Cross-Dimensional Staff Room

It's funny how no matter what approach I take, it's rubbing my sib wrong. I can't think because thinking too hard hurts him, I might touch spots that aren't healed over for him that I don't even know exist in me, because I'm not allowed to think at them. But if I'm not thinking, if I'm just enjoying my blissful unknowing and the lack of painful memories or any memories whatsoever, that's not good either, because then I'm "too quiet." Make up your damn mind already.

So... I'm just going to think now. Draw an outline or something. Talk about me, who I was, my memories, my ~existence~, because fuck, it's gonna trigger him either way. Sorry, Tim. Love you and all but I'm an individual, too. Let's pretend this is an autobiography? In like 1000 words, not 100 000. I don't think there's enough of me to spread that thin, even, at least not now because I've got 0 recollection. Fun!

(Struggling with my backdrop selection; music is too distracting, silence is way too uncomfortable, so going to try a cityscape video instead.)

Here's me. Daniel Benjamin Stoker, born 1990, two years after my brother who doesn't have a middle name. No clue about my childhood, but I assume I was just an average kid. From what I'm hearing, it apparently comes back in pieces, like your story, who you are, but for that I mean... I've got to start somehow, don't I? It's just a kind of a broad subject, though, isn't it, like - someone asks you, well, what's your life been like? What am I supposed to tell? Where do I start? Someone from the back (hey, Jay) told me to just pick whatever comes to mind first, and it starts building from those blocks. So okay! I went mountain climbing once.

No, seriously, that's it. That's the memory. I remember the texture of the rock wall, how pressing your hand into it is like... first you tap at it, grip at it multiple times to make sure it's steady, lay weight on it but not too much because you don't trust it, and you can feel it in your gloved fingertips and the middle joints, all the pressure, the more the better the grip is. Dusty dry air, dusty rock, dusty everything, but the air's kind of cold, like spring. We're pretty high, definitely not in the UK, looks more southern than that. Europe, though, pretty sure. There's a kind of a muscle pain around my knees, at the back of the calf and in the muscles that join up to the knee from the thigh. That's my memory. That's apparently the core of who I am, which is arguably still better than Tim's core memory of a sloppy school bathroom kiss. So I've got that on my side at least. The sky's clear and pale blue, not deep blue unless I look straight up, I have a helmet on and looking up is annoying because it pushes down my face when I do that, so I'm not doing it. Ground is a yellowish, dry shade of dusty, trees look coniferous, not scarce but not tightly together either, thick and green, can't tell from that height if they're short or if it's just the perspective, but it's definitely a forest and they're definitely taller than me. The landscape is mountain and valley, rugged, way out of dense civilisation. I'm sure there's a village or something nearby enough but we're definitely on a hike here. I'm carrying a bag. The cable I'm attached to is black, feels like plastic, and reflects the sun. The hooks are just plain metal in the wall, scratched, blueish.

I've also got a core experience, which again, for Tim, is the few first week or so that he spent living with his two girlfriends at uni. I'm objectively losing this one, because mine is being conscious while dying and dead, and that, honestly, fucking sucks. Especially because I'm not allowed to touch that, not allowed to think about it, but it's a memory that is so fucking vivid it's basically sometimes all that I am. It's not a scary memory, because I don't actually remember ending up in that situation. I just remember being dead, how it felt like to be bound to my body but lacking any human experience. Feeling fingers on the inside of my skin like - you know fresh pig meat like a leg or such that you can get out of a butchery, that still has the thick skin attached? And the skin is kind of like a chewy layer on top of that, with a smooth, sinewy underside that's got a sticky kind of moisture, not wet but not dry either, between it and the muscle? The way it feels, when you've got that fresh pig leg cut off from the thigh or wherever, and you can see the meat and the skin, and then you slide your fingers in there between? Yeah, except I'm the meat and not the fingers.

And it's this kind of a sense of... neutralcy about the whole thing. Not like I don't care, but like I'm an observer, not a participant, in the situation. I'm still attached to my body too, not like watching this happen from the outside. I literally remember what it feels like to have hands inside my body and it's disgusting, but it's not a horrible memory in the sense of fear or pain, because all of that belongs to people who are alive. At that point, I'd already been afraid and in pain and what's left is just this mindless existence where I can't leave the body, but I'm not in control of it anymore, or even the owner of it, just kind of sitting in it because I can't move out or away. Feeling everything. I also remember the wooden floor, which... okay. Stone walls. Utter darkness, aside from my torch someplace far away pointing at one of the walls. This didn't happen in the main theatre or anything, it's not like this grandiose setting of my corpse on a stage with a spotlight on or anything. More like just in one of the corridors inside, where I'd been exploring, where I'd ran into before getting caught and whatever happened then. But it's definitely just a corridor, nothing fancy, nothing for the audience, probably something backstage, where you move around the people and the junk on and off stage. I can't tell because I can't remember anything that happened before I'm dead in there, wherever it is. Even then the only memory we have, collectively, of breaking into the place is from Tim's memories coming after me. Which I don't want to be thinking about. The things he remembers and feels deal critical damage to me, it's just as bad for me to know about him as it is for him to know about me. So. I have no idea where I died, I just know I dropped my torch because it was there, and what happened to me after I was gone.

As to how many memories I have of this and whatever the hell followed, not many, because I wasn't human anymore and things that happened to me or around me didn't concern me. If you can picture what it'd be like to be a pair of shoes in a store, that's how it felt like, except that I also had the understanding that the condition I was in was unnatural and my whole existence was rejecting it, so if you can also imagine the pair of shoes is endlessly screaming inside, that's how it was. The theatre was the factory, what needed to be separated got separated, and I followed the meat, the skin was something that was removed from me, not mine anymore, etc. Then that meat and me attached to it were transported elsewhere, didn't matter to me because I wasn't alive, and my meat continued to do things that were needed from it according to when it was commanded to do that, and it didn't matter because I wasn't alive, but what I was was constantly screaming in that inbetween place of being attached to the body but not in control or inhabiting it. I get that this doesn't make sense, but that's the Stranger for you.

The rest of my existence, as far as I can tell, was actually pretty great. It's kind of a mindfuck of a comparison with nearly anybody in here - everyone here comes from huge trauma and has a history of mental illness, and I'm here like, how do you do fellow kids? I'm a perfectly neurotypical heterosexual guy who never experienced a day of depression, normal sadness aside, in my whole life. Like, the worst mental struggle I ever experienced was breaking up with my first girlfriend or something, a relatively short period of teenage gloom. So I can't really complain, even, can I? People die sometime. And it sucks, yeah, but at this point, I don't feel any attachment to the life I had because I quite frankly don't remember it so I can't miss it, either. I'm clearly carrying some of the detachment into here, but at least I'm not screaming anymore. I'm having a relatively fine afterlife ridealong here and I'm okay with it, I'm at peace, for what it's worth. Tim noted, when I first dropped in on him, that I have like, an uncannily serene all-knowing feel to me and while I definitely lost the all-knowing immediately when embodiment took hold, the serene, it's fine mood has never really shifted. I'm good! You're good, we're good, things will come together somehow.

I just wish I could help the others when they don't feel that way. Maybe it'll change? For me, I mean. Maybe my emotional capacity is just lagging behind or I'll relearn to care at some point, but I'm more here as a safeguard to my brother than anything else. Like he needs me, so I'm here because he called. I don't really feel like I have any unresolved issues that I need to be working through, but, that said, I would like to remember more. Genuinely. While it's great to not need to worry about a thing, I wish I had more context, at the very least.

It has been a very difficult few months in terms of introspection and inner dialogue. However, taking up (however briefly it has been since we started two days ago, this one making the third) the habit of taking an hour's walk each day has greatly boosted our ability to think clearly, and as that is, I'm not surprised to find myself here.

I'll spare you the recap. It's pointless. Too much has happened, in terms of our inner workings, and this is not our mental health blog to begin with - that thing is elsewhere, similarly ignored and abandoned in terms of any meaningful content (though we do like looking at pretty pictures, and at this point, it'll probably come as a surprise to our followers that we post about mental health to begin with when we start again.)

What I'm here for is... memories. I haven't really practiced much introspection on my own either, simply making it day to day. A lot of my functioning, as everybody else's, has been instinctual and bare-bones. I didn't go about picking my memory for these ones, either, but as they sometimes do as your subconscious processes things in the background, it simply came to me a moment ago while I was returning home, feet soaked from the melting snow outside. What a midwinter week it's proving to be.

Now, I haven't really looked at my childhood with any particular focus. In many ways I'm simply embarrassed to - I find myself, my past version, my child-self disagreeable to say the least, and would rather leave him in my past. My husband vehemently disagrees and still holds a desire to connect with that boy, but even in my metaphysical state of being all of me at once should I so choose, I am walling the boy in and my husband out. Frankly, it is not his place to pry, and I am not in the mood of regressing to be that child (ever again, but I'm leaving this open for Martin's sake.)

I don't exactly know how my story starts. I was born, and my parents loved me. My mother was a second-generation immigrant from a family that did not agree on her desire to marry outside of their community, and I believe they cut contact with her (and her husband, who I don't know if they ever so much as met) upon learning about their engagement. I suppose that was the point of no return; dating was something they could still debate on, express their opinion on, hoping to convince her to make a better choice. Engagement, plans to marry, a set date - that was seen as something of an open rejection of her family, an abandonment. So I never did meet my other grandparents. I know nothing about them. I don't even know what my last name could have been, if not for being what it is now, though I'm sure this is a detail I used to know but the universal strainer shed off of me as unimportant upon my death (as it was.) Furthermore, to a British boy raised by a perfectly English grandmother with a very deattached style of parenting, all that name would have been to me was... foreign. No attachments, no context, no cultural background to hang onto. No meaning beyond perhaps emphasising what I might have rather forgotten about: that where I lived was not the whole of my home, my heritage. I always did aspire to be typical.

I learned about a year ago that my experience of losing my parents does not align with the story of who I am that pre-exists my presence here. It was a huge shock, as up until then, I'd thought I was an exact copy, a... transfer, of a person who only existed in the written form here. It was the core of my identity: that I was this, and there was no difference. I was not divergent. Again, I suppose I simply wanted to be typical - expected - ordinary, insignificant, transparent so that I would not draw any attention, or God forbid, questions. What happened to me was that I was orphaned all at once by a car crash. I have a vision of it being in the winter, bad visibility, bad driving conditions, slippery wet roads. Whether this is the case, I don't know. It hardly matters. What mattered to me was that I was... young, I want to say three years old, at the time. My grandmother (father's side, as implied earlier) was taking care of me, I was supposed to stay for a night. A sleepover for me, an ordinary visit, a parental and grandparental duty, for her. I don't think she disliked me yet then. I wasn't her burden. I was probably an inconvenience she likely had little patience for, but in terms of how a grandmother feels upon taking on the responsibility of her own child's child, I believe she would have looked at it as a welcome inconvenience, not an inherently unpleasant one.

As it happens, that would become a permanent arrangement. I feel very little thinking about it. There is no emotional... anything, attached to this. It's unfortunate, I suppose. As a child, like most other orphans I suppose, I'd have emotional fits over the matter - imagining a better life where my mother doted on me, and my father taught me to play football in the backyard. (I don't think I would have liked football, but what do I know; that was part of my fantasies, that my obvious difference that always disappointed everyone around me was due to my unfortunate familial situation and the "trauma" of losing my parents, and if I'd only had my real family there, I would have grown up normal. For the record, I am as autistic as my father was, and I don't think either of us would have enjoyed football overly much.) I'd work myself up over it in the night and cry about my fantasy life, convincing myself that my present life was a tragedy in comparison to the perfect life I would have lived if only. Retrospectively, from my adult point of view, this is ridiculous of course. Yes, my family life would have likely been much better. My parents wanted me, my grandmother never did. That makes a difference to a child, even if the parental figure that despises them is not openly hostile towards them, and my grandmother never was. She was not abusive, merely detached, professional. It was her job that she had not wanted to look after me and raise me up to be a functional adult. She succeeded at it, more or less, and I never lacked in my life. I had a decent schooling, I had vacations, I had toys (though I don't know if I really knew how to play), I had games (which I enjoyed a great deal more), and I had books (so many books) to entertain and educate me. But I did not truly have much in terms of emotional support, though I learned the art of negotiating and making an argument for myself fairly soon to my life, which I think made me more well-suited for academia and later, my brief professional career, making up for some of my obvious social shortcomings. Our relationship was very much like that; professional, based in logical argumentation for and against, and the one who had a better argument for their stance would ultimately win in every case. My grandmother was never the kind of a person who'd order me and call it at that: I always had a voice in the decisions she made, even when I used it for ridiculousness only, which children are prone to do.

But in terms of my life being perfect in my born family - no. Like I said, I wasn't normal to begin with. Forget about the obviousness of my appearance, which I assume would have led me into enough trouble even if I was otherwise picture perfect; rather, it was my inner inability to assimilate with my peers and surroundings that made my life miserable. I can't tell if my grandmother was better or worse at raising an obviously disabled child than any other parent would have been. She'd done it before, and clearly did not like it, but she was adjusted to it and knew her way around it, and most mistakes she'd presumably already made with my father and knew to avoid with me. I felt rather comfortable at home as who I was and it truly did not occur to me most the time that I was so clearly lacking in some aspects that people are expected to inherently master outside my household. I didn't understand why my peers hated me. I decided I didn't care about it, that I was choosing my isolation; in fact, I did find most other children dull. I wasn't invested in their imaginative play, I found it... pointless, "childish" which of course is a much of muchness coming from a six years old, but if I had one ideal in life it was to be as much of an adult from diapers onwards as I possibly could. Like I mentioned before, I did have toys, but don't remember playing with them. I liked organising them, though. By colour and size, and I had a small collection of plastic and stuffed dinosaurs, which I would arrange and rearrange based on whichever criteria I found most appealing at the time. As a smaller child, it would be by the obvious characteristics (colour, size, as for others), and then from thereon, by whichever other characteristics I'd learned about, such as diet (herbivore, carnivore, omnivore), and finally by era. I did have a dinosaur phase as a child, and loved learning all about the timelines, eras, which dinosaur had coexisted with which, and it would upset me greatly when popular media made creative choices on these matters. You probably don't know the pain that I've felt witnessing most of the torturously inaccurate art that surrounds a boy child of a young age when it comes to dinosaurs. Monsters with bad anatomy tearing up other monsters with bad anatomy, each named and inspired by beasts that lived a million years apart from each other. (Have I told you yet that most people found me a terrible bore?)

I'm not sure where I was going with all of this. It sounds like I'm building up a story, but there's no conclusion here. This is as far as my memories take me and I've lost my point. Therefore, as presented: my early childhood.

Happy New Year.
(PS. Yes, I did also hate fireworks as a child. The noise would scare me. I have this in common with the group I'm with now.)

Don't hate me because of it, though. I don't want to be this way. I'm not thinking about harming us because I want to hurt us. I just want to stop hurting.

( The things that didn't happen; )

It really is difficult to believe that we have time now. That there is no rush. That we can - that I can - simply stop and breathe for a while.

Funny that.

I am trying to settle into it to my best ability, but the feeling of urgency, of alarm, never truly fades.

I've got homework from the therapist, right? I'm not gonna do that, though. Been thinking on it a few days now and it's just not happening. Feels like twisting a knife in an infected bullet hole. Like yeah I might be able to get the bullet out, sure, but at what cost? What I'm hoping for is that it'll just scar over by itself. It won't - thanks to the infection - but yeah I'm not sticking a knife in there either, not yet. It's already killed me once, what worse can happen?

So I'm going to talk about something that doesn't feel like that. Specifically, I'm going to talk about Jay. Maybe Martin a bit too, I don't know yet. I sat down here to talk about Jay, though. It's pretty much my last chance based on how I feel now, before we hit the episodes where it gets rough again. I want to write about how I feel after a year of living together with him, away from all of that. Specifically with who he is now, rather than who he was before.

( Read more... )

On the offchance of looking like a pathetic, friendless loser who can't get the support of his team, I'm here again. In all seriousness, this is because I appear to live here now. In the whole past year that we've been aware of the system, not one of us has fronted this long in one go, aside from the host, as should be obvious. Well, I have, for now, replaced the host. I don't know why, and I haven't questioned it; I don't mind, and I have things of my own to focus on.

It's been five days. I think; I haven't been counting. Counting wasn't necessary when I first came to front. I assumed I'd be swapping places with someone in a day or so. I've barely heard from them. It's quite... early, to say, but such a shift is curious in terms of our functioning. Like I said, this is unprecedented, and a massive leap forwards in what we've been trying to achieve. Specifically, in terms of therapy, our goal is to develop a system of equality - with all of us sharing the life, rather than having a frontman, and becoming equally capable of handling all aspects of it.

I've noticed that I certainly have different strengths than our usual fronter. Eating is not one of them. I struggle to remember to eat at all, though part of this might be due to generic loss of appetite following our physical condition as it is. Speaking of which, this side, I believe, I'm proving to be rather adept at. We've suffered of chronic muscle tension in our back, shoulders and neck as long as anyone can remember, and after the booster shot, the inflammation made this situation much, much worse than it has been in a while. Let's just say I've made it a priority to change this. I am tired of the stiffness, tired of the extra effort it takes to move the body for basic things such as walking, and so tired of the nausea and numbness that results from inflammation and nerve pressure. I downloaded an app that alerts me to stretch for five minutes every hour.

I suppose it's working. I've followed it religiously for two days and the amount of muscle soreness that we've - I've - woken up with today seems to signal that something is happening.

I've also drank so much coffee that I've thoroughly irritated our stomach. I'm not sure how to change this situation, the craving is still there. I'll need to search up if decaf makes any difference - I assume it doesn't, the drink itself is acidic.

I assume no one is interested in my developing stomach ulcer. That's fine. I'm not sure what I'm writing here for. I have a lot of things I'd like to write about, but like everyone else so far, I find myself somewhat gagged when it comes to actually writing them. We've learned it by heart to never reveal ourselves in the open, and this is - well - I'm not sure how to undo that conditioning quite yet. Still, I'm particularly hoping that Tim would manage to crawl close enough to front to write his thoughts, this blog was made very much for that purpose, and there's very little else we can do to help him as it is now. We simply don't have the words, nor the understanding that he requires, to do so.

Might end up coming back here to write about introjection, if I ever manage to scrape my thoughts together on the subject. Saw a post arguing against fictives and repeating the ages old assumption that all of us should have developed from childhood media in specific, as if adults perhaps particularly now aren't using fiction as a means of self-reflection and parsing our subconsciousness, trauma and, well, everything. For once, this was not on Reddit. However, I find it irritating that I can't get my hands on any proper research or nuanced, educated dialogue on the matter, so talking about it seems redundant. My opinion is merely the opinion of one made-up person, after all.