Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Sorry for going fucking dark for the last little while.

Lumine visited this past week, during which time I was so goddamned stressed my body came inches from basically falling apart. It wasn’t his fault at all, and he was in fact a most excellent baby. If anyone is to blame, it’s Zelda for dropping the ball when it came to logistics and stressing Emerson and myself out so goddamn badly it started to take a physical toll on both of us. I ended up getting everything set up for Lumine’s arrival and picking him up from the train station pretty much single-handedly because if I hadn’t, he would have been marooned there for a couple hours at the very least, which would not have been Emerson’s fault, he had to work and could not escape early.

Emerson and Lumine bonded quite well, and Lumine actually bonded so well with Zelda’s legendarily shy and skittish cat and made me happy stim so hard in the process that he got an invitation to move up here once more shit shakes out on all of our ends, so that’s absolutely and legitimately lovely.

That leaves ongoing drama with Zelda, which sent me into a chronic pain flare across three body systems from which I am still recovering and now I have a chest cold to boot. I appear to have gotten so damn stressed that I started my menstrual cycle a week early, which most likely knocked out my immune system, allowing for this shit to happen. Oh, and Lumine is fucking sick, as well. I’m fucking sick of the interpersonal stress, and I’m sick and tired of it making me sick and tired.

So, I’ve essentially dropped my weight where a lot of shit is concerned and have stuck myself in a lump of blankets to sleep off this chest cold most of the time. Sleep has always been my favorite alibi when I don’t want to get involved in interpersonal nonsense, as most of my close people know that my sleep is sacrosanct and I do not get much of it.

When I haven’t been asleep, I have been watching Netflix, eating delicious food that Emerson made, or calling and hanging out with people that don’t stress me the fuck out. In other words, I am pretty intentionally being fucking useless to people who are causing a great deal of chronic stress because I quite simply do not have the energy to deal with this shit anymore. Like… I am so drained by this shit that my body will just make me pass the fuck out rather than deal with it. I quite literally physically can’t, and I’m going with my body’s cues here.

Hell yeah for becoming ungovernable and unusable.

Sometimes, though, my brain is tired and my body isn’t. That’s when I just shut my eyes for a bit and chill and let my brain rest and wander for a minute away from my phone or whatever the hell I’ve been doing that’s been making me so tired. It helps, and whenever I regain the capacity to get back to the task at hand, I get back to it.

During one of those brain naps, I got the idea for what could turn into my sixteenth album once my executive dysfunction releases its hold on me. I haven’t been able to play my instruments or record anything for awhile due to being so damn tired and stressed, but I hope I’ll eventually get back to it by prioritizing energizing people and things. I always do. Sometimes I just need a brain nap. Or an actual nap.

I’ve also discovered that watching Netflix helps get my brain in order when I want or need to spend long periods of time alone by acting as a sort of other presence or presences in the room so that it’s easier to both keep track of time (something I don’t have a concrete sense of without an anchor, like music or TV) and a semblance of human company without the pressure to engage back.

It’s easier to eat, stay hydrated, and generally take care of myself with shows I enjoy as an external anchor point. And considering that most of my stress is interpersonal, sometimes it’s nice to just…be able to listen, watch, and get invested in shit without having to do something about it, you know?

I also haven’t let myself really get invested in fiction in a long ass time (around a decade or longer) since I tend to get extremely deeply invested in anything I enjoy beyond my own fiction, so it feels wonderful to be a fucking fan of shit again. Emerson got me hooked on a show called The Magicians on a hunch that I would like it, and it’s honestly like what would happen if The Chronicles of Narnia and Doctor Who had a more dark, more fucked up baby than the both of them, and I am unfortunately quite invested in this bloodbath fuckshow. It reminds me a fair bit of my audio drama The Third Prophecy, and so a lot of the dark shit in it doesn’t really bother me, surprisingly. It’s the sort of thing I would write, and I am of the firm belief that real people are far scarier and more fucked up.

If you can handle the extremely dark tomfuckery, I highly recommend it.

Well, dearly beloved hooligans, I am getting tired again, so I must go rest my mind once more. Whee. I love y’all. Stay tuned for more magic ✨