the spectrum heart cathedral system

 

...I think we're in one of those "dead periods" again.

I just got FL Studio working since we had the laptop crash.
...We lost over a year of work.

It feels like waking up from a dream. Last year, we tried harder than ever to get back into music, and now... now, it's all gone.
But not only that, the worst bit is that we cannot remember what we wrote. We had SO many new files and I cannot remember a single one. That's the most disturbing thing about this.
It's why we're struggling so hard to work on the Leagueworlds, too. We lost all the old info in a dead timeline, in 2012... we don't remember anything firsthand from that time in our life. So we have virtually no idea what those first 17 years of work of art contained.
Yes, there's still the backup written files on our computer-- and that has more value than the art, I would argue-- but now we don't have visuals, and since we can't even hear without pictures, that lack of all pictoral representation is jarring, even if we have no idea what it contained anymore.

...We lost over a year of music and we cannot remember what it was, let alone how to write it again, let alone how to get this program working properly again... I have no idea what we did, or how.
That's... I don't know. Life's been like that for a while. The sudden, utter absence of knowledge that we previously had and/or took for granted, waking up one morning and it's... gone.

We get that with headspace a lot too.
I should mention that's why we gave up on the idea of a comic, at least one that illustrated our past life... even now, reviewing the archives, it's all alien. The vast majority of this feels like someone else's lifetime, and I'm sure it was, but... for the gaps and breaks to be moving closer and closer... I mean, our current memory starts halfway through 2013. And that year is terrifically spotty at best, with weird chunks of recall dispersed throughout the latter half of the year depending on who was even alive at the time. But... that means our total life recall, ACTUAL recall, caps in at literally under three years currently. We're barely a toddler as far as coherent age-time is concerned. That's not much.
...And yet we have to live as a 25-year-old adult when we're awake.
Not to mention everyone expects us to live according to a past that we not only feel no ties to, but have no substantial knowledge of, and which feels most of our physical-life fronters with nausea and fear when they are faced with that burden.

But that's not the current point here.
The current point is... we've been pushed WAY BACK to square one right now.
The art is gone. The music is gone. The writing is partly gone, we did lose a fair amount in 2012 and 2015, but the vital roots still exist. However. Most of it is now false, or alien, or unwritable. The World-roots that existed three years ago no longer exist. So we have to start over on those, too, but... that's an effort. That's a real effort, and we are trying, but we're just weirdly subconsciously disturbed and upset and sobbing over the knowledge that there's this gap in our psyche, something that once held something, and which is now a blind spot, now a hole, now an emptiness that shouldn't be there and yet is and although we can't remember it notbeing there, we know that at one point, it wasn't.

...Maybe that's another motivation towards the eating-disorder alters. There's abuse purgation, abuse imitation, malformed coping, social conformity, seeking acceptance, seeking non-being, and now this... just wanting to somehow fill up that awful nothingness with something, not knowing how else to do so, desperate for the return of something we can't get back, not how it was, not anymore.

...


Headspace is in a really weird place right now too.
We're still functioning, absolutely. We're still healing and communicating.
But... Jay asked something yesterday, when we were meditating. "What do we do when there are no more problems to solve?"
...We were created to protect, to heal, to manage... when we no longer have to do any of that, what do we do?
Laurie shrugged and said "create," hearkening back to the Jewel bloodline purposes, but... I guess that's what this entry is about. We want to create, but... the more we look at it, we have to stop trying to pick up the pieces. We have to just leave that shattered mess on the floor and walk away. Our mind is beating us to it. Our mind is forgetting that pile of broken glass was ever anything but that. Our mind is asking us why we keep staring at rubble, why we don't go build something instead.
God knows we want to, but... our life situation is no longer how it was in high school or whenever. We no longer have that sort of empty, set-schedule environment, where we could literally put the body on autopilot for 8+ hours a day and just let the Jewels create nonstop inside.
God also knows that if we win the lottery tonight the first thing we're doing is going back to school, so that we could get an education AND dive right back into that creative mindspace again.


...In the meantime, what do we do.
We do have a few mp3s saved of some files we lost, so maybe we can listen to those and recreate them the best we can... but...
...Do we want to write music? Do we know how? Better yet, since I obviously don't, does anyone else? I'm sure someone does, so how to we find them? How do we get them out to work in the first place?
...And, again, do we even want to do this anymore? Is it doing good? I know part of us likes it, but...


...There's this weird sort of tiredly content apathy washing over anything. A strange childlike empty happiness, something like an infant in the womb, something that just wants to sleep, something that isn't really depressed or angry or melancholic or anything... something that literally just wants to spend its days in dreams or in dreamspace.


...And God doesn't that tear at our heart.
Has anyone here ever really talked about how real dreams are for us? How we LITERALLY feel more alive when we're asleep than when we're awake? How reality itself feels UNREAL in the waking, but crystal clear in dreamtime? How one of the fastest ways to ground and center and "pay attention" in the physical is to tell ourself "I'm dreaming right now???"
What does that tell you?
...Last night we slept for... 12 hours, at least. We were exhausted; we've been wanting to get a full night's sleep all through December, but it didn't happen. So we needed this.
But... we were dreaming about flying, and wandering joyfully, and becoming Jewel Monsters, and big wide vast open spaces... about trees and rain and rivers and airports and churches and towns. It felt more real than anything we've lived with our eyes open. We felt alive.
...The only curse is that this extends to our nightmares too. That's the only price we have to pay here.


...
Headspace is the same.
God, headspace is the same, why do people think we struggle to live a physical existence, it makes no sense, we aren't OUT here, not truly, not clearly, not when we can close our eyes and "see" the internal world with more awareness and less fogginess than we just saw the outside one...
...When we're sick or scared or highly disoriented, when our head is spinning and we honestly can't think straight, when our physical perception is so muddled that we can look right at a page of a book and not even know what language it is... even then, even then, if we just close our eyes for a moment and float backwards and upwards into headspace... immediately, IMMEDIATELY, even if we're sick or in pain or disoriented beyond belief... immediately, everything makes sense.
We aren't dizzy. We aren't confused. We don't feel out-of-body, we don't feel foggy-headed, we aren't plagued by racing thoughts. We can read and speak and think.
The instant we open our eyes it's a mess again.


What the hell is even happening here?


So I don't know what we're dealing with in life right now.
2016 hasn't "started" yet for us-- despite our brain bizarrely thinking "well duh" or "about time" or "it's been 2016 for ages now" whenever we see the date, like we've been waiting for it for some unknown reason. Nevertheless, January OF 2016 still hasn't settled in entirely. We're still trying to recover from the shock of December, the absent Christmas season, and the total lack of snow. We are really screwed up this year, because summer didn't end until barely two weeks ago, we're still trying to pull our brain out of autumn of 2014, and family stress keeps shoving us back further into 2010.
Therapy is the lifesaver here; it's going spectacularly well, and it's keeping us not only working but also aware of ourselves and our progress. So we're thankful for that.


...We really have to cut this short for now. It's 12:16 and we wanted to stop staying up so late for the new year, at least. That and eating better, not hurting ourselves so badly with that... we're untangling that as carefully as we can. Jemma and Jackie are working together a little better but Jessica is still uncaring, the Destroyer is suddenly back full-force, as are her vicious helpers... that one hyperreligious alter who "hates sinners" keeps coming out too, screaming and trashing things in the name of "merciless good" or whatever. You get the picture: a lot is going on. But 2016 is Leon's color, all vivid indigo light, and that's interesting so we'll see how this goes.


It's going to take a LOT of patience, a LOT of meticulous revision, and a LOT of internal grounding in order to even be capable of writing for the Leagueworlds again. So much toxicity and falsehood got shoved into them, from both feelings of obligation, and internalizing what other people told us it should be, etc. At least three of those Worlds have to literally be torn to the groundand rebuilt almost from scratch.
...but it'll be done. It'll be done, to the best of our ability, if only for the sake of healing. We don't know what end this is all going for anymore. We have no idea if some of these worlds are even supposed to go anywhere. Dream World is, but THAT needs to be rewound to freaking 2002 in order to function right now... literally wipe the past 13 years off the map, and thank God for that. Mage Angels may or may not be able to persist as it is now; it feels like it wants to shed its darkness like a winter coat in summer. Parnassus, Puppetstrings, Magicwarp, and Event Horizon all have awfully heavy tangled vibes shoved on them that need to be removed, and they all might be "starting over" plot-wise for the most part. Hokthai, Oneircia, and Halcyon Days all have huge gaps between beginning and end, and we have no clue what fits there due to how much their base structure keeps massively shifting. Voltage has morphed entirely, Nogaisa may be doing the same, LG*Girls still feels like a concept instead of a story... Rosewindow has a solid heart but it's been threatened by its proximity to headspace so it might be "starting over from square one" too. You get the picture.

Dream World is the most beloved and requires completion even if the others fall away. Rosewindow feels vastly important and we want to see that completed too. Hokthai and Parnassus are dear to our heart, and Mage Angels still feels like it has a message to give. Those are the main ones. We can start there.

Again, I'm babbling. I'm sorry. It's late.

More than anything, we need to go back to a childhood state of mind to write this stuff. It's MANDATORY.
Also we need to figure out how to tap into our childhood virtues without gaining its vices. We want that fiery indomitable confidence, that total self-assurance and power, that defined whoever we were in early elementary school... but we don't want their pride and selfishness and rage and spite.
A few people in our System have a healthy version of that brazen confidence (Frenchie and Genesis immediately come to mind), but people like them keep getting pushed out of fronting by the gatekeeper-esque girls that are full of nothing but shallow self-doubt and nonexistence. They're tied to around 2007 in existence, and we don't like them, but we don't hate them. We just want them to either heal and stop sabotaging our health, or get out of the damn way.

I'm sorry. I'm really really sorry.
The weight of this is getting to me and we just want to cry inside, we want to sleep for days and cry, but we can't, we have work and we have to help the family and we have to be a "normal functioning adult" but we need to cope, we need to figure out where and when the heck we are, and what we're supposed to be doing... I mean we can definitely be patient, we can wait until it reveals itself, but we won't even see that answer if we're mired in the exhausted self-destruction our damaged socials keep perpetuating out of this desperate super-shallow desire to just not exist.
You kids have it al wrong. We WANT to exist. More than anything, we want to LIVE.
...But remember what we said about dreaming.
That's the most ironic thing about all of this.



I'm going to bed. We haven't been tuned into headspace and I can't do that anyway and I'm afraid I'm letting toxic vibes in so for the sake of actual functioning (God help me I literally can't tune into headspace that means i AM unhealthy) I'm going to leave.

 

 

 

 

I've realized that we've been so preoccupied with the stress of survival lately that we haven't been paying much attention to much else?
Like at home, we're just trying to stay safe, and eat without getting awfully sick, and do work for the grandparents, etc. But the responsibilities pile up so fast, we're so tired.
And it's been eating away at our personal goals and responsibilities, because by the time we can sit down (like 9pm) we're so frazzled that we end up dissociating, or handing over the reins to fronters who can operate in such an environment (they aren't internally productive at all and that's bad).
Kyanos needs to help us meditate more often, solid, for longer amounts of time. We NEED to get back into the hour-long ones we used to do, they usually instigated massive internal chance and/or revelation and we desperately need a good boost right now.
Something tells me Jay will be the one to pull that off first; what with Chaos 0 and all, he has indelible ties to the deepest essence of headspace, to the vast colorfulness of it that colors the best parts of the past 2 years, that none of us can ever really forget. But we want to live it that richly again, that actively. So we will.



TBAS mentioned it's the Solstice today and we totally forgot; for us personally that day has always been tied to Halcyon Days so it has a very different meaning than most would assign to it I suppose. For us the solstice brings feelings of kingfishers and oceans and the vastness of space and the life within it. The longest night of the year, the longest time of dark and quiet and birth and creation and infinite possibility, stretching up in a velvet blanket of icy stars and quiet. That's the solstice!


Guess who fronted fro about 60% of the day today? HOOPA.
Talk about a rock solid anchor, holy light. He slips in and just clicks and he's already talking to Cel and Vixie and I'd say I'm surprised but I'm not, not at all.
So it's his birthday today and it was Markus's yesterday and tomorrow is Jay's anniversary and then it's CHRISTMAS. HOORAY.
But yeah Jewel insisted we make the trek to a McDonalds (there's one near our house??? on the highway??? we were ready to drive out of town but hey whoa) to get a legit game Hoopa on Y, and it's perfect because he has a Naïve nature and "is somewhat vain" which is EXACTLY what our innerspace Hoopa dude is like. I like him, he's sweet.
He's also obsessed with this song and kept blasting it in the car with Cel, the both of them dancing. He has the most obvious grin, it's great. Like you know he's out with that look.
Agh but I'm SO GLAD he's already like absolutely anchored in here as an Outspacer. I LOVE him, I love having all these Pokemon around so much.

We're strongly considering buying Omega Ruby but only if we have the funds, and if we can play it safely (i.e. no staggering fiction lag). We shall seeee.


We bought a bottle of melatonin gummy-pills again because even though we're exhausted we can't get tired lately, at all. Hence the staying up until 3. So we take one cherry coma squishy pill and then within 20 minutes we're actually yawning, which is something.
Melatonin also helps dream recall a lot apparently, and Jay's been remembering them a little more recently anyway so HOPEFULLY we'll get back to the daily dream journal. When we don't remember our dreams we're a mess, our whole sense of reality gets thrown off. Maybe that's part of why we've felt so off lately? Probably.


Jay bought a new kind of toothpaste and it's delicious but it's wintergreen with neem and I keep laughing at that. Green with neeeeem. For your teeeeth!

The Snap-On Tools guy at work gave us pink socks as a gift. Yesss. They're fantastic.
We also finally got one of those gray "Colors" shirts our dad always used to wear so we're now officially part of the painter's gang, haha.


Oh we found out, Jemma IS the one who keeps eating oats, she says they "taste the same color as her" and she's always so exhausted-tired (but not sad?) all the time, she goes to them for comfort food.
Chocoloco keeps her under control, he's very compassionate with her.

-- But there's an alter (the one who was just writing?) who steps in and always eats them instead of her, although it would be more accurate to say she just ruins the food and chomps it up to throw it out. She claims she "works for The Destroyer" and she feels like Ruby and/or Hoseki, age 14-15, close enough to mania to be a slip-hacker if they aren't careful.
However today she did speak to Jemma and Chocoloco, explaining herself and letting them do the same, so hopefully they will reach a cooperative, respectful, healthy agreement that will not harm the body but which will also fulfill their individual needs.
That issue of "pursuing concepts" in the physical is still a major concern. It could theoretically be completely, easily healed with more frequent indepth access to headspace, hence the meditation topic previously. It would be in our best interests to try.



It's so foggy out tonight, it's magical.
It's TOO WARM though. Jay wants it to snow and it hasn't snowed and he said he's going to be the snow and that's great but PUT SOME OUTSIDE PLEASE OKAY THANKS.


Now the body is falling asleep standing up and Laurie is glaring at me because I get too manic and nonchalant or whatever and she says there are important things to do. I guess I don't pay attention, I'm just too excited and hyper and she says nighttime is not the time for that! So off I go, bye~~~

 

I've been feeling rather existentially screwed-up lately?
I think it's because we've been letting our well-being completely fall by the wayside. For whatever reason, we just stopped caring about how we treated the body at some point? I don't know if it was post-surgery or what... but the past few months have been rougher than most, from how it feels. Memory is collapsing, health is kind of failing, and honestly we're scared.
We're trying hard to take little steps of improvement, but right now we're also fighting a monstrous wall of depression, shame, and sabotaging self-abusive habits, so those little steps are being taken uphill through a desert at this point.
Still. We won't give up.

Therapy on Monday was INCREDIBLE, from a progress standpoint. I didn't write about it here because it was literally a 40-minute infospill on everything we've been reading lately about RTS and purity/rape culture and how all that ties into our past traumas and current struggles, etc. It's complex but it's VOCABULARY that we've been trying to find for YEARS, like literally we can FINALLY talk about this stuff because there are words that fit it now, there are other people who experienced similar things and who put thoughts together in coherent ways we never would have considered.... you get the idea.
So progress IS being made. It's just tricky lately.

I'm trying to start the dream journal and diet journal again. Both help immensely with grounding and 'non-derealization,' if there's a word for that... they help us get a grip on existence, "hey I actually exist!" That sort of thing. We are uncomfortable with traditional "rituals" but it does help to have patterns. It helps to have solid reference points, threads of coherence, etc.
See I KNOW what to do. Just, right now, it is going to take IRON WILLPOWER to break past these hackers and their programming and all the nasty neglectful habits we've let develop, the same way mold grows, the same way trees rot. We need to just start taking care of ourselves better, more actively.

Doubt is slowly fading. Slowly. But it's fading. I don't know how to express how amazing that is.
Maybe it's because I'm reviewing the archives, remembering who we are/were, but... the reality of us, the honesty of us, is sinking in again. The brightnessof us. Us, seperate from the performances and presentations we cultivated online. We're remembering. I'm remembering.
We're shaking off the dust, we're really trying to.

In the meantime, the past two days have still been oddly off? I've been fasting too much and then panicking because we get sick and eating bad things. It's unhealthy, but I'm aware that it's happening. I just need to make sure we start ACTIVELY using coping methods, grounding skills, etc. We have the help we need. We just need to use it.

Today feels... sad? Like it's an interim feeling, but it's also a calm-before-the-storm feeling... rather, it's like the smell of ozone in the air, potent and buzzing, as the wind whips around you and thunder is rumbling through the mountains, but there's no rain yet. There's no rain yet, and you're running to your car, or to your house, and for a surreal nervous minute you are wrapped up in that whirlwind of almost, in that malestrom of imminence, caught in the tension where there is no time... that's what it feels like.
It's scary too, in that sense, like there's judgment looming and I'm afraid we're running out of time. In any case we ARE using our time unwisely, and I really should ask Cel to help me with that, I know she would. She always helps.
In any case, God knows we need a thunderstorm inside right now. We need the sheets of rain, we need the violet lightning...
But we're getting there. People are healing. People are remembering who they ARE, not who they've been told to be, or who they've allowed themselves to thoughtlessly become.

I've had two dreams this week with Hoopa in them and in both instances ze was directly tied to me somehow. I'm taking that as a good sign too.


So. That's all I have the spoons to type right now. I've been archiving the entire archives onto my laptop, so that's taken many many hours, and several computer crashes. My back hurts and my wrists hurt and my ankles hurt but I'm kind of laughing because God, I can feel that there's blue sky up behind those clouds, I just have to fly.

Therefore I'm just going to toss some System-related art at you because creativity is always good and I love us enough tonight to share this sort of thing.




First is the NEW/current Spectrum Star flowchart, as the last one we did was last July and is now incorrect.



I'm still not sure how correspondences work between colors (I was mapping it out earlier this year), but I'll take the time to revisit that line of thought again soon, if applicable.

Second, also in response to this entry, here's the current work in progress of Central.



I didn't get the chance to touch up the old pictures, but I will soon.
This is also poster-proportioned. So hopefully one day I can get this literally printed as one and put up on the wall in our room. Now we're REALLY unignorable, haha.


Also, you may remember that this was originally supposed to be done in this style, hence the current no-eyes look.
I was experimenting with quotes when we first started... here's the ones we tentatively chose.

 
 

Javier, Leon, and Nathaniel unfortunately don't have much actual dialogue recorded in the archives, so they aren't in those sets.


Speaking of Javier and Nathaniel, I drew these quick headshots as references for a beloved friend (you know who you are) and I don't think they were ever shared here?
  

Javier is really difficult to draw correctly; I'll have to do another picture of him because that one isn't quite correct.
Nat looks a little "buggier" than he does in that sketch (that was just for antennae purposes really). Mainly his eyes are bigger.
Waldorf looks PERFECT though, I am so happy just seeing that picture. Her hair does glow, remember, that's what I was quickly trying to portray there.



I also did three pictures of Infinitii, to show hir "mode changes" roughly.

 

 

Basically:
1) No face-mouth, all wing-mouths: safe to approach. "Feels like a church" mode. Energy is softer, but massive. Carries "creative" Black energy; risk of falling into.
2) No face-eyes, all wing-eyes: approach with caution. Energy is much sharper, "holy fear" sort of vibe. Carries "destructive" Black energy; unpredictable.
3) Face and eyes on both face and wings: the most overwhelming vibe, carrying both sides of Black energy. Completely safe to be around though, if you can handle it.

A rule of thumb is this:
Face-mouths show "negative" Black energy. Face-eyes show "positive" Black energy.
If Infi has NO mouths on hir, ze is completely consumed by the creative side of Black and IS dangerous to be around, although it may not feel like it (that's the danger).
If Infi has NO eyes on hir, GET OUT OF THERE. That's practically Tar-mode. If that's happening Infi is VERY unstable and honestly the System should be concerned.
If Infi changes hir color to be WHITE instead of Black, I have no freaking idea what that's about yet but it usually means that serious business is going down.



And here, have some closeups of the pixels for the original three System daemons.

 

Infinitii, Lethe, and we-still-don't-know, aha. We almost got hir name once, but no dice.
Chocoloco, Dendrite, Nexus, and Triad aren't in this set because I simply haven't gotten around to drawing them out yet.


Someone did try drawing a scene from this *incident* though. Very sketchy, I don't know when it was drawn or who did it, but I am fond of it so here.

 

 

Markus on the left, Ryman and the 2012 Jewel ("Cupid") on the right.



What else can I toss at you.

Oh yeah, this entry is all avatars I've been making at recolor.me and they're really cute actually.

I'm still trying to verify/ finish finding the Spectrum Symbols I mentioned a ways back... Black, Aqua, and Sky are being elusive. Everything else feels fitting right now.
Oh yes, and we have a logo. I'm not showing it to you just yet, I want to digitalize it and make it look lovely. I told you I want to "illustrate" at least some of our life, ideally in a webcomic format, to share with people who haven't/ can't/ would rather not read through the 1000+ pages here. Yes there really are that many dudes, if you've read them all then seriously you deserve some sort of trophy, that is amazing. Also humbling. We owe you a hug or something if we ever meet you physically, really.



Last but not least, here's how many pixel people we have so far.

 

 

About 70 more to go, haha. *sobs*
Not really; we currently only need pixel representations for people who talk in Xangas. But who knows! We all want to talk more, and the channels are open to anyone who wants to chat, so. I'll probably have to do at least 20 more of these at some point. But I'm not complaining; I love everyone and I'm really happy to see the completed art.



On that note it is 1AM and tomorrow is Thursday, I totally forgot. We have TWO therapy appointments and we really should go jogging in the morning before we end up sitting in a car all day. Gotta take those small steps, like I said. Just get the good habits going again.

I love all you readers, invisible or not, and thanks for being there.
May you have a lovely lovely night, and dreams to match.

 

 

 

 

 

God I am in so much pain.

I'm Jemma. I'm still getting used to being "my own person," but... it makes me strangely happy. There's a glitter of light down in my indigo chest that glows when I'm like this. I'm happy. I'm alive. It's weird but... it's nice.
Chocoloco is here too. He's always with me.

I'm updating I guess because no one else got called out. I'm not sure why I'm here.

I... these people, they say they're the Archivists? want me to write about what happened today. But now that they're telling me what it is I don't really know if I want to.
Choco says write it... why? Because you have to. For the good of the System, I guess, although it's no good. Here goes.

There was a hack this afternoon. Garrison (the teal-haired Archivist) says it was one of the people who's going through the Leagueworlds


Who the heck is going through the bleeding Leagueworlds.


Someone. We don't know.
There's an infection spreading. This "obligation" is riding the wave of numbness the current social fronters have, the ones who exist "only to please" and who therefore do not have a solid identity of their own, or a sense of self-preservation, or health or joy.

They're literally killing us is what you're saying.

Essentially, yes. Pardon me, but do you want to do a Xanga?

Heck yeah, but-- no, never mind. Whoever's in the body is too bloody tired. One of the sad people.


I'm too tired to type for anyone. my head hurts and i'm sick scared quiet and hello, why am i out here
the body is sick? i'm not sure how, it's very hot and it hurts sick in a lot of places. the feelings are hard to find but they are awful to feel.

It's protecting Overload from them. All of us, maybe.

The numbness doesn't do a bloody thing. Numbness doesn't do anything but make us not care about the pain. And by 'us' I mean the devils who have been staging as us for the past few months now.




Everything hurts and I am getting very scared, the body shouldn't be this sick al the time, what is happening

good night we need to stop this and go back to ourselves we're getting distracted sorry