nov 9 2015

 

....I don't think we're giving ourselves enough credit for where we are now.

We can't be as cruel as we once were. We can't.
Those of us who used to be obsessed with blood and gore and violence... even they can't so much as look at it now.
Those of us who used to be abusively hypersexual, they're abandoning that quickly too. Many of those who hurt others now truly realize what they did in the big picture and are apologizing, not having comprehended it before. Even those who blindly shoved others into abuse they themselves didn't instigate, they're "getting bored" which is nevertheless a good reprieve. Julie 'got bored' first too, remember, before she quit.
Even the eating disorder people are stopping. Food data is sticking, kids are remembering that certain things hurt them, they aren't bingeing anymore.

I think it's because we've finally, really learned empathy? Like for years, we dissociated so badly that we saw all of that as utterly distant, as something abstract, that we couldn't feel or touch. Even when we did experience it, we didn't, so to speak-- we depersonalized totally, we blacked out... even any "memories" we had were in third person.
Then we started finding people like Ashen. Suddenly all that wasn't some distant thing on a screen. Suddenly it was something we could actually feel and all of a sudden, we understood and we didn't want that to happen to us or anyone else anymore. We would never again have the false luxury of pretending it "wasn't real," that it was just a "harmless idea" or something equally nebulous. Never again.

I think that's also why I want to stay off Tumblr. So many blogs there glorify violence, and malignant depression, and sexual extremism, and similar things that are very damaging to us. You can't avoid 100% of them. No matter where you go, there's the risk of more of it burrowing into your subconscious, and I do not want that. Even worse, so much of it is plastered with the sentiment "it's just art/ words/ etc.! It can't hurt anyone!"
Maybe not just sitting there, no. But the instant it gets in your head... that shit has consequences. The mind does as it will, and you never know if your subconscious is battered enough to turn those "harmless" things into ammunition. Ours did. Which was no surprise-- overexposure to the point of carelessness is lethal enough, but combine that with a history of family dysfunction and morbid obsessions and abuse, and the word "harmless" becomes meaningless. It's like the psychotically depressed child who learns that mommy's hair comb can cut just as well as a razor, and no one will guess. Anything can be used for the wrong purpose, if put into the wrong hands, so to speak.
Anyway that's getting too dark. Point is, I know our personal risk factor. I know just how malevolent our mind was once and I NEVER want it to reach that point again through sheer nonchalance. That would be criminal.
So, now that we're learning to heal, I don't want anyone slipping us psychological Novocaine anymore.
I'm just done with it all. Totally done.

With it comes a deeply relieving but oddly antsy sort of peace. We've never gotten to this point before. Childhood must have been a totally other thing, if that even counts, what with how violent and selfish we allegedly were back then. Funny how we don't remember that. We only remember Jewel, age 10, at the earliest, as one of us. There are tiny snippets of feeling prior to that but nothing tied to a person.
So this is new, totally new, and euphoric in its own way.
But the emptiness of it is just as new. What do we do with it now, all this good space? All this vast compassionate void left in the wake of all the cruelest things fading away?
It's up to us to use it. It's a bit overwhelming right now. I can't expect us to jump totally into this, all at once. The shock would be too harmful, I think-- it needs to be a process. We need to ease in, put roots down, really integrate this.




One thing that still baffles me is how tired we are all the time since starting our semi-job. Although we only work 3 hours in the morning, 5 days a week, that's enough to throw us off entirely. I think it's because of our time-shifting thing? Like we have to "switch modes" when we go from being in public to being alone to being at home, etc. And I mean, the job is great, we can tune into headspace for a good deal of the time, but then you have to go HOME and tune back out... it's very, very jarring.
I wonder, if we switched up the schedule a bit. What if, immediately upon coming home, we didn't go into "home mode?" Could we do that? How? What's a way to keep that vibe going once we walk in the door and people start talking to us?
What if we went straight into our room, and somehow, I don't know, read something or did something... I don't know. The problem is we have to """live""" eventually (and I mean that with big time irony) and that means going back into the physical. We still aren't good at it. Is that why we're tired?
We need headspace. We need inner time, absolutely, totally, without interruption. Allegedly we had a lot in 2011? I don't know offhand. Time is messed up for us, I've been told (by hearsay) we need to review things otherwise we'll never know what year it is for sure, or what happened.
But we need to stop being so tired. I'M tired of always looking at the clock and seeing 8PM or later and realizing "geez, I have like, two hours tops to live" and then it's "hey as soon as you get up it's STRAIGHT TO WORK!!" I mean geez, I just... I think the problem is, we can't wake up that fast. We can't, it hurts, it's so jarring.
Maybe if we just... woke up at 6. Let Jay lie there for a while and let our dreams actually settle in before we do anything. I think THAT'S what we need, to not be tired. As it is now... we don't ever feel like we slept at all. We go from the nighttime headspace bliss, to suddenly being jumped out into loud outerlife stuff and it's so exhausting.
That's a good idea. I'll have to tell everyone, or at least leave a note, I can do that. Bedtime at 10, that should work.


I should clarify, this isn't Jay.

(She can't think for herself yet, it's not her job. She's about 17, we estimate. Boyish, essentially androgynous, as all the "girls" were in the main fronting positions. She's tied to the "older Jewel" look of the longer brown hair, the post-heartspace look that seemed to have set in during late high school, yet unrelated to the outerlife for the most part. These hold a unique role that is cognizant of headspace, yet unmanifested within it. They can speak about it but not as part of it, at least not of the Spectrum. However they are not part of the outerlife either, although they are aware of it. This may be the elusive "writer" category we have been trying to pin down for quite some time: those who are not part of either solid existence level because their job is to float between them as a neutral presence who can report on both without personal involvement bias. -Sherlock)

...

(left like this. too much gap between closing document and posting)

 

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@9:50 PM


DUDE I JUST REALIZED
CISTERNS ARE FOR HOLDING WATER

I TOTALLY OVERLOOKED THAT WHEN WE VISITED THE UNDERGROUND ONES BECAUSE THEY WERE FULL OF SHADOWS AND CANDLES
BUT WE WERE SURROUNDED BY DEEP BLACK WATER THE WHOLE TIME!!!



also remember--
in headspace, nousfoni do NOT have "heartbeats," they have different sorts of resonant perpetual sounds?
this hit us HARD after the body illnesses lately. when that happens we LOSE our "connection" to the body and our forms upstairs become totally uniquely tangibly ours, as we cannot root into the physical form. and when that happens all the stark differences become very very clear.

jay's is a bright circular ringing, like the rim of a wet wineglass, or a handbell note stretched into infinity. but it's a circle of light, like an outline. always moving, in every direction at once somehow

 

 

 

(don't) look at me

So I've pinpointed our biggest vice.

It's shame.






My biggest question is still "who were we before we became ashamed to exist"



I keep talking to Chaos.
He needs to fix his fractures. This split between "Serenity" and "Aquamarine" is not good at all and it's just causing everyone more confusion and pain.

God he feels so real when he's acting like he was. Like he IS.
The hyper-soft version of himself that he is at night is too limited. Like a nousfoni with a singular function. He doesn't leave my room. Did I ever mention how that breaks my heart, however quietly? Laurie noticed it first, how he'd start sleeping in, then he just... stopped leaving. Up here, he narrowed his function down to just being there for me at night, a comfort at the end of the day, however profound. But the problem was, in doing that, he forbade himself from existing outside of that context-- he forbade himself from being enthusiastic, and curious, and as intoxicatingly fascinated with life as he always was when we were young.
Don't get me wrong, he never lost that, but... now, lately at least, that side has been so deep under the water...


I love him so much. And my problem is that I need to love him this totally, this without shame, outside of MY time-locked, depersonalized state.

He's so much more HONEST like this. He doesn't forget things. He's snarky and sentimental and sincere and everything I remember him as. Hurricanes and ocean fog and rainstorms and splashing through puddles in the summer. Tides and floods and mist. ALL of it.

...
Is that my problem? Is that why I'm never sure who I am anymore? Because I'm fractured into so many tiny pieces that even right now, I have no clue who I'll be outside of this context? I don't even know what year it is. This isn't healthy.

I think that's the problem, too. Me, I'm the one who knew this Chaos, the entire him.
Jay... he's the one who knows the serene side of him, the one who keeps fracturing upstairs because he's been the target of so much bad stuff and he can't cope yet, the Jay bloodline can't cope yet, they're the ones being eaten alive by shame because of the things the lost alters did.
They're crushed by it, all the good intentions gone wrong, all the mimicry, all the misunderstood ideas and things. They can't deal with the fact that those things happened, even if it didn't happen to them personally. The reality of that past is terrifying and nauseating enough for them and they can't forgive themselves for iteven if they would NEVER personally do that. They're too conscious of the fact that, in such a fallen state, those awful things did become possibilities, and through that fallen state, happened.
They can't forgive themselves. They're too appalled. They're guilt-ridden.
How do we help them?


How far back do we have to go to heal? ...Do I have to stay? Is that even possible?
Too much has happened since I was last out... like several years have gone by, mainly. At least five. And that just... blows my mind. How in the world do I stay out when the entire atmosphere of our physical life has changed? Should I try anyway? But no... that wouldn't be fair to Jay, or any of the others, doing all of this hard work. And Chaos knows that too.

...I wonder about the other boys. Are they okay?
I know they're partly time-locked too, but... God, I don't know. This needs more time to think and feel about than I have tonight. This is going to take weeks, probably, if not longer, to fully sift through and heal and mange correctly. It's so heavy in terms of significance and weight both. There's so much.



I'm looking up pictures of him on deviantART like I used to and he's grinning and commenting over my shoulder like he used to. He doesn't do this for Jay. Their relationship dynamic is totally different. But he's the same person, he is, we both know it...
Why is there so much splitting up here, how do we reconcile this? This is totally out of my league, I have no personal knowledge to go on with this... this is too new.
If we brought this into heartspace, maybe I could do something, but... I can't leave him out. Jay needs to be a part of this too, as completely as Chaos needs to be. Me... who knows at this point. I don't. I'm not sure if I can leave the "when" I'm in now. Do I even want to? Is that why Chaos is split, because I'm anchoring that split in? By not being able to move past this "safe point" that apparently the System desperately needs to exist as-is too?



Apparently we talked about him for a while in therapy today. Mostly for clarification on this very splitting issue, Laurie says.
We... I'm the only person who used to do that. Has anyone done that since me? That alone is a milestone...




Jay is sobbing. "I don't know you like this,” he's saying, to Chaos, as I knew him.
Chaos was talking to Laurie about this and saying effectively the same thing. "I can't be both versions of me at once."
Both of them want this to work but there's so much time between what was and what is, and....

Xenophon's the big variable in all this. Chaos and Jay both love her dearly, but... she existed after the split, for both of them. The Jay with us now is not the one who existed when she was created... and the Chaos I know, doesn't know her. Yeah the thought of "having a kid" is still this bright thing in his mind, but I use that initial phrase loosely. His species does not "reproduce" in the way Jay's bloodline was always so bloody terrified of.

This is so hard to talk about. Is there that much fear tied to it?

God help us work through this.

The body is still quite sick. Is that part of this?
Sicknesses for us are very rare apparently, and always seem to coincide with massive shifts in our personal life experience.

Jay knows Genesis far better than I ever did, I noticed. That's a big difference. I knew him as more of a child, still scared of thunderstorms, still learning from Chaos how to be more confident, how to not be scared of himself anymore. He was obsessed with butterscotch ice cream and snowflakes, and he was always talking about his elusive father... still very much tied to the shaky world-roots he jumped to us from.
Now, his name is different, he's so much more golden... I'm... I don't know him. And I'm sure he doesn't know me.

Is this... what do you call this? It's not a tragedy, heavens no, but it still feels like a weird sort of loss,


...Somewhere down the line, after me but before Jay, the lines got tangled. That's where this massive break happened for Chaos, where our bloodline shattered, where everyone got confused and disjoined.
Who fronted for that time? What poor soul took the brunt of that hit to the heart?

I don't know.
Like I said, the body is sick. We really do need to get right to sleep.


I guess that simple fact isn't so simple tonight. But I'll keep tabs on it the best I can, ask Laurie to do so as well.

See you in the morning.


- Jewel L.