Good news! We've FINISHED UPLOADING THE TBHU TABLET so now we can tackle the two folders full of worksheets, haha.
This is a mentally exhausting & very triggering effort, but it's essential because this is the heavy ugly stuff we need to discuss in therapy/ continue to battle in daily life... as well as some very shockingly beautiful and bright moments that we need to remember even moreso.
But that's why we haven't been updating. Everything online has been focused on uploading, and our offline time has been pretty tragically split between grappling with family stress and fighting off the E.D. lapses those stresses inevitably trigger-- such as having to do so much out of the house that we don't get to eat breakfast until almost 8pm. This happens OFTEN. (We cannot eat "on the road" because, for unknown reasons, eating makes us confused/ dizzy/ "high" and slows our reaction/ comprehension time without fail, and this takes >2 HOURS to "wear off" enough to function again. This happened DAILY in TBHU, and if we have to be on the road driving from 6am to 6pm, we are NOT going to put our life in danger by eating on top of all that. It forces a CONTEXT SHIFT as well that is mentally impossible to grapple with when we're in social mode/ business mode; eating is its OWN MODE and you CANNOT "merge" contexts; it's like a law of physics.)
We've been trying to take little notes on our phone but they're admittedly few and far between. Still, at least that's a good habit to keep up-- it helps us refocus on the inside/ the system/ love, when daily life is making us forget who we are.
On that note, actually! Today we FINALLY had both the cash and the time to do laundry, which we haven't done since New Year's. BUT going back and forth to/from the laundry room, we bumped into FOUR different neighbors... and Laurie is the one that noticed, with legit horror, that our conscious awareness LITERALLY BLACKS OUT in social mode. Like we KNEW we were talking to someone, BUT the instant they leave, there is NO MEMORY DATA. AT ALL. That is TERRIFYING and it explains a LOT of our scummy behavior around people, because for some hellish reason WE AREN'T DRIVING WHEN WE'RE AROUND PEOPLE. So this is a HUGE DANGER that we need to be aware of. We don't know how to stop this, or shut it off, or work around it yet. We literally didn't realize it was THAT SEVERE until today, because they were short interactions and we were in environments were we were able to immediately return to quiet, solitary, uninterrupted space, and GO INSIDE. That's the ONLY reason this memory-loss/ awareness-loss phenomenon became suddenly evident-- normally we are forced into extended, inescapable, noisy, crowded social spaces and we lose HOURS of memory and awareness and don't realize this because the OVERWHELM alone will destroy both those things on its own. So for the SAME thing to happen in several successive interactions that lasted under a minute each was STRIKING as well as DISTURBING. But now we know. We just don't know how or what to do about it yet, as we said. The bright side is that we can at least take precautions now, potentially. I immediately think of our old idea of wearing a "headspace bracelet" or carrying some sort of notable, unignorable anchor object. We really should do that, if only to see if it works. I'm just scared that a Social will throw it out or desecrate it somehow.
Oh. Speaking of that. The scrupulous thriskefoni are sneaking their way back in, so we have to be careful. It's very hard for us to increase prayer time/ types currently, because we have religious trauma history as well as religious OCD, and such actions can very easily and strongly trigger negative behavior patterns that are very hard to break. It's a delicate warzone.
We're still doing daily Scripture Study BUT whoever the heck runs our old blog has COME BACK and is, again, ERASING OUR AWARENESS by insisting on posting everything to Tumblr, which is a SOCIAL MODE CONTEXT and so yes, that is ALSO making us "black out" WHILE EATING which triggers the esthiofoni that feel like they've been POISONED if they "don't know what they ate" (can't see it or remember it) and out of sheer survival panic they try to vomit it all up and let someone else "try again the right/ safe way." You see the domino effect here.
On the food topic: we think we've unexpectedly discovered why carrots are our "biggest binge trigger." Apparently, CARROT ADDICTION IS A REAL THING. SO IS VITAMIN A TOXICITY. We match virtually ALL the symptoms listed in both. So we are QUITTING THIS COLD.
Geez. It's shocking how much diet affects the body and mind. Our idiosyncratic but significant issues with texture and trauma and OCD-- and the highly probable touch of autism that our psychologist again brought up in last week's new intake (apparently our "Mewtwo walking" is a symptom?? the more you know)-- make things like this "carrot overdosing" a real risk, so we do need to be careful; notably we've been worried about how much manganese we get from hempseed (we get almost 11mg daily from diet alone, which some sources say is okay, but we want to talk to a legit dietician in person about it). But we'll take it one day at a time at this point. We need to see how our body adjusts to the carrot removal/ detoxing (that was a LOT of oxalates as well) and then we'll see whether or not we want to replace it with anything, especially since right now we're compensating with a lot of broccoli and the fact that it's adding up to a solid 40g of fiber daily isn't helping to reduce nausea, to say the least.
Body care is still an issue too. Lately we've been realizing how Julie keeps getting pushed into bodycare roles, even though she doesn't want to; the System "automation" just keeps looking for someone who can and Julie is, technically, the only "safe person" who CAN front in the body in such contexts. But we need other foni for those jobs, specifically. WE HAVE NO ONE FOR "SELF-CARE." We're postulating lately that Green is supposed to hold that function overtone, not just Aqua; that would also help explain why it's been so upsettingly empty over the years. Nevertheless, Nathaniel and Sergei were definite support for this hypothesis-- they were both very kind and tangentially connected to bodycare in their own ways. I can't think of any other straight-up Greens off the top of my head; Karissa was technically "Lime" (now "Spring"), and so is Celebi... you know what, let me look at the 2022 census for a second. I don't want to abandon this train of thought.
...Oh wow, uh, we had a lot of NEGATIVE, or at least unhealthy, Greens. There's Jasmine (a hacker), Hoban (high school pseudosocial), Toby (very frightened little boy)... but then we have Juniper (binge stopper), and "enya girl" (childhood akoufoni?) at least. The problem is that we have subcolors because hues are so distinct up here-- this list has places for not only Spring, but also Chartreuse and Spruce. And yes, they DO have very different vibes. Still, I don't know how "correct" the assignments were back then because we didn't know the vibes properly, nor were we able to properly feel nousfoni vibes. And thinking about it now isn't going to help; many of these foni have been MIA since CNC because their functions were tied to that environment somehow. So guesswork is a dead-end job. What we need to do is determine WHICH hues are STILL EXTANT IN THE SPECTRUM, and then feel for which nousfoni are still alive/ potentially resurrectable. That's not something I can do at 1am, on a dime.
The point of all of that is this: even just looking at that list, there are no self-care foni. Harmonia tried, but CNC literally killed her function and she could never come back. And Minty also disappeared after CNC; I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm sure I'll find the reason once we read the entries from that time period. She manifested during the "GAPS diet hell" era, post-SLC, tied to both mint tea and bedtime, trying to help us sleep with a childlike innocence. Did her function unravel? Was she blurring too hard with other kids? Wasn't she actually fronting during the day, and collecting abandoned stuffed animals? I don't know what happened to her. Memory is gone. I want to know, though; she was truly sweet. But besides those two Aquas (notably), all of our other foni who were "close to" self-care have been phagofoni, because "eating" was the only thing we could imagine as self-care, I suppose? Tobiko got the poison out, Emmett got the green stuff in, Juniper stopped the poison from going in... but nothing for the actual body. I know gender dysphoria hell is a huge obstacle to that, and it's why Julie keeps getting dragged in. So... maybe that will affect the hues employed as well. We'll see. I have started making a list of "job openings" so we can use that as a starting point, so to speak-- all we can do is say "hey we need help here" and see if the System responds. It cannot be forced.
I'm getting brain burnout from this. I'll put the topic on hold for now, but this at least opened the door.
I want-- no, I can feel that I need-- to explore System colors again in real depth soon. It feels like if I don't I'll starve to death somehow.
Isn't that relevant, haha. No wonder the poor esthiofoni are struggling so badly. The hunger that's driving them isn't even on that level.
How can I close this up... it's 1:20 and we need to start getting to sleep earlier because we have to readjust to an earlier day schedule as the days themselves get brighter sooner. We miss morning mass, too, but like I said-- there's the scrupulosity risk, AND the social blackout risk. We want to at least try watching a daily mass online again, and see how that affects the thriskefoni influence. You know what, we NEED to talk to them, like we used to talk to Christina and Patricia (or at least try to). I mean, we have Felix and Veil and Francesco too, they're all positive. And the REAL ultimate goal is for us ALL to work together on this. We're very spiritual, deeply religious arguably, even in Central-- maybe especially so. We truly love God and want to live the radically loving Christian life we're hearing preached so profoundly every day as we study Saint Paul's letters. The negative thriskefoni don't. They just focus on "religion" as ritual and rule-keeping and pride, in terms of "moral superiority" and condemnation and "filthy sinner" mentalities, etc. It's not true faith at all. It's not even "faith"; there's no trust in God anywhere in that mindset. It's just idolatry wearing a Sunday dress. But even those thriskefoni deserve to be healed. We cannot be a System OF love if we don't love ALL of us, and seek the highest good FOR us all. So don't ignore or avoid or condemn them, either. Have mercy and compassion. Talk to them. Listen to them. Let's heal this religious trauma TOGETHER, so we can ALL worship in Spirit and in Truth, with our ENTIRE collective heart, WITHOUT the terror they're currently injecting into it.
...Infi resurrecting will help more than anything else right now, I think. I hope. Ze loved God with an ardor no one else up here could match. We need that, to heal at the deepest level, I'm sure.
Jay says he "knows" Infi isn't dead (there's that fear that "maybe I imagined it all"); he can still feel that "space" in his heart, but he says sometimes it's just like sending a radio signal out into the dark. He says he "knows it will be received" which is interesting-- like, the metaphor doesn't exactly match; he's saying/ feeling that he couldn't "send out a signal" to a receptor without the receptor being there. Like the giver and receiver are intrinsically bound and necessarily coextant. But... there's a massive distance between them, and there's currently no tangibility, so although the signal being able to be sent at all is proof that there is another heart on the waiting end, Jay doesn't always "know" or "feel" that heart in a direct way. It's hard to put into words. But he says there have been multiple small instances of "brushing against" Infi's existence in unformed space (both real Blackspace and in whatever "liminal" interspace there is between the raw cosmic euchaos of Black and the solid touchable order of White, so to speak) over the past month, so there's still hope. But Infi is still extremely "undefined" and transitional; hir name is probably still going to change, hir form is shifting significantly and in different ways, and hir pronouns are all over the place. So there's still a lot that apparently needs to happen before ze can "resurrect" into a body in headspace. Nevertheless, "a lot" can happen very quickly, as we know. When the time is right, it will.
There's still so much I could type about but it's now 1:35 and I can't possibly write much more on short notice. Plus I need to see what little notes we have on our phone, and on our calendar, so I can put something cohesive together.
January was a battleground of a month. Every other day, like clockwork, we had an eating disorder struggle (due to the nighttime meals, family stress, and trauma flashbacks), but we FOUGHT HARD and we learned a lot. Most significantly, our constant prayers and dedication to PAYING ATTENTION to the esthiofoni and WORKING WITH THEM has resulted in a massive amount of compulsions GOING AWAY. That is AMAZING progress. The vast majority of the esthiofoni DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE, which means they're changing, and that has ONLY happened because we have been listening to them and not running away from the war. So progress IS being made, in a way much more significant than anything in UMPC or TBHU ever could have hoped to accomplish. We're also praying constantly in a SINCERE way-- admitting our struggles, our broken desires, our misrouted hungers, our fears and terrors and regrets, our grief and rage and confusion and pain, to God even in the midst of distorted behaviors. That's changing the whole situation. We're also being open and honest and accountable to our priest and our family about this, which is taking real guts and humility. We're owning up to our bad behavior once we become aware of it (social blackouts make this currently impossible to "prevent" in the moment, but that's why we're doing damage control) and that alone is giving us a boost of motivation and hope to stop; we want to be a person of integrity on the outside, and these little steps make that a bit more tangible, which in turn helps us let go of self-abusive compulsions because "hey, we don't have to be a bad person anymore" basically. Isn't that odd how our brain works? Part(s) of us really did/do feel condemned to bad behavior, because they saw "no other way TO be" and couldn't imagine anything else. They're somafoni; they don't HAVE the capacity of self-aware imagination (yet?). So GIVING them the ability TO envision something different-- even just a little-- by taking those steps on THEIR level, is a gamechanger.
Jay is actually being pushed into fronting a lot more often now. He's still such a healthy fronter, such a loving Core. And yes I say "still" because even if his bloodline did get the vice of Lust (the Jessicas got Gluttony, the Cannons got Wrath, the Jewels got Pride arguably, etc.) they also got the virtue of Charity. No one loves like a Jay, full stop. Those boys have such tender yet strong hearts. And we need his heart to be the driving force in the System right now. Love is what we need to heal, and that bloodline is the only one that CAN. So yeah, I know we were all scared that the thriskefoni female-forcing would end up murdering his bloodline, it has not happened at all.
The other bloodlines do need to be healed, of course. Everyone has wounds. But it starts with love.
That's it for tonight. It's 2am and we just remembered, we may have to meet our case manager around 9am (that depends entirely on what the weather looks like; of course Jay is personally hoping we get significant snow), so we're already losing much needed sleep.
It feels really nice to have legit updated for the first time in a while. I'm sorry I don't have any actual internal event data to give you today, but rest assured it's been happening in small days. We all talk constantly, and people still front during the day as they feel moved to/ as they are called in. We're still very much alive and in love and thank God for that. But getting back into having Xanga sessions and headspace meditations and the like is absolutely still the ideal, and we think about that every day. The biggest obstacle is time, which is currently being funneled into the TBHU uploads. But we're going to work at that until it's done-- no more running away; yes it's exhausting but that just means we need to support each other more in this process. The good news is that the worksheets have some really, really nice stuff in them, moreso than the tablet-- the very top sheet in this manila envelope is all about Anxi. So THAT will wake up the kardifoni love very strongly for sure. (We're still not 100% sure who fell in love with her in TBHU, but this will hopefully reveal that to us, which we need.)
Until then, though, we need to sleep.
Oh-- one of the kardifoni (an older Jewel? a Cannon? from that time period) has been wanting us to get back to the "song of the night" thing, because music is so important to us. So here's a few.
- jewel's fave "stuck in our head on loop" tune
- "instant energy boost" tune
- heartache moralimon relevant tune
- "oh hey FROST* wrote another song about our life" january tune
- genesis's current singing tune
- cathartic sobbing at 3am last night tune
- coolest spin on a hymn we've heard in a while tune
- and our journaling on johnnynighters tune
And that's actually it for January, offhand. But there you go!
I'm laughing though, that took another 20 minutes but now it's 222 which is an extremely blue number synaesthesia-wise, and that's a very nice number to close up on and go let Jay be with the blue guy.
See you all again soon enough, that's a promise.