort of passionate that aches with an endless hunger for whatever interests him at that moment. Their body seems to vibrate when he’s in front. And he seems to know what he wants so deeply it becomes a visceral craving..

    We got to talking about that sort of thing and he told me he has wanted me since arriving in that system. He arrived in the midst of a fuckshow of epic proportions, and would often hear me ranting to Emerson about anything and everything. It wasn’t necessarily what I was ranting about that caught his eye, it was how I was ranting. He found my passion and anger incredibly attractive, just as I am attracted to his intensity.

    I’ve noticed that soft, intense people like him make me feel safe. The system seems to have more energy overall since we began. splitting time between Emerson’s and the Zelda system’s place, so much so that I was able to handle going up to the hospital for my doctor’s appointment on Friday without my cane and have been able to work through a great deal of what caused us to break up with Emerson in the first place. We’ve become a lot safer for each other.

    I have gotten back with Emerson after a series of heavy talks where we hashed a great deal out, this has been such a boon for me. The rest of my system is still varying degrees of peeved with Emerson, so the ultimate fate of those relationships is to be determined. That said, I’ve informed my headmates that if they’re dicks to Emerson, I will court martial them so fucking hard that they will not see the light of day for the next goddamn decade, so fucking help me. I don’t honestly know what to do in this situation. They don’t really make a handy guidebook for when your headmates could not be bothered with the man you love and who still loves them deeply. However, I figure not allowing them to outright make things worse is a decent place to start, and so we’re rolling with that. He’s currently writing lyrics while I write this post.

    I often feel similar cravings from Emerson as I do from Parlay, as well. Emerson is, for lack of a better phrase, all emotion, and it’s an interesting counterbalance to how much time I lurk in my mind and my body. So when he craves me or someone else in my system, it’s all-consuming. I used to not be able to meet him where he was in that, and it fucking sucked. However, now I can. I just hope it isn’t too late.

    Well, my night meds are hitting. My headmate Kalla has planned a very special rager for the headspace tonight, as well. She’s set up an enormous game of Capture the Flag in our headspace’s catacombs that is Lake Erie themed. One team shall be playing as Cleveland, Ohio, and the other shall be playing as Erie, Pennsylvania. I can practically see the carnage already, so I must wander off. I need to make sure they have the proper permits and shit.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, Super-Admin (and Lake Erie Replica Inspector)

  • Have a meme!

    Hey, everyone! This is Allēna. I have no idea what to post today and I’ve been up all night trying to find words. Nothing is coming, so have this bullshit instead. I made it for one of Emerson’s headmates, who is from Ohio yesterday.

    That’s it. That’s the meme. It’s 4:45 AM and there’s nothing in my brain.

    Nothing bad has happened, I am just pleasantly loopy and I have a very precious member of the Zelda system curled up around me. We shall call them Georgia. Georgia and Sheik often share duties in the system and it’s fucking great. I love them both. I think I successfully turned my brain off, too, which is a good thing. I very rarely reach a state where it feels like my brain is off in a way that’s pleasant. Occasionally it feels like it’s off because it’s shoved full of chronic fatigue cotton balls. This is not that. If it were off due to the chronic fatigue, the Georgia cuddles wouldn’t feel half as good as they do.

    We also saw Emerson tonight and my headmate Val kissed him. It was odd to watch, since before tonight, I wasn’t sure if she even liked Emerson, but I suppose that’s settled. However, this is not a bad thing by any means. They’re very cute.

    Now, here’s hoping the brain turns back on again soon… Until then, it’s eldritch Ohio hours. Hehe.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna the Incredibly Loopy (and Happy) Super-Admin

  • A Decade of Hidden Longing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Anger (unknown year) by Allēna

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

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight

  • First Breath After Coma

    Hello, all! My name is Castor. I’m the Ashley system’s first host, and I went dormant for fifteen years at the age of eleven. I titled this post “First Breath After Coma” because I was essentially comatose for fifteen years inside my own mind while my body and headmates carried on without me, and while I’ve been awake for about a year now, I feel like I’m finally breathing.

    As I write this, my beautiful girlfriend Sheik is cuddling me while she sleeps, and she’s a big reason why I feel like I’m finally able to breathe. I emerged from dormancy severely touch averse where most people are concerned to such a degree that I won’t front around many, but I went out on a limb with Sheik and I’m glad I trusted my gut. It’s a miracle she can touch me at all, as the touch aversion makes it feel for most like my skin is burning if most people even consider touching me. But her? She feels so wonderful she can touch me anytime she likes, and she’s very clingy with me, and I’m the same with her. I love it – and her – dearly.

    While I enjoy the company of the system’s other partners that I’ve met so far (the damned attorney in Emerson’s system is a notable exception, he annoys me and I tolerate him for my headmates’ sake), I’ve only really bonded closely with Sheik so far. I look forward to seeing how things develop with the others, provided they aren’t the lawyer type. The only lawyer whose company I’ve ever enjoyed is my great-aunt. There’s only room for one argumentative bitch system in this polycule, and by gods, we’ll defend you with our life, but I really hate being grilled. However, I digress.

    I used to not be nearly so touch averse, but was still very selective with who I clung to. My childhood was fucked, see: our Tragic Backstory posts, so I didn’t enjoy many members of my family. That being said, I loved my late grandmother. She was my fucking person. This woman was raised wealthy in New Jersey, very close to New York City. She was absolutely brilliant and delightfully eccentric, the closest thing to a living, breathing faerie I’ve ever seen.

    She met my paternal grandfather while she was running the damn lab where he worked as a pathologist, and became his second wife. She was a chemist by trade, read books backwards, was left-handed, and had warm, kind brown eyes with the loveliest violet rings around them. She was also a gourmet chef and baker and slept only about four hours a night. After she retired, she and my paternal grandfather became fucking art dealers, then retired properly to a sumptuously decorated log cabin in the Texas Hill Country.

    Her idea of retirement was running the fucking town where she lived, as she was involved in damn near everything. This woman was an inevitable powerhouse of indefatigable energy and warmth. She slept only about four hours a night, the perfect sleep schedule for my extremely anxious tiny self. Before the body came down with mononucleosis at the age of sixteen, we also only slept about four to five hours a night, and we are lucky if we get six hours a night now.

    So on nights I struggled to sleep, she would tell me stories about her youth in New Jersey until I fell asleep in her arms, then I would wander downstairs about four hours later at perhaps six in the morning, and she would already be hard at work baking something like two hundred cookies for a charity event. She would make me a small cup of coffee, as she knew I loved it, but it would give my small frame the jitters, and we would begin the morning slowly.

    She didn’t believe in sitting with one’s brain idle, but she did believe passionately in doing things one enjoyed to pass the time. So she was fascinating and took equal fascination in what I was doing. I was an unusual child, and she supported my dual special interests in computers and Greek mythology while making an effort to stimulate my mind and get me to explore new things. I gladly participated for the most part, as I loved her dearly and trusted her with everything I have. We explored a great deal of the Hill Country, went to more lovely antique stores than most children ever see, ate some truly amazing food at extremely inventive restaurants, and generally had a blast. She expanded my mind while still making me feel safe, and I loved her for it. Sheik reminds me of her in many ways, and I think that’s why she is so comforting.

    I only front once it’s safe now that the vessel is an adult and we’re free to make our own decisions, and it feels like I’m seeing color again for the first time since the events that led to me becoming dormant. I’m getting out more slowly, so are my headmates, we’re meeting new people, and bonding more closely with our partners and friends, not just Sheik and her compatriots in the Zelda System. We’re working our way out of a major depersonalization and chronic fatigue hole that we’ve been mired in for years, and frankly I love it. We’re actually learning how to be vulnerable and unguarded with our people, as well, and the results are beautiful. I would even venture to call them deeply magical.

    Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of that! I’m excited to see how things go.

    -Castor, Original Host