prismaticbleed | may 1 2015 (Reply)

This is going to be an absolutely horrible entry and I apologize in advance but this needs to be written about, no matter how sick it makes us.

We're so close to completely healing this.
There's this weird sort of dichotomy left, with all the switching and memory blocking and bleedovers and different hearts and minds and experiences.
But there's no evil tied to it now, not anymore. Infinitii's job is done, in that respect, God willing. Hopefully now ze can heal hirself, and have some peace, and move on from that initial dark purpose. A shadow can hold good knowledge without becoming the bad thing that knowledge was gained from.

Real talk, let it fragment if it must.

There's guilt, and fear, and shame, but it's confused, because it's guilty and afraid and ashamed of something that only exists halfway now, something that barely any of us hold and which is alien to even some of those few.

The body still gets sick but it's so distant and weird and frankly, we dissociate from it still. That alone, the consequences, carry all the trauma residue.
Headaches, fatigue, major confusion, disorientation, bodyaches, emotional numbness/turmoil, a sick sort of flat unease…
…I just realized. Those are mostly symptoms of switching, aren't they.

Hacks are rare now. We've scoured their battlefield so many times, we're wise to them now. And they themselves have bleached it out so many times, to convince us it's "clean" and okay to traverse, even though it's still buried with mines… even so, the bleach has worked in our favor. Any murky forced confusion the Tar forced on us before we learned, is now unusable. Like I said, we understand the truth now, we know what they're actually doing, we know what we actually feel. They can't touch us anymore, unless they ambush us in the middle of a catastrophe, and even then we're on guard.
The problem is, there is still confusion, that isn't attributed to the hackers mostly. Yes, the hackers caused this confusion in the first place, but even now, untouched by that, it's still baffling, wearily and sadly so.

Nobody wants this.
That's the bottom line. No matter how holy, or mindful, or careful, or compassionate we make this, no matter WHAT we do… no one wants it. No one wants it.
Except maybe that's not entirely true. There are at least two people in the System, socials with vague faces, that do want this but no one knows why. They don’t have self-awareness so it might even be pure programming.
Anyway that's the point I'm trying to make.

It all comes down to pain. All of it.
Pain breaks you open. Pain forces vulnerability, and trust, and openness. You cannot hide emotions or lie when you are in pain. For us, when you are truly in pain, you can't even be cruel. Little nagging pains might make someone lash out, but when you get the kind of hurt that draws blood or stops breath, you can't do anything but collapse. You surrender, you let down ALL the walls, you want nothing more than healing and compassion and relief and love. At least, that's how it works for us.
…Why do you think the atonement got so confusing, too?
Even now, no one with the job can grab a knife or a razor without sobbing and shaking. The people who find themselves standing in empty fluorescent-dark bathrooms with steel hovering millimeters above their skin can only choke on tears, afraid, but unwilling to put the weapon down. Then someone is brave, and a red line appears, and then…
Then no one wants to stop.
Then, the body is open.
Atonement began with Laurie, with the graves. We have no memory of it, save for the physical sensation of the knife in meat that cannot be imitated by anything else.
But… it happened because we cared. It happened because we wanted so strongly to be better, to be brighter and stronger… we wanted to be forgiven. We wanted to be healed. We wanted the "pain" to stop… and ironically,
That's what's so confusing. I'm sorry if the words are jumbled. The real pain, it breaks us open, and we DON'T want it to stop, sometimes, IF it accomplishes that. Only sharp, clean pain can do that though. The atonement, the blades, they are the most marked.
The problem is, somewhere along the line, someone found a way to shove that sort of pain into hacks if they tried hard enough.
So every once in a while we'd have a hack with two seconds of screaming pain and the brain would stop, "wait a minute, that's a good thing," and… that's why hacks kept happening for a while. Someone, some poor lost someone, just wanted to be hurt. Someone just wanted the pain, to be broken open, to feel compassion and totality and sincerity… to cry and sob with the weird bleeding joy and the internal community that it carried.
They were looking in the wrong place.

This sounds stupid. I'm sorry.
Nobody wants this.
The body is scared and sick and our heart and head are scared and sick but an equally large part of us is not because the event and the aftereffects and the cause and the experience and the context and the consciousness are all separate. It's all broken up and that's what makes this such a bloody mess.

Laurie is the safest person up here. That makes her the most dangerous person up here.
…
There's at least one of our "inner socials," people who are rooted inside but who operate on the outside, who don't have names or faces as a result… there's at least one of them, who's tied into this issue.
That one person is an androgyne at about 20 years old, female pronoun choice. This child, ze has no name, no real "solid" sense of self outside of that vague "I exist" feeling tied to her being rooted to a timeline spot.
She's dimly aware of the rest of the System but, like all "major" inner-rooted social fronters, she is aware of Laurie.
The problem is, this person also recognizes Laurie as this paragon of virtue, of strength, of everything the hackers CANNOT touch… of everything she wishes she could be. But this child, their mind is still stuck in the empty-confused state of the past, and they were taught that sex=love, and sex=spiritual union, and "you need both those things to be good," and THAT is why this kid keeps running to Laurie, even if Laurie is incapable of and unwilling to participate in ANY of that.
Yeah. This is the kid we've been trying to track down for MONTHS, if not years. This is them.

…

Laurie is this spotless virgin of sanctity and no one can touch her. Not even the ones who would do so with the most pure intentions, for what it's worth. I think that's the lesson here. It's being debated over and over thanks to the outside world but it's what we keep getting.
Some things, no matter how good your intentions are, or how careful you are, or how bright you try to be, are still wrong.

No one wants this. No one, none of us, ever wanted this.

We wanted pain.
We wanted to be devastated in an environment where we could NOT be hurt on the outside.
We wanted chastity.
We wanted charity.
We wanted to temporarily forget about everything but her and the slicing ache and that's it.
That's it.

No one wanted the means. No one wants it.

There are two people in the System, one who looks like the "original" Eros (from 2011-12), and one who looks like a cross between Lace from the Akuna System and us as a little girl. Those two are the only ones who "get us lost" in sexuality because THEY AREN'T "PEOPLE." They are effectively numb fronters which means they DON’T store memories, they DON'T have self-awareness, and they DON'T "WANT" IT. They are simply following programming that tells them HOW to act, and in what contexts, etc.
It makes me ill and sad. They aren't even people. But they are introjects of what sort of people we were always expected to be.
After so many years of loud, forced, brutal expectation, it starts to feel like a demand, like an overriding fact, like we can't be anything different. And that seed of horrible existential self-doubt paves the road for the baobab trees. And they will choke our world to death.

Julie was all programming, at the beginning. My heart hurts for her, how she still regrets that and yet she's moved on so much. She's changed, she's cleared her head, she's gotten rid of all she was NOT and now she's not programmed anymore.
But she's still wrecked on the inside, knowing she was the first person to bring that fear to life, even if she was a puppet too.

We've been programmed really badly. It hurts and I'm sorry and it's scary but at least I know it's from the outside.

"If evil weren't nice, nobody would bother with it."
That's the thing that's been haunting me and making me bitter and furious and scared.
You see it everywhere outside, especially in the religions, the newer ones. "Sexual liberation!" et cetera. A loud part of us says "shut up" to that, and I want to agree, but I'm scared of saying "no" to God? If God's really speaking that through them?
Oh by the way I'm just a kid. Not a little kid but I'm young. Just saying because I know we have to announce ourselves.
See I don't know. My religion, Christianity, says "sex before marriage is evil." BUT what if I don't WANT to get married OR have sex?? THEN I'm going against some OTHER doctrine that says "good Christian women get married and have children" but what if I'm NOT a woman and the Mormons did this same thing to us, "you've gotta get married and have kids," see it's "you GOTTA" so even if they say "premarital sex is shameful and evil and dirty and wrong" they SUDDENLY CHANGE THEIR MINDS once you're married. Now you're a bride or a groom! Congratulations you can have sex (”must have" or the marriage isn't valid, I've heard some people say) and it's not evil anymore.
That's bull crap. And I'm scared because it's like that all over. Prophets say "don't use those stinking parts" and I AGREE but then some other spiritual people say "sex is a gateway to God" or something and I DON'T KNOW.
I DON'T WANT IT, OKAY??? AND YOU'RE SCARING ME BECAUSE YOU'RE MAKING ME DOUBT MYSELF AND THEN I WILL FORCE MYSELF TO "TRY IT" AGAINST MY OWN BEST INTERESTS AND INSTINCT OF SELF-PRESERVATION AND EVEN THOUGH I'M SCARED AND DON'T LIKE IT OR WANT IT I WILL STILL FORCE MYSELF THROUGH IT BECAUSE YOU WANTED ME TO. YOU TOLD ME THAT’S WHAT GOD WANTS IS THIS WHAT HE WANTS? WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME THAT I CAN'T LIKE THIS FOR GOD

stop. Stop. Please. That's where all these problems are coming from
How old are you? I've never heard you talk before

We didn't even know what "sex" was until we were like 16. 18? I don't know. Do I?
By the time college illustration class hit we were horrified, we were already so traumatized we couldn't bear taking a bath anymore, couldn't get undressed without our eyes closed. When did it all happen?

We need to talk about this with the therapist. Somehow. Even if it's "bleached out" it's obviously not a retroactive bleaching. There are old, young parts in here that DON'T have the luxury of "apathy" keeping them vaguely together when hacks happen.
Apathy will kill you. It will. I know it helped you survive once, when you couldn't stop it. It was the strongest painkiller, a shot of Novocaine straight to the skull. But the pain still happened. You're still gutted. Somewhere, you still have damage, a wound that never healed correctly. Yes, it scarred over, yes the bone fused back together. But the scar is deep and white and huge. And the bone isn't aligned properly. Yes it LOOKS healed, but get rid of the drip IV, okay? Get rid of the apathy, of the fear keeping you numb, and THEN tell me you can endure sexuality without total childhood crying terror welling up like lava in your chest cavity. You can't. It ALWAYS happens. And THAT counts as "damage."
I know it SEEMS to help you survive, this apathy, when you're facing the outside world.

You need to drink some water. Stop torturing yourself in little ways. Did you notice you do that, too? The forced eating of foods that make us sick, give us hives, make us vomit, cause us pain. The dehydration. The lack of sleep. The lack of exercise, or overexertion. You're abusing yourself in ways that "DON'T COUNT" in your book because they "don't scar."
Sexual abuse and manipulation doesn't scar physically, either. IT COUNTS.

There's that mysterious "you" again. I can't help but think we're talking to programming, to the shell that carries this body's name and just exists to be "normal." It just exists to be a façade, to keep us hidden and buried, to ignore all pain and joy and reality. It hurts and it makes me sick and God that's why we stay up until 3AM every night anymore, we just want to exist and this is the only time it's safe to. It's the only time we're allowed to. The "outside world" doesn't exist for the most part, at night.
The Internet is still dangerous. Terribly, horrifyingly dangerous. We need to be careful.

Laurie is impervious and we love her and that's never going to change and that is what makes this so painful.
She is the ONLY PERSON in the ENTIRE SYSTEM who can neutralize hacks. INFINITII CAN'T EVEN DO THAT because Infi carries the shadow side OF hacks. Infinitii can get in there and eat the Tar and purify it, but ze knows things, ze has experienced things and carries things that Laurie will never and CAN NEVER know or feel or even think about. Her function forbids it, just as Infi's demands it.

(unfinished; cannot type anymore about this)