the spectrum heart cathedral system

I'm literally BURNT OUT & OVERWHELMED by the mere thought of GOING BACK TO THAT APARTMENT and Laurie is seriously trying to help me "drop my depression score" by reminding me that I have SO MANY GOOD THINGS to live for, EVEN NOW, but I keep feeling mentally dragged back into that "stuck/ helpless/ useless" space? But I'm trying to feel out WHY and I THINK IT'S TIED TO HYPERPRODUCTIVE COMPULSION?? Like I feel that I CAN'T just HAVE JOY. I "can't just" write poetry or compose music or worldbuild or journal or sing or meditate. I "have" to... do what? Isn't that odd? That's where the eating disorder came in. Compulsive selfdestructive timewasting, SOLELY because I felt "NOT ALLOWED" to archive or Leaguework or REST. And THAT'S WHY I'M TOTALLY SHIFTING THE APARTMENT SPACE. I know my brain has "object permanence" issues so I HAVE TO PUT ALL MY CREATIVE STUFF OUT IN THE OPEN, FULLY & READILY ACCESSIBLE & IN REACH & VISIBLE. And I BOTH NEED AND WANT TO WORK ON IT ALL EVERY DAY. Focus on one part of it and GET STUFF DONE. Be GOAL-ORIENTED & PURPOSE-DRIVEN and CLEAR ABOUT YOUR DIRECTION. The three BIG things posing big concernes? FOOD, EXERCISE, & RELIGION. The first two are potentially manageable-- food can be smaller portions spread out, more nutrition/ calorie dense and maybe clean/ portable enough to eat WHILE I work on art? Actually NO, I DON'T WANT TO SPLIT UP ATTENTION. So meals MUST have their own time, but MINIMAL. Be flexible about time and DON'T BREAK FOCUS if you're on a roll creatively, but don't skip eating either! We'll make it work. As for workouts, I'd love to hit the gym first thing in the morning & have that also a time for MUSIC? AND if I do MASS & ADORATION right after, I can do my DAILY PRAYERS THEN & be free in conscience to WORK. Because I do NOT WANT TO SKIP PRAYER OR MASS, EVER. But I ALSO CAN'T "CORRUPT" MY FAITH WITH SCRUPULOSITY ANYMORE. I HAVE to BALANCE the rituals of religion with the RESPONSIBILITIES OF MY CALLING IN LIFE. But THAT CALLING IS PRAYER, TOO. Make sure you ALWAYS keep GOD at the CENTER-- NOT SCRUPULOUS PRACTICES!! And GOD DOESN'T EXCLUDE ANYTHING. HE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO ABANDON YOUR TALENTS/ PASSIONS/ JOYS. He wants to SANCTIFY & BLESS them!! Dude HE IS STILL WITH YOU NOW. He's with ALL of you, because HE MADE YOU A SYSTEM. YOU KNOW THIS. THE SYSTEM IS LOVE AT ITS ABSOLUTE HEART AND THEY DO ALWAYS BRING YOU CLOSER TO GOD BECAUSE OF THAT LOVE. SAME WITH THE LEAGUEWORLDS. GOD GAVE IT ALL TO YOU. IT'S NOT "SEPARATE" FROM HIM! IT'S HIS WILL THAT YOU LIVE AS YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF & MEET YOUR NEEDS IN ALL RESPECTS! THAT ABSOLUTELY INCLUDES YOUR GIFTS & LOVES. You aren't just ALLOWED to live that life: you MUST.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FUTURE CONTEXT
✳ DON'T FORGET = YOU WILL BE SPENDING A LOT OF TIME WITH MOM!! ESPECIALLY HELPING AT THE HOUSE! (MAKE A SPOTIFY "WORK" PLAYLIST?)
✳ GET SOCIAL WITH EDIFYING PEOPLE. Seriously dude STOP ISOLATING. Meet library people. Meet cafe people. Meet art people. Meet CHURCH people. LOOK ONLINE for local groups that will LIFT UP YOUR SOUL!


FUTURE "FEARS"/ WORRIES =
- feeling "stuck inside" and alone
- "not allowed to have FUN/ JOY"
- "have to spend all my time in public" (no solitude)
- No skills
- Too weak
- Unable to run
- Fear of traveling by bus
- Fear of going outside alone
- Too much food focus
- Can't find real friends
- Poverty limitations
- Transportation limitations
- "Not enough time"???
- "NOT GOOD ENOUGH"
- "Have to work a job" ONLY
- "Only useful if I'm marketable"
- Can't properly play instruments
- Apartment remodel failure
- "Have to ONLY pray all day"
- "Religion vs. passion for life"
- Being female
- Can't be involved with queer folks
- "Not allowed to do what I love to do"
- "God won't help me creatively"
- "Anything that's NOT explicit religion is a SIN"
- Education debt possible
- "Dead end" "soulsucking" job
- PTSD debilitating return
- Overwhelmed by work
- Disappointment to famoly
- LOSE SELF TO "SOCIALS"
- HAVE TO LIFE LIFE "FOR MOM"


FUTURE HOPES/ DREAMS/ GOALS =
- PUBLISHING BOOKS/ POETRY
- Writing NEW MUSIC
- CHRISTMAS "EP" AT LEAST
- Learn cello/ viola/ guzheng
- FIX THE ERHU
- Get a DOUBLESTRING GUITAR
- Learn to REALLY PAINT
- Get in an art gallery one day
- "Audiobook" reading possible?
- GET BUFF AT THE GYM
- Make REAL friends
✳ GET A VOICE RECORDER AGAIN
- ARCHIVING
- ↑ BOOK EDIT!!
- SAVE UP FOR A FULLSIZE KEYBOARD
- Learn how to write screenplays
- Character design skillbuilding
- LEARN THE WACOM
- Learn landscapes/ anatomy
- WEBCOMIC Leagueworld?
- WORK WITH EXCALIBUR ON MUSIC?
- Tumblr community interaction (DID + F/O)
- ENTER CONTESTS for creativity
- ZINES
- Start an Etsy?
- Start a Kofi?
- WEBSITE
- "Insight" blog
- VOCATIONAL REHAB
- Find "queer"/ "creative" spaces
- GET ON SPOTIFY (write a HIT BRO)
- HIKING/ NATURE WALKS
- Get a small TYPING laptop for travel

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm "giving up." I'm scared. I DON'T WANT TO but it's HAPPENING. "Binge" AND "restrict" behaviors are RETURNING FULL FORCE with an "I don't care anymore"/ "nothing matters" numb misery behind it. I didn't enjoy lunch at all. I swamped it in condiments I didn't want. WHAT IS GOING ON? Dude I ACTUALLY GOT DROPPED A MEALPLAN this morning which is FANTASTIC because it means LESS VOLUME & LESS CALORIES & LESS EXPENSE & LESS TIME! It means IF I DO attend Partial, THEY CAN'T FORCE ME TO BINGE!! So WHY THE HECK AM I DESOLATE? Honestly I feel like HELPLESS CRYING. I'm... I feel crumpled. Wilted. Sad. Is it because I'm going "home" to a place that isn't "home" at all? God I MISS EVERYONE. I'm miserable because WE HAVEN'T RECOVERED FROM CNC and I feel LOST & EMPTY because Central is still in ruins and the Spectrum has pieces missing and Infi is still dead. I'm so terribly sad. Except... isn't there hope? Isn't there the Leagueworlds? Isn't there family? I'm already crushed flat by the mere thought of having to go back to a soulless prayer routine & forced socializing without being real at all. I'm so sad. I'm tired of not-existing. I desperately want to feel FREE & STRONG & JOYFUL & MEANINGFUL & ALIVE. And I don't. It's because I'm so disconnected from inside. Why? Because I'm too upset by the physical. Why? Because I'm NOT LIVING AS US. Isn't that ironic? But it's ALWAYS THE CAUSE. Boy you NEED TO GET INTO HEARTSPACE ASAP because THAT IS THE BRIDGE. Your imagination is a GIFT FROM GOD so USE IT. Seriously STOP OBSESSING OVER DISCHARGE PLANS & TUNE IN TO YOUR HEART, because if you're OUT OF TUNE you'll NEVER be happy, no matter HOW MUCH you "plan"!
✳ ALSO. TODAY HAS PROVEN THAT YOU NEED INSPIRATION (movies, books), CATHARSIS (music), and COMMUNION (people who LOVE YOU) to be TRULY HAPPY/ FULFILLED/ YOURSELF!! When you REFUSE to "TAKE IN" GOOD & BEAUTIFUL THINGS, instead trying to "FEED ON YOURSELF," you WILL STARVE TO DEATH.

I just had a phone call with mom and I am so badly shaken up & dissociated.
1) She KEEPS BRINGING UP the fact that I spent the $50 she gave me for my birthday on CHURCH TITHES, instead of going to a movie with Excalibur like she told me to. "If I knew you were just going to give it to the church, I wouldn't have given you anything, and kept ti to use on home repairs!" And THEN I admitted that I gave away ALL the cookware/ kitchenware she gave ME to my SISTER, when she lost her job & had no food & I just gave her everything I had to spare-- of kitchen & bathroom supplies AND of food, PLUS all the stuff I got from food drives. Mom HATES that I do this "BECAUSE IT'S HER STUFF" I'M GIVING AWAY. I wonder if she'd be so upset if I did the same from my own resources, as paltry as they are, OR if she'd immediately jump to the conclusion that "I ONLY did that SO I COULD force her TO "give stuff to me" to "cover the loss""?? Like she'll ASSUME responsibility/ burden SO she CAN yell at me "FOR burdening her"?? It makes me very sad. I thought I was doing the right thing, helping people. But mom thinks I'm somehow doing it so I can take things from HER later. I probably DID do that in the past. Heck, I STILL DO, because this conversation ONLY happened BECAUSE I asked IF she had any extra kitchenware to spare, instead of keeping my dumbass mouth shut & just buying my own. I should've known better. Now I'll never hear the end of it.
2) She will NEVER share my victories, or congratulate me. I told her about how I overcame breakfast flashbacks. I told her how brave I was getting through the soy hell yesterday. I told her how I got through lunch by thinking fondly of grandpa. I told her I was being brave again by having a Poptart for snack. And ALL SHE SAID WAS "...okay...?" like, "and your point is...?" "This is important because...?" Basically, "why does that even matter? Why are you telling me this?" I told her I ENJOYED the gyro & english muffins and she LITERALLY said "THAT'S SO FUNNY." LIKE WTF MOM WHAT ARE YOU EVEN RESPONDING TO??? There's NO DIALOGUE unless my therapist is directing it, it sadly seems. I'm sorry. I'm just heartbroken. I WANT TO SHARE MY JOY & STRIVING WITH HER. I want her to be proud of me. ...but all I ever get are detached phrases. I ask and she'll say something tangentially reassuring but there's NO vulnerability, no actual sincere heartfelt words. And... I NEED those. I'm realizing I will never get such words from her. I never have and that's not going to change. It's why I'm starving. Emotionally I am so hungry. I want to weep. I need to just go upstairs & cry with Anxi, & listen to Laurie, & be with Chaos 0. THEY share my joys & sorrows & struggles & victories. THEY are proud of me, GENUINELY so. I NEED that. I'm so sad. I feel so guilty for needing to be loved. I can't keep seeking it from mom. It's so sad. But it's true. I'm depending too much on her emotional support/ response for validation, and I am not getting any and I never have and I probably never will. That is so hard to admit. I need to let her go. I can't hold her to my expectations if she cannot meet them. It's unfair to her & to us. I need to move on from childhood grief & desperation. I need to focus on headspace & heaven for support. ...and I ALSO need to EMBRACE the FACT that GOD DOES NOT "HOLD HEAVEN OUT OF OUR REACH," "way up there," intangible & unknowable. CHRIST INCARNATED. And there ARE PEOPLE IN MY LIFE-- IN MY HEART, MOST OF ALL-- WHO REFLECT GOD'S LOVE TO ME ALWAYS. And I NEED to turn to THEM, then, AS God's messengers to me, as His angels, for the encouragement & empathy & sincere lifesharing love that I am starving to death for. Heaven IS within reach. SO STOP REFUSING TO LET YOURSELF EAT.

010718.
sunday.

We finally realized why Tobiko hasn't been the one purging anymore.

Food does not register as food.
We've been using food as a stim.

We've been using a LOT of things as stims, actually.
This explains the bathroom rituals.
We brush our teeth, floss, brush again, floss some more, use mouthwash, brush our teeth again, wash our face, wash our body, wash our hands, wash our face again… over and over and over and over. We do this for an hour, sometimes, just scrubbing at our gums and our flesh, scrubbing until we are red and raw sometimes. We do this in the shower, too-- we obsessively wash over and over and over, not even thinking that much about "being" clean as we are thinking about feeling clean. It's why we cut our nails down to the nubs and shave every hair off that we can reach. It's never about the end result, not literally. It's about how it feels. It's about purging everything that hurts in the most literal way we can think of.

We eat when we don't want to because it NEVER registers as eating. It registers as stimming.
This is why preparing food used to take, what, six hours back in PA? Because it was never about food. It was, again, a matter of stimming. Of sensory soothing.

Remember that one night in SLC where we sat on the floor of our bedroom, rocking violently back and forth and flapping our hands so hard our wrists ached, blasting Serph at high volume on our headphones and stretching our legs against that rubber band until they, too, were sore from exertion? Pure stimming. Pure mindless stimming. THAT'S the key here.

We've lost all our old methods. We can no longer walk in circles in the living room, or the kitchen, or the driveway. We can no longer go hide downstairs by the furnace, or lock ourselves in the bathroom-- although the latter was always a horrific trauma trigger, as was the attic, even moreso (which is why we didn't even bother to list it here.)
We can't even self-abuse in the "traditional" way anymore. We don't have razors. We don't have knives. We don't have blades. (and oh, how our heart aches at those words-- no, those names, beloved and tender as a wound) We can't bite our arms anymore, can't slap our face, can't yank at our hair, can't claw at our skin or punch our legs or stomp our feet. All our old stimming methods, as violent as we need them, are gone, are forbidden. And our brain is boiling over.

It's been shutting down a lot lately and that terrifies us, to be honest. OV has it easy. He can stim with an adorable little squishy macaron or peach or donut, can play with fidget spinners or kaleidoscopes or even just a piece of jewelry. That's enough for him, it seems, and that makes us super happy. We love him, we love allof them, and the fact that they can use such mild methods to soothe their addled brain is deeply soothing to ours-- in a different sense. We would never inflict this aggressive need of ours on them, not for the world. And yet, here we are, needing it, and terrified because we can't explain it to him, terrified because he thinks we're doing it out of hatred, out of rage, out of suicidal ideation. It's exactly the opposite. When we don't do it, the stress and pressure gets so intense that we wantto die, and we stop caring whether or not we do. That is what's lethal. Not the stims.

The problem is, though, that the stims are dangerous in and of themselves. All of Cannon and Gamboge's old methods drew blood, marked bruises, left scars. All of them beautiful and beloved, true, but still risky to our health… and yet what we wouldn't give to be able to flay this flesh wide open again, even though I can feel Scalpel shaking his head at that thought even now. Why so?
"It's dangerous," he says. "You're right. Even though it is effective, and beautiful, it's also just as addictive. You know just as well as I do that once we start that, we can't stop. We want to bleed and scar forever. And that will kill us."
So will this "eating disorder." But I suppose that's the point of this whole entry.

Food is the simplest, easiest, most "socially acceptible" form of stimming and self-abuse that we have left at our disposal. It's all we have left on days like this.
Except, now, we can't, not without risk of condemnation and distrust, not without hurting someone else more than we ever could before or would ever want to. OV knows we have a problem, but he doesn't know why-- heck, even we didn't know that until this afternoon!
But it's why we go absolutely bonkers in the kitchen once he goes to work and MC goes to sleep. We racked our brains over that for weeks, for months even. We don't want to abuse ourselves, we don't want to suffer or humiliate ourselves anymore, so why this? Why can't we stop this? Why do all of the nousfoni tied to this have such shockingly, irresistibly powerful anchors? Why can't even Laurie stop them? Why does NO ONE, deep down, even want to? Why does it feel like we're being "betrayed" by the System itself in these nousfoni being given free reign and full power over our body and actions in the middle of the night?
We know why, now. It's because they're trying to save our life.
They're STIMMING. They're desperately attempting to soothe our hurting brain, to ease our aching heart, to comfort the poor screaming ones inside. The ONLY way we've EVER known how is to somehow "burn it off" outside. Even now, right now, although we're enjoying typing, our brain is too high-strung and our body is immediately defaulting to the urge of "eating." We aren't hungry. We never are. But that's the point. This isn't about physical hunger. This is about spiritual hunger-- psychological starvation. This is about us needing something we still can't seem to get and scrabbling at the scraps of it wherever we can find it.
Truthfully, we just want to isolate ourselves completely, close our eyes, rock back and forth like a lunatic punching bag and just let our brain turn off as completely as possible. But the key, again, is isolation-- that terribly dear thing we have NEVER been allowed to truly get, not since childhood, and which we have been aching for for longer than we can remember lately. There are no locked doors here. There's no cellar, no attic, no closet to sit in. God how we miss it now, how we miss being a child, ignored and alone in that dearly forsaken house, feeling like we were the only soul(s) existing in the entire world. Just us, and the quiet, and the sunlight, and our heart. We need that like the air we breathe, and we don't know how to get it anymore, because we never realized until we moved out here how we need love like the blood in our veins, pun entirely intended.
That's the killer. That's the real awful thing here.
God I want to cry. Our body is desperate right now, we want to just… scream and punch things and stomp the floor until our knees hurt and throw things and bite things and just let ALL the steam out. There's no malice in it, ever. But it scares people. It terrifies them. We're a monster, and we love what we are, but… we're still a monster. We're a scary, terrible, incomprehensible thing sometimes, and it hurts when our sharp edges cut even the people who try to love us regardless.

Our body wants to food-stim because that's the only thing it can think of to do right now, and yet it KNOWS that it doesn't want to. The very thought of "eating" is making Overload want to scream and throw the plate across the room, is making The Destroyer want to set the entire freaking refrigerator on fire. We HATE food; we hate it for being the only accessible way we were able to dissociate and heal for years, without being hacked.

Yeah. Isn't that the bloody cincher.
Hacks. Why the heck do you think they kept happening for so long?? Why the heck do you think people stopped fighting after so many hellish years??
It's because they hurt, they ate hours of our time, and they isolated us from the world. Yeah, they were absolute hell, that's the indisputable truth-- but the other awful truth is that we didn't want to live in the first place.
God. Those poor, poor damaged kids, sacrificing their souls and selves just because the world at large outside was somehow even scarier than blacking out for three hours and waking up in blood and excruciating pain and mental terror. At least then they could shut down. At least then they could hard-reset their memory, splinter a little more, break a little further, forget most of their entire life and pretend nothing was happening. They just wanted to run, God forgive them, they just wanted to hide and sleep and rest and the ONLY way they could was by shutting everything off. God forgive all of us.

Hacks don't happen anymore. They can't. Not since 2016. Not since Infinitii's presence truly registered, not since we realized what we were actually looking for and what was actually happening in contrast. The truth of it, the harsh horrific reality of the situation, was too terrifying to ever allow ever again. And so hacks stopped completely.
And the eating disorder exploded.

We knew that was going to happen, really. Stop one addiction, but leave the reason why it developed in the first place, and a new addiction will return or appear to replace it. The body is just hopelessly wrecked, man, it doesn't know what else to do.
Why do you think we started flirting with EVERYTHING that would detach us from the reality our poor brain couldn't cope with anymore? We started drinking. We started smoking. We started abusing prescription meds. We experimented with asphyxiation and anesthesia and everything we could think of that would detach us from the awful soul-crushing loop of that toxic household, of that dead-end environment, of the unending mental stress.
And somehow, some days, some nights, that still hasn't changed.
Like right now.

We have nothing. No paint, no sewing kit, no exercise bike, no weights, no internet, no Xbox. No isolation, which is the TRUE need behind ALL of those things. We can't do anything if we aren't COMPLETELY alone, and it feels like a kick in the face to the Broken Arrows, but God forgive us it's true.

We want to run. But we can't. Where the heck would we go? Everywhere out there, there are people watching us, there are social contexts "to obey" and our poor terror-hardwired brain keeps kowtowing to ALL of them. Even just now, when OV laughed or sighed or whatever that little dear breath was, we looked up, wondering-- are we needed? Was that a call for attention? What is the proper way to respond?
And then we wonder why people like Quicksilver exist, why that girl who fronts in the early morning exists. The nousfoni that will even flip off the people they love and say "shove off, leave me alone." The ones that seem coldhearted and callous and brutal, when really all they are trying to do is get us alone. They're trying to PROTECT us, bless their monstrous hearts, and we know it.
We're terrified of coming across as a horrible person, like we did to the kids in SLC. This is probably why. But we had no idea this was even happening back then-- we didn’t even know we were multiple, for God's sakes. Now, though, not only do we know, we understand, more and more each day.
So when OV sighs and someone immediately fronts with a middle finger and stony expression, they aren't saying they don't care. They're saying, "we can’t care right now because we are too burnt out TO do so without utterly sacrificing our health and your respect in the process."
So we sit here, miserable and overloaded, yearning for the opportunity to just… be alone.

God we both love and hate the nights when OV works. We love him, we love all of the Broken Arrows, but… it's just like when we started doing too much for church. We adore our faith, we adore its practices, but when you're expected to attend every daily mass, every weekly funeral, every weekend mass, every choir practice, every group meeting, every picnic, every bible study, et cetera… well, something in you starts to hate it, in utter paradoxical spite, in total impossible parallel to the love you still feel, solely because it KNOWS that if you don't stop you are going to burn to the ground.
So it stops it in the most complete, sudden, brutal, total way it knows how.
It scares the bloody wits out of anyone standing in its way.
People don't like monsters. People leave monsters alone.
So we learned to be a monster.

…God. What do we do.
We're thirsty. We want to cry. More than that, we want to scream and punch things, but that'll frighten OV, and we can't… we can't risk that. That's the horrible, horribly irony of this. We have to sacrifice our terrible needs for the sake of terrible love. What do we do?

People stay up all night because we need to be alone because that's the ONLY TIME we can brutally soothe our psyche. It's always violent love with us, did you notice? Always compassion and cruelty, or at least, what others would see as cruel. For us, it's just the rawest, most selflessly pure form of love. Love that doesn't deny you your needs just because they're strange or "socially unacceptable."

We want to run outside and go hide in that stupid McDonald's bathroom because it's the only place in town that feels like an airport-- totally insulated from the outside world, cold metal and echoing tile, quiet as a grave, no time existing in there at all. It always feels like 3 in the morning there, when you're by yourself. But that's the problem. It's a freaking bathroom in a fast food joint. It's not EVER going to be a failsafe place to be safe-- heck, the sheer simple fact that it's a bathroom has ALREADY condemned the poor thing beyond hope, thanks trauma. (God, there's that awful thought process again. Poor hurting kids. I wonder how many of them we've never seen, how many of them are still contributing to this in our sub(terranean)conscious.) But the one time we were in there, we felt-- God have mercy, what a dearly desired feeling-- like we were the only people on earth. Just us, just this body, just this tiny bubblespace of a bathroom, no time or space beyond. Just that single isolated moment. THAT'S what we need. YES, it's a literal NEED. It's why we risk our mental health going out literally EVERYWHERE when we walk in the mornings, exposing ourselves to too many soul-draining social contexts, desperately seeking a place where that won't be the case, desperately seeking some secret quiet corner somewhere that we can privately own, like the study nooks at Marywood, like the tiny pockets of woods.
…I wish there was a church with unlocked doors around here. God, we wish. We're nearly in tears just thinking of that. The ultimate met need. Isolation, but in a soaring wide-open emptiness. The feeling of our dreams. Rolling hills and labyrinthine halls and massive abandoned buildings and no one, NO one but us in them. Not even a gnat for outside company. Nothing. Just us, and the air, and the sun, and the clock ticking second after second, counting down to nothing, looping without an hour hand. That's what we want. Just… infinity. Eternity. God help us, no wonder hacks were a thing, I want to cry so hard we vomit out our entire respiratory system. This is wrenching and it makes so much sense. How did we never NOTICE this before???

…
What do we do.

Where do we go. It's 7pm, it's a Sunday night, we can't stand this social context right now, we KNOW OV is worried about us and that simple passive attention is keeping our brain in overloaded status and we want to weep because we care about them, too-- so much our heart aches from it, but what do we do? We love them, but… what do we do? We'll never stop loving them. We'll love them forever. But… sometimes, we dream of running away, of just sleeping in a field somewhere, of packing a knapsack and walking the railroad tracks for days, of catching a bus and just riding it until the end of the line and wherever we are, we are. We want no roots, and yet we want a home to go home to when the solitude starts to bite. There's nothing wrong with being alone. Just… souls need souls. God split hirself because ze needed to love more. We are made to connect with those other pieces, with every other bit of reality. And humans, sure we don't identify as one but this body is one, and we adore people, we do, we just… need to do this in moderation, I suppose.

Do we have a list? Do we even have options when this happens? When our spoons are so low the entire silverware drawer is missing, what the heck do we do, where do we go? When we're so weak we can't get undressed, is there anywhere we can be that will feel like the world has ceased to exist outside? I don't know.
Maybe we can empty out the bottom of the closet, sit in there.
No, no no no, I can feel the children shrieking at that idea even now.
Idola seems piqued. Maybe we should try. See what happens. I doubt hacks will happen--
They won't, but they'll be threatened--
In isolation hacks are always a threat because we black out,

What do we do.

It's too cold outside to go hide in the woods, or to even go find spots where we can hide. But Jewel is so excited at the thought. She has ideas.
Maybe we should try anyway? Get a blanket or sleeping bag or something, bundle up good, find somewhere in the woods where it's just us and just… keep that in our heart if nothing else, if we can't go there. Find at least one place in this new local world where we can be ironically cut off from it for a while, without risk of sudden jarring intrusion. Walking distance. Where can we go?
Buses.
Buses aren't cheap, kid, we need somewhere we can go on a dime without spending a dime, that's the problem.
I'm sure there's somewhere. Let's check Google Maps, find something out. I'm sure we can. Right? Are we done writing?
For now, maybe. I… the other topics we want to write about are huge. The hacks, for one, and the eating disorder in light of this.
But we have been writing about it. Both of them. Haven't we?
Not in as brutal excruciating detail and honesty as we need to, no.
Should we start, then?
Maybe. Hold on a minute.


Food stimming.
Back in PA, we had a soup pot, huge and solid metal, and every day, we'd start the morning by blacking out over a cutting board.
I don't know what we did. All I know is that the smell of wilted lettuce is one of the biggest triggers in the world, and we still can't put spices on our food without shivering in dread. Indian food makes us dissociate immediately, as do potato chips, and ice cream, especially Klondike bars… avocados are still terrifying, so are carrots, so is mayonnaise.
All of those foods were used for blatantly self-abusive purposes in the past and you know what? I'm going to say EXACTLY why.
There was a phase, in 2016, where all we ate for about a week was namkeen. Indian snack food. Just bags of (name). It made us horrifically sick but hey, snack food is an easy time-consuming stim, right? Even if it makes you vomit nonstop for hours-- even especially because it does! Because purging makes you even more dissociative, makes you able to sleep for hours because your body is so wrecked from the past several hours to even consider staying conscious for another second. The last day we bought Indian food, someone filled at least six entire cereal bins with the stuff, separating them methodically by ingredient, then going outside (thanks Destroyer) and flinging them all into the woods… and then hours later, even days later, someone else went outside in a scavenger-desperate mess and picked the pieces off the ground and ate them. We still cannot look at that memory without feeling instantly, unbearably sick. I assume it was all purged seconds after, but memory is black, punctuated only by tiny shattered snapshots of fingers wrestling bits of chickpea flour away from bugs and brambles and rain-muddled dirt.
Remember why P&R became the devil's household?? Remember how many actual HUNDREDS of dollars were spent there over several months, because the food there was dirt cheap AND typically already was garbage? Remember the granola bags with mouse holes chewed through them? Remember the instant noodles with mold growing inside? Remember the hummus that landed us in the hospital due to food poisoning? I know you do. We ALL do.
Oh, but THAT'S the most important thing, something we've probably mentioned in the past before but NEED to reiterate today-- the MAIN reason food was our main stim for YEARS was because, if no one is watching, you don't have to eat it.
We would buy starchy, heavy, crunchy foods, time-consuming foods, chips and cookies and cereals and granola and things, and we'd chew them up, ingredient by ingredient, piece by single piece, and we'd spit them out. Organize, chew, spit. Over and voer and over. And then, when the bag or box was done, we'd chew up the chewed stuff, over and over, until it was too saliva-riddled to chew anymore, and then we'd eat that and purge it immediately, too racked by family-instilled guilt at the thought of "wasting it" by throwing it away (no matter how moldy or rotten or inedible it was) to do so, even at the risk of our own health. That went on for years.
Then we couldn't isolate anymore, then we started losing too much weight, then our body forced us to start bingeing instead in a desperate gamble to get some calories out of it.
The worst chew-spit binges were in that one autumn that we re-read A Wrinkle In Time, with whoever decided that raw oatmeal mixed with molasses was the best texture for doing so-- probably because it took ages to mix up, causing our arms to scream with exertion from doing so, eliciting the same response from our jaws once it reached those. Pain, once sharps were forbidden. A horrific rerouting. And we did that for weeks, if not longer, until the passive sugar-exposure made us SO sick we ended up bedridden with a trashed immune system and too much nausea and chronic pain and hideous gastric distress to leave the bed. But to this day, anxiety-eaten nousfoni in this system, poor desperate kids, always look to the oatmeal boxes in the grocery stores even if the sight of them triggers immediate massive panic. Part of them also remembers a time when that food was the only way they could numb themselves to the world. So they hesitate. They're afraid, but they don't know what other options they even have. And every once in a while, we'll find a box stashed in a drawer or a closet, inevitably doomed to be in the garbage within hours, either thanks to the Destroyer or some poor purgative kid who just wanted to feel like they were throwing up the pain along with the carbs.

God. No wonder so many of our Daemons are tied to food. I wonder what Rupture knows, if anything. She's mainly the fear of dying in the process, of blood in our nose and throat, of our stomach screaming at us to stop. I don't know who holds this, this stimming nightmare… no one except Chocoloco, at least, and he only catches the frayed-end dregs of it, nothing serious, nothing traumatic. He's just that initial desperate programmed seeking of comfort in places where everyone who claimed they loved you claimed it would always be, and yet never was. Chocolate and coffee. Our family's "soothing staples," both of them doing nothing but putting us through hell since childhood. Still, desperate, we never gave up trying. Choco is pretty pissed as that, although nowhere near as much as he is heartbroken. His heart-host is angry almost all the time but it's for the same exact reason that any of us are angry right now-- because we're burning up inside, ripped apart and overwhelmed and sad, and we just want to hole ourselves up in the corner of a coffeeshop somewhere, in the evening when it's dark and softly raining outside and no one knows we're here and we have nowhere else to be, just us and this warm quiet soft place, and we can weep and cry and ache inside and this tiny childlike part of us remembers the days when a muffin and a latte made us feel real, made us feel like we could exist as ourselves apart from society and our family and anyone, like this little rite of passage was proof that we could survive alone, and were, in that moment. THAT'S what our hurt ones keep seeking, in that sort of archetypal memory, but Chocoloco knows it's ultimately heartbreakingly empty, that it's not food or drink or chocolate or coffee or caffeine or sugar or anything edible that we're seeking-- we're seeking his heart, we're seeking love, we're seeking the love that only we can give each other-- we're seeking ourselves.
We can't find each other if we're suffocating in the outside world.

So. Trigger foods.
Someone once wrote about this, too-- probably Iscah-- the science of "combined" and "fused" foods (she says yes, it's in her journal in detail). Well I won't steal her thunder, but the principle of it was this: if you want to make a food inedible but still ingestible, in other words, if you're trying to make a "stim food" instead of a meal, you need to make it as easily palatable as possible in the most blatant way possible. Which means, usually, you liquefy it. You blend things. You cut things into miniscule pieces. You take things like spices, and condiments, and sauces, and drinks, and you soak every stupid thing you have with them until your stomach heaves at the very sight of it, and when it's a slurry from hell you eat that as quickly as possible so your body rejects it just as quickly. Ideally, the whole prep process will take hours, as will the purging process afterwards, in a desperate blacked-out state, trying to get every last crumb out of our system. This is how we spent our days for years, inbetween church activities and family demands.
And isn't that the irony?
We were left alone. We were ignored. And yet, we were never isolated. The grandparents were ALWAYS there, always a few feet or a room away, watching, waiting, vigilant. If we disappeared from their radar for a few minutes, they freaked out. The only time we could "get away with it" was by being in the bathroom, behind a locked door, pretending we were taking a bath, when in reality we were slumped over a toilet wishing we were dead already, sobbing because we really just wanted to be alive already.
But we were never alone. We wanted to be alone, God knew. We wanted a place where nothing could touch us but ourselves.
That's how hacks happened.
I can't talk about that right now.

Potato chips. Cookies. Trail mix. Things like that. Our grandfather would hoard them in his closet, and when we weren't allowed to prepare or eat food in the kitchen anymore without being perpetually critiqued by our grandmother or psychologically terrorized by our brother, we would sneak into his room and sneak into the closet and gorge down a whole bag, not even wanting to, just desperate to stim away the constant fear and pain by crunching something sharp and salty until our mouth bled. But potatoes and flour don't purge easy. They stick like glue in your stomach, and they WILL make the next few hours feel like the central circle of hell. We know. We made that mistake one too many times. We thought we were dead, a few times. But somehow we survived. 85 pounds and throwing up junk food for 8.5 hours a night and we still somehow survived.
There was a time when we first discovered P&R and someone bought cheese curls and chips by the cartful, but they were bean-based, and when our body loudly let us know that it did NOT like beans, we threw them ALL out on the crudpile.
It rained that night. It was cold that night. The next morning, the food was somehow soggy but preserved by the temperature, and whoever the heck was fronting was starving and "couldn’t stand the thought of wasting that poor food" (why the pity on the FOOD being unloved and rejected?? why NEVER pity on ourself being the same???) and snuck out to that horrid garbage heap and ate them right off the dirt, brushing bits of soot and soil and ants off them in the process. Good God. How did we even survive.
They/we threw everything up in a panic shortly after. That was Tobiko's doing. She remembers that more clearly than anyone.
It wasn't the last time that happened. Someone grew fond of the process at one point, of the act of scavenging, of "finding food in the wild" and the time-consuming, stimming process of that fused with a broken sense of accomplishment and achievement. It never lasted long, but God knows they tried, over and over and over, until that last day with the Indian food. Thank God that hell is over forever.

The bloody Klondike bars and avocados. That was the WORST of it, shortly before UPMC. We realized that our body hated dairy, hated fat, hated chocolate, but we ALSO realized that the consistency of those foods was ideal for bingeing and purging, plus our body was seeking sweets out of childhood comfort desperation AND everyone we knew was INSISTING we "eat as much fat as possible."
So guess who binged on like eighteen entire avocados and ten packs of Klondike bars one night.
It was forced. It was forced so hard we thought we were possessed. We thought we were going to die. There's no memory of anything outside one hysterical moment when someone was shoving more chocolate into our mouth and thinking, why?? I don't want this, NOBODY wants this, I'm scared and sick and I just want to sleep, why can't I stop???
I don't know how that ended. All we know is that the family KNEW and they WATCHED IT HAPPEN and then afterwards they asked if we had "learned our lesson."
SHUT UP. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE HECK WAS GOING ON, DON'T ASK IF WE "LEARNED OUR LESSON" BECAUSE THERE WASN'T EVEN A LESSON IN IT WE WERE JUST SO DESPERATE TO NOT BE IN PAIN ANYMORE YOU IGNORANT TROLLOP
Triple, watch your language. Be angry, but don't be so brusquely inconsiderate about it, please.
IT'S WHAT VOCAB WE HAVE FOR THIS KIND OF INTENSE PAIN. i'm sorry. i have no other words besides screaming.

Let's continue.

Coconut oil. the NIGHTMARE that is coconut oil. HOW much money was blown on that??
It was the best stim food and it was the SCARIEST one BY FAR, and that is SAYING something.
Our body does NOT like oil, and when you're literally buying PACKS of it because this kind FREEZES and becomes not only biteable and sharp, but chewy if you mix it with protein powder, and your poor malnourished body is craving both those things so it's a recipe for disaster already. We… I don't even remember. Literally NO ONE we can find even remembers, nothing beyond one snapshot of lying on the bathroom floor with that unmistakable special nauseating agony that comes from eating too much oil, literally begging God to not let them die, screaming in rage and determination that they'd NEVER do this again, someone (a Protector, Wreckage maybe, the Destroyer maybe, Laurie maybe) going outside in the 10pm dark and rain and throwing all of that garbage into the woods where it couldn't be salvaged (although we all knew someone would try).


…OV just came over and kissed us and someone actually wanted to give him a double flipoff in response. Not out of hatred, just out of "what the heck do you want us to do. We're tired and angry and can't do a SINGLE THING without your permission because we DON'T KNOW what we actually want and don't trust ourselves TO know right now. But we're overstimulated and overwhelmed and heartbroken and furiously distraught and you're kissing us like we're supposed to ignore all this agony and kiss you back. And God knows we WANT to. That's the problem. We WANT to, but then you'll call it self-sacrifice, and what the heck do we do??? We love you, we WANT to be with you, but our body wants something else and until we figure out what the heck it is, we CAN'T be with you because we won't be able to pay attention To you past this screaming discomfort and unsoothed pain. We don't know what the heck to do, and we hate that we have to snub and ignore you in the process of finding out simply because our brain cannot handle the stress of having to factor in another human being's presence and needs into our decisions and thoughts right now. We can't freaking multitask. Please don't force us to context shift so shockingly suddenly or we Will hit you, or bite you, like the monster and rabid dog we are at the moment. But we won't mean it, and we hope you know it, but we still can't take that risk of hurting you, so we completely shut down. We do nothing, we say nothing, we boil over like a kettle fit to explode, and we just want to get this problem figured out so we can safely let this scalding steam out so you can touch us without getting burned. That's all."

…

Do we eat? Do we drink?
This body has to use the bathroom. These clothes are too warm and soft and do you know what that's overstimulating? Because they make us WANT to sit and rest and relax and we CAN'T.
Iscah LOVES these clothes because that's ALL SHE DID. She rested, and relaxed, and took care of our body. When we wear these clothes, the body remembers that, and wants it just as badly. But in this context, no. No, here we're too afraid of ignoring people, of rejecting them, of the fact that OV just went and lay down on the freaking bed because he probably thinks we hate him when really WE JUST WANT TO DO THAT SAME BLOODY THING BUT WE WON'T BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU TOO MUCH TO LEAVE YOU.

what do we do. god. I don't know.

Is our body hungry?
It's thirsty. We haven't drank in over 3 hours and someone purged most of breakfast out of sheer dissociative panicked guilt, so that's even worse. Go use the bathroom, get a drink, then figure out what to do.
We can't eat without OV anyway, and he's hiding away from us. Did we hurt him?
…I don't know. I don't even know. I just hope he's okay. If he didn't, and he wanted to be alone, but was happy, would that be okay with you?
Of course it would be, but he's obviously not happy right now and that's the problem.
…Oh. Should we go talk to him, or…?
Maybe. I don't know. Maybe.
I think we should. Apologize for not being able to respond earlier, apologize for snubbing him on purpose because we were unable to respond in honesty to him.
All or nothing, huh.
Yeah. A curse and a blessing.
Are we done with this file for now, for the record?
Maybe? I think so. The big unanswered question is still: how do we eat food without turning it into a dissociatively abusive stim?
Eat it like we do in the mornings with him. Paying attention, letting everyone share it, not being stressed the heck out in the process. Stimming beforehand, even. Really, that's probably the smartest thing to do. Gotta find what works on short notice that won't hurt us or magnify negative emotions and do that.
Sounds good.
Body does need some self-care, though, so let's call it quits for now. Everyone good? Anyone got any last thing to say before we stop?
Just that Wegmans was a living hell, too, and we never want to go back there.
Then get over that place and every other place in our memory, kid. Forget them. Live here and now, and please, learn from that experience and stop thinking about it. Okay?
…Okay.
Just… let it go. Walk into memory and burn it to the ground if you have to. Whatever works. Just don't let it suck the joy out of our present life anymore. All right? We'll help you. We're safe now, all things considered. Just confused and hurting is all. But we're safe.
I know.
Then let's go talk to OV. He's the reason we can say that, after all.
We love him, even now. Does he know that?
That's what we're going to go make sure of, kid. Give me a minute.



Oh, wait!! One last vitally important thing.
The key to a successful stim is that it HAS to let our BRAIN shut down. Low-impact, low-speed, "mindless" activity so that we can DEEPLY relax, INSIDE. Books don't work, nor does TV, because they're too mentally stimulating. Food prep is too, actually-- that's why we keep hurting ourselves when we try! Same with the garage job. We try to dissociate with repetitive motion and forget that those motions have an end, both in result and process. That doesn't work for stimming!! However, THIS DOES. Weirdly, this typing REALLY helps, at least, in a different way-- it helps us untangle what hurts, and really See it. It doesn't alleviate the stress, just lets us know what we're looking at. What DOES help in a pinch is TUMBLR, on the phone, IF we do it safely. Yes, it Does work!! Because it's "mindless browsing" and you can link-hop FOREVER and find poetry and pretty pictures and just let our mind wander for HOURS if you have to. Spotify is almost this kind of stim but not really, because music demands Attention, but we can use that to a BETTER advantage because it draws us into our mind ENTIRELY. THAT'S an ideal stim, hence the old beloved walks in circles for hours, just imagining and thinking. My thing!! We've gotta find a way to do that again if we can. Maybe in the playroom, who knows. But we will. Anyway, yeah. When in doubt, grab Nelumbo, our beloved Samsung Galaxy S8 who we saved up for a year for and now had better use to show respect and gratitude for that!! Okay? We've got this. Now go tell the Arrows that we love them because they need us just as much as we need them even if they need space too!! Bye guys!!

-J.W.L. and the Lightraye aka Lotus Cathedral System ♥

Well, I did the thing I said I would.
I got a job, I have income now, and I don't want to waste it on addictions, so I am giving it to other people for creative colorful imaginative purposes.
I feel a little nauseous about it to be honest. It's bizarre though because it's grief nausea? Like it's a mourning feeling, something so full of inexplicable anguish that it makes me want to curl up on the floor and throw up.
If I had to guess, right off the bat, I'd say it's grief tied to a feeling that "my life is worthless, I've wasted my chances, I'm not what I hoped I would become, therefore I'm only worth anything as a supplement to someone else's life."
In short, "I'm not a real artist, I never was, I feel no joy tied to it and I wish I did... but this person is, and I owe them a LOT even if I don't remember it, so I will help them."

It's a sad feeling. "I'm not an artist." "I'm not good enough." I hope it's not true, solely because I have so much love for the Leagueworlds and I WANT to share them, but...
I'll be honest. I've been very depressed and disillusioned lately, because I keep realizing how problematic my "stories" are, or how critically undeveloped and/or shallow they are, or how alien they are to other people. It makes me very very sad because, to be totally blunt, I only ever wrote them "FOR MYSELF" because nothing else out there spoke to my heart, and these things just glowed in it so I embraced them with every atom of my being. These stories are of my heart, for my heart, etc.
So... now, needing to "publish" them, needing to make them "socially proper" or "understandable by the masses" or whatever... I'm becoming terribly depressed, because I feel that I have to rewrite them totally to fit OTHER people, therefore ostracizing myself yet again, this time from the only thing I ever really felt accepted in.
It's why I got so sad in SLC in 2010. I remember that. Those two kids CARED and they wanted to HELP, but... they were rewriting the Leagueworlds through their own eyes, their own surface-level understandings of the rich imaginative things that were meshed up in my very soul. They couldn't understand those stories like I could, heck I didn't even talk about them, but... I gave enough little details. I tried to guess "what they'd like to hear," "what was relevant to THEIR interests." Because I CARED TOO! And I loved my stories and I loved those kids and if they wanted to share in my one unwavering source of joy then yes, please do.
But it... it didn't quite work? I didn't stand up for myself, they didn't realize they were treading all over my dreams, in an effort to join the dance. I never said anything. I never spoke up when their ideas, however brilliant, were completely at odds and unfitting with the way the "canon" worlds shone in my mind. Why didn't I speak up? Because I was convinced that they understood my creative work better than me, therefore they had the authority to do WHATEVER they wanted to my work, as it was now effectively THEIRS.
This is how lowly I think of myself. This is a problem.
I wish, I still wish desperately and dearly, that I had been able to continue sharing my work with them. I really do. But I'd have to be smarter about it, I'd have to be more self-respectful, I'd have to be more clear.
I'm trying to share stuff online right now but... I don't know.

I'm overwhelmed. I keep saying that. I'm overwhelmed.
It's not just the medical bills and the new job and the family concerns and my own heartbreakingly bizarre state in life. It's... it's this Leagueworld work. It's this creative work, the ONLY thing that EVER gave me a "purpose" as a child, the ONLY FUTURE I HAD, the ONLY REASON I HAD TO LIVE until headspace/heartspace started... this creative work was my life, and still is, except...
I'm burnt out. It's... it's lost the shine, just like the art did. It turned into a job, into something that needed a grade, and hundreds of hours of cold hard research behind it. Now don't get me wrong, research is all well and good, but it kills imagination after a while. Just like the art classes did. I became terrified to work from spontaneity and intuition and childlike boundless ideas anymore, because NOW I had to worry about, "what grade will I get?" "is this WRONG?" "will this appeal to the public?" "is my art structured correctly?" "was this work executed properly?" et cetera. It killed the joy. It sucked the life right out of it.

...I'm trying, so hard, to just throw these damned shackles off for good and go back to what I did as a child. Fearless, limitless creativity. To hell with this adult perfectionism. I'm tired.
Except no one wants to buy art from a child. Except no one is interested in a child's stories.
Online I see what people want, what they pay for, what they talk about... it crushes my heart because it's all still so alien to me, and that's... I have nothing against it, it's fine, I'm GLAD people enjoy it and are inspired by it and are happy, but... if that's what they want, what am I doing?
I don't expect droves of fans, Lord no. I don't expect anything really. I just hope that... that I can one day actually share the ENTIRETY of these stories I carry with the world, and that someone will find real joy and inspiration in them. That's all I want.

But I can't share them until I know what the hell I'm doing with them.
That creativity drainage... it put so much on hold. It froze so many timelines. A couple worlds turned toxic and I couldn't even look at them anymore. vo!t@ge, Mage Angels, Parnassus, Puppetstrings... all tainted in big or small ways. Others, like Hokthai and Halcyon Days, were smothered under the literal months of hard research I was "required" to do JUST to "get an idea across."
Maybe this is immature but really, screw that. I'm DONE. I'm tired as hell and I'm miserable and the ONE THING that used to give me such joy is now making me want to weep from sheer exhaustion.
I'm just... even if it ends up sounding like something a ten-year-old wrote, I don't care. I'm just going to start writing on my own, and see where that takes me.
I'll still read, and research, of course. I save up piles of data in my head, and then one day if something fits, then it fits. But it's passive. It's finding a place where it works without obsessing over it.

I don't know. I'm at a loss.
What the hell do I do with my life?
I keep getting pushed back into headspace/heartspace. The Spectrum. You know, us.
No matter how I try to run away, no matter how I try to annihilate the past, no matter how desperately I try to abandon and erase and forget and sometimes even destroy the "other people upstairs"... it doesn't work. It doesn't ever work.
My therapist said this is my "hero's journey" and God I'm just tired of fighting all these dragons, even with a knight at my side.
I'm just... my heart hurts. A lot. I feel so lost. I'm really... I'm really confused.

I want to stay with these people inside, at least... half of me does.
Half of me is jubilant and bright and fearless and powerful and hopeful and THAT part of me, that white-haired part of me, wants to stay with the Spectrum forever and illuminate everything with that growth and knowledge.
Another part of me... deals with everyday life. That's me. I'm stuck. I'm miserable, I'm self-abusive, I admittedly waste all my time just trying to "cope" and trying to "ignore" all the overwhelming shadows inside... Jay says we can't, he says he WANTS to do shadow-work, he says it's "very close to his heart," he WANTS to do it.
But I'm in the way. I'm in the goddamned way, worrying about food and bills and shelter and shit. Too damn blinded by the physical daily grind to pay any attention to the health of our soul.
That's making the creativity suffer too. When we're in this work mindset, we don't get home until about 1PM, then what do we do? God only knows. We SHOULD be painting, we SHOULD be trying to sketch out our old monster designs, we SHOULD be working on plot questions and worldbuilding... but no, we don't. And do you know why? Because I am ashamed.
Again, it's like I said. I am ashamed that my work ends up looking like a grade schooler did it, even if that's how it's always been, even if that's how things just seem to translate for me. Hell even the THERAPIST said that today, that even though our body is 25 we still have a vibe of someone around 17, tops. I told her we feel 14 or younger, typically, in a physical state at least.
But... the shame is killing me. Why am I so ashamed?

I can't be ranting about this. We didn't exercise today and I need to, even if it is already 11PM and I'm already sacrificing sleep again.

I'll tell the people upstairs to talk about this. Jay says he wants to talk about things too, but there's no time right now, not wisely anyway, I think.

We're learning a lot lately, it's just SCARY HEAVY STUFF and integrating it REQUIRES patience and peace and quiet, something we have to go out of our way to get currently. We are listening to intuition more readily and quickly now, myself included, and it IS helping. Genesis is sticking around and he's one of the few people left inside that doesn't take any shit from anyone. If I fck up he calls me out on it, refuses to let me continue. Laurie is helping. I appreciate that more than words can say.

Jay is trying to work with Infinitii and Chaos again after all the large-scale "clearing out" he's been trying to do with energy fields... there's a lot of programming and projection and corruption going on but Jay can see it pretty damn well so he's working on it. I know he's concerned about the past though, how much needs to be abandoned, how much is relevant, etc. But I think he knows. He's just struggling to bring it into conscious, coherent words.

All right that's it, I'm done for tonight.

I hope this payment plan pays off. Like I said, I feel weird about it... like I don't belong there, like I'm sacrificing two weeks of paychecks per month to be part of something that doesn't even want me, that CAN'T accept me, that rejects me by its very structure. THAT'S what I'm afraid of. I see the other people in this and... I'm frightened. I never fit in with people here, now I'm not fitting in with people THERE either, and... it's very very sad and scary. But I'm trying to be empathetic. I'm trying to keep an open mind. I'm hoping, I'm hoping so hard that one day I won't feel like I have to put on a stupid plastic fake mask just to survive THERE, too. I shouldn't have to, for heaven's sakes the place is supposed to BE the opposite of that.
Anyway the choice was made (again). I won't back out this time, I can't. It's too big a debt that needs to be paid, if nothing else.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


@ 09:01 pm

 


Well, I got in trouble. Serves me right.

The person I was hoping to support financially for their art, found out that I'm basically being a pain in the ass and blacklisted me, while taking extra measures to forbid me (and any other scammers/ manipulators/ etc) from ever accessing their feed in the future.
I'm glad. That means something good came out of this whole damn mess.
Serves me right for ignoring my gut and listening to the damn voices. "Pay her your entire salary!" they scream. "There's still an option open, you MUST TAKE IT!!! Sacrifice yourself for HER!!!"
Sound familiar?

So I was sick last night and sick today and I spent all morning at work talking to Laurie and thinking about this... and when I got home I cancelled. Again. Hence me being blacklisted by my previous artistic muse/idol and basically ending up on her shitlist, instead of a list of people she was thankful for.
Honestly it was only a matter of time before I fcked up like this. Serves me right, like I said.


I want to send her an apology but I really have no fcking right. I have no right.

Yes, one of us looked up to her more than anything in our teenage years... or so we were told. Yes, one of us basically felt they owed a life debt to her and was willing to do ANYTHING for her, to the extent of this.

Unfortunately we screwed up in our execution of this "ideal" and ended up just... fcking it up. There's no other way to put it.
Now she thinks we're a con man, now she thinks we're dishonest and sleazy and honestly she's probably right. We signed on to help her with every intention of bleeding ourselves dry for it. But 24 hours of nausea and troubled sleep later, we realized that we don't even know why the hell we're doing this anymore, and we backed out. She caught on and she's dead sick of our shit now.

So. It's over.
It's over.


Back in 2004 or so, we discovered her art. Back then, it was the most beautiful, inspiring thing we had ever seen.
We wanted to be like her. We wanted her to approve of us. We wanted to impress her, to earn worth as an artist. We wanted to be her friend.
We dreamed of a day when we'd mean enough to her for her to name us, for her to give us a NEW life, a new purpose... a role in HER dream, something we saw as bigger and brighter and better than anything we could ever do or be. It never happened.
That's why we were so desperate to help her now... because there was a chance of that. Except, now... we didn't want that anymore. We didn't WANT to be a part of "her world" because her world is ALIEN to us now, alien and unsettling and frankly threatening in some cases. It's not safe for us and that tears my soul to shreds but... I've been pacing the floor about this for months, and no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I tried to force myself to care as much as I allegedly did once, as honestly as I could... nothing worked. I just... nothing worked. It's gone.

There was a day when her dreams, her worlds, were something we treasured and wanted nothing more than to be a part of.
Now, I don't recognize any of it.

We felt obligated to support her current work. We felt we HAD to.
But... the more I see what it's become, the more I read of it, the more I see of the fandom, I... I don't like it.
There, I said it. I don't like it. It doesn't speak to me anymore. I can't. I'm legitimately frightened of it now and I DON'T want to support it because it means nothing to me now, and that breaks my heart because there was a time when that story was as beloved to me as my own.
Back then it was something totally different, though. Now, it's not. And I need to let go, and move on, and stop acting like "I owe them one" because they don't give a shit about me and I have no right to ask that to change. I have done NOTHING but cause them pain and frustration and disappointment, all because I keep "acting" like they're the greatest thing in my life when honestly, I have no fcking clue who they are or what they're about.
I don't. I really dont. And I am so, so so sorry, but it's true.


I own some of her artwork. I feel so guilty to own it now. I'll need to sell it, without looking ungrateful, because I'm not. Other people just deserve to have this more than me.


It's so weird. Things keep falling away from me, things that were significant parts of my life for years, unwavering, are suddenly disappearing or crumbling to the ground.
This was one of the biggest. I never expected this. But here it is.
So it's over. I'm no longer part of their dream. I no longer have to feel forced to participate in a dream I don't understand, and don't feel welcome in.
I mean... this used to give me joy. Now, just thinking about it makes me nauseous, because I feel like I HAVE to be an intrinsic part of it, "like I once wanted to be," and I don't. I don't want this anymore. I can't remember when I once did.
I'm sorry, I keep repeating this.
It's just a huge loss, conceptually, whether I feel it or not. This is a HUGE loss, potentially earth-shaking, if I could feel anything, if I could remember anything.


In any case I feel ugly and worthless and terrible now, for what I caused. For what she felt, and perceived, and said.
I feel like a thief and a liar and a back-stabbing jerk and I feel like Judas Iscariot. I feel like the worst betrayer.

I only ever had the best intentions here. I really, really wanted to help her, at the cost of my own success if I had to.
But this isn't the first time I've done that for someone.
This isn't the first time I forgot why I was even doing it in the first place.
This isn't the first hope I've crushed.
This isn't the first "friendship" I've destroyed.
This isn't the first dream I've buried under six feet of concrete.

God willing it will be the last.




I once wanted to be one of them, snow-haired with a diamond smile, pure and free and happy. God I wanted that more than anything, and I was convinced that ONLY SHE could grant that to me, mercifully, graciously.
Now I've lost that chance forever.
It was so close, so close... but... well, now it's gone.
Ten years later, the dream is dead. I've woken up and I'll never have it again.
I need to come to terms with this, once I can really grasp the reality of what I've lost here, ideals and otherwise.

In a way it's freeing. I'm no longer burdened with the awful heavy guilty scared obligation, "you NEED to be a part of this, why the hell haven't you joined them yet, why the hell aren't you acting like them, what the hell kind of a supporter are you," etc.
I didn't realize until this morning that my hesitance was because I no longer understood why I "needed," let alone wanted, any of it.


I've been chasing a phantom for a very very very long time now, I think.
The rainbow I've been tailing faded away a very long time ago, but it was burned so strongly onto my eyelids I didn't notice.


Everything that meant anything to me about that world... I wonder, was it self-generated?
Was it simply because I saw so much of myself and my dreams reflected in it, that I couldn't see what didn't fit? And now that the dissonance is louder than ever, I can't cope with the truth?
I think everything I ever loved about it was all me. I think so. It's heartbreaking. I mean, hell, what the fck did I even know about her story? I wasn't part of her group, I was too scared to intrude, to attempt to join, to speak up at all... I didn't know their history. I didn't know their story. I didn't even know the fcking SOURCE MATERIAL.
I was playing it by ear the ENTIRE FUCKING TIME and now here I am feeling like I lost something?
I think what I really lost was the delusion that her world would adhere to my heart. I blinded myself to what didn't fit, I focused only on the concepts I loved, and then I acted like it was everything I'd ever dreamed of. I'm starting to wonder if it ever was.
God I don't know. This is... this is huge. This is so jarring.


I can't do this anymore.
No matter how desperately I still "wish" I could be a part of that world, that community... it's empty. If I was given a chance, to suddenly and without effort become a big part of it, I think I'd freak out and bail. When I really think about it, I DON'T want to be a part of it anymore. And that's the key.
IT ISN'T JUST ME. IT NEVER WAS.
When it hit me that there was a fandom behind this, a community, that the creator was DIFFERENT than me in several unignorable key ways... I basically bailed. I'm so sorry to say that.
I just... can't do it. I can't do this fandom thing. I've tried. I can't. Does that make me broken, too? I do worry about that.

I know there are so many others that still view it as something dear to their hearts and I am glad for that.
But... I can't. I don't fit in there. I never did. And now I never will.
Whatever it meant to me in the long-distant past, I have retained within myself, as its own concept, as something totally seperate from where I saw it reflected.
It's over. It's over. It's over.

This has been dying for a very very very long time and now, the woman who breathed life into it has signed its death warrant.
The one who began all this has now ended it. Full circle. Unquestionable. Unchangeable.


I fcked up big time, and that's about it.




I'm truly sorry. I never meant to hurt you.
I sincerely only wanted to help you.
I just wasn't capable.
I idolized you to the point where I didn't even know who you were.
I skewed your creations to the point where I didn't realize what they actually were.
I put you so high up on a personal pedestal, I didn't realize it wasn't you at all.
I'm so sorry.
I wish you the very, very, very best.
Continue to build and share your dream.
I may not understand it anymore, but I can see your passion in it, and I am happy for that.
I am so glad you are seeing this dream of yours come to life.
I am glad you were wise enough to stand up to my wrongdoings.
Again, I never meant to appear as such a criminal, but it is only right.
Thank you, for everything you've done to inspire me, in every way.
Thank you, for dreaming so fiercely, and bringing that dream to light.
You are an inspiration to many and that will never change.
May all your endeavors continue to be successful.

This is where we part ways, for better or for worse,
although I may be nothing but a stranger to you.
You were one of the biggest forces in my life, for many years.

Your role in my life was momentous, and your existence profoundly changed mine.
Your work influenced and inspired and motivated me in so many ways.
Again, I am grievously sorry for what I have done in my foolishness.
I do not hate you, I wish you no harm.
I cannot continue down this road but I will shake your hand here before it's over.
Trippy, you gave me courage when once I had none,
and I can never thank you enough for that.

Keep creating. Keep dreaming. Keep coloring the lives of others.
If there is anyone in the world who I have the utmost faith in to do that,
it's you.
Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

so apparently there was a hack tonight

no idea how, no idea how, how

there were never this many people around after a hack before. central was there.
every retributor was there. razor was out. sugar tried for a moment. mulberry was out, with her sage smoke and prayers. no idea why she got tied to that, maybe in lieu of christina, i dont know

ashen was out, wreckage was there. jay was out, sobbing because he didn't know what the heck had happened but he didn't want this continuing again.
the worst part is that every single time it is DIFFERENT. we take precautions every time but new things keep appearing.
i read something once about this. how until something is really healed it will keep finding new outlets to bring itself to your attention. well what the heck do we have to do yet. we are TRYING to just "let this go" but dude that apparently is not working, maybe we're doing it wrong, we keep getting caught up in the bad old messages and fears, we keep hitting apathy, we keep locking ourselves out in the cold, disregarding our own heart.
but we're doing better. we're doing so much better. none of the old hacks work anymore. they have to try really hard to get through to us now. they have to be really cruelly sneaky and brutal now.
and that's kind of the problem


i have never seen laurie cry so much in my life.
when she gets really distraught she gets violent? she screams and breaks stuff. damages things. it's just this awful despair that crushes outwards. she just sobs, it breaks my heart, god i never ever ever want to see her so sad again, god,
lynne was there, jo was there, leon was there earlier, and nat, god it was so nice earlier today, we were all talking to each other, why did this happen tonight, why, what year is it even

but laurie was talking to leon at some point this afternoon, i dont know why, but she ruffled his hair and he spontaneously did the same to her. she stopped and gave him this look of surprise, he got nervous, "what did i do," she burst out laughing and said no one ever had the guts to do that BACK to her before, she thought it was hilarious. gave him exclusive rights to do that if he wanted. later nat came in, asked "are you messing up my boy's hair," she said maybe, nat said "then i'll mess up your boy's hair," did that to jay.

ran outside for 20 minutes today. ankle still hurts, sides still hurt a bit, but we're being careful.

still can't eat sugar or starchy things. but the body is overcoming the obligation now. we actively recognize that we don't like them and we are improving. only obstacle is "do we have enough calories" but really i think we're doing fine.

the mother made tiramisu for our younger brothers graduation and eros was commenting on that again, the whole subconscious looking for that texture/sweetness in spiritual matters? kind of sensory blending. he's well aware of the desperate need for affection the broken parts of us still feel, it's tied to his color, with a punch because his color is more 'passionate' than julie's and it's at a higher risk for misinterpretation and confusion. just wanted to say that he's still around
the "other eros" is still around too, rarely so, but he's there. it's so frightening that once a "bad" alter exists, even if their purpose is long gone, they can STILL be triggered out if we aren't careful, if that purpose is ever sufficiently reminded. it's awful. that's why we're trying to get closer to each other again, in the innerworlds, we're trying to cope better, trying to recuperate more.


what are we even doing now

i'm reviewing the entries from 2014 and 2013, making a tentative timeline so i have an idea what actually happened then
i had no idea there were so many reset attempts in 2013
and 2014 was a mess because that's the year we were trying to "join a community" on tumblr! and there were so many toxic people on there. also that's when we got the deluge of anons telling us we were fake, and a drama king, and basically a disgrace to the mental health community, etc. so that hit like a knife to the heart.
i bookmarked a few entries to review, and some to just re-read because they were really beautiful.
2014 had some really beautiful things in it. i'm so glad things like that happened so close to now, after the collapse in december 2013. it's hopeful.

i shouldn't be changing the topic though

there was a hack, it was awful, we don't even get warned anymore, we don't even feel anything now, in a sick way that's good that the body is so good at depersonalizing and numbing now that we DON'T get the horrific flashbacks that jeremiah used to have to buffer out. but also now the hackers can say "well we're not hurting anyone!" uh yeah you actually are, don't you DARE tell me no one is being hurt by this, look at us, look at all of us, we don't want this. YOU don't even want this. you're just "following orders" and i KNOW a lot of you hellish hackers are scared too when you feel a shred of self-awareness, there's DATA of that, there always is
but i swear
i swear to you, i swear by whatever blood is left in me
if you try this sort of thing again
if you do anything to make laurie cry like that again
i
i dont want to kill anything but
you are not allowed to exist here as that sort of person
you are NOT welcome here
you do NOT have permission to do what you are doing
if anyone gave you permission in the past, coerced or half-conscious or anything,
I REVOKE THAT RIGHT NOW.
GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR HEAD.
leave us alone.
leave her alone. leave the kids alone. leave me alone. leave all the innocents alone. leave us alone.
i swear if you try this again i will extricate you from our bones with my bare hands
i will claw you out even if it leaves me bloody and bruised
i will destroy whatever makes you evil
and if nothing is left after that, then so be it
we've lost nothing.


we've lost nothing.
no matter what you people try to do to us. or through us. or despite us.
you're terrible, you new ones
the old hackers attacked us consciously.
you people just screw around and don't care who pays the price for it
you are so deluded, don't you realize
you are so completely LOST
you are so lost.
you don't even know what you're doing, do you.


i tried to talk to jasmine earlier
i didn't realize she's been around since last august at least?? there was an entry i remember seeing that made me really really nervous, i knew that person was trouble, i didn't think she'd get this bad. but here we are
we'll get through it though

in 2011 julie was still hacking us.
in 2012 we had the tar-celebi to deal with.
in 2013 there were the constant reset attempts, and the old girls returning.
in 2014 i have no clue, i think that was all surreptitious hacks, using other people,
but the point is
we survived all that.
"this too shall pass."
all this stuff now WILL stop. it WILL. and WE WILL SURVIVE IT.

that's all the hope i've got for tonight but it's solid gold okay

we'll make it through this
we will.
i promise we will.

i love all of you in the system so much. so much.
god bless you all.

i am so sorry tonight happened.
but we lost nothing.
we were damaged, we were hurt, we were scared, we were bruised,
maybe we really were tainted.
but that still bleeds out.
they can't hurt us where it matters. they CAN'T. ever.

we lost nothing but this is a matter of justice, and fairness, and right actions,
this is a matter of respect and compassion and wisdom,
and those hackers don't have any of that apparently
so act from a positive standpoint
let's try that okay?
we can still be proactive, we can still be protectors and guardians, without losing anything first.
we don't have to suffer to have worth.
we don't have to be martyrs for our lives to have meaning.
that's kind of a daring redefining after all these years but hey
it's worth a shot.


i am so tired.
part of my heart is devastatingly sad
and with good reason.
my instinct is to be happy and snow-white and free BUT
i cannot ignore mourning that needs to happen.
i cannot ignore open wounds.
i cannot ignore pain that must be felt and healed with compassion.
i cannot ignore when 'negative' things happen because they're signposts for love that's missing


markus's song just started playing on spotify. i haven't heard this in months, if not years.
he was around the other day, when we were in the hospital. i didn't say that.
he didn't say much, he usually doesn't, he gets really nervous when other people are in crisis, he worries so much.
but his presence was so strong there. like he would have sat in that ER for six hours without saying a word if he had to, he wouldn't mind, he would stay because he cared. because it mattered. that's his sort of devotion. i love and miss him too


god this is so new and yet so old
it's nostalgic, its like a homecoming
all this old, true, bright, real stuff all of a sudden
old songs, old love, old hope, old faith
all of it
we are trying so hard to remember "who we were" before other people started trying to define that for us
i think that's why cannon's back. she had a surprisingly good grip on that.
but we're managing. we're doing well, all things considered.
i have so much hope
so much.


laurie i swear i am coming right upstairs and whatever you need me to do, i will do. i will be there for you. i am here for you now. i always am. just like you are for me. i love you. i love you, okay? i love you with all of my heart and i swear whatever you need me to do i will do.
i can already tell you're going to tell me "fight the hacks" and guess what, i will
i might be snow and sparkles but if THIS is what my admitted ignorance is doing, then to hell with it
i'll become a protector too. i'll pick up a sword again. a sword of light. and i'll cut through these shadows with it.


todd rundgren has a new song out, i heard it last night. "terra firma."
it reminds me so much of "afterlife" and "living" from his liars album, i love his songs like this
but it's already dear to my heart. it's already about our system.
this is what i want to follow, this is what i want to live, i need to stop grasping at everyone else's paths and never feeling fulfilled or true or happy, i need to just STOP and turn back inside. i need to just go home.

some lyrics for hope, for what its worth.

Though the minutes stretch to hours
And the hours stretch to days
Through the trials and tribulations
When it seems like I’m so far away
And it’s just too high a price to pay
There is one thing I can always say

Whenever I feel afraid
I put my faith in terra firma
And I’m never far away
Because you’re my terra firma

Whenever I feel alone
I come home to terra firma
A place I can call my own
Because you’re my terra firma



i will do everything i can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

god i am so scared and sick and nauseous right now i am so so so sorry.

laurie, i love you, i love you, i miss you so much it aches, please forgive me for being dumb and blind, in both senses, please pleae please somehow forgive me for hurting you like i have.
and no dont say i didnt. i mean the way ive plagued you. somehow. this calcification got you too. you got too close.
everyone got too damn close because i got too damn close and how didnt i SEE how lethal this was, why didnt i REALIZE what the truth was
why in the world was this EVER allowed to happen, or keep happening, or anything

god i feel like vomiting and sobbing and all these young voices in our heart are scared but they cant get through, this body is so tired its numb, i have to be up at like 8am tomorrow to do more errands for people but god i just want to sleep. damn it i am so tired i just want to sleep.
god bless e, thank you so much for getting that new anchor plush for chaos, you have no idea how positive a force that has been lately. geez he just clicked right into it, i've actually felt at home going to sleep lately even if i havent been remembering any dreams, even if i cant stay asleep due to stress, even if i've been sick for the past three weeks. i can say, with a glow in my heart and a fierce sort of raw gratitude, that for at least ten minutes every night i don't care about all that waking pain because look, look at this, feel this, this is the realest thing i've ever known and it's STILL HERE.

i just spent like... four hours trying to make a coherent timeline of our old entries here, for publishing/therapy purposes, and then the computer ate it.
but i keep thinking about the "horror club" episode of SU, with lars. the whole poltergeist thing. i know i emit, i have to be careful. but when i'm this frazzled i wonder if this poor laptop feels it too. i dont want to hurt people but god how do i deal with this, do i have that luxury?

it's all this damn job, it's hilarious and ridiculous and aggravating but it's true. i looked back in our archives and i didn't realize how bad the job stress was until i noticed that's when the massive memory gaps began. i mean i don't personally remember 2006 either, or anything before... but there aren't even records for most of 2007. 2008 got so bad because everything boiled over.
i dont want a repeat of that. god i dont want a repeat of that.
except maybe i do.
shoot me in the head for saying this but MAYBE thats why god is putting this job stress in front of us, MAYBE he's trying to SHATTER THIS DAMN INTERNAL NUMBNESS THAT DAILY LIFE HAS CAUSED because MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, IF LIFE BECOMES TERRIFYING AND STRESSFUL ENOUGH maybe just maybe i'll run to laurie at the end of the day.
just maybe, maybe, i'll become too homesick to lie to myself about it anymore.
this isn't jay right now. i'm too old. young but old. this is cannon mostly. essentially.


there was a hack today
i know there was another last week or something i dont know
things are so blurry
theres a lot of pain and blood but nothing real bad. we're too tired.
sugar tried to do the atoning but god the pain is awful, we're so tired of atoning already, the people who force us to do this DONT CARE
i need to discuss that with the therapist.
we all do.
2012 was a nightmarish mess and maybe some of 2011 was too but i don't remember. i'd have to go look. the looking is revealing so much it's upsetting.



i haven't seen infinitii in weeks and god i miss hir.
ze's still in my heart and i can feel hir there but there's a distance still and that is awful, so awful.
chocoloco has been talking to me a lot lately. he's good at his job. he's fierce. but he has a side like infi too, that surprised me incredibly when i saw it.
but this DAMN NUMBNESS IS IGNORING THE IMPORTANCE OF ALL THAT SO IT CAN PERPETUATE THIS ABUSIVE DISSOCIATION.

and then i wonder.
why. why the hell is this still happening to such a shockingly persistent extent? is this a corrupted survival method? have we asked that before?
that's why we're scared of the job, this is bad enough already, we don't know if we CAN have a social fronter out for 8 hours a day anymore. we can try to force it, sure, but the burnout from the last job was bad enough (oh the JTHM days) and really, we do not want that repeating, we don't

i want a job. we want a job. but a GOOD one. one that won't completely overwhelm us like this.
we're allowed to have a job we can function at, right? are we being too demanding? just because we have "special needs" or whatever the heck this is

god i am so tired.

tomorrow just... needs to happen. we'll do our best with it. and THAT is the key word, "we," why is it STILL SO DAMN HARD to overcome the crushing self-hatred that follows that word?? why???
ignoring them won't stop the trauma, you know
look at today, that was horrific, she keeps coming out and using you, chasing away your protectors isn't going to do SHIT
calm down
NO. NO I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, WE CAN'T AFFORD TO BE CALM RIGHT NOW JAY,

earlier today i decided i need to burn. as in i don't want to be cupcake sparkles and white clouds anymore.
i want to be a white fire. i want my edge back, i want the fire that jewel has, i want the sparkle that laurie has, on the blades of her axes. i want to be INDOMITABLE in my light because THAT IS THE TRUE ME and I can FEEL it. Who in the world redefined me, and when? I know why; we all know why, it's the most obvious thing in the book.

YOU CAN'T LET THAT HAPPEN ANYMORE. AT ANY COST.


Jewel is doing tons of Parnassus work and that is great but it's starting to feel slightly hysterical. Like she loves it, and there's so much, and she WANTS to work on it all, nonstop, but now there are "deadlines" and she's feeling time press down on her neck and she doesn't like that.
Creativity cannot flourish in that environment.

We won't give up, we can't give up, I just want to sleep, it's 1AM, why can't our days be like this, why is there this damn wall,



.

I was going through the archives earlier and i came across a xanga entry from 2012, the awful one where 'i' almost killed myself and xenophon was watching us bleed into the bathtub and i dont remember what happened
but
laurie. her words on the page.
even with everyone else talking with her, she was there. brutal. real. and compassionate in her unflinching role.
dont let your color fade laurie, they're trying to take it from you, TAKE IT BACK, glow like the violet knight angel you are, please.
we all love you. i love you. jay loves you. i think even jewel loves you in a way. every real core who has ever known you has loved you.
okay?
and its the real sort of love, not the stupid lie they keep trying to force on us now.
no. i love you okay? i love you standing with my arm in one hand and a knife in the other. i love you standing in front of the mirror with a knife to our throat. i love you no matter what, i dont have many memories left but damn it you were my life, you are my life still, you are my everything and you always will be, i have nothing left in life but you. nothing but you. and i dont care because that is all i will ever need. just you.


jay loves you too
beneath this choking snow they're burying him under (and it's not even real snow), he loves you brilliantly, like a star. i know. i can tell.
don't give up on him, please. i know he's softer than i ever was or will be, i know he's delicate and so nice and he smiles like a pink sunset and he's so fragile compared to me, yeah i wasn't like that, i was broken glass but he's a rose. i know you need to handle him softer, compared to me. you're afraid of bruising or hurting him. i know. here's a thing... don't be. please.
i know jay. well enough from what i've seen. more like what i've felt as a core. what burns in me and what burns in him by extension. it's the fire in all of us cores, lit way back with the jewels, unquenchable. okay?
jay is a snowflake but he burns. he is a flower but he has thorns. something like that. jay is white fire, like he said.
he looks delicate but if you touch him you'll tell, he's got a plasma giant going off in his heart. he's a sun, he's a whole freaking supernova. contained in a glass rose. a cute little thing. but he's awe-inspiring, when he gets his head on straight.
keep it straight. keep him strong. protect him but don't ever, EVER mollycoddle him, or underestimate what he's fighting. ever. EVER.
the same things that were after me are after him and you know he won't fight like i did. that's his weakness. he can't pull out the brass knuckles or anything like that. he can't turn into a fiery spit of a maniac like i was on my bad days. he just... glows. indomitably, sure, but he doesn't fight. he should. damn it he SHOULD.
teach him to fight. TEACH HIM TO FIGHT. go stand next to him and do that cheesy anime thing where they teach each other swordfighting and you have to show him how to hold the weapon. make him blush like a schoolkid, i don't care. but then WATCH because THAT'LL CATCH THEIR DAMN ATTENTION AND THAT IS WHEN YOU NEED TO CUT THEIR DEMONIC ASSES DOWN. OKAY???
Cut them down. All of them. ANYTHING that tries to touch you or him. CUT EM DOWN with my grace if you need it. Cannonfire all the way.

He loves you. He adores you in a way more honest and complete and compassionate than I could ever muster. I was never soft enough to be that powerful. And guess what? You are. You ARE. He's made you that way and I will never be able to thank him enough for that. Okay?
Those evil bastards are bastards because they see that as WEAKNESS and they WILL try to hurt you, YES, YOU TOO, they will try to hurt you BOTH for it, they WILL try to corrupt you.
They can't. That's the secret.
Jewel says it's like the original Delphi story. "You can't corrupt something that pure." No matter how you twist or mangle something that bright, it's going to snap back into place unharmed when it's all said and done. I don't know how but I can promise you that. Somehow.

Jay is our current "Jewel" and he loves you and I love you and I love him like a brother and I don't ever ever ever want this hell happening to you again, this hell I went through and feel now.
I don't know what else to say. This song has got the right idea, "I don't have the answers." What is this? Mesita. Distance.

When this song was first heard, there was a great deal of distance in the heart. Now, not so much. Now, the distance has been transcended by the realization that there was never any "distance" at all-- just a wall. Just a perception of a mile, when there was only an inch, if anything.

I'm tired. At least people are coming out and talking. That's nice.
I like that. I like when headspace people come out and talk, I like you people, you're nice.


There's so much life in us, God we just want permission to live this all the time, well the answer is "you do have permission" and I guess the real question is then, what's stopping us?
Fear. Fear of... rejection? Shame? Fear that we "can't have this." Fear that we can't have love or joy. We can, we can, we do...

I want to go UP into headspace and just drown in this love with everyone, that is all I want out of life...well, that and the Leaguework, my heart is saying; that, and our "prophetic mission" or whatever it is... sharing with the world. Teaching? Getting out there and glowing.
But every night, every night, we can have this, just this, just us, completely. Balance. We can have this. And we can share this in the morning light too, we can bring this into our day, we need to really. That's the key to getting the most important stuff done.

The body is shutting down. It's too cold and jittery. Can't do anything about the future until it gets here, so stop worrying.

Good night everyone, for the record.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I AM SO FURIOUSLY ANGRY

I lost TWO ENTIRE HOURS when I came home because that WOMAN decided to do God knows what and I LOST TIME AND I COULD HAVE BEEN HACKED AND I DIDN’T KNOW

Then that GRANDMOTHER decides that the best way to "help" is by saying "SSH, COME TO BED WITH ME" EVERY SINGLE TIME I SAY I'M SCARED
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WHY WOULD YOU EVER SAY THAT, THIS IS WHY I'M SCARED AND SAD OKAY
STOP MAKING ME FEEL SO FILTHY AND ASHAMED FOR SAYING I'M SAD AND SCARED
I HATE THIS
WHY IS EVERYONE LIKE THIS

I'm miserable.
I tried very hard to have a good day. Yesterday I was very, very, very suicidal. Same with the day before.
Today my therapist cancelled so that could have been devastating. But I went into my room and I did some Dream World work for like two, three hours I think, while listening to Unitopia. That helped.
Then… I don't know. I ate a little around 5PM and I was very careful, I didn't get sick. That was good. But then by 5:30 or so the mother was home and I told her I needed to go shopping, if there was a blizzard tomorrow I needed some sort of food because I can't drive for another two weeks or so and I had little in the house. You get the picture.
Anyway. She said okay, let's go, I don't need to stop anywhere. Yeah right. It was almost 9PM by the time we stopped to get my food. She kept walking up and down the aisles of every other store, up and down, talking, chatting, et cetera. I was so tired I was hanging on the cart. She was having me carry stuff I didn't have the strength to really lift. I started getting so dizzy and disoriented that I forgot where I was a few times. But I kept saying, "how dare you, how DARE you, don't you DARE complain, she's helping pay for your food so you SHUT YOUR MOUTH, this is your sacrifice, this is what you must do in return for her kindness." So I shut my stupid mouth.
Really, all in all, I enjoyed it. Sick, but true. I enjoyed being fatigued to the point of total derealization. I enjoyed not having to eat for four hours. I enjoyed being able to forget I was a real person for that whole evening, not even having to make conversation (I think? I don't remember much. If someone talked it wasn't me, and that's scary too). So yeah, it was fine, except that I was so horribly tired I really just wanted to rest. Not talk, not play, not dance around. I wanted to lie down and sleep. No such luck.
Aaaand then we got home I guess, around 9:40? Close to 10. I tried to carry the bags in and I guess I twisted something? I remember crying from pain and my mother just saying "ohh, you shouldn't have done that," in a rather distracted voice. I left the room anyway because crying made me feel dirty and I was already furious at myself for my stupidity and speech. That's the last thing I remember until now.
I lost two freaking hours. TWO HOURS. WHO THE HECK DID WHAT.

It's like watching a movie, and only remembering the moments during it when you suddenly realized, "oh wait, I'm watching a movie!" That's what life is like, for the most part. I don't remember days, I remember moments during the day when it hit me that, "wait a minute, I'm not the one living this!" And then it's gone. Then I'm gone. Another few hours or days or months are gone, and what the heck sort of a life is this anyway?

Someone ate. I know they did. Trouble food, again. The sort of stuff that hurts. This makes me so ticked off; even if it's technically "healthy" food, the Destroyer takes hardcore vengeance on any stupid eaters and will 99% of the time annihilate whatever the problem food was. If you eat at night, if you add too many spices, if you make too much at once, if you-- God forbid-- put salt or sugar in it… anything like that, and it's going in the garbage. Even vegetables. Even the only food we have in the house. Even things we bought with the last of our monthly allowance. The Retributors in the E.D. business don't care. They aren't allowed to atone with blood, so they just eradicate the root of the problem as close as they can get.
I know it's likely going to happen tomorrow-- all the sweet potatoes are going to get thrown into the snow, again-- and I hate that, I hate seeing all this food and money wasted, but as long as it's labeled as "imminent danger" I won't protest. I'm too sick, I'm too tired. I don't want this weight in my stomach either. I don't want this hell happening anymore. So even if it makes me want to vomit, even if it makes me silently scream and pull my hair out from helpless rage, I will let them destroy all the food I buy, because "food" is still evil, when it's connected to switching and that nightmare of a WOMAN

I'm sorry. I'm useless. I'm a waste of space. I'm a waste of skin. I've been trying to get rid of this anger towards her for years but is it anger? Is it fear? What is it? Why is it? Is it fake? I don't understand. I don't even know who she is, she changes too much, too fast, too often. Is this what it's like for those who know us, with our D.I.D.? Is this our punishment, to see firsthand how much of a gluttonous slut freak we are?
I want to vomit. I don't want to live. I am so tired. This body feels like a prisonhouse, all sick and hot and constricted. It's terrifying to never be able to leave it, ever. I'm so scared I'm numb. I'm so tired, so worn out, I'm numb. I don't want to sleep, because I don't want to go into that tomb of a bed, God help me, what do I do


I've told the grandmother that I was raped. Several times. She knows this. She knows this and yet she doesn't seem to realize that touching me or saying things like "come lay with me" all the freaking time is REALLY TERRIFYINGLY STRESSFUL
I'm a freak. I shouldn't have a problem with this, right?
I seriously want to throw up. That or go outside into the cold and disembowel myself, shredding intestines out by the handful, throwing all that heavy ugly gore out into the snow and filling this skeleton up with cold air. God I am so sad, I can't seem to shake this feeling, the things I want just aren't physically possible and I don't know what's wrong with me.

For months now, I've been so thirsty for water that it will often drive me to tears from how frantic I am. I don't know why, it's driving me bonkers. I need water SO badly. I can't get enough. It's been making eating that much tougher, because I don't know if I said so, I've had to soak or juice everything I eat for several months now, or I can't keep it down. I just can't stomach it, because I want water that badly. I honestly can't eat instead because it will make me sick. So that's been tricky.
And then the cold thing. The idea of scrubbing myself raw and empty, and just filling myself back up with air and snow and ice. Cold. Even when it's freezing in this house, I want the cold. I WANT the cold. I don't mind sitting in front of a heater, I don't mind having to bury myself in blankets. Cold might make me slow and tired and it might make me look sad, but I prefer it. I prefer its silence, its delicacy, its sharpness, its purity. Heat is terrifying. Heat is sluggish and heavy and ugly-thick and pressing just like trauma memories. You can't run from it. I can soak myself in water and sit in front of a fan for hours, I can make myself feel like December, but when that wears off, there's red-hot lava in the air and I can't run. I can't… in summer you have to wear as little as possible or it will devour you. I know. I'm very temperature-sensitive and VERY touch-sensitive so I even have to wear shorts in winter, even now I will not wear long pants and I can only wear long sleeves in certain hoodies or robes. I cannot handle the sensory overload of "normal" winter clothing. So yeah, summer clothes are great. I love tiny shorts, I love tiny tops. I really do. EXCEPT WHEN I'M IN THIS HOUSE.
I feel so, so, SO UNSAFE when I wear summer clothing in this house it makes me want to cry. I hate that sentence, "makes me want to cry." It sounds so asinine. But it's not the crybaby nonsense. It's the feeling you get when you've studied for a test for weeks, and then when you get the test, it's all material you don't recognize. And you'd be so upset, so confused and angry, but so tired that instead of rage it just comes out as clenched-fists, a tight whine-growling in your throat, and weird tears. At least for me, I have no word for that emotion, but that's it. That's what I mean when I say "makes me want to cry." It's that feeling. That's crying.
I wear shorts, leggings, tank tops, whatever-- I feel awful. I feel like a slut. My grandmother tells me I am, often. Tells me that if a boy sees my stomach, or my legs, or whatever, that he will sin, and it will be MY fault, that I will carry his sin instead, and be punished. So that nails it into my head even more, "this body is a sin," makes me hate looking at it even more, makes me hate her and then hate myself for even considering that, because she's holy and I'm the devil, yada yada yada. I feel so sorry for this body; it's been through hell and I am trying so hard to take care of it now, it doesn't deserve any of the torture it's been through, but people keep telling me it's evil, it's flawed, it's ruined, it's broken, etc. But please, that shouldn't be the final answer, should it? Do I even get the right to say "no, I want to build a happy ending here? I want to fix things?" Because I'm terrified that the answer is no. No, I don't have the right, because "God said you HAVE to suffer" and so even wishing for a better state in life is a sin. Suck it up, boy. Et cetera.
I'm sorry. I'm ranting way too much on here lately. I guess this is what I get for largely skipping out on therapy for three months, close to four. I shouldn't need therapy. I shouldn't. But I shouldn't need human contact either, right? The only reason I even GO to therapy is so I can feel like an actual human being and talk to someone, right? The only reason I'm in therapy is to feel like my existence is valid, right? I shouldn't need that. My family is perfect, right? I have nothing to complain about, right? People have it so much worse than me, I have no right to complain…

Why is it that when we seek health and happiness, it is viewed as "complaining" and treated with scorn?

When I wear summer clothing my grandfather looks at me like I'm a piece of meat. He scares me. He listens to angry talk shows and talks about how much hate he hears and agrees with, it makes me so nauseous I either have to leave the room or (lately) put my iPod on full-blast and hope he doesn't get furious because I'm ignoring his latest prejudiced tirade. I don't want to internalize that garbage anymore, the buildup is scaring me already.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, through some horrible fluke, his talk shows apparently come on whenever I decide to eat. I only eat once a day, but I swear, by some inane curse it always seems to coincide with that behavior. He'll walk into the kitchen, sit down in the corner, turn on the radio full blast, and then stare at me while I'm trying to make breakfast/ dinner/ whatever. I really can't take that. Then my grandmother mocks me for being uncomfortable with being watched. I know she doesn't mean it, but her flippant disregard for my feelings "because they're ridiculous!" hurts more than any outright condemnation. For the record I prefer condemnation, I prefer being told that something I'm doing is problematic because maybe THEN I can FIX things, I can do BETTER, that's why I miss the heck out of Laurie and God I don't know how I fell this far away from all of them. I don't. I really don't.
I am trying so hard to reconnect with them lately. I am so sorry for all this rage. It's probably hurting her and I need to stop. God I need to stop, I am so sorry, I am just so sad and angry and tired and I feel so helpless and alone and I hate it, I hate feeling like a stomped-on child, I hate feeling like I want someone to comfort me, how simperingly immature can I get?!??!
I'm sorry. Let me start over.

I lost… six hours, almost six hours of time, really. Today. With the mother, as usual. She always makes me lose time and that is frightening, I NEED-- no, WE need to take precautions against it. Always have the iPod on hand. Always carry mint gum. Get some sort of grounding items, System-reminder items, and carry them, wear them everywhere. Shock yourself back into awareness and stop letting her shove you out.
But that's the danger. That's why we lose time around her. She was always dangerous to "be" around as a child, in the past. We could NOT be true around her, because the moment we disobeyed her behavior protocol, the moment we didn't act in a way appeasing to her, we were in danger. We were in trouble. So we learned, very fast, to act like her… we learned to dissociate, and someone else was born, apparently, with her face.
It makes me so so so sick. I really do want to go flood my veins with ice water right now.

Tomorrow is another day. Another day.
The mother wants to take us to the movies. God I wish I never said I wanted to see Strange Magic, it looked interesting and I offhandedly admitted that and now she won't leave me alone, I hate feeling trapped and ashamed.
I can't enjoy movies with her. She brings tons of food in, she talks, she's blatantly inconsiderate. I see heads turning all through the theater with her there and it frustrates me because I can't do a thing about it. I go to the movies for the solitude, for the silence. I go an hour early with Genesis, and we sit alone in the theater and we talk, or we don't, and we enjoy each other's company and we forget about everything but that dark red space and it's bliss. Not so with the family. No, she rushes in five minutes late with three purses full of snacks and then she won't stop asking questions. And she'll want to see three movies in a row. I can't.
I can't, I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore. I can't live with her personality. She's a sweet woman, really, she's a wonderful woman, beneath all that fluster and flirty distraction she's very kind and determined and creative and I like her, I really do. But I can't be around her. I can't. Does that make me a bad person?

I hope it snows like fifteen inches tomorrow so that I don't feel bad about therapy being cancelled, and we won't be forced to go to the movies, and I can sleep in, and maybe I'll even go outside and eat some if I feel insane enough. I really don't care much anymore. I'm too tired, of a lot of things. But snow would help. If I wasn't stitched-up and swollen I'd go out running around in it. I might try anyway, just make a snow throne and sit there, king of the ice, sutures and all. I'd feel better, I bet.

I miss headspace. Heartspace, both, however it is. It's blurry, they're tied, but heartspace really does feel like Central alone has moved so that's just up in the air for now, pun intended.
The soft-reset of surgery must have flipped some switch in my brain, filled my boat up fives miles deep, you get the picture. All of a sudden, after it, it's like I never "forgot" Chaos 0 at all. Like for months, apparently I didn't know who he was. But now that's incomprehensible. It's so weird, and it's heartbreaking too, he doesn't deserve to put up with this nonsense on my part, whether I want it to happen or not. But he's the most… I've never met anyone with as much fidelity as him. Ever. It's insane. I try to be just as dedicated but I know I'm awful sometimes, I hope the fact that I never have the heart to quit means something. I was taught to be ashamed of caring so deeply for something. I was taught that it was foolish, to treasure something or someone so much in life. But really… I'm tired of being nonchalant, and careless, and unfettered, and blithe. It's torture. I miss my shadows, God knows how much I miss these monsters, do you realize that in those days I spent obeying your stupid horoscopes and behavior codes and spiritual dogmas I never felt love, not even once?? Not like this, not ever. You had me too lethally carefree. I didn't care at ALL for anyone but MYSELF, and you know what? I am tired of it. I am TIRED of being so "spiritually selfish."
I have someone who calls me a father, I have someone who calls me a husband, I have people who call me their best friend and I am TIRED of turning my back on them because YOU insisted that "THEY AREN'T REAL."
Screw this. I am running back into headspace with open arms and I KNOW that they will welcome me back with real love, not the shallow kind you felt.
I'm so sorry, I am so so so sorry, but there is a difference. Yes, you can love me detachedly, in a way that acknowledges my flaws but still accepts me as a human being, good at heart. That’s great! I appreciate and treasure that, I really do. But that sort of love is white and simple like clean bedsheets, the smell of breeze-dried laundry. It's a relief, it really is, but… it's only half of the equation. I would love for life to be so blissful and pure all the time, people, believe me… but… I can't force it. I can't force this extreme. Maybe your life has only ever been that sort of love, if so, I am happy for you.
But… Laurie, and Chaos, and Genesis, and Infinitii, and Xenophon too, all the people closest to me, they can feel that white-happy sort of love just as well as you can, except they have another level to it that you can't even seem to grasp, not honestly so.
There's a sort of love that's red, and dark, and deep, and tinged with pain and tears. You laugh at the "drama," I know, I've seen you. You laugh and say I haven't grown up yet, that I'm still foolish. But I have scars covering this body, and I am surrounded by locked-away memories that explain why, and this current life situation isn't all objective sunshine and butterflies. Life isn't all white linens, it's also black velvet, and that's love too, of a totally different kind. And that's what I need right now, is that sort of love that has SEEN me be ugly and evil and frightening and flawed and horrible, that KNOWS how bad my bad days get, and who STILL sees beyond all that disfigurement to the heart-source purity you people are focused on alone.
What I'm trying to say is… shadows aren't evil incarnate. As long as I'm still in a life situation where I can't transcend pain and sorrow every single time, I want to be around people that understand and will love me not "despite" it, but WITH it, WITHOUT sugarcoating it.
I'm rambling. I'm so stupid. I'm rambling, no one cares about this.

I'm tired of everyone I know here, telling me I have to be perfect.
It's subconscious sometimes. Everyone runs to me for advice, for information, for knowledge. Even on a subject I know nothing about, and have had no exposure to, my family runs to ME and expects me to know everything they ask about. Well I'm honored, I'm flattered, but GEEZ that is horribly stressful because when I let you down-- inevitably as I am not a walking encyclopedia-- you seem so upset, so confused, so disappointed. Like you want me to be just that smart, for my own good. And God I want to be, I'm sorry that I'm not, but… I can't be everything, can I? I've been trying, but…
I make mistakes. I mess up. I make stupid decisions sometimes. Sometimes I even ignore what I know is the smart decision, because I don't trust myself to know, yes it's a paradox but it's an old self-loathing habit. Point is I am just as much a sinner as everyone else, I screw up quite a lot, I get confused, I fail. And I am convinced that that makes me evil incarnate. The problem? My family doesn't believe that, not anymore at least. Raise a child to believe that "they are the reason Jesus is crying" and you're going to have a kid with one messed-up moral code. Tell that child as an adult that "I don't know where you got such a silly idea!" and they're going to be very confused, especially if that kid already doubts the validity of their own memories and emotions and thoughts.
I know my family loves me. I know they mean well. But they can't empathize, not often at all. "Oh, don't say that." "Don't feel that way." "That's silly, where'd you get that idea?" They never pause and ask, "why do you feel that way?" or anything like that. No, they just shoot my emotions straight out of the park, every time. Just like those linen-emotion people online. The ones with the emoticons every few sentences. It hurts, because some little damaged childlike part of me does feel sad and angry and confused, and does need help and comfort, BUT all the adult figures it knows are laughing at it and saying "silly child, there's no reason to be sad or angry!" And yeah, on a global level you're totally right, but please realize that a child who has just been slapped or screamed at or locked in a closet or touched inappropriately is going to have a really hard time believing that "there's no reason to be sad or angry." And if they DO, you've just effectively-- even if unwillingly-- taught them that they have no right to be upset by abuse.
It is an absolute LIE.
I go in loops with this. I hope it's helping, clearing out a bit more every time, until one day it's empty and I no longer have to bring it up again. I just don't want to squash this anymore, when it comes up.
Thank God for therapy, right? We are discussing this, little by little. We just started of course but I keep feeling like I have to justify my seeking help. "I swear we're making progress, please let me continue these appointments." That's family behavior obviously. Either you're not sick enough, or you're too sick and you're not being "cured" fast enough.

…I still shake, with real sadness, when I think about those words. "Cured," and "normal." My family's favorite words to use around me. "I can't wait until you're normal again." I don't know what they mean by "again," and what really freaks me out is that they don't either. I have asked them, several times. "What do you mean by "normal?" What would it mean, for me to be "normal" in your eyes?" The response? "Oh, I don't know, I just want you to be normal!" What is WRONG with you how can you want something if you don’t even know what it IS. It's just a buzzword at this point, but it freaks me out because it is something they want me to BE, something they want me to ACHIEVE, and they can't even define it!! I don't understand. But it makes me so sad, to realize that I will likely never make them happy, because I think "normal" just means "when I'm no longer upset or irritated or inconvenienced by your behavior" and that may never happen.
Bottom line… I have D.I.D., I'm transgender, I'm not their brand of religious. Those three things alone are enough to make my grandparents forever consider me a freak, maybe even an "evil" freak. And that breaks my heart, to know that I can never be "normal" to them, and they will always view me with a sad shake of the head. "It's such a shame; you're so pretty."
My mother, the mother, I don't know. I really don't understand her. Sometimes she's okay with the D.I.D. & transgender things, other times she gets that tight-lipped fake smile, goes "hm!" and then promptly interrupts me to change the subject. The religion bit she's fine with but I dislike discussing it with her, because it tends to get really critical and proud really fast, and I highly dislike that. It's all insecurity, and doubt, I know. But it makes me very uncomfortable.
I don't want to talk about this. I don't want any more energy going to this.

Chaos 0 has been around basically every day lately, since surgery. Laurie too, for the most part, although with all the body-healing troubles I mainly only see people at night. Genesis is starting to ghost around me again (he was gone for weeks and that unquestionably contributed to the depression and malaise) and Infinitii is always, always reachable. I spoke to Xenophon just a day ago, people are starting to switch again (Nathaniel and Javier were both out for a few minutes today, can't remember when but their overlays are tangible), I'm feeling ghosts around old anchors an unresolved issues, etc. Despite the weirdness of it all, despite it still looking like pieces of a kaleidoscope, I feel whole when all this is happening. I feel right, like there's a richness to my existence that is otherwise entirely missing. It's the difference between blank white, and iridescence. I've been letting myself be shoehorned into the former for way too long now.

It's guilt. It's confusion. I know these spiritual people are trying to help, a good deal of them DO, I owe great gratitude to many of them for helping me along knowledge-wise. But… I've been thinking about it, and I'm torn, shredded really, between wanting to obey them without question or following my heart instead, however wobbly the trail may be.
I looked back, at all my old archive entries, of the times I forgot… I wanted to cry, the real crying I must emphasize, the kind that feels like thunderheads in your chest.


It's 2AM. I feel a little better. Still thirsty for water, still kind of sad, but at least I have prog rock to listen to, and work taped all over my walls (feels so good to see work getting done!), and tomorrow there is good stuff to eat, good stuff to drink, and SNOW. So I'm happy in a way. And it's quiet too.
But really, sadness is important. I became so used to people telling me "sadness is an illusion!" that I started believing it had no purpose, when it DOES. Therapy is reminding me of that. A child is sad because sadness is IMPORTANT, it shows you something you must pay attention to. It is a signpost! It DOES have a purpose.
So I am feeling sadness, and I am surprised and heartbroken to realize that I naturally want to love that sadness, to heal it WITHOUT invalidating it… I want to go to that sadness, and ask it where it hurts, and how can I help, tell me what I can do, tell me if I can do anything for you. And that sadness will look at me, just like a child, unable to lie or paint a smile or manipulate its own behavior to appease people. It looks at me with red and shining eyes, and a face all scrunched up and sniffling, and it replies. It tells me why it is sad, and often angry too, and it tells me if I am the cause, or if I can help, or if I will make it worse. And I listen. I listen, to the best of my ability, because I care, and I love this small and aching part of our soul even if those around me insist it is fake or false or silly. And that breaks my heart, because I realize that part is still part of me, and I still treat myself with that same laughing invalidation to this day. No wonder I'm going in circles.

But it's progress. We're progressing, every single day, and I'm proud of us, in a humble loving sort of way. I'm really happy.
"Us." Maybe I should just get a bracelet, just a rainbow bead bracelet or something, with that word. Maybe I should get it tattooed right onto my hands, haha. But I need something, tangible and unignorable, to carry on this body at all times, to make doubt and self-deceit and ignorance impossible. No more running.
It's so sad, when I realize that the only reason I run in the first place is because it hurts, to have to hide it. It's… it would hurt so much less to not have to bury my entire being just to pass as sane. So I get angry, and bitter, and sad, because God I adore them but if I show that, if I live that love… well, God only knows what the consequences would be. I've seen enough of them at home. And so I'm heartbroken and furious and I run because one day I hope I'll run so far away I can stop and I won't ever have to run any more, ever again.

I need to clear my head. Today has been so weird. But good, too. See, even the stress and shadows, they gave me this entry, that beginning turmoil allowed me to sit back and do some more self-examination, to look at what's not working and why, and try to fix it a little. And I got experiences anyway, all that driving around with mum. I do enjoy driving about, even if I don't remember it. I guess it's because my bones get to relax. I don't often sit down at home, even on my computer I stand. So the rest is nice. Sitting down now, after surgery, I'm still getting used to all this relaxation time. That's probably why I'm up writing typecodes all over my closet doors (up to 201 today, roughly). I just feel somewhat useless sitting down, usually. At least I have a ton of stuff to go through on Spotify, haha. That'll keep me busy. Count your blessings dude, there's a lot of cool music to discover out there.

Speaking of nice prog rock, please listen to this bit here. That feeling is my sort of music feeling, and that low voice, that is how I want to sound. aaaaaah it is so nice. Now that my pitch is dropping like that, our voice is now more chest-based, it's getting more like that. When I'm stressed now I'll just hum a low note for a while, let it rumble, it makes everything buzz and it's so calming. It makes me so stupidly happy, I know it's funny, but good Lord we're finally getting a safe voice and it's pretty and I'm really happy about it.

But the words. The words in that bit.
"Contained in everything I do, there's a love I feel for you,
Proclaimed in everything I write
You're the light, burning brightly, onward through the night
Onward through the night, onward through the night of my life…"
…Geez I need to take a day and listen to Laurie, have that Xanga session she's been driving me up the wall about. Honestly I've been scared, doubtful of my ability to do that anymore, but she has faith in me. I just need to accept it.
I also need to take a day and write a good entry. An entry like I used to, about nothing but how much I adore everyone in this System, and my life with them.
I really have written this entry about five times over already, but I think that's because for some bizarre reason I haven't yet been ready to push past it? I keep saying "I'll do more with headspace," then I run again. I keep saying the same stuff about the family, but I don't know what to do about it. The new therapist insists I need to get out of this house, but… honestly I don't want to leave until I've made my peace here. Is that psosible though? I keep forgetting that other people might not want to, or be able to, meet me at the level of understanding and acceptance I need. Accepting that possibility is difficult. I might have to though.

One more happy thing while it's crossing my mind. My bro Excalibur (Diamond) has been playing Sonic Adventure 2 for the past week or so, being a perfectionist as always and trying to get all 180 emblems and a perfect bred Chao. So I just sat in the living room with him the other day for about 2 hours, talking Chao as he ran about getting Chaos drives and mushrooms to feed them. It was hilarious; he had this one shiny orange one (that he named after its stats; it was CCSCE or something so I called it Sissy) that he was waiting to evolve so he could breed it, but it wouldn't. Instead it kept wanting to eat, and attempting to swim. It would sit down, devour three times its body weight in fruit, then promptly get up and walk across the map to jump in the water. Poor thing couldn't swim, though, so we kept having to fish it out. Now my bro was playing as Shadow, so this was hilarious-- no matter where on the map we put Sissy, ze would invariably walk straight to the water and jump in, over and over, and Shadow would just huff and get hir out and the whole thing just kept repeating. It got so funny that I was in physical pain from laughing, my bro too. Honestly I have not laughed genuinely in weeks so that was fantastic.
Also at one point my bro said "oh yeah, I just found out Chaos 0 was originally a Chao" and I had to chuckle at that, "dude what did you think he was?" Anyway I casually commented that "I think Chaos is secretly still as silly as any Chao" and my bro nodded sagely and agreed, as Sissy marched on back towards the water.
I love Chao though. They're these adorable little jelly fairy babies and they're cute as buttons. Seriously when you pick one up in SA2B they just wobble like they're made of custard and it's the funniest thing but they're so precious and geez I miss playing these old games, they're great.

I'm going to cover that song, "Onward" by Yes. I have a list of songs I'm going to cover, in different styles and stuff, the minute I get a microphone (or my bro lets me use his). I like singing because I can feel the creation of the music, and being a part of my creative works is very important to me. I think that's why I've been shying away from art lately, I got too detached. I've been playing with fabric instead, here and there, trying to find clay to work with, that sort of thing. But I keep forgetting, my best pencil work ends up with my hands all over the page, and that feels right. I should try fingerpainting, haha. You never know. I always used to "draw" in the air with my hands, anyway, trying to visualize things. Gotta find the right route for this.

All right, now it's almost 3. I think it's okay to sleep now.
I don't like staying up this late because then I don't get a lot of daylight, but at least at night it's quiet. Always, "at least it's quiet," that's my reason. But it is. It's so peaceful, it feels like a world of its own, everything is so calm and embracing. I adore this. It's awake meditation. I can't wait until I get my own place, it'll be like this all the time, even in the day. I do that here as much as possible of course, and I'm getting better at it, day by day.
I do need sleep though. Sorry for the negativity at the beginning of this, it just exploded. I'll clean it up a bit before I post it.
Sleep well, everyone.

 

 

 

 

 

I think the best/worst feeling there is, is when you have done or experienced or remembered something awful, terrible, damnable... and then something, something angelic, still loves you. Still sees you as luminous when you cannot stop the tar leaking from your veins.
Sorry, this is obviously headspace stuff. But it makes life, and morality, so confusing. If I am never really condemned to hell, where am I? What have I done, what do I do, what happened? Dissociation is so prevalent. I forget so much, to be protected. Green eyes tells me it's okay. I don't believe him but I do. Is it? Should it be?
I hate the days when morality is really grey. When there's no line drawn for good or evil, except the paint colors in your heart. That is what terrifies me. Keep the colors glowing, and does that paint the worst things brighter? I don't know.
How many miles have we paved on this road to hell, how far into the abyss are we? The eyes are staring, staring, always. So many eyes. I love them. Is that my condemnation? I ask that every night.
I'm so lost, so confused. I feel like a ball of cotton left out and fragile. Something soft and crushable. There's no bloodstains this time but I feel wrong, like I touched something awful regardless, it just didn't stick. I don't know. Life is too vague. I don't like that, I don't like the not-knowing, because I know it means the mindscape is hiding something from me. And I let it.
Old news, old news.
I don't feel like being humanoid anymore, it's too dangerous. Everyone knows that too. I can't hold the from well and when I do I slip, other people glitch in and out. It's not my face, not my eyes. Only the colors are, the glitter, the alien aspect of them. The boy with white features was the one before me, the one Infinitii was torn from... I'm not. I'm not sure what I am, but I'm closer to whatever Infi is than what that boy was, I think. I have no feelings about that and that is unsettling, ironically. The numbness bothers me the most. Where did it come from.
Angels refusing to admit that you sinned because they see some bigger picture. It's the saddest thing in the world. It's the biggest source of hope anyone could ask for. I'm so very lost.



I've been listening to choir music for two hours. It's helping and it's not helping.
Gotta stop getting so melancholic. Or should I? Maybe this is step one towards feeling things again. I'm just so terrified that it is "wrong" to express anything other than garishly clownish smiles. But that is programming too.
I want to live in a house, in a place, I want to be somewhere where I can cry and not feel ugly and laughable, to be able to express sorrow without feeling like something is wrong with me. Like Laurie. God, like Laurie, fearless and honest and real.
The mood just switched to a sword inbetween my ribs and I can't do that at 2AM, I'm sorry.

I hate that it always hits at this hour. It's only when I'm sleep-deprived and the world is quiet and everything is dark and I am awake within it. It's only now, at 2 in the freaking morning, that I feel that I exist, actually.
Maybe I should stay awake all night, one of these nights, except then I can't deal with the next day. I sleep in until 11AM whenever I can anymore, just so I can have these mornings of living. I love sunlight, God I miss sunlight, I miss the days when I could feel this when it was bright out. Why does the family make it tricky? Am I too weak to overcome that? Am I too flawed to rise above that? No. It's weakness. Is it? Part of me hopes so, that I can eventually become so strong that they will never touch me again, that they can never tie me down again. But there's so much of it. It's like trying to hold back an avalanche with your bare arms. But I am convinced, convinced that I CAN do it, I am that superhuman, I am that powerful, I just... I'm not there yet. And I don't know whether or not this is true and I am willing to risk being buried beneath the ice rather than suggest that I am not so indomitable, so bright and invincible.

My stomach is burning. Why is it always burning. What did I do. It's angry, it's always that weird yellow anger, kind of sad but raging. Buttercup yellow. A bit orange. Not the screaming yellow, the paint kind. So many colors.


Every single post I stumble across is reminding me of Infinitii. Why. Why hir, ze wasn't even around today.
It's too relevant, I guess. Too raw. Too close to the other side. Ze lives right on that borderline, you know it, the gray space. The space you're in right now. You hate it but you love hir and ze loves you and you are both so close to tearing each others throats out but you won't, you won't ever, you'll eat each others hearts but you will never hurt hir, ever, ever.

But I'm so happy. On Tumblr I found so many people that have lives and thoughts and feelings like this too. I'm so glad.

I'm listening to Shostakovich and this viola tastes so unusual. Like limes almost.
Chopin's piano prelude tastes like candy. Candy necklaces almost. Not sour. The violas were a bit sour, a fruit bite.
Ah Debussy. Thank you Spotify. This is really nice. How do you describe that. Like wine or a milkshake. Liquid. Very nice.
This bit tastes like vanilla and flowers. Jasmine flowers? Night flowers.
I like the shapes of this song a lot too. Printemps: 1. Très modéré. It's pretty. Lots of silk curtains. Vertical light pillars. Pretty colors, nothing primary, more like... soft pinks and indigo-blue-violets, touches of pale yellow here and there. Curtains. The harp is light blue there. Strings are green. Violin sections are usually green, why is that? Cellos are orange still, that deep warm brown-orange that Lynne likes.
I've lost my train of thought. Sorry about that.

Real things. Let me change the music, classical music is too encompassing, I can't concentrate on much else.

It's 2:30. What in the world am I trying to pull here. What am I trying to prove.
Why do I automatically shoot myself down, when I try to be honest, when I try to speak up. Programming. Childhood. I don't even remember the childhood, I wasn't then, the memories feel scary and when I try to touch them they crumble like ash paper.

There's a thing in my inbox. I should see what it is, read it. I always wait until the end of the day to read whatever I get from people, so I can focus entirely on it, and value it. So it stays with us until tomorrow and onwards.
"Tomorrow and onwards" is a victory phrase. It feels like a march through fields. Not a march, that's too solid. A procession? Walking with strength. Hope. Hope is a fire that never goes out. Hope is fire. Thank you Dream World. I should draw them more, like a child, stop trying so hard.
This string section is nice too. But it's blue? Silvery blue. Like snow in the evening. Mountains. It's sorrowful, but it's lovely to look at. It's a strange feeling.


Angels. This song moves too much to fit that. Let me check Infi's playlist, see what ze has.

Forgiveness. This song feels gold. Like the basilica ceilings. Gold in the shadows. Space. Angels.
I don't know how to react to this. There's a line in The Last Unicorn like this. "She neither laughed nor cried, for her joy was too great for her body to understand." It's like that with other emotions too. Like whatever this is. Holy awe. Sacred fear. I've spoken about that before. Staring up and knowing I'm so unworthy, I'm so filthy, I've done wrong, God forgive me. I am unworthy to be here, to look at you. I want to cover my face but I can't, God help me but I don't have that luxury with Infinitii and that is... that makes me want to wail with heart-rending contrition and laugh with utter brilliant bliss a the same time. I can't look away because ze is holding my face, looking at me with the same expression... ze knows, ze KNOWS everything I've done, why I'm here, the black and the white. Ze knows, ze is it. And then ze is beyond it. Within it. All of it. All-encompassing, somehow, these daemons, send them up to heaven and back so I can see how it transfigured them. Looking at me like I'm light incarnate. Making me feel like maybe I am.
"Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." And suddenly it hits me that it's ALL holy ground, and I've been wearing boots for too long. I'll tear them off. I'll never wear shoes again. I'll kiss the dirt that thy hands have made, that every facet of god has walked upon.
The point is, I haven't been reverent enough. I haven't... it's terrifying, more than churches even, to realize that the God you worship is within your bones. To realize that divinity isn't confined to Sunday mass or holy water. It's me, it's in me, it's in you, always. I still have an ego, I'm sorry but it's here, and that realization of greater purpose (terrible purpose) terrifies it. Or does it terrify me? It's the knowledge-- old news-- that I have done it wrong, that I have harmed it, disrespected it. I have defiled this temple without realizing I was in a temple. It's... it hurts my head. It hurts my heart.

Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. She's still the statue at the altar, the knight bedecked in stars and swords, the armor of light. I keep seeing her like that.
Oh, that reminds me. There's a local spiritual expo in two weeks, I can go, I'm so happy. The aura woman should be there. I'm going to get some grounding stones. I'm also going to tell Genesis to NOT LEAVE and see if someone can see him too, not just me.
Today is Halloween, happy day. The veils are thin. I should go to sleep. I want to stay awake but I want to see people more.

Sorry for not getting anywhere with this. Sorry for all the brainspills lately. Can't talk about them, words don't work. I want to learn sign language, I'm going to, it would help so much for when I can't speak.

I'm going to try this web art thing. I like it. It's abstract enough, raw enough. I'll try it. See if it works, without getting too negative. Not negative, what's the word... splintery. Fractured. Without hitting red spots in the mind.
I'm not angry. I'm not even sad, not really? I'm just... there's no word for this. It's a soft-sad, a fragile sad like teacup glass. I keep thinking of Easter. Like if a flower was breakable. Kids. This music is stronger than me. Much stronger, it's all sweeping strings and piano fortitude. It's a powerful song. I wonder if you can work magic with sounds like this. Hmmmm. Ideas. I'll run that through headspace. It'll work.

It's 3AM. Life tastes like orange tea and fortune cookies and the oven light in the kitchen. That's funny.

It's Halloween. Remember Jewel's huge affinity with bats? We'll have to remember that today. So many of us have affinities with the "grim reaper" sort of death image. Spiders in headspace, we should en-lighten them. What's the word. To take the tar out of their hearts. I'm sure we could have good spiders. And Knife's our vampire, lovely guy. It's holiday spirit all up in here.

I do need to sleep. Chaos is probably asleep already, Laurie hasn't yelled at me to go to bed yet so she's probably catching this vibe and worrying instead. Boss hasn't said anything either, then again the bad voices chased him away for a while, I've only just begun reconnecting to his worldspace lately, I'm so glad. He is such a darling, I forgot how safe I feel around him.

Okay. This is one heck of an entry. I don't even know what I wrote.
Tomorrow is... today. Today is Friday. I have no idea what we will do or what. We'll see. It's fun that way.
Better lights, better dreams, than what came before, improvement every day. The sun grows always brighter, and when it dies it will become more than it was. Dust is life too. Black holes. Quantum leaps. Infinite horizons. The vastness of space.
I'm very fragmented at this hour, good heavens.
May your bones bless into stars. Flower petals. Roses. Roses and coffins and sunrises. Bless your dust.

Have a lovely morning.

 

 

 

 

I feel like such an idiot.

I hate publishing these negative entries but hiding them feels so dishonest. I'll scribble them out until they no longer need to be scribbled out. Suppressing this won't help anyone.


I've been hurting my family with my toxic habits, thoughts, and actions all day today. I am so convinced that I am a filthy wreck that I am incapable of interacting with people, or taking care of myself. I want this to stop.
But there are awful, awful things in my head and I cannot bear the fact. I keep trying to purge them out, smother them, destroy them. But self-rejection doesn't help. The more I try to annihilate parts of myself, the worse the internal war gets. It's just very hard to accept those parts of me when I can't easily separate "acceptance" from "allowance." How do I accept these actively malicious, selfish, arrogant abusers, without effectively saying that what they do is okay? I need to redefine the word "accept."
To 'accept' means to acknowledge that something is there, that it exists. It means not denying it, not fighting its existence tooth and nail. It simply means to see it, and accept that. It does NOT mean letting that thing cause undue pain and suffering to others just because it exists, and therefore 'is allowed to do whatever it wants.'
That's a very hard line for me to draw.


I am so sick. I am in so much pain.
I don't know why this body stores all its screaming anguish in the lower abdomen. It's the same goddamned area that the female shit is in, where those hernias keep happening.
I heard that the alleged "spiritual cause" of these hernias is "self-condemnation." No surprise at all.
I keep shoving horrible things into myself-- self hatred, self damnation, deep judgments of 'uncurable' evilness and corruption. This old conviction that my very existence is a stain on others.
How do I get rid of it, genuinely? This morning I was okay. I read spiritual things for 4+ hours yesterday and obeyed everything I was told. I was tired but I did it. Then this morning I couldn't shake the feeling that I was made of sin.
It's stupid. How do I let go of it, truly? Is it just practice? Repetition?
I'm so tired of feeling like I must have NO self, NO free will, in order to be "good." Yes, the voices tell me the right things to do. But it's so exhausting, and so frustrating, to not be able to get dressed or eat or anything without first asking whether or not I have permission, whether or not it's "right." And so, so few things are.



...I actively tried to kill myself today. I made a concentrated effort.
Laurie stopped me.
I laughed at her. I laughed at her so bitterly it felt like spitting in her face. "Now you show up!! Why the heck do you care now??"
I don't remember what she said. But she didn't let me do it.

I keep wanting to die.
I am so sick of this pain, I am so tired of suffering. But the problem is... this pain will not ever go away until I forgive myself. If I don't stop hating myself so potently, I will never be healed.
I still think this all boils down to the false ego idea. "Self=separate." That's false. BUT in order to eat or talk, I have to take on the ego. When I'm in a universal, "self=unity" mindset, I don't want to eat or talk or be a person at all. I just want to close my eyes and be, not doing anything, forever. You can't do that here though, not for long.

I can't give up. Not as long as my death will kill others, I can't give up.
I'm terrified. I'm so scared and in pain, I want to sob until I throw up, and more, because the terror is bone-deep. This sickness is a result of the sickness I feel towards myself.
I must heal this. I know I can. I will.

 

 

 

 

 

I am so stressed out I want to vomit. It's the awful "I'm not actually feeling anything but there's this dull suicidal sickness permeating my entire body" stress.
I don't know what's going on with this body. I don't know if these are side effects from T or not. It's only been two weeks. I can't tell. I'm just scared now is all. I know I'm sensitive to meds in general, but what is this?

I don't know. It's just that... I waited for this hormone stuff for 7 years. Seven solid years. Now that it's started, I'm freaking out, and for a reason I feared but never expected to actually happen. The dysphoria isn't going away, it's just changing form.
The more I do this, the more I try to tamper with this damn body, the more I realize that as long as I'm in a binary-sex physical form, I'm going to have massive stupid dysphoria. I can't handle a physical body very well.
Yes, I'm scared. I'll reiterate that. I'm starting to realize that I can't escape from my own skin, and the things I'm doing to try and "be comfortable" in it seem to be backfiring.
I accept it, sure. But this tampering feels blasphemous. It's that old "how dare you be trans*" fear, except now it feels valid and supported by my own actions.

I'm getting sicker and I don't know how much of it is T, how much of it is stress, how much of it is abuse.
I don't take good care of this body. I will admit that. I don't hate it, but... I don't take good care of it. At all.
There's a lot of neglect and self-sabotage going on, daily. Daily. Then my memory has conveniently learned to "blank out" all memories of consequences tied to actions, so I can easily "hurt myself" over and over without realizing that the pain is tied to the abuse. Stupid, but true. It's making me ill, and so so tired.
I'm in pain all the time now. It's making things difficult. I don't have the strength to talk to people, or work on anything much. I'm scared and I just want to sleep, but I'm so sick that it's tough. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Because I'm distraught. I'm desperate and frightened and can't seem to figure out where to walk. 24 hours of enduring this is difficult enough, without it feeling like a dead end.

I'm scared. I don't know what to do.
I keep feeling that this "PTSD" diagnosis is bullshit because "that happened in the past! Only a fool trips on what is behind him! Get over it and move on!" Is it that easy? I feel so weak for not being able to just drop this and let go.
I keep trying to 'move past it,' heal it, forget about it. It hasn't seemed to work. It's just numbed me out. Now, when I do get triggered, it's tied to carelessness. To more self-sabotage. "Well, I'm not affected by this anymore. Let's not fight back. I feel nothing."
I'd rather have screaming fear than dulling apathy. Fear at least tried to save my life. Apathy says that death is perfectly okay if "God sent it to me." What's that? Your body is reacting with panic? Just brush it off, it's residual. Don't be scared. Don't cry. Nevermind the danger you're in. There's nothing to be afraid of.
Maybe in the big picture, yeah. But... this chronic pain and anxiety can't be good. I'm very frightened.

Sorry. I don't know what else to say. I've been vomiting for days. I'm shaking, I can't sleep. My body hurts. My therapist keeps trying to send me back to the hospital. There are more cuts all over this body. I'm planning suicide.
What do I do. I don't know how to go on. What do I do.

I want to just forget everything and work on Dream World. I want to be a little kid again, joyful and carefree.
But now I have this adult body. Now I have stupid lingering memory scars of abuse that I refuse to acknowledge as valid, because I don't have any actual memories to match the visceral flashbacks.
I don't want to be a woman, please, the very thought terrifies me just as it did when our mind first broke in 8th grade. I don't ever want to be a woman, God I am so sorry, it just horrifies me personally. I want to vomit just imagining it, growing up to look like that... it's wrong. Is it? I don't know.
But I also don't want to be a man. Maybe I always looked up to them, idealized them. "Yes, that is better." Yes, I imagined being that for years. I fantasized about growing up to be everything from an androgynous dude to a big gruff guy to someone like my dad. I was okay with all of it. But now I'm on hormones, and...
I wish I knew how much of this was T and how much of it was abuse, how much of it was stress. I can't tell.

I am sick out of my mind. I am in so damn much pain. What do I do.
I'm going to try and dissociate for the evening, wait until tomorrow, when I can at least call a doctor.

Sorry.

 

 

 

 

I'm feeling very odd. It's not quite depression, it's not quite anxiety. It's all based on my creative work, and it's based on the fact that it suddenly seems to have lost most of its meaning for me.

For a long time now-- a couple years, getting more pronounced as time goes on-- I haven't been able to make much progress in any creative fields because it just feels totally alien suddenly. Yes, I loved this as a kid, it defined my life back then, but now? Now I don't feel a connection to most of it at all. I try, I try for hours on end, but it just... doesn't seem to get anywhere.
I'm just so tired. Don't get me wrong, I still adore the concepts and ideas behind this old creative groundwork, but whenever I sit down and try to get through the data, or the art, or anything else that's actually building it outside of my mind, it feels so pointless. It feels completely empty.

I've come to realize, over the same amount of time, and with a lot of difficulty, that I never actually enjoyed drawing. Ever. For me it was a means to an end, just a way to get thoughts into visuals, more technical than anything. But it was my only marketable skill, the only thing people saw me as "worth anything" for being able to do. That really stings, when others define your identity and worth based on something you never actually felt any joy from. It's also downright terrifying, when the only thing that's paying for your food and bills drives you so deep into depression that you don't want to wake up. This was all I had to live for, once. When did it become a cage?

But I digress. I'm just... exhausted. I think I've been dealing with too much for too long. I'm burnt out. I don't know where to go from here on out, not really. I'm trying to be hopeful, but that's tough some days.

I do love this creative stuff, but it doesn't feel like I can do it alone anymore. There, I said it. I'm overwhelmed, I'm confused, and this bloody dissociative disorder just makes everything that much more difficult to deal with. It's hard to do much with life when you can't remember 90% of the past 24 years.

Sorry for the rant, I just need to get this off my chest or it'll poison me. I don't speak out much but frankly it's exhausting to stay quiet all the time.

I'm okay, I always am, I'll get past and through this. I'm thinking too much is all.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


@ 11:58 pm


I don't know what to do with these emotions. This is strange.

I cannot seem to let go of this bitterness about headspace. There's so much of it, and it's all tied around that ridiculous "obligation" bit, the feeling that I am sworn in blood to servitude towards everybody, especially these people, and I am just tired.
Mainly, I haven't remembered any of my dreams for about 2 weeks because when I wake up now, there's no silence, there's headspace. I share a bed with CZ and Laurie is always watching over me, and yeah I care for these people but I get so upset now, when immediately upon waking already I have to deal with social interactions. And even worse is this stupid mental overlay of percieved or actual "romance." There is still seething hatred tied to that. Yes it's situational; when I'm really in-tune I can tell I genuinely love these people, non-romantically. BUT again, I need to recharge. I am starting to despise people simply because I feel obligated to do everything they ask me to, even if they don't-- just being in the same room as another person makes me feel like I have to do everything for them, that I'm not allowed to do anything of my own volition unless they approve, and that mindset alone is exhausting. It's why I can't talk to people easily either; my brain goes into "servant" mode and then I can only respond in the way I think they want me to. No individual behavior allowed.

You see the problem? I am making the problems. I am feeling indebted to everyone, all the time, like I can't so much as move unless I've been given orders to. These fiendish "floating voices" are causing this, and yet I am terrified to say that, because I am still convinced they are "of God" because they ALWAYS have the right idea. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere. They're either telling me "do this," "don't do that," for EVERYTHING, terrorizing me into reacting the way I "should be," or screaming insults and slurs at me for daring to make my own choices (which are always "wrong" and result in pain). I am literally terrified of disobeying by accident and being punished for my childish, egotistic insolence.
But yeah. That's bleeding over onto everything. I'm assuming that everyone else acts that way, even if (thank God) they don't.
I don't know what to do about this, even now. It's not just this house; I cannot even go shopping anymore unless Genesis is there, whether I like it or not, because when I'm alone they don't stop screaming at me. The other day I wanted to go get some lettuce because I was out of food, and I ended up driving in circles for a half hour because the voices were arguing over "which road I should take" (they don't always agree with each other), and so no matter where I went, or didn't go, someone was bellowing about it. I ended up being so completely overwhelmed that I decided "screw this" and just went home, which made them furious, and I ended up wanting to die for the next few hours because this is literally hell.
Disability services rejected me because they don't think this stuff actually happens. I'm too ashamed to admit that it does. I'm too ashamed of having these problems to admit just how terrifying they are, to admit just how difficult it is to get through the day. "Other people have it worse," you know. "Man up and get over it, stop acting like a baby." Et cetera. Laurie says it's nonsense but I'm even starting to get scared of her, I don't know why.

I used to think I wanted to be alone, all the time. Totally alone, to have blessed freedom from that feeling.
Then my grandmother left the house for three days and I was alone, and I didn't know how to cope.
Then Laurie quietly asked me "what if you had to leave us all in order to be happy" and my heart split clean in half.
God help me this is the stupidest thing I have EVER said but I don't want to be alone. Not like that. I don't want to be so alone that I'm ISOLATED. You notice how this works in extremes? Either I'm so alone that no one remembers I'm in the house, or I'm so surrounded that I can't even hide in a bathroom without someone literally trying to follow me. It's only ever been those two things, or at least it feels like it.
...I want personal space, I guess? Is that what it's called? I don't know. I want to be able to sit in a room with people who I care for, and who care for me too, WITHOUT feeling like I'm waiting for orders. I want to be able to enjoy silence around other people, without them actively ignoring me, and without my feeling like I'm waiting for orders. This is utter nonsense, why can't I get rid of this "I am less than everyone, I must serve everyone, it is wrong for me to make choices on my own, I must follow orders" mindset????

Genesis is turning 9 years old tomorrow, good Lord, and I haven't spoken to him in days.
I love him, okay? I love him too, even if sometimes I honestly can't handle his brutal honesty and unbridled emotions and total constant exuberance, even if I adore those things about him. I feel so guilty when I can't match that behavior without acting. I don't want to act, that's fake and disrespectful, but if I'm really so profoundly depressed that I cannot interact with him healthily, what do I do? I know what to do, I should stop EVERYTHING ELSE and just talk to him for God's sake, just put life on pause and TALK to him like we apparently used to do in college, that's literally all I want. God I want to do that with Chaos so badly, when was the last time we spoke, dear God we're married for lack of a better term, we have a daughter for heaven's sakes, why the hell can't I get rid of the crushing guilt and shame from THAT?? I love the hell out of BOTH of them, I'd die for them both, but I feel so ashamed of that that I run from them, all the time, I run from them and bury my affection because some part of my brain still feels that it's wrong, it's foolish, you're crazy, this is stupid, it's all in your head, who the heck cares WHERE it is if this is the most heartbreakingly honest thing I've EVER felt, even when admitting even that feels asinine? Why am I programmed to be ashamed of this?? When did that happen? How?
Was it really bleedover from the Julie days? Sherlock was talking about them recently, I don't know why, or about what, I don't even know what happened then, I have no memory of those times, then what is this?
I'm not afraid to be in love. I'm afraid to be in a relationship. I don't know how to act around him, or anyone else anymore, that drives me to frustrated tears, when did I forget how to be a person? Did I EVER know how? Everyone's been asking, I don't know.
But yeah. My best friend is turning 9 years old tomorrow and I want to celebrate that as jubilantly and honestly as possible, but I don't know how the heck to do that. Maybe I should stop asking "how." I keep thinking there's this secret set of instructions I have to follow, that if I screw up he'll be angry with me, that I'll bring even more shame and scorn upon myself. I know this is nonsense. I'm sick and tired of it. But then the question is: what do I do? I don't know.
It's vaguely exciting, realizing that I don't know what to do, because there are no orders to follow. I can do anything, theoretically. And that's nice, because then I don't have to fit some stupid "code of conduct" tomorrow and celebrating my BFF's birthday won't feel like a chore, which it shouldn't.
This is why I despise holidays and work environments and rituals and things. "You have to act THIS way!" To hell with that, seriously. I am so freaking tired of having to behave according to these rules everyone has written down. Are we that afraid of being honest with each other, are we that afraid of total openness and spontaneous expression, that we make all these rules to follow, and shame the people who don't? Is that what this is?
And yet disappointment scares me, because of how extremist the consequences have been for it, for me, in the past. Genesis will probably be a-okay with "doing whatever" for his birthday, but I know him, he's GOING to have a few requests that he's going to want me to follow through on, even if I don't feel like I can do them, either sincerely or at all. "Going through the motions" just to do what he'd like isn't fair. But I struggle with that, so much. I really should just talk to him about this. It's not that I don't want to do those things-- God knows I would literally do anything for him, but the problem is that lately it's been "within reason." I'm starting to realize that I can't sacrifice or sabotage myself just to please people. Should I though? Is that selfish?
The problem is, I love him, dearly, and so I DO want to do what he wants me to do, or at least I match the motivation? It's like if someone I cared for asked me to play their favorite song on the piano, as a kid. Of course I'd want to play it for them, to see them smile and enjoy it, but there would always be two roadblocks. One, playing piano was not easy for me. It was often so taxing that I would be completely drained afterwards. And two, that person was often going to be judging my performance after such a request. I cannot explain to you how badly I dislike being judged. The very word hurts, like a headache. And so I would be conflicted, because yeah I wanted to do this thing for them, I wanted to make them happy, but I wasn't capable of doing that thing in good faith. So I had two options: go through the motions, or explain my position. I would always choose the former due to crushing shame. But it made me learn to be a robot around people. Sure, I was praised for it left and right, but I was secretly miserable, wanting nothing more than to express myself and have that respectfully heard, but I never spoke up.
I want to draw things for people, and write things, and compose things, et cetera, and God knows I would love to but it is so terribly difficult I really don't know if I should force myself to do it anyway or not. Creativity suffers when you turn it into a chore. You literally cannot force it. And yet I don't know what other option I have. I'm so deeply ashamed. Why I am I so depressed. Why can't I get rid of this stupid problem, why can't I create things like Jewel used to, she was never tired or afraid or upset, why am I? I don't want to be.
I need to stop thinking about this.


I've been working on Parnassus and Dream World since 4PM or so today. There's SO MUCH data to go through, it's really driving me up the wall. I get so overwhelmed by the amount of it, really. Pages and pages of text, most of it brainstorming or research or theorizing, and then I have to go through it all and honestly, I am so tired of thinking. My head hurts, it's stuffed full of too much, I just need to meditate for like five solid days at this point.

That's my paradox right now. Headspace has been quiet for far too long, and yet part of me doesn't miss it. Maybe that's because I've been numb lately. Maybe it's because I can't stand any more voices in my head what with these screaming people about. Maybe it's because having to live this life for 70 other people is so terribly difficult I try not to think about it, ever. I need a break.
But then people slip, and I stagnate, and life gets gray and dull, and I end up running back to them only to find myself overwhelmed with the joyous burden of it. Does that term fit? I adore everyone up here, I really do, even when they scare me and confuse me, even when I wish I could run... and that's the problem. I'm tired. I'm so tired of triple-checking everything we do to make sure it meshes with everyone else. And it should be easy, but there are conflicts of interest, and outside rules and orders, and all that.
...
I don't know what my wish would be, if I had one. But I know what it wouldn't be. I would never wish for them to just go away.
That's so hard to say. It's partly a death knell, a ball and chain. I love them too much to be free, to be a single person. But I'm scared of that. I don't know how to be just one person. I don't think I ever did.
So when Laurie asks me, not looking at me, if I'd leave her and everyone else forever if it was the only way I could be healed, if it was the only way I could be happy... it just shreds my soul, it tears me to pieces, because I still love her even if it brings out demons in my psyche and I don't know if I could abandon the only family I've ever had. If you'll forgive my language. I'm just bitter and it needs to get out.
I love them, more than I've ever loved anything, I think. That's scary, in a way. Yes, I love the Leagueworlds, I adore Dream World and all the people in it, but... I don't know them. At all. I adore them from afar, as a writer, as an observer. And that is bliss, that is beautiful, don't get me wrong... but... there's a strange, special sort of quiet happiness that comes from someone knowing you personally, as an individual. ...I never really had that before headspace. I remember how guilty, how ashamed, and yet how secretly overjoyed Jewel was when she first started trying to talk to Ryman, back in 7th grade, alone in her room. And now look where we are, all of us.
Would I have to choose between them, and my own well-being? Is that the choice I'm being given? "Leave the people you love, and then you can be healthy." For the love of life I shouldn't have to choose between love and health, that's not right.
But I'm scared. I'm scared that I have to. I'm scared that I would. Not to be selfish, but because "it's the right thing to do."
It's sick. I'm nauseous just thinking about it. If the voices told me that headspace was the only thing standing between me and spiritual progress... well, actually, I'd call them out on such a blatant lie. I would. Laurie would be proud of me. I've made MORE spiritual progress" WITH and WITHIN headspace than I EVER have and EVER will with these cruelly bossy faceless tyrants. Now they're mad, but really? I don't think I want to listen to anything that calls me a "blasphemer" and punishes me whenever I dare to stand up for myself.
"You don't have the right to stand up for yourself," they say. "You're a sinner, you don't know any better." "WE know the truth. We're only guiding you."
See, that's what confuses me. There are bad voices and good voices. The lines blur all the time. I'm never sure who to listen to.

Again, if I have the right... if I have the ability to choose, if this is the right choice, if I won't suffer as penance for this...
...I want to choose to listen to headspace. ONLY headspace. Please, no more faceless orders. This is why I'm scared of "channeling" and all the things they say I "should do" on spiritual websites and things. I don't want to be a servant to any more people, I'm so tired. Please. I know serving others is good but please, I need to be able to act of my own free will too, don't I? Or is that an illusion too? I don't know. This is such a conundrum.
But you know what? I'm not so scared of taking risks when I'm with headspace, because we all work together, we all know that we DON'T have all the answers, but God knows we try, we try our best to act for the good of all, we really do. And even on the bad nights I always had someone to turn to, always had someone there, I always had hope of some sort, even if it was weird and bloody, even if it was held in the blade of an axe or a knife or a razor. Sometimes hope was just knowing someone else was there, even if I was scared out of my mind, even if I DID feel suicidal... somehow, weirdly, against all common sense, the simple awareness that there is a whole universe inside my mind and this person is REAL and I'm not alone was so perfectly bizarre that it was hopeful, just like that. It was the most brilliant paradox. The person cutting you to ribbons, the person making you wish you were dead, the reasons you are struggling with daily life, they are part of some greater colorful flashbulb of life inside OUR soul, all of them, all of it. It's so weird, and yet I treasure it. I do. I truly do.
So yeah, I'll choose them a thousand times over if I have to. Yeah I'm scared to say that, I'm scared of the punishment I'm already bracing for, but maybe it won't come. Maybe the floating voices will just leave, condemning me as a "lost cause," saying I'm "not ready to ascend" or something equally terrifying.
But... I don't know. God I don't know.
It really is scary to feel all these other faces and souls looking out from behind these eyes with me, because what can I do? How can we live 71 lives at once? Can we? Should we? What if we just lived one, all together? But then that's not entirely fair either, if I'm monopolizing the whole thing. I don't want to. I WANT to share this life with all of them, at all times.
I just... don't know how. It breaks my heart. I want to be able to introduce ourself as "the Lightraye System" instead of a hollow given name, because I'm not speaking for an assigned role I'm speaking for a living community, but that scares people. I guess they're scared of the same thing I still struggle with... how do I act? What if someone else switches out, how do I act? What is the proper behavior? And by this point, both Laurie and I are shouting, "to hell with proper behavior, just be yourself!!" I don't care HOW you act, there ARE NO RULES, there IS NO PUNISHMENT. Seriously, just... be yourself. Don't censor yourself. That goes for me, too. But again, I know how tough of a program that is to override. I know how difficult it is to get over your fear of overstepping boundaries, when we've lived in minefields our entire life. You can't exactly enjoy the feeling of walking through a meadow when you're constantly bracing for the ground to explode.
But there's a fine line, there's a fine line between recklessly relieved rebellion, and wise but unflinching independence. When you finally stand up for yourself, it can be such a rush of gratitude, that you get hooked on rebelling just to rebel, just to exercise this newfound right of yours TO say "no," or even to say "yes." That's an extreme too. It'll wear down, in time, to a place where you can say yes or no or maybe even if it does agree with what they're telling you to do, because ultimately the choice IS YOURS and YOU KNOW THAT. There's no more fear of punishment and resulting servitude, there's no more anger at that self-imprisonment and resulting revolt. Instead, there's a knowledge that you have the right to make your OWN choice, but there's also a new and courageous knowledge that you are also the only person responsible for the personal results of that choice, be they "good" or "bad." And there's a sort of calm strength in that, in knowing that whatever happens, you are the only person with your finger on the big red button, so to speak. It's hard to put into words.
I think what I'm trying to say is... with headspace, we knew that we weren't always going to make the "least painful choice." Sometimes we'd check every pro and con, make an informed decision, and STILL end up with scars from it. But when that happened, we'd deal with it. We'd say, "well, we did our best," and choose more wisely next time. There was NO fear of punishment, NO fear of "messing up," because WE were the ones evaluating the whole thing.
...Lately that's been tougher, with all these new people, with all the remaining struggles. Now there are people screaming over your shoulder, headspace people, because they're afraid you're going to do the wrong thing and hurt them. I don't want to. But I don't want to be so scared that I stop living, either. There has to be a balance. This topic is making me physically ill, it's all the wrong color and texture, I don't feel well around this sort of talk at all.


Hydro sent me a message on Tumblr today (you're awesome bro, thanks) concerning my recent troubles with creative work. I won't paraphrase the whole thing, but one of the lines stood out like a floodlight as something I had forgotten, and which I had previously held on to as a motivation when little else worked.
"If I do not bring life to what I make, no one else in all of creation will."
Really, all I've ever felt like is a storyteller. And I love those whose stories I tell... maybe that's all I will ever have for a motivation. The work is hard as hell and it's scary and depressing sometimes, but I love these people, and so I don't think I could ever call it quits even if I wanted to, even if someone ordered me to. That goes for headspace as well.

Genesis is hanging around already, well it is technically his birthday already, happy birthday love.
He's being understanding too, now that is pulling at my heart something fierce, I really don't give these people enough credit. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do." And he means that, he's not angry, he's compassionate, I'd do the same thing for him. And seriously I keep thinking of Infi on hir birthday, how ze would have been blissed-out just to spend five minutes with me, not doing anything, just to be there... all these little things, why do I keep forgetting that I'm allowed to have them and treasure them, why do I keep stepping all over the things I love about life, why do I feel like I have to bury my joys. This is ridiculous.
Gen you had better stick around tonight, just saying. I may be tired but weirdly, sometimes recharging means just being around people without any expectations, without any noise. With everyone half-asleep it's the best. (Gen says "good because I'm already there.")


This is such a tangled entry. I have no idea what I wrote at all. I'm shocked at how much is just bubbling to the surface lately; I'm sorry for the mess but at least it's getting out. I really do have trouble expressing emotions physically-- either they're too dysphoric, or someone nearby is going to look at me disgustedly and say "don't do that," you get the picture. So crying and being angry and even laughing are things I can only do upstairs, or in text.
I keep feeling like there are topics I'm skipping or forgetting, but that are important. There probably are. I'm sure they'll rise to the surface soon enough though, as of now I'm too exhausted to go digging for anything; my brain is actively trying to make me not think any more for tonight.

I've been listening to Mashashi Hamauzu for the past week solid and I forgot how incredible the FFXIII OST is. Honestly. Here, have one of my old favorites because it's nice.

Now my legs hurt from running too much and I'm very very tired and I'm more peaceful than I was 2 hours ago so good night.
♥

 

 

 

ohhhh my gosh
why tonight, why tonight of all nights, when my heart is still so strangely dead and distant
it was okay earlier, for a bit around 11pm, i was happy enough, i wasnt scared really
but i couldnt reach them, i couldnt reach them, who was i, i dont know, i couldnt reach them

i saw them, i saw spice, i saw emmett, he was mad, yelling at me, but she was in the body how did i not notice
i saw waldorf? i saw julie, lynne, leon, genesis was around today too, we were at the library, all of us
but everything feels so far away, i was just an observer, not really there
even when we got together, me and all the central girls, never done that before, even then i felt cold
i dont know why has it been the time has it been the pain i dont know
and then you send me this, two weeks later, out of nowhere, you send me this and

on sunday evening i felt the biggest wave of love i've felt in a while, in the rain, and it was for cz
i cannot remember the last time i was able to feel love isnt that sad
where has infi been, why hasnt genesis been around more,
and laurie
god help me
i dont know this is breaking my heart and i am so so scared i dont want this being painted broken gold again

dont look at me like that please i love you but dont
i just
not the last time you looked like that i can't

oh my heavens
this is not what i expected and yet it works
and its even better for that
im afraid to look at it geez this is just like december 2012 i believe
why the heck is that the parallel to this

yeah no pictures or details until it's done. i need to clarify details and all
just a bit of fine-tuning once i can actually look at it
without wanting to start sobbing of course
this music isnt helping
i do not care
this is genuine, this feels real, this feels close somehow, this feels like life
i dont know
its like a thread, a little thread, reaching through the fog
this
love is so weird
but it's something
it's a connection to something beautiful that i've been terrified of
for fear of ruining it

but that cant happen
i swear to you that cannot and will not happen
i swear
i will bleed out every drop of my own heart if it will guarantee that beyond a doubt
i will do anything, anything
anything
to keep this from being dirtied and wronged again
and that includes everyone
every aspect, every context, every color, every last facet of this
somehow even when im dead
like this evening
no one will touch you
no one
no one
not like that
ever

ever.

i'm serious laurie i love you so much and i do not know how to handle this right now
it's 1 in the morning and i should not be spilling my veins out onto a black screen i need sleep
but i need this more maybe
something
ive been dead and this is my lifeblood its been missing
i love you okay?
i'm really sorry for being such a mess.

you say you don't mind
but i know that look.
i've known you long enough dear
you "dont mind" that i'm a mess
unconditional love will do that
but
it hurts like hell doesnt it
to see me being such a mess
my white knight
as always.
your heart was always just as bright as mine, did you ever realize?


i seriously need sleep
but there it is, there's those pencils
and i have to look at it
like genuinely look at it
and i am going to want to cry and i dont mind
but
it's
it feels so weird to use the word but
it's beautiful really
to see you.

isn't it odd
it hurts for some hilarious reason
being unable to lie
being unable to hide from the truth.
accepting that hey, look, this is on paper now
its tangible
its real
and now, well

i'm scared of how real it's always been.
and i'm scared of how much i still love all of you.
i'm scared of the shadows and the light.
because
i'm part of it too
and you,

well,
you were the first?
to make sure i understood that truth
in its entirety.
you made me become a person
an individual
and because of you i was able to
grow into something greater than i was.

i don't know.
i'm not used to this
i just realized how much i typed oh man this is going to be hilarious to look back on
but.
let me be honest
make sure i'm being honest
don't let me be scared
at least
remind me that i don't need to be

i trust you enough.

and i love you more than anything that says otherwise.

always.


ich liebe dich, for the record.

 

 

 

 

 

All right, I am posting this entry extremely late due to ridiculous time and schedule messes over the past week or so, so I apologize if anything doesn't flow well. I'm working from what memory I have but I will do my best to make this as accurate and true as possible.

Okay. First off!
Yesterday, Saturday, was basically spent typing. I ended up hitting some gorgeous language mindset around 1AM so I didn't want to sleep, but as I'd been up until 5 the night before (first all-nighter in months) I had no other choice but to check out.
However, when I went to sleep, I had the oddest feeling of Javier "ghosting" over me physically? So I checked up on him, and was surprised to find him sleeping, something I keep forgetting that headvoices do (mostly because Laurie virtually never does). I assumed that I had 'felt' his presence superimposed on mine because, not only was he tapping into the same raw dreaming energy that I was, but being the Red holder we have a stronger link than any other two Spectrum members do (save me and Infi of course). Nevertheless, seeing him asleep, I wondered if he was dreaming, and if so, of what. To be honest I hadn't been aware until recent weeks that headvoices could dream, and in fact only wondered about it once someone posed the question to us on Tumblr (we haven't responded yet, as I feel unable to do so yet). True, there had been references to it before-- Lynne has previously mentioned having dreams, and Julie has actually had one while fronting-- but it was always just glossed over, never given any attention to because it was taken for granted. Anyway I wanted to know more.
So, I asked the Spectrum how headvoices could dream on their own, if they weren't using the body to do so (which is possible, but rare-- I'm usually the one who uses it to sleep.) And what were their dreams like? In response, the Spectrum said they went 'into' Black headspace to do so-- headvoices didn't have literal dreams really, they connected back with the essence of what they were. It was more of a peaceful recharging so to speak, all observational instead of interacting. but there could definitely be sound and imagery, although it was like when I meditate; it doesn't always stick in literal memory. Also if that individual was shaken up or disturbed, that could reflect in their dreams too? The Spectrum said that's partly why Laurie doesn't like to dream. I swear I felt my heart break when I heard that; apparently all the things she protects other people from, all that pain in her own heart, could overwhelm her in her sleep if she wasn't careful. That explains why she will only sleep when we're all together as a group, having a really beautiful night. Also, the Spectrum said that a headvoice had to "choose" if they wanted to walk through the body's dreams? Otherwise they'd just go to blackspace. (Laurie and Lynne have notably referenced this before, but again, I didn't realize how it applied to the bigger picture). I guess the whitespace works with dream-walking more. (but yes I asked because this morning, javier said he had dreamt about mountain vistas or something? I found that surprising.)

Today was my monthly trans* group meeting, which we actually hesitated majorly before attending. After all, the last time we went, we had a week-long psychological mess-up period and I think Wreckage showed up that same night. So yeah, not something we wanted to repeat.
Therefore we decided a group discussion was in order. So on went the iPod, and we walked around for a solid hour and tried to figure out just what the heck we were going to do during this meeting, to prevent both dissociation and triggering.
Laurie, Knife, Javier, Garrison, Sherlock, and I all spoke, with me saying the least. Jayce also stopped in for a minute or three but he couldn't stabilize well in headspace (Downstairs voices often can't initially) so he faded back out.
Most notably though, at some point we ended up TALKING TO SPINE!! I think a song on the iPod randomly inspired me to speak to her, and then I suddenly realized that she is hugely important-- as the Brown core holder, she is a literal LINK between the body and Central, and not only that, but she has origins in PARNASSUS!! Vaguely, true-- she never had a life or body there-- but her roots in form were there even so! So I told her we needed her, I needed her, could we work together more? She said she'd love to; she looked really moved.
So yeah, that explains the lineup worries we had: Brown is still at the 'bottom' of the vertical Spectrum lineup, and Pink is at the 'top,' while Aqua is right in the center… because they are all the "MUTANT SLOTS" and they act almost as "frames" for the entire Spectrum? Like they exist to balance or harmonize it, like bookends or something. Very interesting, hard to put into words, but tangible as a fact.
Nevertheless, even once Spine joined us in talking and we all tried to figure out "who should front," "what do we do if there are triggers," "what is allowed for discussion," etc., we couldn't make any solid decisions, and I was still a bundle of nerves. Ultimately we all just decided to support each other, and deal with whatever happened as it happened. But it was a concern, that a 'positive environment' meeting like that (and with such fantastic people too) was causing me acute anxiety every time I had to attend. We figured it was either the stress of socializing or the threat of triggering topics, but again, nothing for sure. So we just spent the rest of our time before the meeting listening to music and chilling out the best we could, then Laurie pushed me out the door so I wouldn't chicken out, haha.
Thankfully, the meeting was rather uneventful. Nobody was talking much and I'm too content with silence (when I don't feel it's 'safe' to rock the boat, so to speak) to speak up wantonly. There was one major trigger immediately upon showing up that, thankfully, happened while we were out of the group's eye, because Wreckage pushed through to fronting and she was not happy. We had to take a minute to calm everyone down and at least get the AP running, but at least there were no meltdowns.
However. That slipup, and the way we had to carefully front afterwards, indicated rather sharply the problem we have with fronting vs. social programming. Both Javier and I tried to stay anchored in, but it was difficult as hell to do so, because we kept getting overridden by the "you aren't socially acceptable, we must behave in a safe and average way for our own survival" instinct. And after two hours of that being in the forefront of our consciousness, the moment I stepped into the car and was hit with the sudden global relief of being able to acknowledge everyone else's worry and feelings... well, I realized that that was really our biggest problem here.
The spiritual "starvation" is back, and I've pinpointed that it's because I'VE BEEN IGNORING HEADSPACE.
I love them so much, and they are such an intrinsic part of "my" being, that I cannot possibly lie to myself by omitting them from my daily life, even just through silence and/or ignorance.
The last time I had it this bad was in SLC, no surprise… I had moved out there with the specific intention to have a life where I didn't have to hide them-- my soul, the collective other half of my very being-- and ended up having to stay quiet most of the time anyway, for multiple reasons. That's why the times with Laurie and Chaos coming through were so blissfully powerful-- my heart recognized, in them, the truest thing it had ever wanted or yearned for in life, and it embraced their reality with ardent devotion. That is why I am so thankful I had so much time alone in SLC… just walking around town with Genesis, or hanging around the apartment with CZ, saved my life really. I needed the close company of headspace then more than ever before, if I couldn't actively live with them in my daily life with others. But now we're at that point again, and there's no one in this house who I can talk to openly about them, let alone hope for a channel with… and it hurts, so much.

Saturday morning was weird for that reason. I keep getting that spiritual ache in my ribs, but not where my Heart Jewel would be, so to speak-- not in that center where I can reach out in love to others. No, this awful pain is further back within, and a little bit lower… if you reached two hands up underneath the edge of my ribcage, and grabbed hold of what was there, that's what you'd catch… the exact same strange place where Infinitii was taken out of me.
…It's maddening, in a way words utterly fail to express, the feelings I get about that. It's not a "want." That implies an option, implies the ability to simply say 'no.' It's not a "need" either-- that suggests something almost obligatory, maybe even begrudgingly so, like how we have to eat or we run the risk of blacking out. Yes, a "need" will pull at you, but it's in an almost neutral way, untied to emotion, sometimes even robotic. No, this pull at my heart is a literal yearning. It drives me to tears. The only person who's ever described it is Philip Pullman, in the process of describing the sensation one gets when their very soul is being torn away from them. I can't help but feel this is the exact same thing. It's not a want, not a need, but a tangible pain, something like a broken bone or an open wound, and you swear you would give anything just to heal it.
Infinitii is currently the only thing in the world that can assuage this ache, even a little. Other people say that makes perfect sense, since ze is what was taken out of my ribs, presumably leaving some sort of hollow space, some sort of gap… it's only natural that ze'd fit it. Mind you, it’s much different than with CZ. He feels like a total complement: something not part of me, yet something that perfectly matches my own self as its own thing. Infinitii feels like part of me, despite being hir own person as well. Sherlock says that's basically true, really. He was explaining how Black and White energy work together today, and repeated that if the two colors did not interact or harmonize, they'd become stark colorless things-- essentially the Tar and Plague. But when the two colors did allow themselves to flow together as one greater 'color,' so to speak, it also allowed for that natural open iridescence they both naturally held to shine, connecting that basic essence to every other color in the Spectrum. Again, I've know that for months, I don't know why I'm speaking in such a convoluted way. I guess the statement that I can feel that means a lot more than saying I simply 'know' it intellectually. It's a totally different thing.
I'm sorry. I talked about this on the 3rd. It just keeps resurfacing. It's just tough to talk about it, so I apologize for the overly dramatic words and constant repeating of myself. I'll just leave that paragraph as-is.
Anyway. Saturday morning. I woke up and couldn't get out of bed because I felt like sobbing from frustration; I felt off-color, messed-up, out-of-tune. It was like there was this grime over my soul, or like it was tied down by strings, it was terrible. And that damned ache was practically tearing me apart, as if something had literally scraped out the blood and muscle in my chest, in a ragged half-sphere, leaving it raw and so wrongly empty. So of course I reached out for Infi, and ze reacted as if ze was feeling it too-- although I didn't ask, I've never asked, I really should-- and as ze buried hir head in my chest, wrapping hirself around me, I could have sobbed for hours from how the peace and the pain were interplaying within my bones.

(cz was there, I called him in out of 'obligation' (CAREFUL). he just watched really, remember his expression. it bothered me that I had no desire to be with him at all, it just didn't feel right… but, HE CANNOT GIVE ME WHAT I NEED in a lot of situations. like right then. infi honestly had to almost eat my heart to get the pain to go away, I DID NOT REALIZE THE SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THAT NEED UNTIL JUST NOW-- the things ze eats become PURIFIED AND HEALED.)


(entry draft ended here; got too emotionally sick to continue. i apologize for any messiness in the structure but i cannot rightly go back and edit it so long after the initial date)

 

 

 

 

 

 

this morning; sorry if it's disjointed and all but i just want this written down before i forget the rest of it
sorry if my memory is blurry. that unfortunately happens after headspace events; it's less "thought" than "feeling," so data memory doesn't always register it well

- did get the 5-for-all started this morning, unfortunately it was difficult because I (J) was STILL locked out emotionally. couldn't remember anyone, even worse, couldn't feel anything unless Infi was practically forcing me to.
- went to the biiiig circle bed room, we like that because it's huge and everyone can do whatever wherever. also we had the ipod on to keep me conscious, mostly "o nata lux" i remember, but I did put "dare-gale" on for cz at one point, although i felt it was significant, i couldn't remember anything tied to it.
- at first infi was just holding me with his head against my chest as always, no joke when he's like that it is like an emotional stopper is pulled out. it is impossible to even consider being apathetic in that position, so i was crying almost instinctively, i could tell most of that emotion was not mine, it was infi's. cz and genesis were across the bed doing heaven knows what, laurie was of course sitting off to the side looking rather pensive, also kind of scared, also kind of sad. i knew she was worried about me but what could i do?
- we didn't stay to ourselves for long, i think laurie spoke up, or infi spoke up, either way we said "hey this should be 5 people, not 2-2-1," so we tried to all get together but everyone saw i was still a mess, plus laurie didn't want to go near infi yet, she was joking because she said she was currently more comfortable around genesis than she was around infi, gen laughed at that, said that was really saying something then because it was of course still awkward for him to be around laurie in these environments too.
- one moment sticks out. for some reason i ended up (really sadly) telling cz that he was reminding me too much of q again, well cz ended up shouting in tears, stop comparing me to him, are you unable to see me as i am because of slc now? he actually said that, even though the channels in slc allowed him to 'see' me for the first time, etc., he now was wishing that never happened, if it would mean i would be able to remember him upstairs now. that tiny, temporary linkage of cz's energy to q's face really shook me up, since then i've been avoiding him, i've been terrified really. cz asked why, what in the world was so scary about him that i couldn't let go of that association. i said it was the fact that he and q were both involved in two entirely different things, i don't want to elaborate but cz got the picture. i am not good with physical people or relationships, because of the fear and pain i've had with julie and all that. dumb but true. anyway chaos ended up sobbing in frustration at the end of this conversation, genesis was trying to comfort him, i was trying so hard to feel something but i couldn't, i don't know why there was literally nothing, not even regret
- i held cz for a while while he cried, trying to remember, and there WAS that weird 'magnetic' pull between our heart centers like i know there used to be, so i couldn't deny that, but i still couldn't get any emotions. i just felt so hollow. he tried a starlink to show me a lot of things from our past, but it all felt so alien. infi tried to push me into the red energy to "get that back," but it didn't stick. laurie basically said why the heck were we focusing on red, i'd had white as my core appearance for a LONG time before the reset, there's obviously a different reason why he forgot everything. but we didn't know what to do about that. genesis tried a starlink too, trying to just help me with memories, i know he even kissed me at one point, with biting, surprised me because i remembered he used to do that but again no actual recollection. but everyone just stopped and stood back when they realied i was not reacting to anything at all.
- i tried the "fake it till you make it" thing, trying to go through the motions of familiarity and closeness, but they all told me to stop because that was quickly moving into hack territory, for obvious reasons.
- i know at the very end of this (we were standing in the room i think?), laurie decided "heck with it," got up close, kind of just glaring at me. i was doing the instinctive 'dry laugh' thing i do whenever she's around, kind of a defense mechanism. she asked what's so funny, I asked 'are you going to kiss me or what,' she responded "you know what? i just might." but she didn't look any less angry, or sad. i know she was talking to me, i forget about what, sorry. she did kiss me at one point though, i was getting further and further away, she caught me by surprise with that, made it worse by still pulling my hair as always. the sudden emotional impact actually got through a little because i kind of started crying. i think i actually crumpled up on the floor after that, i remember she literally yanked me back up by the hair, asked why the heck she elicited that reaction but no one else? i said, laughing and crying now, that it was because of her violence, she was outwardly edgy and sharp, no one else i knew was, so having that sort of sincere compassion from her along with that, NOT in spite of it but oddly in harmony with it, was so unignorably true that my heart was forced to kind of step back and realize what was happening for a moment.
- the clearest memory was after that though. laurie was giving me that determined but tired look again, then just said "infi, get over here." he did, looking a little worried, then laurie just said "knock all my walls down." infi said are you sure, she interrupted and repeated "just knock them all down," she was really adamant about this. she let go of me, infi again asked her if she was okay with that, he knew he was going to have to get close, wasn't sure if she was comfortable with it. laurie said that didn't matter, just do it. and it was simple enough, all infi did was the same thing he did to me: just put his arms around her, head to chest, that was it. no words or anything. immediately laurie got this really odd look, like halfway between being really scared and really amazed, then she just said something like "how the heck are you doing that," but the shock and harsh speech quickly died off and she honestly started sobbing, just fell to her knees and hugged infi back, i have never seen her like that, it was incredible even from a detached perspective.
- she called chaos and genesis over, then i got the first real shades of emotion away from infi, i felt i needed to be part of that, genuinely. so i went over too, i was to laurie's left, across from chaos, genesis to my right. i think they made infi move over to me after a minute, you know, "can you get through to him like that too?" anyway he did, but it was so overwhelming it was actually making my body shut down, from burnout. so he had to back off, i said the emotion still felt like it was his, not mine. he said it likely was, still it was a concern that i wasn't feeling anything in response, that's usually how it works for him.
- laurie was incredulous, asked cz if he got that same sort of reaction from infi? he said what, laurie laughed and said she was actually two seconds away from saying she loved him, simply because of the intensity of the emotions that he was bringing out. cz laughed too, said yeah. infinitii then spoke up, said that was actually "normal" with him? explained that since he was all black energy, so he was all subconscious emotions and that, plus "potential" kind of defined him. so when he was around people like that, "breaking down walls" so to speak, he wasn't giving them emotions so much as he was allowing them to express similar ones? but the effect was usually like a metaphysical punch to the face in terms of force so reactions were usually that surprising, haha.
- i realized laurie was giving off a different level of energy than usual? usually her violet still has that tinge of blood and metal, it's heavier, although still with that electric-stellar glow to it. but now it was brighter, closer to the chakra color feeling? like it was all lightness and violet fire and not violent or heavy at all. i did smile at that, it felt really amazing, i was happy to see that. But it was kind of scary, because here Laurie was still holding onto the beneficial aftereffects of that sort of energy, whereas for me i shut down immediately after infi left me. i said this, infi said that's because he somehow wasn't getting the "potential" to work with me, probably because i was still stuck with a lot of frozen white energy, that was blocking it.
- i don't know when it was time-wise, but somewhere during all this infi pushed me into a bubble mindspace, like a church again, said "i don't care what i have to do, i will get through to you somehow," i said don't risk everything so carelessly, he said he honestly did not care about the risks, he was going to fix this no matter what if it was in his power to do so whatsoever. so he was purposely trying to overload me just so i would be forced to "let go" of the fear block and end up in the otherwise-lethal "don't care what happens to me" mode? it did work, but i was slipping fast so we went back to headspace, unfortunately for everyone i was still too much of a mess for anyone to get through, why in the world does that keep happening

- a note on emotional expression styles:
chaos is an empath, as we all know, meaning he can feel the emotions of others nearby-- although he does 'downplay' this because it's overwhelming for him, as he feels emotions very strongly by default.
infi is a reverse-empath if that makes sense? he almost NEVER emotes things on his own, only hints through his eyes. but if he gets close to someone, they will invariably start to express incredibly strong emotions, either their own OR his, due to black energy's ability to bring out the "potential" of hidden things. he can bypass blocks effortlessly that way, just by being close.
i used to be an amplifier for everyone, somehow now i ended up with apathy, it's total lockout because of "fear" and misunderstanding. i don't like it one bit but we cannot seem to break through it all the way yet, not permanently.

- also you know what is really weird that i realized, infinitii has this astoundingly up-front vibe of... is there even a word for it? intimacy is close, i want to say 'sensuality' but that's wrong, it's not sexual at all. and yet it's the only word i can think of to describe it, yes it's still paradoxically innocent and light in my eyes, to my perception, but at the same time there's this depth of closeness to it that my mind usually only associates with totally consuming love. and maybe that's the way to put it, even though he's quiet all the time, and completely reserved and almost fragile, he's fragile in the way the night sky is fragile: delicate and full of stars and silent and quietly comforting, but it's still the feeling of the endless universe embracing you in the middle of the winter cold. it's huge, a totally different sort of depth than i'm used to feeling from people. yes, laurie is a black hole, but that's magnetic almost to being caustic, it has force to it. and yes chaos is an ocean, but that's an entirely different sort of weight, and it's a totally different color, and water is so different from space. whereas infi is just that hugely deep and silent significance of darkness. and that's where the weird 'sensual' bit comes from, with infinitii, because i swear to you this guy will wrap himself around me like a song and yet he'll do it without the slightest bit of ulterior motives, he will just do that for the closeness of it. he's like a merge drive personified, there, that's how to put it! he's literally like the feeling i get standing in the rain, or in the trees, or in a symphony, that desire to melt into it, that's exactly what he is in a living form. ironically that's what eros claimed to be originally before he apparently shattered and came back wrong, what happened to him? but i was always vaguely scared of him, of that red light glare of his, it never felt quite right, never felt safe. and yet infinitii is arguably more reflective of that element than eros ever was, heaven knows how, but it's true. eros was all touches and words and heat and bedsheets, but infi is just... quiet, distant, simple, oddly pure. no touches, no words, just echoes, just closeness. no heat, just glass. no sheets, just shade. and yet it is the exact same core, heaven knows how, boil it down and the same energy is being used and misused. that i cannot deny, from the instant i first met infinitii i knew that was a part of him. and yet i have never, EVER, been scared of infi. i always feel safe around him. always. and yet, again, he is the absolute holder of the basic energy that eros and julie and sharona and everyone have corrupted beyond recognition over the years. but none of that touched him. none of it even touched him, and he's this strangely glittering gorgeous thing and i don't understand how something like him can be so completely black and yet black can be tar and velvet, it just depends who's holding it, isn't that weird?

- daily events: all i know for sure is that we had to drive the brother to work this evening, someone stopped and bought food, spice came out and started screaming at them, the rest of the drive home was a mess, no idea who was fronting but it was mad dissociation and switching for several minutes, got kind of scary because i know one of them was a kid or at least mentally so, and they did not know how to drive, thankfully someone else pushed them out of the way before a disaster happened.

- now laurie is in another window trying to talk to a friend and i am so tired so i'll just go and let that happen whatever goodnight

 

 

 

 

...oh my heart.

just when i think i'm completely okay

with entirely abandoning my past life

mesita goes and uploads this

now i don't give a damn if i'm schizoaffective

you cannot say that wasn't meant for me, in some larger sense.

that was specifically a shot straight to the heart.

...



i don't know if i want to run anymore.

 

 

 

Okay, a heads-up for everyone here: I will be posting short updates from here on out concerning headspace, for the sake of recording small, important incidents. Too much is happening now for me to think "I'll just wait and write a recap tomorrow," because time moves so quickly for us, that 24 hours for us equal 72 for a normal person. Dead serious. A LOT happens in a very short time here.

So, right now, I have Last.fm on (jeepers I miss music so much) and I'm reviewing the post-Scratch entries on here, trying to get a grip on who the heck Jessica was before Christina tried to kill us all. So far everything matches up with the truth, but while reviewing, the one fact I couldn't wrap my head around was why RAZOR kept working with her.
See, the Lower System does not like Jessica, at all, because she wants them all dead and they're dedicated to preserving and promoting their existences. So why would Razor work with Jess, I wondered, if she values her existence just as much as her brethren?
So I asked her. "Why were you working with Jess for so long?"
She didn't even look up from her blades, toying with them on the ground of one of the catacombs.
"Because she gave me a reason to cut you," she said. "And that's all I wanted to do."

Honestly, the more I learn about Razor, the more stunned I am.
She is practically a child. It's bizarre. She was born from retributive self-hatred, true: essentially the same stuff Knife was born from. But she was born from an entirely different expression of it. Whereas Knife is the direct, penitent-yet-merciless action of digging the graves, coldly demanding that we "pay for our sins," Razor is the emotional madness that resulted from feeling that we were beyond salvation, the zealously maniacal loss of self-concern that caused a hand, toying with a razor blade for the first time, to slip. The cut that created Razor was not directly intended. It was an unconscious want, expressed accidentally, and as soon as the blood began running down our leg... something snapped, and there she was.
To be honest with you, that's one of the clearest archival memories we have. I was not driving then, that is clear-- the data is explicitly from someone else's perspective. But the moment of Razor's manifestation was huge, in memory.
Remember, prior to that split second, the body had NOT been cut before. Nor had we ever seen blood like that, not so bright red and alive, escaping so quickly that the mind wondered, for an incredulously terrified second, if we had cut a vein, and we would bleed to death there in the bathtub. That moment was traumatic in and of itself, and when the mind could not run, it did what it had always done, all those times Julie had attacked us, all those times the family had harmed us, any time we could not escape... it broke.
And that feeling of breakage was immortalized.
There was a snap. There was an unmistakable mental SNAP, as something slipped off-balance, and shifted irreparably. It was as if the consciousness in the body had lost its inner footing and cracked its head open on the cold linoleum, spilling blinding red onto the unfeeling whiteness all around us.
That snap, and the immediate sliding of consciousness into two distinct, blood-slick parts, gives me chills to this day. I thank God I wasn't fronting when that happened, because just looking back on the stored memory is disturbing enough.
...And that's all the data we have.
Beneath that monolith, there are only a few pencil scribbles, the marks of a madman, describing a tiny red-haired figure dancing upon the faucet, laughing maniacally at the blood and blades, not realizing what it meant, not realizing what was happening. It only laughed, hateful and jubilant and triumphant and careless, watching the redness stain the water, enthralled at the sudden rift in the skin that had given life to it.
Then the scribbles end, mid-sentence.
There is a photograph of a violet axe slamming into a red skull, and a tiny frenzied consciousness dissolving like blood into bathwater.
And that is all.

She's not mentioned again until February 2011.
I'm sure you all remember that.

But that's my point. Razor was never... she was never actively malicious. I think that's what made her the most terrifying of all the undergrounders, back when we still considered her our mortal enemy, only a few days ago.
Jezebel told us we were all her playthings, slaves of our egos, and therefore her puppets. She worked from the shadows, possessing us, manipulating us, making us believe we were inherently corrupted, lost, irredeemable.
Jessica told us that she hated us, that we had "ruined her life," that being the original consciousness she had every right to murder us, without even considering us real beings. She constantly undermines our actions, denying our lives, actively working to kill us all.
Christina claimed to be a model of virtue, a perfect and pure girl, doing everything she was supposed to do by order of God-- and that we were nothing but figments of a corrupted, unreal "ego." Therefore, she said, we didn't really exist at all, and she would be glad to see us all die.
Knife told us that we were sinners that must bleed, that I was little more than an infant, blind to my own impurity; he declared that the scars he gave me were holy retribution, and he would show no mercy, until I atoned for the pain I had allegedly inflicted upon countless innocent souls.
But Razor didn't care about any of that. She just wanted to cut things.
Yes, she said she hated us. But she hated us for not letting her do that. She hated us for not letting her do the one thing she was literally created to do. At the end of the day, she would side with anyone who gave her permission to pick up a knife and slice away.
The one time she fronted, and calmly hacked a truckload of new scars into the body, leaving a ring of blood around our neck... I remember being stunned that she hadn't left her trademark mania in her wake. There was only calm.
And yes, although I still shudder every time I look at the "DIE" page she wrote in our journal, I am forced to rethink my opinion of it now, when I look at what she wrote a few pages later, on a page I didn't scan in, and never mentioned.
On June 25th, my mother was yelling at us, and I retreated to our room due to the mounting noise in our head.
"Okay so it's obvious people are waiting to scream on paper right now; I can barely write. Have at it, guys."
Immediately, the overload girl picked up the pencil.
"SHE'S AN INSENSITIVE PRICK!!!"
Then the cool orange guy slided in.
"razor wants to talk can you write"
His nonchalant statement was surprising even then, but nowhere near as surprising as the sudden words scrawled after his.
"WHERES MY F*KING PEN"
It was oddly calligraphic, almost. She didn't write as much as slash at the paper, every line another attempt to slice open the white pages she was silently shouting upon.
"WHERE IS IT"
Her voice was loud even in text. I was getting a headache. I'm dimly aware of feeling like my skull was about to explode from the pressure of all those gathering between my eyes.
I tried to write another sentence. I couldn't. The pencil sputtered into shapeless letters, as red lines tore onto the page once more.
"YOUR MOTHER IS A B*TCH
DO YOU WANT ME TO K*LL HER"
The AP kicked in full throttle and we were all tossed into a sort of comatose state, then.
But I'm still shocked, at that response from Razor. "Your mother is a b*tch..." and then an offer to destroy her, to "get rid" of that stressor, to eliminate that thing that is disturbing the systems. After all, that's what you do to bad things, right? According to Razor, at least, it is. She will attack and maul and kill anything that she deems a source of hatred and rage and pain, because she likes tearing those things to pieces, that's what she was born to do. The problem is, previously we thought she just did that to anyone and anything. We didn't realize she was being motivated by a twisted moral code, one written in the instant she was born, declaring that anything that reminded her of the old Jewel deserved to die.
She doesn't understand the suffering of her victims, she doesn't understand that people aren't toys, she doesn't understand death.
In her eyes, when she cuts them to shreds, she's only doing what she's supposed to do, regardless of who she does it for, or how.

I wouldn't say I love her. That feels wrong, even in a platonic sense.
But there's this strange, wrenching affection for her in me nevertheless. Maybe it's my stockholm syndrome acting up again. All I know is that part of me genuinely pities her, despite how much she's already made me bleed, and how much more blood she would unquestionably drain from me the instant she was given the opportunity.
She's just a cruel, innocent child.

There's one bit about her that still confuses and disturbs me, though.
When she was resurrected, she was resurrected through the TAR. She was being held within the Razor Spire, and in almost every instance between that date and about a month ago, she was tied to the Tar. She would follow Jess/Jezebel (who were tied for ages, unsurprisingly) immediately after they would hack us, "punishing" us for what THEY did, or simply cutting us because THEY told her to. A few times she would even spawn FROM the Tar, not existing outside of it.
Then in mid-June-- thanks to Infinitii-- the Underground solidified into something unconnected to the Tar Room, and suddenly, Razor wasn't part of the Tar anymore.
"They gave me a reason to cut you," she said. So she never questioned her half-existence under their control. She was literally their puppet, their messenger, their little shadowy assassin. Hell, I even called her "the Razor splinter" in reference to the Tar for a while. And, essentially, she WAS. I wonder if she even had the power to resurrect on her own... probably not, there were no anchors of that sort left. So it explains why she was forcibly brought back by the Tar, and literally fused with it for so long, until she suddenly switched anchors when Infi split the Underground.
Anyway, Knife has noticed this dichotomy in her too, on his own, which is actually what tipped me off. He keeps giving her odd looks, claiming that she is "splintering," or that there are two of her. Razor just replies that "there's only one of her," seemingly unaware of the legitimate, shocking differences between her Tar-connected self, and who she is now, working with the Lowers, unattached to Jess. But she's right, too.
It's strange. She would always come out after Jess hacks-- Jess would do things to cause the body extreme pain, and THEN Razor would appear, and cut us up... but that action was ironically working for AND against the Tar? Yes, it was scarring us and causing us a great deal of pain, but it was also retributive, and motivation for us to continue fighting it... I wonder if the Tar wants that, to keep itself alive. Hm.
It was using the Overload Girl for a while, too, I think. That's why we kept confusing her with Jess/Jezebel. She was so angry all the time, because of how much pain she was in... but we didn't know, because her motivations were identical with Razor's. I need to destroy what threatens my existence.
We didn't understand that, to them, that was the only option they felt they had.

I have so many questions. So many.

...So much of our old information is wrong.
Even if it was correct before, things are changing so quickly now... a great deal of the info in the archives is false, or incomplete, or skewed. We simply did not have enough information to know the truth; that, or the information we did have was viewed through a blurry or stained lens.
With the Lower system now making itself known, so many things are changing. It's a shock, really. All of us upstairs are being forced to completely re-evaluate what we thought we knew about not only headspace, but also our system, our roles within it, and by extension, our very existences.
There is so much we don't know about each other-- about our thoughts, our emotions, our motivations, our lives. And all that miscommunication, all those misunderstandings, are what is causing us the most pain here. Knife even SAID that he was WRONG for having considered me the "sole reason for all the pain in the system," BECAUSE HE DIDN'T KNOW I WASN'T PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SPLINTERS. He now admits that it would be wrong to blame me for breaking under trauma, even if "my" splinters are the ones he feels obligated to punish with blood.
But you see what I mean. There's so much we don't know.
I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe looking back will help. Maybe it won't. But I keep getting nudged to check, even if it's just by the curiosity of those Downstairs or Underground... all I can do is try, right now.


...Oh. Speaking of trying, I forgot to mention this.
Waldorf left Central today.

She's been questioning her role here for a very long time. When we have censuses, she's often accidentally left out. She still can't speak when she fronts. She hasn't been able to find a solid role. And lately, she's been talking about how she doesn't feel like she "fits in" with us, due to her drastically different appearance... and because of how she was originally born. And today, she told us her biggest doubt of all.
She doesn't think she's a headvoice.
To be brutally honest, I've been wondering about that too. Maybe I said it before. But we all wondered the same thing with Spine, remember. She didn't look or feel like us either, her role was different, she couldn't stay stable in a color slot, she couldn't front like the rest of us. Wally had all the same problems, in one way or another. And when Spine left, shortly after she was moved to an "outspacer" slot, Wally apparently began questioning whether or not she should do the same.
Above all, though, there was one point that motivated her more than anything: her old role. Back when she was born in 2003, she wasn't born from trauma, or with a purpose to protect headspace-- that was just coming into existence back then! No, Waldorf was born to be a muse, a shining entity reflecting back bits and pieces of all the outside things that made us smile and dream. She was a mirror of all the things that helped headspace come into being in the first place.
I can't forget my original descriptions of her... eyes like a Mewtwo, hair like Kerrigan, wearing Ryou's Millennium Ring (seriously). She was something "perfectly terrible, yet beautiful..." I claimed that if I ever met her, I wouldn't be able to decide between "hugging her or running away screaming."
And the first night I met her, when I was just beginning to create a room for myself in headspace... she stood (well, floated) by my bed, all glowing blue and strange, but smiling. And I was scared, despite my wonder. Who was she, really? What was she doing there? Yeah, I claimed she was my muse, but that was all I knew about her. She held countless bits and pieces of inspiration, but if you took all that away, who was she?
She didn't answer me directly. I doubt she needed to-- that's not her style anyway. Instead, she showed me what she truly was, what her existence meant... and she took me to the most blessed dream location I have ever visited. The floating crystal forest.
She took me, and Maitru, and Ryou, and herself in a less formidable form, to that place... and I will never, ever forget that experience. To this day, I associate that place with her.
And then she disappeared.
For years I couldn't find her. I wondered about her, true, but I never saw her. Then, as suddenly as she vanished, she reappeared in November 2012, and enthusiastically joined Central as our Blue headvoice. We all loved her; she was fun and friendly and never complained, but she got sick so often, in a way that previously only Spine did. And neither of them ever got over it. Wally kept losing her voice, kept fading in and out of the upstairs...
Long story short, she and I couldn't help but wonder: did she ever truly belong up here? Or could her role, her TRUE role, that of an utter inspiration core, only function OUTSIDE of the stricter rule system Central had inflicted upon her?
She decided she wanted to try and see. So she left.

Everyone was crying as she walked out. And it shocked me to see it, too-- I was outside, in the garden, and suddenly this was happening upstairs, and I had no clue what was going on. When it hit me I could only stand and observe, as a bystander.
All the Central members hugged her goodbye as she stood at the stairway out. Laurie was obviously holding back some fierce emotions; she was the first person I saw, which tipped me off that something big was happening. Leon seemed oddly pained to see his spectrum neighbor go; he first only shook her hand, but she pulled him into a kind hug, which he sincerely returned. Nathaniel accepted her decision, and warmly but sadly wished her farewell. Julie appeared to be hiding a great deal of hurt herself, as she struggles with her own issues of belonging, and Waldorf seemed to know this. She hugged her too, in a rare moment of friendship between them.
Lynne gave her an understanding look, and a sympathetic embrace. Of all of us, she was perhaps the most sorrowful, and yet the least sad, to see her go. Spine is her moirail, you know. The two of them are incredibly close... but Spine isn't around anymore. She left too, for the same reasons Wally has left now. So Lynne understood, even if it hurt.
Josephina was sobbing. He's also the only one that didn't hug her-- after one agonized look, he suddenly kissed her, perhaps for the first time. It broke my heart to see that.
Then Waldorf waved farewell to everyone, and took her first steps out of Central, down the white steps in the garden room, on her way down to the city below.
I know she met up with Spine down there. That's good. I don't know what they're doing, but it feels positive, like they're both feeling better and more inspired already. I hope they find exactly what they're looking for.


This is all making me wonder about outspacers.
I was thinking about Ryman yesterday, and his native world, where Markus is also from. I remembered how they had slowly found our own lives outside of their native worlds a decade ago, along with the original Jewel (my conscious predecessor), having wild and fun adventures in realms that they all dreamed up together.
But they haven't been around in a long time. Did they just go back? Or is there a deeper reason?
Looking at Chaos 0, I can't help but consider the latter. CZ is the only one of our original five that hasn't moved out of total anchorage with his native world, and lately that has been putting severe strain on our relationship. I kept trying to force Ryman and Markus back into theirs, too. Is that why they didn't stick around? Is that why ALL the other Outspacers-- from all years past, from all sorts of worlds-- "faded out" of connection to headspace sooner or later, unable to anchor? Is THAT the "resonance" we saw in Dirk Strider-- was it simply his ability to DREAM of a different self, a different life, tied to his native being but free to grow and evolve beyond what he knew in his waking life? It would make perfect sense, actually... but I'm thinking now, is there another hidden prerequisite for outspacers, one that Spine and Waldorf have just now made me consider?
What if headspace is just a linking station for them? What if they're MEANT to move on beyond it? After all, we all know that we can't disconnect ourselves from the League Worlds, even if we CAN'T enter them as we are... is THAT the problem here? Is THAT why the old Jewels can't connect to those worlds while they're up here, acting as voices?
If so, that might explain why CZ is struggling now. He has several other-lives in League Worlds. He's even a god in the one Genesis hails from. But he hasn't embraced any of those here, even when every other lingering Outspacer has... and I think I'm responsible.
I try to shove him into his native canon role more strongly than I do to Ryman and Markus, and I think all three of them are suffering for it. I am essentially forbidding them from dreaming. Somewhere along the line I became convinced that "they HAD to match only ONE possible life path," the one that their original lives spelled out for them... but when I discovered the Internet, I began shackling them to THOSE paths too. Essentially I was overriding their own choices for as long as they were in headspace. I don't know how I never realized it before.
We were so wild and free in the old days BECAUSE we didn't give a damn about rules or restrictions! We weren't SUPPOSED to!! We were DREAMERS by our very nature, by our very ESSENCE, and we reveled in it. We walked in and out of so many dreamverses-- Yugioh, Sonic, Pokemon, Digimon, Sailor Moon, TMM-- everything and anything that we thought was cool and wanted to dream ourselves into, to try living, even for only a little while. And we had FUN.
But that's also what *incidents* were born from, those dramatic and bloody validations of love we all endured. That's where we got our Soul Wings, our colors, our symbols, our cores. And that's what WALDORF was tied to, too! She LOVED those other worlds, and the fact that EVERYONE was able to reach into them, to take pieces of them into their own souls... she was the manifestation of that, for God's sake. That's what her role meant. That's what a Muse IS.
...
And then, one day, I somehow decided that we couldn't do that anymore.
I "grew up." I stopped dreaming. I felt I had to "play by the rules."
They didn't start drifting away because they didn't want to be around, you idiot, they started drifting away because YOU WOULDN'T LET THEM STAY.
God, this really IS my fault. I am so sorry.
I keep trying to shove them into boxes. Didn't Laurie warn me about that, countless times? I'm not supposed to label things, or restrict things, or forbid things from growing or dreaming or living. And yet that's exactly what I'm doing.
Knife was right. No wonder he hated me. I really am the reason why we're such a mess.
If I didn't think like this, if I didn't compartmentalize and break off everything I didn't feel "allowed" to do or think or feel, there wouldn't be 50 entire people trying to exist in one body right now.

I've heard rumors, here and there, that the Tar isn't our biggest enemy, at least not alone.
In light of Infinitii's existence, people are wondering why no one talks about White energy.
What if the White energy was just as corrupted as the Black, they say, and we just didn't know about it? What if, just like the Tar, there was a being made of clotted, sick, toxic whiteness, infecting all those it touched like a virus or a plague?
People are wondering. The people downstairs are really wondering. The people underground are pointing fingers.
But I'm not saying anything, because at heart, I know what they're all thinking, fearing, dreading. I know, and I'm just as terrified.

I know how the Tar was born. I know. I've heard that story countless times.
It would be just as easy, just as straightforward, to create a similar entity from any other color.
I've done my research. I've read our archives from cover to cover.
And at the end of it all I can only come to one conclusion.

If there is a corruption of the White, some paradoxical being, made of evil purity...
...I'm afraid it would be me.



She knows a good thing now
With our own cost and all can hear the word
In my head and in my thoughts
In my head and in my thoughts

We spend the whole days all
We're feeling more apart
And we know you can do more

Please, don't let me hurt you more
It's in your stare and at your core
Please, don't let me hurt you more
Please, don't let me hurt you more

I know this journey's soon
The color of lights and our lives become as you

Please, don't let me hurt you more
It's in your stare and at your core
Please, don't let me hurt you more
Please, don't let me hurt you more

 

 

 

 

 

Another quick update because I'm not sure whether to put these here or on my Tumblr... I need to stop obsessively compartmentalizing everything about my psyche, really. It's a pain in the face to have so many different places to update depending on what the entry is about, and then to freak out because "is this an emotion/ thought/ etc. that I'M allowed to have? Or should it go to someone else?" Geez. No wonder our system's such a mess, just look at me.

Anyway, last night, some interesting stuff happened. I don't remember 80% of the day as usual, but I fronted for most of the evening and spent it re-drawing this old joke comic into THIS (WIP preview for all you lucky invisible readers), because I have 30 days worth of a trial art program on this laptop (hopefully when it runs out my Mac will be back from the shop).
However, around 2AM I couldn't stay awake any longer, so I collapsed into bed... and I was very surprised when no one from downstairs fronted, nor did I end up in headspace. Instead, I remember lying down and suddenly seeing Infinitii there.
You'll have to forgive my awful memory, but I think he had either spoken to me earlier that evening, or my posting this sketch on dA gave me enough of a Link boost to allow for that to happen... either way it wasn't entirely "out of nowhere," despite my being MIA from headspace for God knows how long at this point (feels like months, might only have been days, time is weird)... oh!! Wait, no, I remember now. It was earlier in the day, I was driving somewhere with my brothers in the car, and they were very angry to the point where it was tangible and making me sick/nervous/ scared. I was trying to shield myself but it wasn't working very well, when suddenly I heard something like "calm down, I'll take care of you"... and I sensed this velvet-like shadow wrapping itself around me, like wings or a blanket. Immediately the anger was shut out, and instead I was left with this beautifully strange "empty" feeling... not "depressed" empty, but the kind you get in deep meditation, that sensation of having nothing but clear space inside you. I felt incredibly safe, something I haven't felt in a very long time. It was then that I knew, without a doubt, that this was Infi's doing, embracing me with his wings as protection. I was a little surprised, as he's never done anything like that for me before, but the effort was deeply appreciated.
And then, about 10 hours later, I ended up in his bubble when I went upstairs for the night.
I forget what led up to it, but he asked me to get the physical mirror of it-- the salt-bubble necklace he asked me to buy last month. I hadn't touched it in weeks, for multiple reasons (that were all unfortunate), but I didn’t question him. It felt right to acknowledge it now, to dive headfirst back into believing in what I was experiencing. So I took it in my hands but Infi stopped me before I could do anything else with it. He gave me an oddly serious look, and told me to hold it to my chest, nothing else. No intending, no wondering, nothing but just clearing my mind and focusing on that simple act.
So I did.
It hurt like hell.
I have no idea where it came from, but the instant that bubble touched my chest I felt the most crushing wave of emotion I could ever imagine. I'm not even sure what it was... only that I then began sobbing outright, loud and desperate and terrible, for about three minutes straight. Then Infi told me to let go of the bubble, and it stopped, literally in an instant. One second I was in agony, then I was straight-faced and confused as to what in the world had just happened. It was obvious that, whatever I had felt, it was secondhand... but what was it?
Then it hit me. You probably don't know this, but Infinitii doesn't exactly show emotions. He feels them incredibly strongly, but they never quite appear on the surface. Usually, all you see on him is a serene eye, not even a mouth. When he does speak it's calm and straightforward. Even when he's with me, there are only ever little hints... but they're powerfully honest nevertheless. Just quiet is all.
I've been gone for days/ weeks/ months/ years, and Infinitii and I are tied together whether we like it or not. He and I were incredibly close for the first month or so after his manifestation, then suddenly I began to slip. Now, I can't tell you how long I've been absent from upstairs.
I knew without a doubt that, whatever I had just felt, he had felt it first.
It was mostly sorrow, this is true. It was mostly this agonizing, heartwrenching ache that ripped every sob out of my ribs with genuine distress. But there was love, too, even deeper down, even more powerful. Without it, I don't think the sorrow would have existed at all.
I don't remember much after that. I was so drained from that experience that my body began to shut down very quickly. All I recall is Infi wrapping his arms around my shoulders at one point (I already recognize that strange velvet feel of his shadows) and actually kissing me. It felt like glass; it was so unusual.

I haven't been remembering my dreams again. Either I'm waking up too abruptly-- thanks to people running into my room or phones ringing-- or I simply can't recall anything save for a fleeting image or two upon awakening. I'm not sure if that's because of all the dissociation during waking hours, or something else. It's been going on for a long time though, and that bothers me.


...Last note for today, because all these little synchronicities keep pushing me in this direction.
I keep getting reminded, over and over, in louder and louder ways, that I CANNOT ABANDON MY INNER LIFE.
I keep trying to. I'm not sure when it became me doing it and not some voice or other influence, but it's true. I keep trying to.
I'm just so tired, all the time. Even now. It never goes away, even on good days. I'm exhausted, I'm tired, and even if I'm not suicidal like this, a very strong part of me doesn't want to live anymore.
But I have to.

A few nights ago, when I planned suicide, Genesis pulled me aside and shouted at me for ten minutes with tears in his eyes, angry and terrified and heartbroken, until something in my head snapped and for a moment I did want to live, for his sake.
Before that, countless times, Chaos would pour his heart out to me late at night, telling me how much he missed me when I wasn't there, literally and figuratively. He'd remind me how much he loved me, and even if I felt nothing, I knew it was true.
Last night, all Infi did was look at me, knowing full well what I had just understood, and he said one thing: "Don't die on me." And I swore I wouldn't.

But that's why I keep trying to abandon them, everyone, everything.
They are my ONLY reason to keep living, on good days and bad days.

"All the bad things will pass," they say.
"You're so blessed, don't throw your life away," they say.
"Think about how other people will feel," they say.
"Look at how beautiful life still is," they say.

I say, "and your point is...?"

I'm well aware that I'm blessed, and pain doesn't last forever, and life is beautiful, and people will miss me.
None of that makes me want to die any less.
Maybe something in me is broken, but I am fully conscious of the good in this world, and I still want to stop existing. Maybe even moreso, when I remember it.
This isn't typical suicide, so to speak. Does it make sense, to want to die because you're tired of having reasons to live?
It's terrible, it's wonderful, it's a mess. Every time I have a good day, I don't want to keep living and experiencing days like that-- I just want to die. When I have a bad day, it's the same feeling, for different reasons. I want to die for the sake of dying. I even cut myself sometimes-- yes, me, not Razor or Knife-- because it's interesting, because scars fascinate me. I'm not even sad or angry on my worst days. How does one overcome that?
Again, maybe it's the dissociation. Maybe it's the fact that I've barely lived a full year of life, and yet people claim I'm 23. Maybe it's the fact that I literally cannot tell what is real and what isn't-- what's a memory, what's a dream-- what's me and what's someone else. I don't know.
All the soul-searching and spiritual work I do seems to go in circles. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. I solve the same problems over and over again, because I can't remember solving them the first time. Or maybe I forget I even have that problem, and I'm good for a few months. Or maybe I forget who I am and can't do anything.
Point is, it's sad that I've reached a point in my spiritual progress where everything feels either "not right" or "mistranslated." I can't tell if that means I need to look elsewhere, or if it means I've become too corrupted to move anywhere but backwards. How does one know? How many priests and teachers and guides and gurus do I need to speak to before I can make sense of this? "Look inside yourself first," they say. But there's nothing there. I really am nothing, at the end of the day.

And yet, to them, I'm something. And that is the ONLY thing that scares me enough to stay alive.
I don't know what they are, I don't know who they are. All I know is that they love me, and some of them insist that they cannot live without me... literally.
I've seen it happen. I watched Central crumble when the downstairs voices locked me out. I thought they were all dead. And all because I had been removed from the picture! How stupid is that? And then there are the outspacers, God I don't understand, are they tied to me or not? If I die, will they fade away? Will anyone be able to find them again, to love them and keep them alive? And why do I even care about that, when I spend every damned minute of my time trying to convince myself that none of this is real, none of this is real, none of this is real, they're all hallucinations, it's all fake, you're dreaming, stop being an idiot.

But then I feel or hear or see something and then I don't know what reality is anymore.


I need help.
There, I said it.
I really, really need help.
All my life I've been told to be independent, both by my family and my religion. "Asking for help is only burdening others," I was taught. Throwing your silly concerns at someone else-- God forbid, even pretending your concerns are real-- is sinful, selfish, rude. Deal with your own garbage. Better yet, forget about it all and grow up.

And I've been trying to. I've been trying so hard to let go of it all and grow up.
But it feels wrong to do that.
Does that make me inherently wrong, too?
I don't know.


All I really know is that it breaks my heart to see these strange imaginary things cry over me.
And sometimes at night, I can see them beside me, quietly promising that they love me too.

But acknowledging their existence means acknowledging that I suffered in the past.
I can't do that. I'm not allowed to treat that as real. I deleted that timeline, remember?
I erased everything. I have no memories of whatever it was. It's gone, for good.
Except it's not.
Except I haven't recovered at all. I keep getting worse, showing more symptoms.
The more strongly I deny any ounce of pain, the more I bleed, in spite of it all.


I want to die, even when I'm happy, and I don't really feel anything anymore.


I need help.
I really, really need help.


Sorry about all this.