#tragic-backstory — Public Fediverse posts

Well, I had therapy yesterday…

this session actually felt productive.

I’ve been wondering for a long ass time why I write the way that I do. It feels like I’m possessed much of the time. Once I start on a project, I find it very difficult to stop, and if I’m not working on a project, even if there is no specific creative urge, it induces paralyzing anxiety. I feel like I constantly have to be working on something or else I feel like I go (more) insane, start climbing the walls, what have you. I’m a perfectionist about my work, too – if it’s not up to a very high bar that LITERALLY NO ONE ON EARTH is holding me to but myself, I panic and find it very difficult to share it.

I’m also VERY rigid in other areas of my life. I am severely anxious about a lot. I have a damn near pathological need to know as much as possible, especially if it might possibly involve me, no matter how mentally taxing learning all of this information might be day in and day out. I feel like I have to know. Additionally, I feel like I have to be doing something about what I know, lest the doomspirals begin in that way, as well. I hold people to very, very high standards as well because if they fall short, it makes me VERY anxious, like my life could fall apart at any moment, someone could get hurt, etc..

I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. We all have.

I talked with my therapist about much of this yesterday and he said that it sounded like I was describing obsessive-compulsive disorder. Initially he recommended seeing a psychiatrist about it, but I reminded him that due to my trauma with all of that (see: all of my posts about my mother DIYing MKULTRA with psych meds, etc.) and the fact that while it does suck to create this way, writing and creativity is my lifeline. I don’t know what I would do without it, and I am processing a lot of my trauma when I write. So ultimately we determined that that probably wasn’t the best idea since it wasn’t necessarily harming me and in fact doing more good at this point in time.

So, that’s my confession for you all. I quite likely have OCD and it’s the root of much of my creativity, perfectionism, and a whole lot of other shit. It feels less like a death sentence to admit that than I thought it would.

Until tomorrow (or the doomspirals will get me, haha),

-Allēna

#MadStudies #mentalHealth #OCD #processingTrauma #therapy #tragicBackstory

On Hooking ‘Em and Cooking ‘Em (Get Your Minds Out Of The Gutter, You Sinners)

Hello, assembled host. Lazarus here once more with more bullshit for your viewing pleasure. The below prompt from the journaling app Day One looks interesting, so I shall answer it in due time, but before I get into the thick of it, have a fucking meme I cooked up last night that is tangentially related because I said so.

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

Today’s prompt from Day One.

To answer the intriguing question the prompt posed, my answer is both. Why, you may ask? Because I’m an AuDHD gremlin with a fucking brainhole with a working knowledge of world history from my years spent as a tutor who happens to see the future on occasion due to a nifty combination of brain damage, annoyingly supercharged intuition, synesthesia, and neurodivergent pattern recognition. In short, my brain never shuts the fuck up, especially as I continue my inner work and find pockets of my mind that I have repressed for years. I have next to no sense of linear time or object permanence. Can I get a pretty damn accurate sense of who you are within five minutes of meeting you? Absolutely. Do I know where my cell phone is half the time? Oh gods no.

And due to surviving a helluva lot of trauma, having a near perfect autobiographical memory, and being unusually well traveled due to being raised with an ass load of money and being so charismatic I annoy myself, I have many, many stories to tell on top of my knowledge of world history. I call these stories my Lore or my Tragic Backstory interchangeably depending on how I’m feeling that day. As demonstrated by the meme I shared above, people seem to like the stories that come out of my facehole.

So yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about both. Time isn’t linear, anyway, so what the hell? Mentally I’m almost constantly relaxing on a huge plot of land in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania ten years from now, or trying to find various belongings of mine that have disappeared into the fucking ether again. Where are Y’ALL mentally?

Anywho, it’s almost my naptime. Before I go, have more memes and a video of me voice acting for a kitten who I call Sean Connery Nugget with the Zelda System. 🤣

Goodnight, lovely gremlins. Tell me of your many travels in the comments, throw a party, do whatever you want. Just be excellent to each other, that’s all I ask. 💛 Until next time, stay tuned for more magic. – Lazarus

PS. 2011 or so called and it wants you to have this earworm back 🤣

https://open.spotify.com/track/02GjIfCpwttPAikjm5Hwcb?si=P4WU3rDKQSGZinC-AT7cvg

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#alchemist #alchemy #cptsd #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1808 #deconstruction #lore #memes #processingTrauma #prophecies #SeanConnery #SeanConneryNugget #strokeSurvivor #tbi #tragicBackstory #Xavier #Zelda #ZeldaSystem

Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:

What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.

I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.

So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?

Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.

Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.

I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.

In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.

I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.

Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.

And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.

Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.

Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.

I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨

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https://opensorceryy.co/a-journey-to-the-center-of-myself/

#albums #art #audioEngineering #backstory #catharsis #childhood #cptsd #creativity #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2106 #deconstruction #ElectricalAudio #Emerson #Hawthorne #Hera #influences #inspiration #introspection #KenNelson #lore #music #onWriting #passions #polyamory #production #ptsd #ramble #recording #songwriting #spiritualJourney #SteveAlbini #tragicBackstory #whatLightsMeTheFuckUp

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 by some miracle. 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

https://opensorceryy.co/first-breath-after-coma/

#agoraphobia #backstory #CastorSPosts #catharsis #childhood #chronicFatigue #chronicIllness #depersonalization #depression #dissociativeIdentityDisorder #Emerson #healing #introspection #lore #meditation #paternalGrandmother #polyamory #recovery #rest #Sheik #socializingAsADisabledPerson #texas #tragicBackstory #Zelda

Hey, everyone. Allēna here. This post will be a heavy one, but I want to write it even though I know it’s gonna hurt. I’ve spent years praised for my emotional strength and resilience when all I wanted was to be safe. Lately I’ve been deep in contemplation about that very thing and in conversation with several people about this and related issues myself and my system have been having. Then I came across this Thread and wanted to answer the question Nate poses for you so that you can see the true, extremely heavy cost of resilience and “strength” as most people define it. Don’t get me wrong, healing has been costly, too. But trying to be hard and guarded costs far more than healing ever has.

My Headmates and I Have Spoken About Some Of The Things That Happened To Us And How We Got Through Them, But What Did We Lose In The Process? Trust, for One.

The first thing that comes to mind is the ability to trust. System wide, we struggle to trust and are actually diagnosed agoraphobes as of 2021. It’s complete and utter hell. Our trauma taught us that we are the only ones that we can truly rely on at the end of the day, and that everyone has a price. Some people’s prices are simply higher than others. Everyone will fail us eventually in some way. After twenty some odd years of that horseshit, while we care about people deeply and want to connect with them, we don’t truly remember how to, at least not without soul-deep fear. That strength, that mysterious nature you supposedly see in us is visceral terror. We ache to connect with people, we love them, but often can’t because the fear is so exhausting that we get too tired to even leave the house. Talk about a fucking heavy cost. Some people have managed to prove these beliefs wrong, but it’s an uphill battle for everyone involved and we would give anything for the ability to trust back.

We Also Lost The Little Health We Had Left

Relatedly, due to repeated betrayals and us being too afraid to ask for help, we stressed the body out to the point of chronic illness and severe fatigue. We’ve gotten better at firing ourselves as we’ve healed, but by that point, the damage was already long done. We should have asked for help a long time ago, and we should have had people who made it safe to ask. But we didn’t, so we internalized the idea that the only way we would ever get anything for ourselves in this world was if we got it done on our own without help. That belief and the subsequent actions we took made us very, very sick. This has turned into an ugly, compounding downward spiral we’re still trying to work out way out of gently years later that I wouldn’t wish on damn near anyone. What doesn’t kill you does not, in fact, make you stronger. Ultimately, it tends to make you wish it had finished the fucking job and give you a fuck ton to mourn in therapy.

It Has As Also Cost Us Relationships And Opportunities

Due to the agoraphobia and exhaustion, we’ve had to back out of a lot that we truly didn’t want leave behind. It sidelines us a lot. We have to rest a great deal and has forced us to be nocturnal because we’ve developed a medical mystery of a chronic illness due to the stress on the house body that makes us very sick and physically weak if we are exposed to heat and sunlight for any length of time whatsoever. We will literally collapse if we aren’t careful. As such, even if we weren’t terrified of people, that severely limits our options for a lot and we miss out almost daily. It’s horribly sad. We miss the sunlight on our skin, traveling, and going out with friends. We don’t want to be stuck at home all the time.

Conversely, we also struggle in close relationships because of how guarded we are. The guardedness is absolutely a trauma response and comes with fun side helpings of anger, depression, and occasional impulsivity. We struggle with vulnerability and detest anything that even smells like control or manipulation and will fight hard for our autonomy even if there’s no reason to. We’re constantly on edge unless we’re completely alone. We’ve lost a lot of people because of our anger and inability to be vulnerable. We’re working on healing all of that now, but I wish we had never been forced into this position at all. So in a life of battles won at heavy cost, ultimately the heaviest cost of the supposed strength you see is our peace. All we ever wanted from the time we were young was to be kept safe and a life of peace, and we never got that until we began healing.

Final Thoughts

We still have a long way to go. Nobody’s perfect, especially not us cockroach motherfuckers. But something my system and I have learned over the years is that doing our best to feel and be kind and to keep an open heart and mind despite all the bullshit and trauma is true strength, not trauma responses and guardedness. Long term therapy with a therapist who’s no-bullshit like us has helped, as well as running our life like a meritocracy. If people show up for us consistently and show genuine respect for us and our boundaries, we open up more to them over time and let them in more and more. It’s a great way to ease both the body and the system into vulnerability and to make sure that the other person’s intentions are genuine.

If you’re traumatized like us, I understand that it’s a motherfucking struggle. I get that it hurts every goddamned day. You must have lost so much. My heart and empathy goes out to you. I hope you get rest and ease soon, my friend.

As always, stay tuned for more magic!

-Allēna, Super-Admin

https://opensorceryy.co/at-heavy-cost/

#agoraphobia #chronicFatigue #chronicIllness #cptsd #fatigue #grief #healing #introspection #loss #socializingAsADisabledPerson #tragicBackstory #traumaSurvivor