020716

I have no idea when we last updated. Let me put down what I can remember.

We haven't slept much in two, three weeks now. Stress was really high for a while.
We had to call the cops/ambulance on the brother again last Sunday so that literally ate the entire day (7am-5pm, about) but, since then he hasn't been scathing or furious or threatening or dark. The catch? He still scares us, and we don't know why.
...There's a certain demeanor that freaks us out, that makes Dread and Sylvain come out, that keeps us from functioning properly as a result of being stuck in "danger mode." The brother has it, an old friend had it, we're sure other people had to, but our memory is shot. By itself it's effectively harmless; someone's presentation can't hurt you. But our biggest threats were always inside. Someone's presentation can be toxic if you mimic it, if it triggers harmful things, if it can be twisted and used against you, etc.
We cannot figure out WHY in the world this ISN'T FIXED YET.
It's the "knife-edge softness" demeanor and we don't know how to express our fear of it. Only boys have it. Girls are different. Boys walking around all soft-footed and talking in breathy smiley-concerned voices that sound a little too prying for comfort, like they're asking a question for the sake of studying your reaction and taking notes or something, I don't know. We're scared of "smiley voices," they sound predatory. Predatory. So that's our fault.
Most of it is projection, but a big part of us hates soft, simpering, overly gentle and passive and mincing demeanors. I know why immediately-- every single boy who's been "interested" in us has acted that way and we HATED IT. It was the death knell of a friendship whenever it appeared. Boys would turn from adventurous funny interesting unique people into shallow romance-whispers and whenever that happened, I guess over time, people like Cannon and Overload (as that sort of presentation does cause sensory overload what with the sound and touch and stuff) were born and grew to get us away from them, or if that failed, to get them away from us.
...The awful thing is that we didn't want anyone to get away from anyone. We still loved those people, we were just so heartbroken that we couldn't be what they wanted, and they couldn't be what we wanted, and neither of us spoke up about it. Maybe if we did things would have gone differently. But what one of us said ages ago, however dramatically, still rings true-- "once we love someone, we never stop."
We still love Q, very very much, just as much as we did in 2008. And we love Y, very very much, just as much as we did in 2010. Time and switching and confusion has made memory of those timelines absolutely mangled BUT people like Jay, who hold the loving core of what we are, can STILL access the data memory of all those times and places, even if they weren't "there" when they appened temporally. And ironically, that makes our experience of it now even more real.
But that's the point. We cannot have what was originally had, it's impossible, for many reasons. Some part of us still wishes it had such a solid, constant presence of friendship, but that may not be possible anymore either. We think we hurt him too badly, we don't know if he'll ever forgive us for it, and we're terrifically sorry for our lack of empathy and our shortsightedness and our judgments based on fear. We understand completely if he would rather we stay out of his current timeline now, for good. That's fine. What's not fine is the deep concern that we hurt him, and ner, because we do NOT want to cause them pain or confusion or sorrow or fear, ever, but... we're afraid that we did. Hell, we absolutely did, what with people like Overload and Cannon not knowing how to cope with emotions and just exploding all over the world with it. We're sorry, but what's done is done, and now we just want to see the undeserving recipients of that externalized pain heal from it.
...The problem, though, is that... with the brother, it's confusing because we don't know him. We have NO MEMORIES of him, at all, ever. And that's really jarring. We can guess at memories, based on what we were told by others, but it's all pieced-together imagining and not a real event. What little pieces we have, are empty, like data memories. When we look where the brother allegedly was or should have been, he's not. There's no face, no body even. We can't even imagine who he is, or what he looks like.
...In a way, he'd be happy with that. We know his self-image doesn't match his body at at all and... well, in the months we've known that, we've only ever been able to see him as his "inner self." So maybe this stark memory loss is related to that. Anyway, like I said, I think he'd strongly prefer that.
The issue is that as long as visuals and presentation don't match that, we don't know who he is. He feels like a total stranger. And although we genuinely love who he IS, the person that we talk to when the walls are down enough, well... most of the time around the house he doesn't feel like that. And we don't feel like ourself either, what with all the socials. No wonder things are a mess; there aren't any real people involved in this mess of fright and bewilderment.
It's so stupid. We're afraid of something that doesn't even exist; it's all projected terror and potential threat because those wracked parts of our psyche aren't willing to take the risk. And yet even thinking of how he looks/ acts is TERRIFYING and makes our older damaged ones FURIOUS and is it because we don't know him? Is it because he's a total stranger? When we're at a time when we can actually look back at the scary SLC stuff and forgive it totally because we KNEW those kids and we KNEW they would NEVER HURT US even if it felt like it at the time, even if we were in too much psychological agony to tell the difference. The point is we forgive every single instance that makes our hurt parts scream and cry and bare their bloody teeth, because we knew the people we were blaming, and they were blameless. There's that awful sentence. The fear was always put there. Infinitii was right. How ironic that putting fear somewhere still makes it lethal. Tar and Plague may be internally-rooted but they can still kill you.
So we don't know who the brother is yet. Not really. It's hard to not be scared of him because we don't know him as anything OTHER than this.
... And he has hurt us. Maybe not physically-- ironically again, as we still subconsciously welcome physical pain-- but emotionally, psychologically, he's hurt us very badly, and it's been intentional as far as we can tell. You don't "accidentally" call someone a morally bankrupt monster (and we need to let go of that too; we don't want a grudge but this hurts so bad it's scary, it plays on all our deepest fears and inadequacies).
So. Bottom line is, I want to heal the fear/hatred as that is utter poison but we're still scared of hitting the exact opposite which is the people-pleasers who just fueled that fear with their programmed hypertolerance.
It's an ancient topic, I know. But now it's in our face EVERY DAY, constantly, unavoidably. We cannot escape it, or remove the trigger, so it's becoming blindingly triggering and we're a frazzled mess because it's still terrifying but what do we do?


What else.
We have a few random notes saved to text files.

0117= david and simeon comforting each other

0127: "We discovered an awesome new webcomic: Power Nap. The art is marvelous; that's the sort of style I want to emulate in terms of compositional dynamics, expressiveness, and fluidity of movement."

0206= grandmother to grandfather:
"I don't even know how you can stand being in that filthy cellar all the time. you're not even human. I'm sure of it. you're not human."
(she often says "you're disgusting" "you look like a pig" etc.)
hanging something on the stairs, it fell, she spat down the stairs:
"go ahead, fall, you bitch!"
hearing all this was terrifying because it made me realize two things: one, that the BROTHER is mirroring this same sort of language towards me, ironically as he insists the grandmother is "sheer evil"-- and two, that we've internalized that same acidic judgment towards ourself. when we heard her shout down the stairs we just... stopped. "oh, that's where it came from." it was jarring, to hear the same hatred our most furious alters carry on the outside, so exactly.



We've been sick for... a long time? That's making stuff blurry too. We're trying but it's exhausting.
We need sleep, but there's too much work. both personal and family work. at least lent is comign up, we use that to justify super-ascetic behavior and no one bats an eye usually
but we need a break, somehow, we're desperate, nothing i'm writing is making any sense.


We haven't known who we "are" in a long time, either. the fronters are stuck in either 2005 or 2009? like the main girl who keeps coming out is FIFTEEN and thinks we're STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL and she's been getting memories and impulses that NO ONE ELSE HAS and it's scary because that's... a decade ago. she has no progress in her and she's still stuck as a blind post-trauma manic. she's terrifying because she was born TO blind us to that unbearable pain/fear, through her hyperactive obsessions, through her total lack of self-awareness and quiet. we don't want that. we want her to stop, and leave.
but alters exist for a reason, and they show up for a reason too. why 2005, why now? no clue. that's question #2, after #1 how to cope with the brother's terrifyingly different attitude all of a sudden.
isn't that ironic? when he was emotionally abusive we were still scared but we were angry and we wept and we were so stressed we were vomiting all the time and couldn't sleep. but everyone else was like that too, in the whole house. we knew we weren't acting stupidly or nonsensically or something. but now.. now he's acting too nice? i dont' know. and we're still so so scared. but it's plague fear now. now it's the fear that was all over slc. now it's the fear that was all over social situations and schools. now it's that damn stupid "i'm not hypermasculine, i love you! i'm nice! i know better!" sort of shit that means well but is terrifying and why, why, is it just because we were aro-ace and that attitude always coincided with terror, even though we were only EVER abused by women,

i don't understand.

we're going to sheppard pratt in march, we think. it's mandatory now. we need to exist again. we need time to focus on nothing but US.
if we can push it to april that would be ideal. we need easter. we can't miss easter, after missing christmas. easter is rebirth and contrition and resurrection and hope and light and it's jay's true holiday, it matches his heart-color, we need our inner life to saturate everything again.
we need to start isolating ourself, we think. no more forced socialization. stay alone in our room as much as psosible. we've been around people too much, it's making us forget who we are and when we are and where we are.
we're mixing up dates, mixing up entire YEARS, we're forgetting names, we're getting lost on the road, etc. we have no idea what's happening due to all this temporal gap switchiness and forced social numbness and the inexplicable, suffocating terror associated with high school for some reason. it's existential panic but it's so numbed, it's like watching a shrapnel and lightning explosion on a tv set with the volume off. there's fire and twisted metal and sirens and people dying, you know it's all shrieking fear, but there's no sound. that's what high school feels like.
...
oddly, this isn't a lockout, or a numb period. every day, headspace taps in SOLID at least once. typically it's at night, and thank god for chaos zero's new anchor plush because without him i don't know where we'd be. laurie still tries to wake us up in the mornings, but ever since we started helping our dad, that sudden 7am wakeup is not only annihilating our dream recall, but it's forcing socials into the body before we're even conscious, and it's making us dizzy and dazed through the whole day because we're not fully awake until like 9pm. it's horrendous.
...
god i don't know. i want to sob, like a helpless tired child, at this. i want to have days where i can wake up on my own and just lay there for a bit, remember our dreams, wake up in headspace and wake up feeling something. i want to have days where we can eat in peace, where we can eat without vomiting out of fear, where we can actually go in the damned living room and play piano or play nier or even just look out the windows for once. god we feel so alone and rejected in this house and i'm so tired.

...


we're trying to work on dream world cataloguing but that's exhausting too. we're trying to organize the virtue-vice list better, stack them all into related banks and see if that works for a less rigid, more fluid system... it's tough. there's like 1000 v/vs to go through and a lot of them are neutral, this list is like a decade old too so.
we're playing with the idea of having more fluidity in color variations too? aywas designs and the pokemon-breed variations on tumblr inspired us on that. but nothing too drastic, that wouldn't work for us. still, it's cool, because like what if budariye grew different flowers depending on where they were native to? what if pochann had different wing patterns? what if kyoe had different pupil shapes? it's all interesting and fun, it's really just subtle worldbuilding so it is both relaxing and motivating at once.
the biggest thing we have to do is finish naming the first 5 generations of monsters, then draw ALL the ones who don't have art/ lost their art, and then we can jump into finding the 6th generation. god that would light up our life SO much. it's the one biggest source of life from childhood that we literally haven't had since we startedhigh school, really. g4 was 2004, and then g5 was technically 2006 but it suffered so much, it ended up feeling so distant and abstracted... we stopped being able to find monsters for a very long time around then. so i'd say 2006 was the last real jewel-based year. 2007, god only knows. we're assuming parnassus kicked in, but the fronters for that time period are virtually nonexistent and our memory doesn't really pick up clearly until late 2010, in jayce's house, as we've said before. i still don't have dates for the university days. the memories are so real but they float otuside of time, really.

...

god i dn't know. i hurt a lot and i'm scared and we keep getting sick, we haven't gotten sick in years and we've been sick like 4 times already since halloween. it's scary.


we're giving up the internet for lent. essentially everything but lj and ebay because we need to sell things. but we need to get the heck AWAY from the internet for a while, there's too much danger. we need to relax and work and we don't want anything else in our head.

it's 10pm, we need to get a drink, and stretch. we're not used to sitting down like this, but we're so tired and in pain we haven't been able to exercise much lately, let alone stand for so long.

why is it so hard to exist, lately? is it because we're too aware of the split between inner and outer lately?
this is jay now, at least, trying to
i wish i could exist all the time, in this "life," but i'm rooted upstairs. i can't live the physical life, i've tried. but i want to exist all the time nevertheless. i wish i could. i'm sure we did at some point, i mean from what we can recall of 2013, weren't we doing that? i have no idea, i'm sorry.

infinitii is still around. ze's been helping me lately. when things get too calcified, if someone can at least get hir attention, to ghost for a minute, it will kick out the socials and call me in.
like laurie said to me before, at least we're not numbed-out. it's shocking, but thank god. that's at least hope


why is it SO HARD TO EXIST LATELY??

what is this tired exhausted sad numb fog??? over EVERYTHING???

is it stress? sleep deprivation? sickness? all three?
it's funny, we keep forgetting those things exist. we keep thinking the state of the body has nno effect on us because we exist separate from it; if it dies, we keep going. did you know, we asked the socials (via thought pushes) what would happen to them when the body died? and they all say "well i'd be dead too." they have no concept of living past the body, or outside of it, or anythign. when the body dies, so do they, done and done. well for us, all of us, when the body dies, we keep living. we're just not in the shell anymoer. does that make sense? so we want to front because we EXIST and we're ALIVE but these shallow soulless fronters keep coming out and why, every alter exists for a reason, are we just so exhausted that our brain is trying to sleep all day and that's the only way to do so?? put out "asleep" people who don't think or feel or anything, that we can LITERALLY just "watch" from the sidelines if we want? because it's too exhausting do to much else lately?


we NEED to recover. we need to.

as of right now we're so tired again, we want to cry, this damn body, you have no idea how BAD the dysphoria has been laetly.
at least we're almost a year on hormones now. that's something.
but the body stil looks/ feels/ sounds like abusers and although we HAVE won the war, no matter what, no matter what, there are people who won't let go of it so we need to keep them out. we're doing well.
as time goes on that will stop entirely, i know it. i know it will. i'm so glad, i'm so thankful, it's finally over, it's just the last few gunshots going off before the warzone clears for the first tiem in god knows how long.
the eating disorder is doing what it usualy does. big swells of addictive abusive behacior, that suddenly die off within like 48 hours. that's good, but its worrying. when you have such a pronounced problem, and then literally over a weekend it STOPS DEAD, with no impetus to come back, what is really causing it?
docs still say it's stress. "stress will kill you," yes we know, we don't want that to happen.


coping. gotta cope. what does that even mean anymore, "cope,"
to manage symptoms when they come up,
to stay mindful and not get dragged away by flashbacks,
to basically just deal with the currently unavoidable stress as wisely as we can.

it's hard when the slightest trigger makes you shut down sometimes. hear a voice, shut down. someone walks in, shut down. it's the "freeze" reaction. it's always the kids. WHY THE KIDS???????? if this boy-fear is tied to the teenage girls, why the hell do the CHILDREN keep coming out???? is that because they're tied to the fear of actual harm? like from the parents and grandparents? and that's the atmosphere of fear with this too?
the teenage girls broke in those situations; i assume the people-pleasers came out. that was "the only safe thing" in those situations. but now we can't do that anymore, we're too aware of the issue, so now we FEEL the fear that those paper-smile girls used to ignore, and that fear was last felt with children. i think that makes sense.
why 15 though, why are we stuck in 2005-2006, i want to review those records BUT it will give that girl even more of an anchor and we don't want that. we have to prevent that somehow, override her influence somehow.


god i am so tired i'm literally just rambling, it's too hot in this house, i want to cry, i can't handle summer, i can't cope with another hot season when we didnt even get much of a cold one this year, i don't want those hackers to come back, please, please, all the worst girls come out when it's hot. i can't. please. the war is over, but they didn't get the memo, don't you DARE touch any of us,


we need to have a xanga session. we haven't had one in so so long because it's been hard to get the time to have one (5+ solid hours) and they're mentally exhausting and we haven't had the capacity to channel people well as a result of our body fatigue affecting the upstairs, as shocking as that still is to us.
but we can still close our eyes and go up into headspace and instantly, instantly, we're well and happy and alive,


the mother has been at the house for the past 5 days or so and she never ever ever ever stops talking and making noise and she sleeps in our room and she won't stop, god, why won't she EVER be quiet, ever,
we can't sleep because she rips all the covers off our bed and sprawls all over so we waited three weeeks for a weekened to sleep and we didnt get it. god i'm so tired. i 'm so tired i'm so TIRED.


...


i'm going to close this up for now.

we're literally so full of awful childlike emotions we can't function. we want to scream and wail and beat our fists off the walls and people and ourself and we want to bite things and twist peoples arms to make them stop making so much noise and we want quiet. we want quiet, we want to be alone. we want our adventures, our imagination, our toys to invent worlds and stories with, dragons and dolls and monsters and unicorns and things, not a care in the world.
but we can't go back to that. not like that. it's impossible.
we just want... simple happiness. no schedule. no running list of obligations. no constant noise and adult nonsense and people not letting you play anymore. we want music and light and laughter and fun and we can't HAVE that anymore bcecause people claim rooms in the hosue now and we're locked out of freedom because THE BOYS GREW UP AND THEY'RE "SO COOL" NOW it's stupid. it's STUPID STUPID STUPID and we're so mad at growing up because it RUINS EVERYTHING.

we're so tired of people acting so smart, never leaving you alone, we're so tired of nonstop "small talk" and grown ups never stop chattering like parakeets and it's so annoying. they never actually say anything interesting, it's like bland bread or paper.
grown ups are so weird and it makes me so angry because they always try to box me in and make me like them. don't explore, don't do this, don't do that, go here, don't go there, wear this, eat this, on and on. i'm tired

we're all so tired.

we're wise enough and loving enough to take care of ourself, we know that.
it's this world that's scary and exhausting and too loud and too stressed out.


i'm so sad. i'm so sad. stop attackig our childhood.
the worst part of growing up is when grown-ups try to make your life like theirs.


the hackers have ALREADY LOST, it's impossible for them to win, don't worry about that part.


god i need to just go back and read the archives for like three hours every day. i want this again, 24/7, it's like my heart is missing when we're not living primarily inside. i love and miss everyone so much. it aches so badly i can't bear it.

but the pressure of the physical future is bearing down on us and until we learn how to grapple with that better, we can't have an inner-dominated life because the body won't be able to survive and THAT'S where all the stress is coming from lately.

the disabiity hearing should help. sheppard pratt should help.
until then we'll do what we can.

sorry about this mess of an entry. just wanted to get something up here, for our sake as well as yours.