They say you shouldn’t nightblog, I say fuck the rules. You get painsomnia poetry.

Because with yours truly’s CPTSD, you get art on occasion. Treat yourself.

-Allēna

#NEISvoid #spilledink #cptsd #poetry #insomnia #anaisnin #enneagram8 #vulnerability #spoonie #painsomnia

#anaisnin #cptsd #enneagram8 #insomnia #NEISvoid #painsomnia #poetry #spilledink #Spoonie #vulnerability

Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”

I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.

I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.

I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.

However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.

My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”

However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.

For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.

I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.

I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.

I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.

Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.

I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.

Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.

Your strangely wired sorcerer,

Lazarus

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*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.

https://opensorceryy.co/alchemy/

#adventures #alchemy #anger #angerManagement #backstory #beingAFuckingBadass #boundaries #catharsis #constructiveThings #cptsd #creativity #deadHand #deconditioning #deconstruction #Emerson #enneagram8 #enneagram8w9 #forgiveness #guernica #healing #Hera #hotTake #introspection #lore #meditation #postTraumaticGrowth #recovery #usingAngerConstructively #vitaminB100Experiment #Zelda

Hey, all.

This is Lazarus again.

In 2021, I was talking with my friend Delta about all of the shit I was going through at the time while deep in survival mode and about being an Enneagram Eight largely geared toward self preservation, and I predicted that once I got out of survival mode and was safe, I would sort of… collapse. I would have no idea what the fuck to do with myself and kinda deflate and go more or less catatonic. That prediction has turned out to be more or less accurate most days.

As my life has stabilized, I find myself with less and less to solve and fewer fires to put out, with many of the remaining problems largely outside of my control and completely outside of my power to fix or help with. In short, most days, despite having the stability I worked so hard for, I feel more lost and adrift than ever. I have been sleeping a lot. I just don’t have much desire to do much, and I do the rare activity when the mood or inspiration strikes. My general state reminds me a lot of when I lost my dad, Xavier, back in 2016.

I wonder a lot if I’m subconsciously or somatically grieving all of the bullshit of the last three or four years or perhaps even longer because of how badly the wind has been knocked out of me. I barely even have energy to reply to a fraction of the dozens of messages on the various messaging apps I get daily, and I am trying to move away from feeling so bad about that because realistically I just can’t right now. That’s the plain and simple fact of the matter. I only really respond to people and reach out or have my phone nearby at all if I feel up to it, which is rare, and I have been trying to strike a balance between isolation and social time so that I don’t fall off the face of the Earth completely. I don’t want to fully withdraw or even withdraw at all, but my brain and body have been demanding that to some degree, and I’m going with that rather than fighting it so as to not make whatever this is longer and worse.

On the subject of recovery, I did a bit more research on what the underlying cause of my symptoms might be that have been making my body and mind feel so damn out of whack, and came up with a decent theory that my thyroid might have gotten ever so slightly cooked due to Hera’s batshit DIY MKULTRA scheme she put me through, and the HRT I’m on combined with the years of stress has been making it go, ah, ever so slightly haywire.

So I found some scholarly research that said that thyroid patients suffering from both hypothyroidism AND hyperthyroidism benefit from taking various forms of vitamin B and thiamine for their chronic fatigue especially. Luckily for me, a former friend of mine had send me a bunch of supplements she wasn’t gonna use late last year and among them was a B100 complex supplement. So I decided to test my theory and give this shit a try and see if it did anything for my fatigue and other symptoms.

Well, it appears to be doing a fair bit. I’m about five days into the test and my brain fog and pain is leagues better. It appears to be helping my lack of object permanence and executive function, as well, giving me some semblance of both. I have also noticed that I’m not super overstimulated by huge amounts of sound, nor does silence understimulate me as badly. I can sit in silence for far longer without my mind itching for music or internally screaming. It may also be helping with the flashbacks, as well, but that’s to be determined. I will need to continue the test for longer to see if it has any significant effect there. So perhaps my fried thyroid theory holds water. I will need to address this with my doctors next time I can spare a brain cell, haha.

I’m also far less angry and my headaches are gradually getting better as I work through my anxiety, as they appear to be triggered by anxiety and moments of emotional distress, which the B100 appears to be lessening as a baseline. Yay for House MD-ing myself at home! I just love being an AuDHDer with a special interest in weird ass branches of medicine who was practically raised by doctors, hahahaaaaa. (This is partly sarcastic, partly genuine. Specialized knowledge and deep somatic intuition saves lives, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s just annoying that my body is so weird and there are so many things that the medical field as we know it doesn’t explore without months of waiting or you have the charisma of a fucking god).

Seeing as there are a lot of positive effects even through the semi-catatonia and the semi-catatonia predates the B100 test, I don’t think the B100 complex is the culprit here. If anything, the supplement appears to be helping. I’m just probably processing years of grief somatically that I’m not entirely consciously aware of.

So that leaves a large amount of time to fill as I heal that would ordinarily be spent in agonizing mental or physical pain, parsing my way through interpersonal trashfires, or recovering from the aforementioned problems. That huge amount of time to fill raises some incredibly simple, yet profound questions that I’m currently exploring the answers to: what the fuck do I do now? What actually makes me happy now that I’m living more out of love than out of spite and my brain and my body aren’t fucking screaming 24/7?

I know I love writing on here and writing in general. I am deeply proud of myself for having a space that is mine that I’ve maintained for months now even if I can’t post daily, and that does a lot for my quality of life. I like having spaces that are mine where I can express myself with the people that I love that would be very difficult to take from me or from them. I know research and engaging in my myriad special interests lights me the fuck up. Emerson raids the local Little Free Libraries like the adorable gremlin he is and often spoils me by bringing books back about topics that he either knows I’m fascinated with or that he thinks would catch my eye, and I do indeed feel very spoiled and lucky when he does that. That man is a catch and a half.

I’ve seen the concept of “dopamine menus” floating around on the Internet for some time, as well, and I’ve started merging that concept with a sort of free form to do list before I go to bed if I’m not completely beat to fuck by the time I pass out and can spare a brain cell to dump all the things that might possibly bring me joy the next day even if things go to shit on paper. I often struggle in the moment to think of anything that would bring me a shred of happiness in the moment if I’m sad or bored or anxious and looking for a pick me up, and having all of that on hand and prepped the night before helps a LOT in those moments.

I think all of those taken in tandem are a decent place to start. I’m trying to move away from the notion that I have to have a Grand Plan ™️ or a goal to accomplish at all times and I really think that teenage me had it right when they said that happiness was having good talks, good music, and good food with good people. That was really their goal in life, and I think they’d be proud of me for getting here. I do a LOT of all of the above.

So stay tuned for more magic, horseshoes and weedwhackers (you decide what y’all are in the comments). See you fuckers next time.

-Lazarus

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https://opensorceryy.co/at-last-im-found/

#academics #beauty #catatonia #catharsis #charisma #chronicFatigue #chronicIllness #cptsd #creativity #deconstruction #delta #depression #Emerson #enneagram8 #enneagram8w9 #enneagramOfPersonality #happiness #healing #Hera #inspiration #introspection #intuition #medicalResearch #metacognition #music #ramble #rest #sliceOfLife #thyroidProblems #Xavier

Hey, everyone! My name is Allēna. Even though I have yet to post here officially, it seems my reputation precedes me – my headmates wrote a standout series of pieces on my multi-part poem “Guernica” that requires very little introduction. I guess you might say that I’m the most reclusive super-admin in a system of of recluses, second only to perhaps Renn. As Ellie did before me a few times, I found the inspiration for this post on social media, Threads specifically. I included my findings in the image above. This post perfectly describes the struggle we keep having system wide with making posts and creating content. As people, we are essentially an open secret.

From 2021 and on, we were increasingly pushed into the limelight when we wanted nothing more than to be as far from it as possible. Yet, almost everything we enjoy doing is very social and requires a great many high powered connections to ever dream of getting eyes on our creations on a large enough scale to make the sort of money or achieve the sort of notoriety to make the sort of reclusive lifestyle we ultimately long for possible. So it becomes a sort of balancing act and a question of vulnerability. How much do we share? How much is comfortable? How much is safe? How much is trauma talking, and how much of it is logical to fear?

Becoming An Open Secret – Bread And Circuses

Before Eight took over, we were far more open. Granted, I still had to be careful lest I still risk fucking horrific punishment, but I wasn’t agoraphobic and wasn’t afraid to try and connect with people even if I had to express myself in code if my mother was around. It wasn’t until our mother betrayed Peri and then Eight multiple times and they weren’t sure who they could trust that they became too afraid to be open with anyone that we truly became an open secret the way we are now. That has only started to change back for the better since meeting our husband, Emerson.

Before him, however, we would hardly tell anyone anything about ourselves. Much of our content would be what Eight called “bread and circuses”, memes and shitposts designed to distract people away from the fact that we were pretty severely depressed and suffering, often in and out of abusive situations we didn’t feel safe to go into detail about. We would only ever ask people for help if we were truly suffering to the point of chronic suicidality or things were getting so dangerous they posed a significant threat to our physical safety and we needed help yesterday. Much of what we would make and share was hilarious but was an attempt to mask our deep pain. We had forgotten how to genuinely connect with people due to the agoraphobia and ever-worsening complex PTSD.

Besides meeting Emerson, what changed? Why did we stop?

Boredom

Eight may be a recluse like the rest of us, but he hates being bored. When he’s bored he is the embodiment of the old idiom “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop” and in that mind the Devil finds many tools. Therefore, that old bastard delights in novelty and in being completely unpredictable. He eventually grew tired of doing the same damn bread and circus bullshit and also realized it wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be, so he decided to take a risk and try and be a bit more vulnerable…you know…as a treat. He was terrified, but he sure as hell wasn’t bored anymore. Mission fucking accomplished. It’s difficult to be bored when you’re midway through a massive panic attack and hyperventilating like you’re being chased by a pissed off lion, you know? He’s also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, in case you haven’t gathered that. Speaking of that..

Risk Taking

We’ve never been the sort to keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t working. Even though it’s terrifying, we figured out pretty fast that staying closed off like that wasn’t going to get us anywhere, both in the real world OR online. People generally like to know who it is that they’re dealing with, and that involves vulnerability, believe it or not. So we had to learn how to be vulnerable again, as terrifying as it was. It’s still very much a work in progress. However, the payoff is worth it in our closest relationships, and we’re rediscovering that there are many people we can trust. We just have to actually be brave and self disclose.

That isn’t to say, however, that we’re spilling our guts out 24/7 to everyone all the time. There’s still a great deal of the bread and circus type fuckery. There’s just more of us going out on a limb now and actually being honest about how we’re really doing now rather than hiding it behind memes and humor or trying to walk it all off now like nothing’s actually wrong.

Are There Any Advantages To Being Less Open, Though?

Oh, fucking plenty. And we still don’t share anything we don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing publicly. We aren’t gonna talk about shit if we aren’t ready or push ourselves more than we have the capacity for. People can think of that however the hell they want. Just because they might talk about certain things publicly doesn’t mean we have to, and vice versa. We only really give a shit about what a handful of people think, and odds are that if we don’t know the person closely and personally, we don’t rightly care about their opinion. No one is entitled to shit from us unless we agree they are.

And weirdly, that private way of doing things often gets us read as “mysterious” and often works in our favor, so if it works, it works, even if it’s not intentional. It isn’t intentional, for the record. We’re often tired and don’t want everyone to know our every move or else we would not have the energy or time to execute those moves, let alone breathe.

Final Thoughts

Being this sort of open secret is a balance between being vulnerable and providing the people with memes and other bullshit content. We’ll always be honest, but we may not say everything. We’ll do our utmost if asked, though, boundaries and energy permitting.

As my headmates say, stay tuned for more magic!

Yours in tomfuckery,

Allēna, Super-Admin

https://opensorceryy.co/an-open-secret/

#agoraphobia #charisma #chronicIllness #enneagram8 #enneagram8w9 #inspiration #introspection #ptsd #tragicBackstory

Hey, everyone! My name is Eight. I’m one of the super-admins here, and I’m here to talk to y’all today about one of my all-time favorite topics ever, the Enneagram of Personality. I’ve loved this personality typology system since my good friend Delta introduced me to it many years ago. There are nine basic types in this system, and my type, where I get the “Eight” nickname from, is the Enneagram Type 8.

The Enneagram Institute has a great overview of my type, as do several other websites, teachers, and coaches. However, I’ve noticed during my years of study that not much of the literature about the Enneagram Type 8 is written by 8s themselves. As a result, we get a very bad reputation among the Enneagram community as ruthless bullies, master manipulators, self absorbed egotists, and just all around assholes. I suspect that many of these authors once ran afoul of a Type 8 or two, or possibly even betrayed one of them, hence the terrible reputation we get. Spoiler: you betray us or one of our people and it will not end well for you.

And yes, some Type 8s can be awful. But that applies to any group of people. So I’ve come here today to hopefully clear up some of the mystery surrounding the Enneagram Type 8 and talk about what it’s like to be one.

The Enneagram Type 8: Hard Shell, Soft Underbelly

There’s a lot of debate in the community as to whether Type 8s are simply born like this, or if there’s some kind of inciting incident early in life that makes them that way. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say definitively that I practically came out of the womb the way that I am. Since I was very little, I have always been a fighter, and have been stubborn as hell for as long as anyone can remember.

I value my autonomy higher than anything else on this accursed rock, and will go to great lengths to preserve it, and will go out of my way to undermine people who try and control me when I didn’t consent to take orders from them. I am, and have always been, the boss of me. My biggest fear is of being hurt or blindsided when I’m vulnerable and in need (like, it’s my deepest, yet most unconscious fear), and betrayal will make me incredibly cold and angry. I will completely stop caring about what happens to a person who has betrayed me after they do so, and it’s even worse if they hurt or betray one of my people.

I struggle to open up to people about anything that I consider important to me, and it’s pretty common knowledge that nobody knows me completely, as much as I would like them to.

The Boss of Me

I’ll push harder and longer than most people anyone have ever met if there’s something that I want or if there’s an obstacle in my way, and I’ve been like that for as long as my headmates can remember. My colleagues have written at length about us surviving a massive stroke and then clawing our way out of Texas kicking and screaming.

Yeah, the success on our side was mostly my doing. And there’s no way I could have done that without enough iron-willed determination to fight Death himself multiple times. And lemme tell you – in a crisis, that’s a major advantage. I don’t care what happens to me or my body, I WILL get to safety and I WILL give anyone who stands in my way a VERY bad day in the process. My path out of Texas was so batshit insane on purpose because I knew the people in league with my abusers would never want to follow me.

What Happens in Peacetime?

In more peaceful times, however, this often works to my detriment. I struggle a lot when there is nothing challenging me. Think of me like the human version of an Alaskan Husky dog. I, like a Husky, don’t know what to do with myself if my life isn’t on fire or I am bored, and will often cause some bullshit and push the people I love away without meaning to when I’m stressed or out of my element, such as in close relationships where being emotionally vulnerable can make or break your relationship.

My relationship with my beloved husband Emerson actually suffered greatly for the first year and a half we were together because he is far more emotionally expressive and emotionally based than I am, and I struggle a lot with emotional vulnerability.

Inner Work, More Emotional Vulnerability, And No-Bullshit Therapy For You, Mountain of Madness!

I, as is typical for the Enneagram Type 8, prefer to do things, not talk or feel. As a result, I wouldn’t tell him how I was feeling or where my head was at, and he couldn’t give me what I wanted in the relationship. It was a very please, for the love of the gods, help me help you type of situation, and I wasn’t being very helpful at all. I’m in therapy to and have an amazing, no-bullshit, straight-talking therapist who will call me out if I’m in the wrong, but will also celebrate my wins with me. I need both of those things in a therapist, honestly.

Because of all the work I did both internally and in tandem with Emerson, I am far more open and transparent with him than I’ve ever been with anyone. It was absolutely and utterly terrifying. I cried more during that healing journey while struggling to open up and reconciling my terror of being seen with my desire for love and a healthy relationship with him than I probably ever have before. But I wanted it more than anything, so I fucking did the work.

The Current State of Things

Now, I feel safe enough to fully drop my guard around him. I’m working on doing the same for others who have proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have my back. I’m also working on mitigating how bad things get when I become stressed or overwhelmed, because both Emerson and I have noticed that I try and take projects over even if they aren’t my responsibility to ensure that they are complete and done right. There, I still need to do a lot of work on letting shit go, lest I steamroll everything, burn bridges, and exhaust myself in the process. I am impatient and often frustrated, so I’ve been working on breathing deep and slowing down. Not my circus, not my monkeys. That’s what I have to tell myself, anyway.

A Word of Advice to Partners of Enneagram Type 8s

In the same vein, if your partner is an Enneagram Type 8, you will not get them to change by attempting to force, coerce, beg, or cajole them into doing so. If they truly, genuinely love you, call them out and ask them to change. If they want a relationship with you and value you highly, they’ll do the work. We’re very self motivated people and we pursue what we want relentlessly. We are also allergic to bullshit, can usually read people very well, and can catch people in lies like we’re in the fucking CIA, so if you know what’s good for you, just tell your Type 8 partner the truth with no sugarcoating, short, straight, actionable, and to the point. Trust me, it’ll go a lot better for you.

Closing Remarks

Don’t tell anyone, but in my experience, Type 8s are actually very sweet and some of the kindest, coolest people you’ll ever meet once you get to know them and actually earn their respect. Me? If you think I’m cool, awesome. If you don’t? Your loss. I think I’m cool, haha. In any case, I hope you enjoyed your stay on my batshit website, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

-Eight, Super-Admin, Enneagram Eight, Dipshit

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#deadHand #drama #Emerson #enneagram8 #enneagram8w9 #enneagramOfPersonality #introspection #personalityTypology #tragicBackstory

@TheWildflowerist @clark I feel that. As I'm kinda approaching reconstruction with a very mystic scaffolding, I find myself trying to push the envelope a little in our conversations about Spirituality (because I'm an #enneagram8 and always confrontational), but the response always makes me feel like I might be a little alien.