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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...


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


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


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


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


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


What the hell is even happening here?


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


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


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

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

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

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

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



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

 

 

 

 

quick stream-of-consciousness update because this needs to be a daily thing again.
i don't want to forget anything, and the more i tune in, the more happens. man i miss this, it's beautiful.


first, laurie told me to write this down-- on friday, on the way home from grocery shopping, I had apparently sadly said "I wish people would just front like they used to," and since I was so distraught (and having trouble fronting myself) laurie had called josephina in? and he had fronted very well for about ten solid minutes! I don't know what he did or said but that's awesome. I am very very glad to hear that people can still do that. odd as it sounds I miss that, I miss being actively and undeniably plural; I miss feeling that I am sharing this body with everyone else. I miss the strange richness of it.

unfortunately friday is marked as being "troublesome" and so it is largely missing from memory. all I know is that it was a cloudy day.



last night.

talking to knife, laurie, lynne, and infinitii.
started out as I was going to sleep. we were all in the underground 'lobby' (relatively new), this open area between the main ground and the stairs that lead into the lowerspace and the underground. it's all warm glowing light and wood and it's nice.
knife was there because we had brought him there I think. I know he had been 'sleeping' in the christmas tree room? like that big church room where he set up the tree last december, he never took it down, it's still pink. he loves it. I had gone to talk to him and found him dozing off on one of the seats in front of it. gently woke him up, again I forget for what purpose-- there had been an important question-- and he came with me back to where I was talking to laurie.
lynne joined us shortly after, I forget when exactly. same with infi; ze had been floating around me all evening I think? but hir presence had been there and ze likes to talk to me at night. so it was the 5 of us just chilling out at 1am or so.
anyway laurie and I were again discussing 'getting everyone back together,' forging stronger ties between everyone in headspace, in light of the past 8 months of quiet. but then of course laurie had to also start teasing me about wanting to kiss everybody, asked if that was still a thing. asked if I'd kiss knife, we both got hilariously flustered for different reasons. I said "he's too adorable," but knife just wanted to know what that act would entail? he was blushing over the details really. he's like that. but laurie was cracking up at this. lynne was giggling about this too, I think she joked that she'd kiss me first as an example or something. I again protested that I couldn't do that so casually, but wondered how much of that feeling was old social programming, having to act a certain way. somewhere around here I paused, and asked knife if he was aromantic? it had just hit me. he asked me what that meant. laurie joked "what do you mean knife's not romantic" because he fits the literal term to a T. but she then said that she was aromantic and yet she'd still kissed me; the two things weren't mutually exclusive.
lynne and laurie got off on a tangent then, poking fun at each other as always. but as I listened I was again struck by how self-assured lynne always is. she's playful but always mature, it's a great balance. anyway I remember laurie made some joke about infinitii, how once you've been hit by hir vibe that's it, you're gone. lynne giggled at this, infi gave laurie a look. laurie shrugged and apologized, said that with me you just never sleep again. I said only because I stay up so late. she laughed and said that was the point, look at what time it was

anyway knife was still terribly confused and I guess we were all treating this topic too lightly, because without another word infi got up and walked over to me. everyone stopped talking, and I remember being both mesmerized and intimidated; the way ze walks is always so graceful but deliberate.
but if I was nervous at first, that melted almost immediately. when infi got closer (like within 4 feet) it was like this quiet black surge of love just swelled up around me, like velvet, it was heartbreaking and powerful and tore me glittering in two. I remember helplessly reaching up to hir (I was sitting on a low bench) and ze just knelt down in front of me and held my face, looking at me without a word, and I was in tears. I choked out that I loved hir, and infi said "I know." with hir mouth. that alone was huge, but… that's usually cz's line. and hearing it from hir, in a manner ze usually reserves for hir darker side, held such huge significance that it moved me to a sort of joyously humbled silence. I absolutely adored hir in those moments.
infi was talking to me then. I forget the exact words and I'm sorry. I was too overwhelmed with the sensation of hir being there; if you've ever been that close to hir then you know what I mean. but mostly it was a reminder, don't downplay yourself, don't mock or doubt yourself, etc. remember this and the truth of it. and yet there weren't much words. there was too much feeling and I forgot how much ze feels. all those eyes, and the way hir voice just echoes. I honestly forgot where I was for a while.

knife teared up after seeing all of this (caught me by surprise as I forgot anyone else was in the room), said "that's what I mean," and explained that he wasn't yet 'accustomed' (wrong word? more like he didn't know how to handle it) with the sort of 'love' that sort of behavior would elicit or require? he was stumbling over his words too; very strong vibe of him being surprised at his own reservations.
I pointed out that he didn't seem to have a problem with infi, but infi said that wasn't surprising; ze didn't require any sort of behavior from anyone. people reacted to hir in the way most natural to them I guess.
we tried to reassure him but he had too many questions in general. then oddly, when trying to explain what he saw as that 'more romantic' sort of love, knife gave "lynne and spine" for an example? that caught me by surprise. laurie said "wait what" and asked if this was true? lynne paused for a moment, then nodded, said yes. explained that although she was 'dating' julie, she wasn't 'in love' with her, at least not yet (that 'growing into' possibility was important). but she did love spine, the same way I loved laurie.
laurie paused and said 'holy shit' at this, rather reflectively. she also said that was really sweet actually.
(also! note to self: remember last month when lynne and spine 'started' the orange realms? they were walking through the woods. I saw it secondhand and it was very dreamlike so it's hard to remember but I never wrote it here so there's at least a mention)

anyway, knife was torn, he loved people naturally and simply, was it 'bad' or otherwise detrimental for him to not find that sort of behavior similarly easy?
infi then strongly reiterated that the sort of pure, innocent, affectionate love that Pinks held was incredibly important and that knife should never downplay it or think of it as 'less' than anything else.

sorry that whole bit's a mess. the Pinks are still clearing out residue from the julie days obviously. I just wanted that written down because it happened.




today.

infi was in my dream before I woke up? some odd thing with weeping angels and someone almost dying as a result? but jessica was there, styled like a powerpuff girl oddly, but still actively vicious. the partner of the dying person was trying to save them, tearfully so, jessica kept trying to sabotage it. the person was making some sort of poultice out of gems?? like there was an opal at the center, and all these rubies in what looked like white icing. they had to knead it to get everything at the right consistency or something, they had to ultimately put it at this spot on their partner's back. apparently that's where the "lethal injury" was, it had split their spine or something? very sharp memory of the color green at impact point, like a geyser pool in color and shape.
anyway. right before I woke up, infi showed up in the room, which caused jessica to disappear entirely. ze then gave the distraught person a lump of gold to put at the very center of the poultice-thing. then ze gave them all the final instructions and helped them apply it to their partner's spine, reassured them everything was fine, they would live and heal completely. anyway I thought that was interesting, that ze just walked in and helped the situation resolve so compassionately.

had to drive to mum's house to get vegetables, randomly said hello to waldorf while walking to the garden (I missed her all of a sudden). she was putting up light flowers like bruce munro's work, all in this blue glowy techno-forest area. like a city street lit up. she said she was trying to build the Blue realms, bit by bit, she was experimenting with ideas. I said it was gorgeous so far, but then asked why the sudden nature imagery? I thought she was more technological in general. she said yeah, but she figured she should work with elements too?
kind of blurry, I'm not sure what she said blue was, hinted that yellow was electric and that sky was air? but also MIRRORS. very clear flash of that! green was nature, aqua wasn't mentioned but I wondered about it.

at some point during church later (xennie was there too!) I was strongly reminded of laurie, I don’t recall what exactly, but I remember holding her hands (both at once, together) in this meaningful aching way. there's this crystal clear visual memory of the bandages on her arms, and that her hands looked slightly battered (little red cuts and things). she gave me this very meaningful look that I didn't meet exactly because it would've broke me I think. was too enraptured by her hands, the moment was practically tangible
in any case some minutes after that she said we should "do that rotating thing," in terms of who would be my main advisor or confidant for the day. I wanted deeper emotional and mental connections with everybody, and besides Central needed to get a deep understanding of the daily life too.
long story short laurie pushed me a bit and told me to go talk to someone else for a bit. so I ended up spontaneously talking to nathaniel.

nat's got this lovely little pocket-realm going on for Green, branching out from his room (which is mostly thick forest branches and pink roses-- always has been). we were sitting in the boughs of some ancient tree, surrounded entirely by that flowery canopy, watching the sunlight filter through the leaves. I think I was holding his hand, something simple like that.
nat reiterated that he dealt with "love in the face of change," or "love throughout all change"
also said why his being a moth was significant. not just the metamorphosis, but also because moths fly at night, and they are drawn to the light. even in pitch black they will find it, but in the darkness they are not lost. they have a sort of quiet inner peace, a silent and unhurried faith. nat said Greens are like that, that's their virtue, is that serenity and faith in the universe.
he said sergei fit that extremely well too. it struck me that so did the queen, surprisingly.
reminder that aqua voices hold devotion, or fortitude?
also total agreement that violet was tied to the cores? like all their roles are partly to advise and support the core, not just laurie. I said that made sense, was definitely possible.
anyway I remember as he spoke about the moth thing, he was talking with his hands, eyes so bright and wide (such gorgeous eyes; they're like big emerald cabochons), but still radiating that essential calmness. kind of like the sunlight in the trees. but he looked so genuinely happy and inspired, I smiled so much just listening to him, feeling his history in his words, knowing how much it meant for him to be here now, as he was, talking like this.
also I think he has moth fluff. he has to. I remember there was fuzzy green around his sleeve cuff, couldn't tell if it was part of his outfit or not. I've never seen him without his robe, so I have no idea.

"navy singer" out to sing during mass, she's finally feeling more like her own person now. name is "nienna" I think? root letter was "n" in any case. I originally thought she was tied to sapphires but that's a (small) aesthetic tie, not a name tie.
her role is actually "the ability to 'join the song' without being afraid of your own voice," so to speak. so yeah she's a singer, but more specifically, she sings to be part of the music, part of the choir, without a shred of self-doubt or misplaced guilt. that was very clear today.
she also has heavy hair. long, and wavy, like silk. reminded me of water, very subtle 'wave' to it, all in one piece. it's not like lynne's! hers is lighter and curls softly. they both love their dresses though, but even then the styles do differ!


got home at 6pm or so. xenophon spent most of the evening with me and oh my lord she is such a sweetheart and a godsend.
she is definitely violet, haha. unflinching integrity. kept keeping me on track, not letting me slip, et cetera. making sure I was talking care of myself. and best of all? there was NO backtalk to her orders from the floating voices OR the old girls. it was the best and safest evening I have had in weeks, dead serious. I love her so much, I am so humbled to have this kid calling me a father, her love is absolutely unfailing. I hope I can give her the same.

massive e.d. voice resurgence later though, that was a shock
the destroyer was talking to xennie for quite a while! that's new. xennie was distraught about so many other people being out when she was just trying to help me, to that the destroyer said "jay doesn't eat; he never eats" and it later hit me that dude, I DON’T, that's not my job! which explains why there's so much difficulty there. on that note xennie asked something about that, forget what exactly, but the destroyer ultimately said that's why the "eating" concerns were such a huge battleground-- I'm the core, the person supposed to be fronting benevolently whenever possible, but the eating thing isn't my fight. I can't take up that cross, by my role. so other people like to sneak in and 'act in my stead' then, claiming authority, but harming the body. so lots of headvoices deal with the e.d. stuff as a result, it's a mess since as soon as that battleground is entered, so to speak, switchiness becomes the norm. several people phase in and out without any real sense of order. the destroyer said we needed to get some coherence there, emmett needed to be on-call at all times, spice needed total authority given to her if at all possible, etc.
then the destroyer said she works with fig-- confirming her as both alive and nonhuman, but still not a fully developed individual yet-- and that fig's job is to hold the idea of "joyful eating," something totally alien to us currently. fig is the childhood experiences of actually sitting down and enjoying meals, of seeing eating as something caring and thankful. however the curse is that she holds a lot of outdated memories, of childhood foods that are no longer safe or appetizing or even wanted. so we're working through that. but since fig wants to 'enjoy' those old data foods, but cannot know (due to that old data) whether or not such a food is even edible now, she is trying everything. but we cannot eat like 98% of it so that's where the destroyer jumps in, to get rid of toxic food.
xennie asked her at one point why she can't just leave the food for other people in the house? yeah it's 'poison' for us but not for the family. if we know we can't eat it we don't have to. the destroyer paused, notably, and said that she hadn't thought of that before. that definitely was an option. so that's good.


this evening laurie and I agreed that xangas need to start happening again.
there has been too much downtime, as a whole, and that's giving the ego remnants (the "old girls") too much power and influence. that hit me today, sharply, during church. so we need to put in heavy duty work now, just like when this all started, to connect back together as a system, as a whole.
laurie's idea is to write down, during the day, discussion topics both good and bad. like if a problem or concern comes up, write it down and we will discuss it like we used to, with anyone who we feel should talk about it too. same with good things that happen, write 'em down. basically I should start carrying sherlock's book with me and keeping a running log. really that would be very beneficial.


anyway it is now 2:30 am and I cannot think coherently long enough to type anything else! good night.

 

 

I think I'm going to get an actual paper journal and start a daily log of sorts. It'll help with memory, for one-- it's very hard for me to keep track of things on my own, and I can't always get on this computer-- my current internet setup involves dragging my laptop into the kitchen (I don't have wifi and the only cable is in there), which then requires me to sit in an excruciatingly painful position at a corner desk until my battery dies. Needless to say I'm tired of it, so I might actually take a break from the internet entirely until April... we'll see.
In any case I need to start keeping more accurate records of our inner life. I love our System, even on its bad days, as you all know... and it's the little things, the details and the fragile moments, that we treasure the most.

Today, Javier let the cats in. He loves animals and randomly decided to come out for the first time in a while to greet them and let them in from the cold.

I forgot to tell you guys, on Thursday Knife actually tried singing a bit of this song (he loves SanteJazz) via channeling, the first time he'd ever attempted to do so, and it was one of the most uplifting things I've seen in a while. Also he hugged Infi at one point. And he wants a permanent Christmas tree somewhere in the new Underground (mostly above ground now!) because-- I don't know if I mentioned-- he spent weeks secretly making one for this past Christmas, as he loved the concept, and eventually didn't ever want to take it down. It's decorated in pink. I swear that man is too adorable for his own good.

I woke up suddenly at 7AM feeling utterly split in half. There was me-- Jay-- and then there was the girl, the cynical uncaring one, who lives in this body. We were both fronting completely, somehow, upon awakening, and I could barely keep my consciousness from slipping under the wheels of hers. I wanted to cry from the paralyzingly spiteful emptiness inside her mind, like old gray paint thrown onto the windowpanes, coloring our room like a storm hovering on the horizon. She felt like life had betrayed her, somehow, and she didn't want to wake up, and she didn't want to sleep, and she was miserable. I couldn't bear it; I couldn't stand the existential carelessness and the fact that it was making me forget who I was apart from it, that I was something apart from it.
All I remember is quietly crying for Infi, and holding hir in my arms as I tossed a robe over my eyes and tried desperately to fall back asleep.

Xennie came to church with me today, halfway through, as it was crowded and she couldn't find a place to sit next to me. Upon leaving she learned that she can't run about on her own when there are moving cars around-- she almost dashed into the path of one leaving the parking lot. I told her to hold my hand so she did, apologizing and shaken. I said it was okay, don't worry, just stay close to me and I'll make sure you're always safe. But it worried me, to see how she has this pent-up enthusiastic energy and wants to talk to me, and wants to run around and have fun with her other father for God's sake... but she only really sees me on Saturday evenings and that breaks my heart.
My biological father has been divorced for almost 7 years. I see him maybe 2, 3 times per month. And here, my baby girl is seeing me barely twice more at worst, and it wasn't until today that I saw how it was affecting her. Who the hell is raising her? I don't give a damn if my genetics aren't literally part of her, I really don't-- I've got a bloodline and if that's all I can see reflected in her then I will embrace that with all my heart because she STILL calls me her father and I will not, I will never deny her that, ever, ever again. But I'm not... I haven't been there for her. I want to be, God knows I want to me, but it is so difficult when I have to split realities to do so. It is so heartbreaking when I have to wear myself out in meditation for hours just to be with her in a way that doesn't subtract from the experience for either of us. And she's growing up, almost without guidance, thank heaven above that she has Laurie and all of headspace but I'm her FATHER, where the hell am I??
I'm sorry. That got unexpectedly emotional. But it's honest and I am leaving it there 100%.

I got a really bad burn on my left hand and arm yesterday after watching Donnie Darko and it was hilarious because I blanked out when I noticed it was burning, and that made it worse obviously. I was just glad at the time that I'm a champ at sensory dissociation so after the initial searing pain I managed to forget it was there for the next few hours despite the ignored signals making my brain feel all funny. Anyway my hand is fine now, but the arm burn is problematic to take care of because the skin is burnt off, and all I can do is wrap it with gauze really. Not sure why I'm telling you about this, maybe just because it's going to leave yet another scar on my arm. That arm is a mess by this point.

Donnie Darko. Geez. I've wanted to see that movie since high school and I finally did. No regrets, but here are some thoughts because I want to write about this before I forget (spoiler warning!):
■ The attitudes of everyone in the movie were actually painful for me to watch. I still have a hard time imagining that some high schools are apparently like that? So I blanked out quite a bit during the movie which was upsetting.
■ FRANK THE RABBIT ACTUALLY SOUNDS A LOT LIKE INFI AND IT MADE ME VERY FLUSTERED AT FIRST. (It's obviously not exact, but the unusual soft tone and that slightly dissonant echo are really close)
■ "Destruction is a form of creation." Hello CZ. I do like Donnie's response though: "They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things." It sounded almost contradictory to me at first, but then I thought about my own life, and realized it's very true. You cannot build something new upon old rotted ruins. The foundation will crumble. Sometimes, to change things, you really need to tear things down to the ground-- to get every last scrap out of the dirt, to "destroy" the old and allow for something new, something better, to bloom. Again, that whole thing keeps making me think of Chaos and who he's been to both me and the System since 2003... even if I don't 'remember' most of it, there's this vibe about him that is basically a hurricane and a summer rain at the same time. He's water. He's simultaneously a source of life, soft and receptive and flowing and deep, and this force of total destruction... powerful, wild, and crashing down with unstoppable force, washing away everything in its path. But then comes the rain, and in that place where previously nothing could grow, now in the upturned mud and ashes there are flowers beginning to sprout. It's so strange, how he is perfectly both, but there it is, and I love that about him. I'll likely write more about this once I re-read the script, because when it's in front of me all at once I can find threads and parallels and things, and I'm curious to revisit how this theme plays out in the film... it basically defines the entire time-travel phenomenon with the tangent universe. To ensure creation, something is destroyed. It's really fascinating.
■ Also, actually, if you get to the heart of it, the whole spectrum of human emotion really does narrow down to Fear vs Love. But it does take a lot of narrowing-down (and too many people think "love" means "romance" which isn't true) so Donnie wasn't entirely incorrect. Fear and Love manifest in tons of different ways, and those ways can become so convoluted and so distant from their source that, in many cases, it's near-impossible to tell which is which on the surface. And I didn't like how Kitty didn't explain anything about that, just assumed everything was that black-and-white. Fear and Love are the deepest motivations, but they aren't that cut-and-dry, and Fear is very good at masquerading if you aren't looking carefully. Even so, I really, really liked how the Fear/Love thing ended up subtly being another massive undercurrent of the movie, at least from my perspective.
■ Major props to Donnie for standing up to Kitty (and everyone else really); I can't stand seeing teachers close their own minds, and/or abuse their authority over their students for the sake of defending their own pride and/or comfortable beliefs about life. Although Karen was a little distressing for me for personal reasons, I liked the way she asked questions, pushed limits, and made the kids think. I wish I'd had more teachers like that, haha.
■ In any case Kitty's class made me very uncomfortable (and not just because of the 80s aesthetics), as did Kitty herself, but I can't truly dislike the woman because she's trying to be a genuinely good person, she's just so single-minded about the process that she can't see outside of it and I just feel bad that she's forbidding herself from that broader vision. But really she reminds me a lot of some psychologically abusive people in my life so I can't defend her that much. Let's just leave her as-is.
■ In the director's cut, there's one bit when they're watching the Cunningham videotape and Donnie is getting distracted, but Frank says something along the lines of "watch closely; you might miss something important." I had to smile because that was just like what happens with me and headspace reminders. And I love the weird poem Donnie gives later, for the same reason... "A storm is coming, Frank says; a storm that will swallow the children, and I will deliver them from the kingdom of pain. I will deliver the children back to their doorsteps, and send the monsters back to the underground. I'll send them back to a place where no one else can see them, except for me... because I am Donnie Darko." I know it's relevant to the movie, but again, to me it was another massive reflection of headspace, and loudly so (just capitalize "Underground" for example). And I just treasure when things like that happen, both negative and positive, because the synchronicity speaks for all of us and it helps us grow, and being able to see reflections of us in everything else, despite all the self-doubt from past years, is really amazing.
■ The scene with Jim Cunningham also gave me a lot of mixed feelings. Again, I know what he was trying to say. But it was far, far too simplified, and I honestly doubt the man's understanding of love, what with what he was apparently doing behind the scenes. Regardless, his advice still had truth in it. "Violence is a product of fear; learn to truly love yourself." That is a truth I've had to learn the hard way, over many years, so believe me when I say that in this society it is MUCH easier said than done. Plus, we hear "love yourself" so often as a stock inspirational phrase-- one that has lost its actual meaning through repetition and incorrect context-- that I do not blame Donnie for getting pissed. He saw the practical side of things, which I commend him for bringing up, but he was also so pessimistic about the whole thing that he failed to see that Jim's advice, when looked at correctly, was still valid. It was just one half of the whole answer. But in the situation that was beyond his sight so again, I just thank the film for allowing the whole picture to still be visible there.
■ Also, some kid asks Jim "how do I figure out what I want to be when I grow up?" Again, Donnie is right in saying that no one knows that at their age, especially not all at once; it takes exploration and time... but in the director's cut, Jim replied to the kid first, and said something along the lines of, "find out what it is that makes you feel real unconditional love, and do that." And this light just went on in my head when he said that. Yeah, it's going to take time and trial and error, but honestly if your heart is singing to the tune of something then for heaven's sake, let it! It's damn scary sometimes, because maybe you don't know the words, or maybe you're too ashamed or frightened or proud or doubtful to join in, or maybe you've never been able to carry a tune before. All I can tell you is that if you trust that, even just a little, genuinely, and follow it... it will lead you in the right direction. Whatever it is. If Infi's taught me anything, it's that in surrendering to the music you become it, and that is such a transcendental feeling that once you actually touch it, even if only for a split second, you can't imagine ever turning your back on it again. And believe me, I've been there, and I've tried to run. I've gotten scared and I've tried to block my ears simply because I didn't believe I could sing at all, I didn't believe I had the right to hear this music, let alone become it. But my soul is made of sheet music and I always end up trying again. In fewer words, follow Jim's advice for this one, as well as Donnie's.
■ TIME TRAVEL. That whole bit was very interesting, but I didn't grasp it entirely the first time. I will have to review it again later if I feel inspired to. Even so I am fascinated by the entire causality scheme and the "Living Receiver" and all that, and I'm curious as to know how it works as a whole. I do like seeing other people's concepts and ideas about time and space and the like, especially in such creative formats.
■ Last reiterated thought for now. Even on a personally symbolic level, there was so much in this movie that paralleled headspace, or events that I've experienced as a result of it. So even if a lot of the movie was somewhat unsettling to me-- really I cannot handle violence or the way Donnie's classmates behaved and it was hard to watch at times-- it felt like another relevant thing, in this falling-back-together of things the System is experiencing now. Sorry I've fallen out of well-structured language with this rambling. Give me a moment.

I owe you guys a text wall like that about His Dark Materials but I'd need to either buy a copy, or take it back out of the library first, as I marked all the pages that had ideas or lines I wanted to revisit. Either way, I won't forget to write, if only for one reason.... I finished the last 100 pages around 1AM in my room, but it took a while to finish specifically because Chaos kept seeing parallels that I was missing and really he made some very significant insights about our situation especially... honestly I have a lot of emotions surrounding him specifically in light of the trilogy's ending, and an equal amount surrounding Infi in light of the dæmons (a concept he's now very fond of). I just adore that trilogy now, I really do, and I owe it it's own entry. You'll get one.

This evening, we finally figured out what the unknown voice in this entry was trying to say about The Destroyer's bizarre ED habits (the only part I admittedly read; I'll have to read the rest of the entry tomorrow). It hit me in a sudden burst of realization when I snapped into awareness for one moment today, as some seaweed-haired girl was curled up with her hands down her throat, dripping and choking like the ocean ruptured and not an ounce of malice in it.
That's when it hit me. The purgation was a positive coping mechanism, risen up after the loss of all other ablutions. And it was damn effective.
I don't know how I never noticed before. They only ever do that with heavy foods. They spend all our money on heavy, poisonous food, the kind of stuff Spice and Emmett scream and protest over, the sort of substances that feel and look and taste like the Tar used to. They buy things that we know we cannot eat without excruciating pain, without emotional meltdowns, without finding ourselves literally holding back our hands from the knife drawer... and then they destroy it. They destroy it. They feign the act of eating, for long enough to be sick and filthy and humiliated and crushed by self-loathing, feeling like an animal, biting into things that bleed and stain their throats. They shred these heavy things, feeling obligated to eat them but refusing to choke it down, boiling with rage and hatred and fury and the desperate need to get rid of it, to utterly annihilate this awful thing that they are forcing into their own body, against their will and yet without fighting back... until eventually, hours later, they've won. They've held out long enough. This awful lethal weight has worn itself down into an inedible mess, into something so profoundly disgusting, so blackened and mangled and wrecked, that its only fate is oblivion. That it deserves oblivion.
And then they throw it out.
And then they throw it up.
But I had no idea of the relief, the total grateful liberation the brackish-green girl lived for until I suddenly found myself in her position, if only for a moment. I had no idea that they only reason they put themselves through hell in the first place was so that they could experience the utter deliverance from it.
They are actively, willingly acting out the fulfillment of a desperate need we never had met. They are forcibly, tearfully, angrily taking in all the heaviness-- the lies, the blood, the nightmares, the panic, the shock, the shame, the things we tried to bury alive-- they are reliving that horrific consumption, in every sense of the word, and then they are doing what we are still struggling to accomplish as a whole... they are spitting it out. They are forcing it back out into the abyss it came from. They are forbidding that sludge from rotting our insides. For them, it is worth repeating the entire symbolic process just for the few excruciating minutes where they can control the outcome, where they can CHANGE the way things played out, where they can stop the pain before it digs in its claws. They are trying to destroy what was destroying us. And that is the root of this disorder.


Lastly, the two big nights of February (the 13th and the 26th) are getting their own entry. I can't remember much of them data-wise, but what I do is still relevant. I guess that's to be expected when the heart is doing most of the experiencing, and not the mind, therefore things don't get stored or perceived the same way. But... the 26th was one of the absolute loveliest evenings I've had in months, on many levels. It gave us all a lot of hope, and it marked some massive progress for us, although there are still things that need to be worked out (as therapy the next day showed us clearly). Nevertheless, as I will say countless times, there is so much love and support and determination in this System that I have total, unwavering faith in our ability as a community to get through this, in the best possible way for all of us. I just have this total faith in the universe really, in that force of love and light that I used to call God and still do in a different way. And that's in us, odd as it may seem to some. Macrocosms and microcosms. It's lovely really, and I love everyone I've been blessed enough to share this life with, despite the bloody circumstances that allowed for it. Nights like this I'm just... reduced to silence from the awe of it. There's so much. There's always so much I just want to express from the heartbreaking joy of it but it doesn't translate into words.

I'm getting close to poet mode on an emotional level so I'm going to close this up and get to sleep... it is really late and boss is probably wondering where I am, to say the least!

 

See you soon.

 

 

 

humansofnewyork: "I ran away to California for a week without telling anyone. I wanted to remove myself from everything, to see if I could work out some things in my head. But it actually created more problems. I learned it doesn’t really work that way."
"How do you mean?"
"Just that if you can’t figure out your problems in your present circumstances, you’re probably not going to figure them out by running away from them."

 

I moved out-of-state three times for this reason, and had to return due to my 'problems' becoming monstrous as a result. So this rings very true.
Your problems are within you. No change in physical location will change that.
Problems, troubles, pains, will all resurface, over and over, until you can heal them and let them go. That's a fact of life.
Ultimately, you really do just need to face them head-on, and deal with whatever happens from there. One day at a time.

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@ 12:21 am

We had at least five total-integration attempts over the past 12 months. Unfortunately they were all instigated by less-than-benevolent individuals, and were more concerned about destroying people than really integrating healthily.
But yeah, somehow, we survived. The first two attempts actually made our dissociation much worse. Our System member count has tripled from what it was in 2012, solely because half of us didn’t show our faces until our entire inner world was shaken to its core with those attempts.

...It is a very common occurrence in our System for people to “die and come back,” in as little as minutes to as long as several years. Our headspace seems to have a permament rule of thumb that, “if someone is needed, they will not— and cannot— stay dead, for the sake of everyone else.” Some people have tried to stay dead (notably Javier), but ultimately, yeah, the System itself will bring them back IF AND WHEN they are needed to be alive. If they were supposed to integrate, or disappear, or otherwise fade away… then they will stay gone.

 

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@ 01:32 am


Just a quick note.
Headspace/heartspace tends to snap back with a bang when it's been ignored for a while, usually with a surge of dark things from under the surface too. It forces focus, really.
So this evening, we had a legit hack. Scared us all badly. Haven't had one of those since... mid-December? I think? Don't remember. Could be sooner, but no memory. Anyway nothing this bad since Javier died, I would wager. Most of us thought it had stopped permanently, but no, there are still OLD deep roots. So this revealed those at least.
In short: the perpetrator was a splinter. We thought they died in 2011! But no, this was clearly and undeniably the same guy. So the System is pretty shaken up, we didn't expect this at all, especially not now. But there it is.

As a result a bunch of people came out today, for the first time in weeks.

 
First, we have a ton of people tied to eating disorders, but the head honcho finally showed her face for good today. She calls herself "The Destroyer." She's also right on the fence between being benevolent or malevolent, what with her anchor being what it is. We'll write more about her tomorrow.

Infi was out for about five minutes in the evening. Ze's the only reason we got through this without a total meltdown, as he managed to redirect the hacker intent at the last second.

The "Victorian pink" girl finally revealed herself (we've been suspecting her). She is human, strongly tied to OLD trauma, and seems stuck around age 13-14. She's very wounded emotionally and is obviously traumatized from abuse. She also seems totally unaware of headspace, with her focus being solely on the horror and pain she is mentally stuck in reliving right now. She's also markedly suicidal, in a desperately frantic sense, which is obviously a major concern.

Sylvain's brother was out shortly, to chase someone bad away. Good to know he's still able to front.

Some new but shockingly solid green girl was out, fighting shadows in the downstairs bedroom with scissors. She's non-human (somewhat demonic actually?), but fiercely benevolent, and seems to be a protector. We're going to try and find her inside ASAP, as Green people are rare and we definitely need her help right now.

Overload was also out temporarily, to forcibly tell the A.P. not to try and trigger any body memories. She was surprisingly powerful in forbidding anyone from even trying to move the body at the time.

Lastly, Mulberry and Knife both co-fronted for a few minutes before we detached from the situation entirely and went online. Mulberry was trying to clear any lingering hack energy from the environment, to keep any bad triggers from jumping up during the night, and Knife was making sure no one tried to self-abuse or otherwise harm the body (as there were some very strong inclinations and attempts to).

 

After all that we did a headcount and we're at 60 now, as far as stable and identified people go. To think, back in 2012 there were barely 20 of us known. But it's nicer now, with everyone. There are so many good people in here, we love them. We all love each other really, that's the thing that keeps us going even when bad nights like this happen, because they will. Blood and sunshine, my friends. Y'need both.

That's it for tonight. Battery is almost gone, we need sleep anyway.
Dreams lately have been very enlightening (and headspace people are showing up in them lucidly again!) but we haven't posted them online yet. Also a few more audio notes to post to the archives once someone stops being afraid to listen to them. Doubt is a terrible thing, when it affects the existences of others.
Nevertheless it's late and we're tired and typing nonsensically isn't helping anyone. Have a good night.

 

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

 

@ 01:54 am


It's odd, but moving nevertheless.

Five years after finding her, by some glorious accident, that photograph of her illuminated face is one of the only things that can restore my hope in a single instant.
She's become a sort of intangibly eternal monument to the purity of inspiration, and of the inherent beauty in all things. Does that make sense in words?
Looking at her, even now, after so much has changed... the reality of her existence still makes me believe, with total surrendering conviction, that my own existence isn't anywhere near as dark as I may feel it is.

How odd. But how lovely, too.