My Brainhole… Visualized

A bit of context: my friend mk (it/its) posted an incredible thought piece on its Substack on feral anarchy, what it means, etc., and I found it very inspiring. I, too, am quite feral, a synesthete, have zero sense of linear time, and have built my very neuroqueer life from a place of loosely organized chaos. So I decided to make art that aimed to describe my experience a bit. Therefore… Have this!

Many of the words in this art piece are from my poetry, hehe.

I highly recommend reading mk’s work if you do not and following/subscribing! It’s doing great things.

-Lazarus ✨

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So I Think I May Be More Aroace Than Originally Estimated??

I’ve been doing some Thinking about how my brain works, and it would seem that my particular DICK HEAD COMBINATION OF AUDHD gives me the worst traits of both autism AND ADHD. Like, if given enough stimulants and time, I can hyperfocus forever on something I’m fascinated with to the point where I learn an ungodly amount of information about it and retain nearly all of it. Not just that, but I make creations with that knowledge, too. This fucking blog, for example. It’s linked in with the Fediverse via ActivityPub and Alex Kirk’s masterful Friends plugins, etc.. My numerous special interests have been combining, reshuffling and making unholy bastard children in my mental Back 40 on this tiny hell site since May because of the way my cracked brainhole works.

Conversely, in order to socialize, I have to focus on whatever social thing is going on around me completely and let myself dissolve into it. Switching between whatever the fuck project has taken hold of my mind and going into a social activity of any form is a multistep process that requires me ACTUALLY MANUALLY SHIFTING MY BRAIN AWAY from the project rabbit hole and into the social one. And there is a grouchy hell to pay if I’m interrupted mid project.

However, I thought about it a step further. I have pretty much always been able to discern the difference between the feelings I get when the various happy chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, are triggered in my brain, body, etc., and upon further contemplation, I began to wonder if that’s why my particular bastard flavor of AuDHD is such a bastard to begin with. Because what I noticed from years of combing back through my system’s memories both pre and most massive integration is that my happy chemicals seem to be fucking heavily partitioned, and perhaps that’s why I can discern the difference between the feelings they give me in the first place. Hence that’s probably why I have to manually shift between projects (dopamine) and socializing (oxytocin).

Serotonin is a whole other can of worms for me and I have to manually induce that bitch, too. It often takes days and that’s a whole OTHER post. I might write about that bastard chemical later, lol. She is a cruel mistress 🤣

Last night, a long time aroace friend dropped me into a Facebook group called [aroace confusion intensifies]. I’ve identified as demi-aromantic/demi-asexual for some time, but as I kept relating to more and more posts, I thought more and more about the happy chemical partition theory I have going and all of my relationships, both current and past, and how my batshit brain might play into ALLLL of that.

Now, I do experience attraction to SOME people. But with the whole “having to shift my brain manually into a state where it won’t scream when I need to socialize” thing, the frequency in which I fall into random projects, and the fact that I experience a near complete lack of linear time and object permanence, said attraction takes a VERY LONG TIME to form, if it ever forms at all. Deep, genuine, romantic attachment to a person takes EVEN FUCKING LONGER. Because what the ENTIRE fuck is a “romance” as society has established it, anyway? So it takes my crippled ass YEARS sometimes to get a damned clue. And I think my cracked brainhole is why, lmao. Polyamory has been a lifesaver in that regard because in order to have a healthy polyamorous relationship, the people involved HAVE TO ENGAGE IN A HEFTY AMOUNT OF NEGOTIATION FROM THE OUTSET about expectations and things about the relationship, which my clueless ass can DEFINITELY get behind. 🤣

So unfortunately, when person number ten billion comes up to me is like “LAZARUS. I LOVE YOUR WORK. I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. PLEASEEEEEE DATE ME, ETC”, more often than not, I have just emerged from my mental Laz Cave, haven’t seen or interacted with a soul in fourteen hours or more, and haven’t shifted into Oxytocin Mode yet, which is necessary for human bonding, so I’m like,

“uh. What year is it again?”

Stay tuned for more (brainhole) magic, gremlins.

-Lazarus

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About Time

Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?

The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.

A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.

And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.

Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛

“one: the end. texas + points east”

somebody,
somewhere…
i remember my heart burning 
as i longed for the leaves of the east 

count up all of the hours in the day
execute plans with no emotion 
execute emotions like they are enemies
i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
such that

all you see is your reflection 
it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
of who i once was
she was weak and afraid 
i killed her
i am electricity
born from the ashes of my home, 
my hell
do not presume you can put a label on me. 

you will not learn to hate me.
you will learn to be afraid of me. 
to drink about me 
and worship me (posthumously) 
and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
to who i was 
who you thought you had
who you once were 
and who you wish you could still find

i was a child then. 
i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
you grew up too slowly for your taste 
i miss the boy you were
even then 
even though i was a teacher
you taught me everything i know
i was odd and you were even and steady 
my eccentricity was my salvation 
and the universe loves irony and wordplay.

“two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”

i had a waking dream last night
someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
wrapping themself in inky cloth 
in chapel hill, north carolina…
the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet 
i would know when my marching orders come 
i have not learned enough to be able to see 
what i am looking for for what it is yet 

would i see it as a prison now?
or would i see it as coming home?
what if i chew through the bars 
of what i am supposed to love?
i fell in love with points east before 
and all signs are pointing to that 
as my home 

you may remember me as a season 
a time of day, a concept -
i think of you as places i have yet to walk 
i see beginning as end as beginning 
i see you as who you are, who you were, 
and who you will become 
you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful 
you are soft and tender and strong 
you are cosmic in scope and 
infinitesimally small at once 
you are that you are.

“three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”

i told you once when i was elsewhere that 
buddhism seemed round 
you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel 
i used to be scared of going forward
i thought it endless and vast when it is truly 
cyclical and you can return to where you 
were as easily as listening to your favorite song
some revolutions just take longer than others 

the last watch of the night is deep and rich 
and sweet like a plum 
indigo like the deepest sea 
this is where i make my home 
i tell my stories after dark 
comfortable in the space 
between ending and beginning 
you remind me of different paths 
the road not taken
but all roads lead home 
some are just longer than others
more winding -

and home is where you will find me 
i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times 
i know great and terrible things 
i’ve asked the void questions 
and she has answered me. 
who is out there?
where are they?
her answer?
go back to the end.

I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨

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