the spectrum heart cathedral system

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 ♥

 

 

I am in hrorible pain.


WHY THE HELL ARE THERE RAPIST INTROJECTS IN THIS SYSTEM?????????
AND WHY THE HELL ARE THEY ALL ADULT WOMEN?????? WHO CALL THEMSELVES OUR "MOM"???????????
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?????????????????????????????/


Moxie got hacked by the horrible fcking fat woman alter who calls herself "mommy" and keeps FCKING RAPING THE CHILDREN.
I swear that HAS to be "sharona" because Simeon was getting triggered badly by her being around too.
ashen almost did. but she was too old
dread didn’t come out. moxie did.
I don’t fcking know why the hell this keeps happening


IS SOME PART OF OUR PSYCHE CONVINCED WE DESERVE THIS???????


its heartbreaking, the kids are saying "mommy says she loves me but she makes me feel dirty" and I want to fcking vomit
what the hell is this

is this tumblrs fault
is this the goddamn porn industrys fault
is this fcking FIGURE DRAWING classes fault
we see this shit EVERYWHERE
always the SAME FCKING WOMEN
THEY ALL LOOK THE GODDAMNED SAME
AND THEY ARE HORRIFYING

god I am so sick

moxie feels about 11
she was confused why the body was so big
says that "her tummy was too big" and that it was "mommy fat" and she had to get rid of it or it would hurt her
god isnt that telling
she cut up the arms just like a kid would and said she wanted to die
julie and laurie both tried to stop her, calm her down, but she was too empty sad

god
WHY
WHY????????????????


THIS DOESN'T EVEN HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH OUR BIOLOGICAL MOTHER ANYMORE
WHERE THE HELL DID THIS SHIT EVEN COME FROM??????????


knife cant atone anymore without heave-sobbing its terrible
he cannot bear seeing all this blood
everyone who feels the hacks says "its never enough"
no amount of blood can ever entirely bleed out the horror and filthy feeling
it helps, god it helps, it really does,
but the event happened
and the memories get buried
BURIED
SIX FEET UNDER
DONT YOU FCKING DARE TOUCH THAT SHIT ITS EVIL

someone
SOME MOTHERFCKER
TRIED TO IMITATE THE OLD JULIE HACKING METHODS
THAT'S WHY THIS SHIT HAPPENED

why the hell do we keep going back in time
why WYHY

i dont understsand
i dont understand

i dont understand any of this

who the hell keeps using us
is this mind control
is this possession
what is this
what IS THIS
its not us its never been us
we fight tooth and nail

they have to SHUT US DOWN in order to hurt us AT ALL

but thats exactly what keeps happening


god please
make this stop
please
make this stop.

please.

make this stop.

i dont care what you have to do
i dont care how much of us you have to kill

KILL THIS BODY PLEASE
THERES SO MUCH EVIL IN IT
PLEASE
GET THESE GIRLS OUT OF HERE
PLEASE
THIS BODY IS TERRIFYING AND FULL OF EVIL
PELASE DESTROY IT
SOMEHOW
WERE SCARED TO DIE BUT WE DNT WANT TO BE EVIL ANYMORE
PLEASE
HELPE US
HELP US PLEASE

PLEASE

 

 

 

God, give me the strength to protect this kid.

I don't know if the prayers of people like me get heard, or by what, or whatever. All I know is that I'm bloody torn up right now over this, about how terribly scared these kids are, how they're legitimately losing hope, losing the will to fight, to carry on..

God help me I don't know what to do. I'm crying here.

God give me the strength to PROTECT us, all of us for life's sake, ALL of us in here.
Just... I hate hating things, I really do, especially now that Julie's with us. I don't want to hate these tarbrain hackers because geez, what if THEY end up with us one day? And who knows, enough love and effort and they might.
Except that's how Jay thinks. I hope. Used to think, at least. But look what they did to him.

There are a couple of 'psychopaths' in this System, at least. They've got frighteningly brilliant masks and when they take them off it's just bloodied teeth underneath. Eating our hearts out, basically. And at least one of the Jays is into that torture apparently, so that's even MORE opportunity for these bloody hackers to get at him.

Geez look at this word salad. I'm rambling. Guess I'm more nervous than I thought.
Heck, of course I'm nervous. The body's dying for God's sake. I'm so nervous I'm shaking. I don't know what the heck to do.

We're trying. God knows we're trying. Those of us who can still fight are fighting. And apparently, this is really bloody sad but at least it's got a silver lining, apparently the 'body' is learning how to be afraid again. How awful is that. We had so many numb fronters, so many dissociated 'optimist' hackers, that we somehow got inundated with this hellish anaesthetizing numbness thing. Now it's cracking, if only because there are still people on the inside looking out, and even if no one's feeling anything we can still realize what's going on.
It's the most bloody ironic thing. "Logic will save us." Emotion is useless right now. It's corrupt. The knowledge, the experience, the people up here doing the "blasphemous" thing of being "logical" and "analytical" and "judgmental," THEY'RE the ones feeling 'emotions' now, THEY'RE the ones trying to SAVE people for crying out loud,
THE BLEEDING ARCHIVISTS CARE MORE ABOUT HUMAN WORTH THAN THE GODFORSAKEN SPIRITUAL FRONTERS DO.

God help us.
Spice is right, this body is really sick. We've really gotta crack down on that too.
I don't know. I'm literally just unloading my brain onto this screen. Needed an outlet of some sort for all this pain I'm dealing with in silence, ha ha. Bad habit of mine.

God give me strength. That's about it in a nutshell.

I'm out of here for the night. Nothing else I can type that doesn't involve me shattering in tears. I can't do that in the body, the bloody emotion killers step in. My heart actually hurts, and I can't feel that on the outside because this demonic social programming has deemed it "unacceptable." No emotions allowed in the body.
Then again the hacker residue doesn't help. When the body looks like the abuser, or IS the abuser in some cases, seeing IT cry when you're heartbroken is more than a little jarring, so I've heard.

Anyway I can still cry my stupid eyes out inside if I want to. Pretend I didn't say that. God. I'm so bleeding scared of being scared and sad. I guess it's 'cause I know it means I'm at a loss. When I'm at a loss you know there's trouble, heh. Don't like this at all.

Infinitii's gotta help me out here. I've gotta talk to Knife, I haven't seen him in a while. Maybe chill with the girls. Something. Gotta connect with people up here, feel a little alive while I still can, feel that SOMETHING matters more than this...

God all we've wanted is to have this on the outside, that's it.
Who the heck decided to make us "normal?"
Who the heck decided compassion and integrity and individual worth were useless in the face of "popular opinion" or whatever similar garbage? Who the heck decided to just throw everything meaningful to the wind because otherwise they'd be the "freak," the "outcast,"
geez.
We need to get out of this house, I guess. God I don't know. I'm really bloody hopeless and scared right now, I admit it, no use hiding it. I'm slipping really freaking badly, I've gotta go yell at Jewel about this or something.

I don't want to lose my anchor. God I don't want to lose my anchor. I don't want to be forgotten. I don't want to be erased. I don't want to lose who I am like I've seen so many other people do. I've seen too many people die in too many ways. I don't want to be next, not when people are counting on my stability to survive.

God I need a Core to talk to. A Host, whoever, whatever. I need one of them here right about now. It's been so frighteningly hard to find one lately, it's been so bloody hard to function without that constant kid around to yell at and guide around and care for, you know? I haven't been able to figure out who the heck's been around lately, if anyone. I miss Jay. I miss Jewel. I miss Cannon. I miss all the kids who knew me by name and looked up to me as their guardian angel or big sister or best friend or knight in shining armor.
God I am bloody crying. I cannot handle this.

"I'll go wherever you'll go," why on earth is that song playing in my head all of a sudden. Just... come on.

Soeeone's hacking the LEAGUEWORLDS. God, just... what the actual hell, WHY, why won't they freaking STOP, I PAID IN BLOOD FOR THIS, SHE DID, WE ALL DID,
I almost died, I wanted to, because of this trauma, because of all the innocent kids who were paying the real price for this... Ashen and Moxie and all those others we can't find, God, just... why is it always kids, why is it always the sweet ones, Jeremiah and Jay and Julie even, just... why? WHY?
I can't, I can't stand for this. I can't. I need to go get a bunch of Retributors and just straight-out depthcharge this demon, whoever in hell is hacking THEM, hurting those OTHER kids and sweet hearts, I swear why are THEY always the targets, why the blood do you people always touch the innocent ones and spend the entire freaking time smiling and trying to convince them it's OKAY???
What the hell is wrong with you. What the hell is wrong with us that that sort of evil thing is propagating in our head? What sort of messages even took root in here? Who the hell DOES that?
I can't take it, I can't take all these kids being hurt, Sugar's gotta help me with this, Sugar and Wreckage, God forgive me but she is so hard to deal with, I can't bloody handle being around Wreckage for long because she deals with terrors I could never touch, and never WANT to touch, it would tear me to shreds. But she's hard as nails, just like me, but worse. She carries all this pain that doesn't scar.
God help us all.
There is too bloody much pain in here. Why the heck can I feel it, I'm not even enduring any of that, why aren't the kids allowed to be afraid for God's sake?? Who the heck is stopping them? Who the heck tried to convince them it was "okay" to be hurt? Who in hell keeps CONFUSING them??
This is why my boy loves pain. Jay. Poor kid has a legit addiction and I don't understand it but it worries the wits out of me, there's such actual desperation in his eyes when he's bloodied up, it's this need for this sort of heartwrenching compassion he only seems able to really crash into when the pain does too. I don't know. I just keep wondering, what in hell happened to you for this to be such a constant in the Cores, why is our biggest weakness pain, why do the kids keep calling me when they're getting hurt, and for all the wrong reasons, is this why it's so bloody hard for some of them to fight back? Because love is pain, and I'm tied to pain, and when they're euphoric from it they look for me? Not realizing that someone is using that pain as a bloody trapdoor to hurt them like I never, ever would?
Then they call for me again when it's over.
"I'm sorry, I didn't realize." They're hysterical, terrified. They didn't understand or even freaking know what was going on. All they knew was that it hurt and in some way they thought it was worth it, only to be proved wrong.
Geez. I shouldn't be looking at this. The apathy is kicking in out of despair, don't you dare take away my compassion and anger. Don't you DARE.

God it hurts so bad because I KNOW, I know how bloody confused they are, I remember one time I found Jay totally debilitated, dazed and dissociated in a hack attempt and I flat-out hit him, I gave him real pain, and all of a sudden he snaps to attention, jumps away, runs to me. Scared out of his mind.
I'm rambling. It is so hard to type right now, I'm trying too hard. All I'm saying is that... blood is still the means of salvation here. The Retributors are still God's Angels if you want to put it that way. We're... heh, "we're" still important and holy here. We are. This... this is so bloody complicated but we're alive, and we care, God knows we love these people we protect and if anyone DARES say otherwise they've got a bone to pick with me.
Bottom line is I don't want to hit a kid, and really I think a lot of these kids are too freaking young to be tied to that association yet. Who can save them? Are they still afraid enough to save themselves? God I hope so, if not I'm telling Sugar and Wreckage to get the heck in there, me too for the record, I should tag along with them on their missions too.
But... it's the older ones, really it's the older ones that I'm personally the most worried about, because Sugar and Wreckage still work through violence, through brute force and that's really important up here but sometimes, the situations get really disturbing and twisted, and brute force doesn't do a thing. I know, I've tried. That's why I started carrying lanterns too. Sometimes the older ones are so messed up from pain already that you've gotta show them the light somehow. Talk them out of danger. Remind them who they are, what is happening, what they're worth... then drag them right outta there if they don't wake up within zero point three seconds. Because I'm not gonna stand by and monologue while someone's life integrity is in danger. Sometimes even a direct threat, those are rare but those are also when brute force works just as well so hey.
What am I talking about. I'm rambling again. Sorry, I'm really out of it today. Overlay isn't working so hot, the time and pain are making it tough too, lot of dissociation going on.

They're hacking the Leagueworlds again. That's unbearable. What do I do.
I can't handle seeing Jewel and Jay react to this, that's worse than anything I could feel on my own, that alone is reason to fight until my bones break for this cause. Anything to save those tears from running down their faces. Anything to keep them safe.

My heart is breaking. I can't deal with this. I might have to talk to someone.
Have a good night if I don't, it's all I can do for anyone right now is wish them the best. I'll do what I can.

 

 

 

 

There's never enough blood. There's never enough blood.

I need to be reset. The verdict is final.
I don't care anymore. I can't cry anymore. I can't feel anymore. I'm a hollow empty white shell and I'm killing everyone else. I need to go.
There's already someone else growing in the wings, and has been for a while. They should be the main person. They're good. They don't do the things I do.

I'm numb. I'm numb. I'm numb. Cannon succeeded. She lived as a result but it was a dead life.
There are naked people in tumblr all the time, just like in college. thats why we stay away. but we can look at them now and not care. it's numb. "who gives a damn." except they still infect our subconscious and then the flashbacks happen again and it's awful and horrible and i don't CARE if you can look at them without feeling anything, maybe it was better when we WERE scared and repulsed because then we could PROTECT ourselves you ever think of that
the numbness kept us alive but this is no life, no life, no life


To hell with "art." Stop using that as an excuse for your hedonistic licentiousness and gluttony. Stop saying "but it's artistic! But it's creative expression!" SCREW YOU. You saw exactly where that got us today, and if you're going to still smile and even shrug and say "I'm incapable of shame now! Isn't that great! Life is beautiful!" while Knife is a sobbing wreck and the body is swollen and bleeding and sick, I will kill you.


No, I won't stand for this. I will personally murder you first. I am sick and tired of this.
Jay called me useless today. Useless. I've known he was slipping for a while now but I stopped caring too. You see? I don't care anymore. I'm useless, my job is shot, I'm a bleeding wreck. I can't tell what's right and what's not anymore and I let you get away with your garbage because you've convinced me that I'm just supposed to stand around and watch. Stop caring. Stop judging. Well to hell with apathy. When I cared and judged and slaughtered people like you, the System actually worked. We actually had something functional. We tried to be better. Not like this. Not like this living nightmare. I'm done.
Kill me, Jay. I swear to God, kill me or I'll do it myself. I'm done. I'm sick of this. I've lost my anchor and I've failed my purpose and I literally do not deserve to exist right now. Kill me or else.
11:11. God damn it.
If the System needs me I'll come back.
God I'm going to cry, this is ridiculous. Where are we. Where are we. What are we even doing.
I still care, damn it. I still care.
The arm scars came back. I think it's because I wanted the reminder. The body isn't giving me the new ones. I can feel 'em now, kid, and I'm at least disgustedly grateful that the code is being followed. "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul," are we adopting that now? Because it works, for this. Screw around with our collective spirit and you've gotta bleed for it.
I just wish that the bitches responsible were the ones bleeding. But they don't care. They're gone by the time the blade is out.
...Except sometimes, it's you. Except far too bloody often now, it's you doing the screwing around, and you're so bloody dazed I can't tell what I'm supposed to do. It's not a hack, you're not doing anything to me, you're just in pain and you're looking to purge something and what the heck am I supposed to do? When you insist that you're suffering on purpose, in order to atone for some other sin, and then I forget to think logically and realize that two wrongs do not ever make a right. You're just layering the scars, kid. You're killing us.

...You're not the Jay I knew. I think we all know that. We don't know who you are.
You've splintered again, or Scratched yourself, or something. I wish I could pinpoint a date. Maybe it was last December, who knows. But you... you don't know us. You don't quite care. You're empty. Jay wasn't.
He's still here, the cupcake-haired dude with the glitter in his eyes. But you're tied to him somehow. I know that, kid I've seen the switch happen. He's frayed on the inside and he can't function like this at all.
God, I just... don't know. What do we do. Who is our core, is it Jewel again, with all this Dream World work? Heck, if I have to stop existing in order to let that happen, then so be it, as long as it annihilates this hack hell along with it. Except the Leagueworlds have been suffering from hacks too, for years now, and that's the only reason we nearly died in the past.
I wonder if that's why we're so bloody numb, now. If it got so intolerably bad, so incomprehensible for him, to realize just how horrible this hack situation really was... he just blanked out. Numbed out. Stopped splitting into us because he just didn't want to even exist anymore.
I'd prefer a plethora of rainbow faces, if you don't mind. I wouldn't care if there were 200 more of us by tomorrow. As long as it brings you back, Jay. Jewel. Cannon. Whoever you are and were. The Core, the real one, the kid with hope and love and trust who loved me and saw the light in everyone. You. Come back. I'll endure anything if it will bring you back.
Anything but this, at least. There's a song about that, you'd appreciate the joke. But I can't. I can't do this, I can't sacrifice my integrity and function just because I'm so desperate with hope I'm blinding myself. Just like you, I guess.
I miss you, kid. We all do. I miss life. I'm not sure what the heck is going on, or what we're supposed to become, but... this isn't it. You keep insisting it is, whoever you are, the person around now. But you're glossing over this reality and everyone knows it.
Hey, readers. You know who you are, and thanks for being there. Did you know this kid is still bloody abusing? That the hacks haven't stopped, and are practically daily now? He's dissociated all the bloody time, the 'bulimia' is in full swing, he's not sleeping well, he's always tired, he feels utterly purposeless. I wonder why, hint hint. Except Jewel doesn't. She's typing, but then she's only around to type. We still haven't got the social thing down after how many years. Too much programming. But yeah, has he been telling you just how bad it actually is lately? No, of course not. He keeps sugarcoating it, swearing up and down that it's "God's will" somehow for him to be stuck in a loop of self-sabotage and misery. It's torture.
Yeah, there are good days. There are some genuinely good days lately, too. My only complaint is that they're existential. They're... we're not there. No one is there. His 'good days' are often decided in the last five minutes before sleep, when he looks back on the past 24 hours and, since he is content at the moment, decides everything was a-okay. "Good days."
He's prone to say today was good, too. Except I know it wasn't, not entirely. And that's the key. Not entirely. Yeah, sure, take the whole package as a learning experience, but don't pretend that bad things didn't occur. For heaven's sake, Jay. He was screaming for a half hour in the car today, screaming and sobbing, because he actively ignored his heart or something. He refused to follow something he genuinely, sincerely wanted, something positive and healthy. He shot it down, didn't do it. I don't want to look at anything after that, Garrison, thanks but no thanks. Suffice to say it was bad. "Very bad," he emphasizes. Three hours. What the heck, kid.
...I don't know. I'm heartbroken. I want to die, hoping maybe I'll wake up when I do and discover all this was a bad dream or something. Unreal. A mirage. God I wish. I wish all of this agony was just a hallucination.
...
I've got nothing else to say. Just needed to vent. I'm sure Jewel wants to get back to work on here, God willing that will help things calm down a little. It's just so cruelly hard to "cheer up" after a hack, and frankly that's been my vice lately. Should we? I know Jay's heart aches that this torture is still happening, mine is too, but... anger and sorrow and rage and regret and even determination are waiting in the wings. The bad used to bring a better, sharper sort of good. The blood used to be a battle march. Now it's just red tears and pain. And it's never enough, not now. The retributors cut more than ever, it's desperate.
Sorry. Numbness is kicking in and I'm slipping. Again, should I fight it, yada yada, cowardly nonsense all the way through.
You know what, yes, I am going to fight this with everything I've got left.
Listen. Hacks are straight-up evil. We have every right in the book to be furious that they happened, to try and prevent them from happening again, and to severely punish the people responsible for that crime. Okay? No pansy pacifist idiocy where you let people murder you with a smile. To hell with that, back where it came from. I'm sick of not being able to fight, or being allowed to fight even, it's burning me out I think. That's probably why I'm slipping. I'm supposed to be the axe-warrior up here, I'm supposed to be the knight in shining armor, cutting down dragons from hell and saving princes in distress and all that. They've got me relegated to a freakin' chair in the royal court, shiny and all but not worth a jot, and the bombs are falling outside. I'll pick up this freakin' furniture and break the castle doors down if you won't let me out, so help me. Just give me a sword for heaven's sake, I refuse to let this kingdom fall even if you insist it's "going to happen." Yeah no kidding it's going to happen if you don't move! But you're convinced that non-action is the way to go. Sheesh. If this is what those new-age yoga princesses or whatever you call them did, then they can go jump in a lake. That's complete nonsense on my clock, and I'm sorry, but I refuse to follow that doctrine anymore, even if I only ever did it for your sake, kid.
There's a heavy as hell numbness in here, like a fogbank made of cotton. It's heavy. How the heck long has it been building up. We're going to need to burn it down or something soon, fast.
There's got to be a way we can come back, without this thing kicking us out. We've gotta convince this blank-eyed fronter that fighting back is the "right thing to do" in this situation, because it IS, and deep down you know it-- would you condone this action if they asked you? If a tar-handed hacker asked you, "can I literally desecrate your body," would you say "sure" just because you're still convinced that saying "no" is wrong?? Because at this point I think you would. You'd think, "they must know better than I do, maybe this is God's will," forgetting that maybe "God" is waiting for you to speak up for once, you ever think of that?
Someone in this System is playing with the idea that they're nonhuman and a touch divine, like Chaos, even like Infi. I'm willing to back them up on that mindset if it powers their soul-preservation, if it makes them treat this body and mind and heart like a temple of God again, if it makes them want the moral best for us and themselves. If seeing yourself as a bit angelic means honestly caring about our well-being again then so be it, you go for it. Acknowledge your God-mirrored 'divinity' and ours, you keep insisting it's there, and then brushing it aside whenever someone decides to ignore it. Take a stand, seriously. If you don't we're all going to end up dead, and God knows we're too far down that road already.
How many times have I lectured him on this. How many times. Not enough. Heh, that's relevant.

I'm gonna quit talking, seriously. I've got a bit of warrior's hope now, getting riled up like that. We can build a new day, we can be the dawn after the hell of a night. If I can redeem myself somehow, maybe I won't have to die to prove it first. I don't know. That desperation is stuck in my ribs like icicles now and that is freaking me the heck out. Is this what White corruption is like? Poor kid. No wonder he's so messed up. This would crush anyone who got it too bad.


I'm out. See you whenever.
Good to be alive at least, in principle. Can't do a thing if you're dead.

 

 

I had to wear Knife's cross all evening today because we had such a brutal hack this morning that the ENTIRE Underground was freaking out and taking every last safety measure possible to keep us from trying to kill ourself.
Here's what the data said.
JULIE WAS DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE.
Apparently she left a voice recording on Mitchell (our handheld recorder), that ONLY Knife heard, before deleting it in disgust. I think she said something like "I win, bitch" but I can't be sure.
Also, she FRONTED TO HACK US. THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE AND THAT'S KIND OF TERRIFYING.
Typically she "hacks" someone else's consciousness, or fronting-- hence the term-- by driving them to a severely dissociated state where she has total power over them. She has NEVER just SHOVED EVERYONE ELSE OUT TO DO THIS BEFORE.
So, yeah, NO chance of buffering, or trauma control. I don't even know how long she was in the body when it happened. I have no idea.
All I know for sure is that Sugar got the body into the bathroom and SHE decided she was responsible for giving retribition? She didn't even want Knife or Razor to know-- I guess she felt responsible for "not being able to stop Julie-- OH! That's what happened!!
Apparently Sugar managed to BREAK THROUGH the hack for a split second before being shoved out again? And although she definitely tried to stop her, she mustn't have been strong enough, as Julie "won out." And Sugar was being eaten with guilt over that, "I could have stopped her and didn't," therefore she wanted to be the one bearing retribution for it, in secret, not even wanting the other Undergrounders to know that a hack had happened (since it was a totally new sort of hack, we had no alarms for it and no one was notified). Oh my gosh that's so sad, I am so sorry she had to deal with that alone.
But I guess the others found out soon enough? Because there's a weird fragmented data memory of Razor coming out later, complimenting Sugar's work, and then a few minutes later Razor asking Knife why the weapons won't work and being very distressed about it? But that is absolutely all I can see about whatever happened there.
The next thing I can see is Mulberry fronting in the bedroom, smudging sage of all things? And actually using it to try and "purify the room from Julie's taint." I know this for sure because the room was full of smoke afterwards, she must have burnt a lot. But that's not the important thing. That important thing is that she was trying to bless the room, and SO DID KNIFE, SUGAR, AND RAZOR. I don't know how they did it, or what they said, but... wow. Here are the four main Undergrounders, four individuals I used to be terrified of, viewing them as persecutory and harmful abusers... and here they are now, going above and beyond their normal duties to try and protect us. Me included. There was a time when I thought they were literally incapable of such an act of compassion and protection and hope. But it apparently DID happen today, a strange and oddly moving light shining in the aftermath of a horrible, horrible dark thing.
I don't know when Knife decided we should wear a cross. All I know is that I'm wearing one, and I was told via a stern mental message "not to take it off," so I won't. I'll keep it on tomorrow too. I'm kind of scared that such a bad hack apparently happened; I don't want to be caught off guard by any follow-ups tomorrow. I'm one of the most fragile people up here, by my nature; I would literally die if I got caught in a hack. It's why I usually only come out at night now. Isn't that ironic? Nighttime used to be the most dangerous time for us, tons of hacks. Now mornings are. How did that happen?

Besides that I have no idea what happened today.
My grandmother did mention at one point that apparently, my mother visited for a while last night while I was on the computer? Problem is, I DON'T REMEMBER THAT! And when I told her that, she said that this is the SECOND TIME THIS WEEK that I wasn't aware she had visited, AND spoke to me, while in the living room! That's really jarring. Am I seriously losing that much time? How did I never notice that before? Did I just take the memory gaps for granted, with stress and lack of sleep, shrugging off weeks that disappeared into oblivion, simply because no one cared to inform me of what happened during those missing hours? It's kind of scary, to wonder WHO people know "me" as. Who in the world fronted at our old job, then, which I don't remember at all? Or at school? Did different fronters handle different schools? The old assignment tablets are dizzying to read, each one of them obviously has a different author, who in the world WERE we?
I'm not going to worry about that right now though. Too tired.

I have one last thing to say tonight (it is 1AM and I really want to sleep), something BIG that I NEED to mention in therapy tomorrow.
There is... there are a few files on Mitchell, my voice recorder, that I didn't put there. I knew about two of them prior to today. When checking files today (I recorded some music this morning and wanted to see what else was on there), I found three more.
I don't have them uploaded anywhere. I don't know if I should. But I've spent the past few hours transcribing them for you to read.
Here you go.

The first, and earliest, was a day I was feeling too drastically ill to drive home, so Lynne did so, and then invited everyone else to talk. That one was more 'fun,' with no heavy material discussed, but it gives a rough feel of what everyone sounds like when fronting. It was notable, though, because it's the only time I've ever heard Nathaniel talk in the body, at least that I remember. I also speak on there, SEPARATE from Jewel (another host-piece), so that's important too as differentiation was blurry for a while prior to that time period.

The second, the scariest one, I have no idea when or how it happened. I guess whoever was fronting was trying to catch the Undergrounders talking, in light of the first file. Someone got mad about it, and then suddenly Knife and Razor were caught in audio for the FIRST time ever, as far as I know. Seriously, Knife had never spoken prior to this, and I don't think Razor had either. Speaking of Razor though, listening to her talk is one of the creepiest things I have ever experienced.

The third happened spontaneously on the way to the library, I think? I know Jo asked to front as he was having trouble with that issue and wanted to get it off his chest. Since his role in the System has been all over the place, having a 3-minute file of him talking is really something. It's also VERY important, as this was right after we learned Christina's name, and Jo's observations on her proved to be highly valuable in understanding what was going on with that whole mess.

The fourth happened when I was going to pick my brother up from work, but that's all I know! Apparently ZWEI of all people noticed we had the voice recorder, and decided to say hello by singing into it for seven minutes. I'll tell you what, I am super glad she did. HER VOICE IS ADORABLE. She is also a darn good singer, wow, I might have to get her her own Soundcloud or something. Anyway listening to her sing makes me smile. I hope she's still around.

The fifth and sixth happened on the same day, only about a week or so ago. I also was not clearly aware of them until today. They are probably the most incredible files on the entire recorder, amounting to 15 MINUTES of audio, all from a headvoice that I don't actually know. Who is it, you ask? The one we've been calling SPICE. The one in charge of food. And she is not happy.
Listening to this one today actually made me cry. It... you have to hear it. You really do. It's surreal and disturbing and heartbreaking at the same time. She talks about her role, but mostly, she talks about how much she hates me? Although I know she doesn't mean "me"-- problem is, ALL the main fronters are called "J" BY DEFAULT because we assume a host-piece is driving if the fronter is unidentified. But I'm the one named J, and since I'm the main host-piece in headspace, meaning I'm the only host-piece that people know, all the blame tends to go to ME, whether or not I'm even aware of the event I'm being blamed for... or, at least, it did until the reset disasters occurred and I ended up feeling like 5 years old and Knife realized I was just as much a victim of the Tar junk as he was. So people had to re-think my assumed guilty conscience and then they realized stuff is really just a huge mess up here.
Anyway that's not the point. The point is that nothing like this has EVER happened to us before. This is a SOCIAL voice, a FACELESS one no less, who we didn't even KNOW about in any concrete manner prior to this recording... and yet there she is, 15 minutes of pain and rage and sorrow. She also says a LOT of really important things, which-- amazingly-- pertain to exactly what I'm discussing in therapy right now, and was seeking answers for. I'll have to thank her, if she'll listen to me. Or if I can reach her. Maybe if I start a new food journal and leave messages for her in there? Speaking of, I need to scan in her angry messages from the old one, now that I know the real motives behind them...
You know, even if I'm not directly responsible, I'll take the blame if it means I can heal it and help her. I felt so awful, hearing her words. I know I can't eat those foods, but I'M not in charge of that! I dissociate every time I walk into the kitchen ESPECIALLY if someone else is in there!! I'm not the one she needs to yell at, although maybe I am to blame for not being able to front and keep the real culprit from coming out. I guess that's how Sugar felt this morning.
I don't think "Spice" has fronted since then. I have been careful with food lately for unrelated reasons (surgery mostly), so now hearing this I'm VERY glad that I've been doing so. I'll be even more careful from now on.

Now, it's 2AM, I have nothing left to say tonight. Tomorrow is therapy and that's BIG and I need to be up at 9AM for it so I have to leave right now.
See you!

My mother and grandmother woke me up with tears and screaming today.
I'm so sick of seeing them suffer, especially when I'm the cause.
No one should have to suffer because of a senseless jerk like me.
I don't know how to relieve that pain, though.
Suicide solves nothing. I've always known that, and besides I have a massive Xor complex so I can't kill myself even if I wanted to. I want to go out like he did... giving up his life to save someone.
Couldn't tell my mother any of that, though. Can't tell the therapists, as they write everything that you can't touch off as "imaginary."
That means nothing. It just has a different reality.
They wouldn't believe a word I said, so I can say nothing.
I can't tell them that my dreams are full of death and emptiness.
I can't tell them that I saw a demon as a child.
I can't tell them that Laurie's job is to make sure I suffer.
I can't tell them that Julie rapes me whenever I try to sleep.
I can't tell them that I'm a sexless and ageless celibate.
I can't tell them about anyone that I love.
I can honestly say that yes, no one understands me.
I think it's because I'd be terrified if they did.

 

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@7:34PM

I apologize in advance for being a whiny jerk, but I figured I'd actually write this stuff in my online journal for once.


So my id keeps harassing me, leaving me empty and crying in a corner for my superego whenever she shows up.
She's never been this loud before. She's talking to us now.

Unfortunately, my superego gets terribly pissed because I'm terribly weak and I always seem to let that pink bitch take advantage of me.
My superego takes her anger out on my id, and she's merciless... but then she turns towards me, every time.
Take it like a man, she says, and laughs. Or not.

One for every sin.

I don't know how or when it got this bad, but I've been shivering in this hell for ages now and I just wish it could end quickly. I don't want to wait another year... I don't even want to wait another month. This is too much.


In the meantime, life outside my head isn't much better. College is killing me in more ways than just financially, and my family life is quite literally falling apart at the seams.
That scares me. 2007 was normal, but since then everything has just been spiraling downhill and fast.
You know the story-- divorce, suicide attempts, court hearings, legal trouble, financial torment, stress and misunderstandings and pain all around. It's not improving at all.

I'm still praying, still hoping, but I get the feeling that God wants me to finally learn from my actions for once before anything starts looking up.
I'm being a jerk. I keep giving in when I should be fighting, I should be the one setting an example for the fallen souls out there. I'm sick of being just another screwup.

I've become not only a huge procrastinator, but a liar.
I've become not only a hypocrite, but a manipulator.
I've become not only distant, but apathetic.


I really don't want to end up in the places I've seen some people in, and God help them to get out of there too.

...


They say God helps those who help themselves.


But I honestly don't know what to do anymore.