Shadows And Self

We owe you no explanation DID Permanent Trigger Warning

[shadowsandself]

A life of collisions and divisions.

Of silences and symphonies

To remain whole by breaking apart

Of turning and yearning and always burning

Solitude is a double edged sword

The rest of the world slumbers

Only We exist.

[shadowsandself]

My name is Damage.

My name is Manic.

My name is Compendium.

My name is darkness.

Heirs to a blue house.

Time will tell if this is an echo or a true resurrection of this place.

We miss words.

[shadowsandself]

All our sins remembered

This might be the last entry written here. Personal things reached a head today and the gang couldn't cope. D tricked my partner into triggering the Catalyst. Meditation, lucid dreaming, psychological conditioning, self hypnosis. All of those to put a keyphrase in place almost 10 years ago. I'm not sure how well it will work. Not exactly the kind of thing that they could test. Slamming a door. Not even sure if it's locking it away or integration. The end result is the same. My head feels like it's going to implode. But it's my head. Just me. I can already feel everything shifting and combining. Memories, feelings, impulses and desires. All the lil boxes that let me deal with life. All of them open and poured out on the floor. It was desperate and stupid but it was time. It won't fix me, I'm still erratic and emotional and all that I was before it. But it's all me now. No more blocks. I can do this. I have to do this. For her.

[shadowsandself]

Cycle

I'm not sure where to start. Things have been... Bad. Unstable. Tonight it got worse until I got it back under control. Bleak is proving too volatile and insidious to properly surpress. Had my first black out in long time tonight. Been seeing Creepers. I'm not sure what to do. Especially since I'm headed into the most stressful part of the year. Have to keep going until either he gives or I do. Sometimes you just have to fight.

[shadowsandself]

Demi

There's a fact that we let ourselves often forget. It's something we even told our partner once, but we're pretty sure they forgot or didn't understand the significance at the time. We were reminded of it tonight by events and conversations. To be honest, it's been on our mind a lot lately for various reasons. One of which is that we know we should put it here. The open secret that Bleak was not always Bleak... and I was not always Nameless. Bleak. My predecessor. He was the first Nameless. He was the other half with Dark. Survivor of The Betrayal. I could explain the why and the how, but it wouldn't matter here. The only one it matters to, that we care to give an explanation to, is our partner. They already know the details anyways. In the end, all that matters is that he wanted to die. After five years that goal was in sight. So close. Then everything changed again. I was born out of a split second of chaos. Patched together of the few pieces that wanted a reason to live. Given a name rather than chosen one. Made in an image and offered a choice. I have no regrets for my choice, although at times I do feel a sadness. I understand the truth that I represent the fact that we will never agree to complete integration. But in the strangest way, it isn't me that advocated hope tonight. It was him. It reminded me that he is where our obsession and fanaticism comes from. He is the extreme that refuses rational limitations and socially acceptable definitions of appropriate amounts. For an instant, he was as he had been. Gentle unbreaking iron. And I could not tell the difference between us. I wonder if that's what being human feels like.

[shadowsandself]

By any other name

Fought with Bleak and Demon all day. Demon has felt a lot like Dark lately. He's tried to claim the name for over a year now. Sometimes I slip and call him by it. It fills me with horror when I do. I can't. I can't go back to that. But the line has been blurring. I don't even know what the point is. He whispers changing his name changes nothing but I know. The names define them. It is who they are. It gives them life but also binds them. To change the name is to change the Other. Dark reborn. The idea of the possibility is enough to give me waves of panic. The truth is that Demon has always been a shadow of Dark. A pale successor. A measure put in place as a safeguard against Dark's return. The panic part of my brain whispers that a return was Dark's plan all along. Dark was... Unique. None before or since like him. He was strong enough to be unbound. To exert whatever control he wanted. To take over as he pleased. It's taken us years since his death to establish stability and control. The idea of losing that is terrifying. There are other reasons as well but I know if I explore them tonight, it'll be a one way trip down the rabbit hole. For now, I have to keep breathing.

[donnergrauen]

Sometimes, Intruders seem to talk.

[shadowsandself]

Motions

We are the isolation. He screams at me and I want nothing more than silence. The louder I turn my silence, the louder He screams. So I've been feeling shut down lately. Alone. Maybe stress. Maybe changes. Maybe just tired of everything being slightly off from what I wish it was. Maybe I'm just doing everything wrong. He screams.

[shadowsandself]

The Sequencer Grid

Calm. He lives, He breathes. In the heart of the Machine Lands. He lives within the Sequencer Grid. He created it for Us. It is the one part of the the Innerscape that touches the external world. A power cycling system, to grant Us control. To grant Him control. There are many components to the Sequencer grid. The Primary Grid. The Secondary Grid. The Tertiary, or Auxiliary, Grid. Each grid is comprised and linked by hundreds of nodes. Some nodes are external, some internal. Each node is responsible for a function of the host. The Core provides available energy to the grids. The routing and rerouting of the nodes determines the allocation of this energy. By distributing energy, the Sequencer Grid maintains the functions of the host. The secondary purpose of the Sequencer Grid is the augmentation and execution of these functions. Order. Control. Clean. Clinical. Efficient. A perfect system. For a broken world

[shadowsandself]

We hover between dream and waking. Not sleep. Never sleep. We don't even try anymore. Instead we are aware. We see and feel and smell and touch but it is beyond what it should be. How does one describe the blurred line of reality when the unreal becomes casual? We're not fragmenting and yet each of Us has been very active lately. It's especially hard when we close our eyes and perception doesn't stop. Not sure what can or should be done about it. It's likely we're heading into a bad stretch, but that's nothing new. We'll try to write here more. Falling out of the habit when some of us don't want to. D just doesn't like being on display. Ironic, really...

[shadowsandself]

I've been hesitant to say it, but we've gotten rid of Midnight. D and Calm broke him down. It took weeks and a concerted effort from everyone. This isn't something we can often do, but this time we got lucky. Calm has been doing much better as well, now that he's reclaimed his pieces. He even ventured out today to observe a conversation I was having with our co-worker. The day was slow and chill enough, we all took a turn in the sun. D needed it. He's having some trouble readjusting to the reclamation of his pieces. He has to having them though. Trying to shed them is what got the whole Midnight fiasco going in the first place. Hopefully, that's finally behind us.

[shadowsandself]

With great power

It's a very draining week. Getting worse. Our partner helped tonight. Put Demon in his place and cheered me up enough to deal with Calm and Bleak, even though it took several hours for me to settle them. Gonna sleep now. Too exhausted to write more. Two days to get through until the "weekend" then we can rest. Maybe.

[goodbyeeveryonepeacendblessings]

where’s that video of the naked crackhead literally running the speed of a moving car and I use the term literally literally he was deadass keeping up with the car

[goodbyeeveryonepeacendblessings]

[signlesstheredbloodedtroll]

Hi! Humans don’t have an eye shine, so that’s not a person!

[legitimatelala]

😨

[nyanbinyuri]

[iwannabeadored]

hey since I just told a friend this and they found it helpful: if you’re having hallucinations and are having trouble distinguishing what’s real and what’s not, use your phone’s camera and take a picture of the thing you might be hallucinating. cameras don’t hallucinate.

[iwannabeadored]

hey maybe reblog this for other neurodivergent people to see please?

[flamboyantjunkrat-deactivated20]

sometimes ur own hallucinations may show up on camera or on a recording if its an auditory hallucination, so if ur unsure and have someone you trust, you can try sending the picture or recording to them and asking them what they see/hear too!!

[mercy-misrule]

I’ve only ever had like three or four instances of visual hallucinations but a friend who has them regularly

says that the way she checks is that she takes off her glasses, and if the image is still in perfect focus, that’s a hallucination

that might not work for everyone, but it might be helpful for some!

[waylaidbyspace]

When I thought I was hearing a roommate/family member in the next room and thought they were talking to me, and couldn’t tell if they were actually in there or not and if they were actually saying those things (and usually the things they were saying were pretty bizarre and mean), if I put on headphones and blasted music and could still hear them clearly then I could tell it wasn’t them and I was hallucinating (so bascially similar to the eyeglasses post above, but on the auditory side of things). Headphones and music are great for fact-checking or for helping to block the quieter things out.

[iwannabeadored]

these r all gr8

[palpablenotion]

@strangerdarkerbetter ive seen you reblog some stuff about this before

[sorrowsfall-deactivated20190102]

I learned pretty young that my visual hallucinations didn’t have shadows and don’t interact with the environment like if it’s windy their hair doesn’t move.

[shadowsandself]

Storm tossed

Massive migraine today. Not sure what brought it on but know it was partly internal because it affected the Others. Couldn't handle today and had to leave work. Feeling guilt and fragile now. Even 9 hours later and after resting and doing cures, can still feel it. Calm says we're going to the hospital tomorrow if the pain is still there in the morning. Can't argue that. D still sounds like insane screeching radio. Probably because he's filtering out a lot of the pain. Days like today, we feel like Pinocchio and Humpty Dumpty.

[shadowsandself]

So much of what we see claims Alters cannot die. Dormancy or integration. Those are the only accepted options. They do not understand. The Others fed on each other. Fought and consumed each other. Small deaths. Integration in a way, perhaps. And then Dark died. He took the full force of The Betrayal and shielded the Physical body from death. It took it months to even begin recovering. Time beyond sanity. Time when others outside had to watch that real death did not claim the body. Time without any of us. Just a shell without thought or fear or joy. Just pain. Over a year passed before any could manifest again. Even then, they were not the same as those before. Dark. Jonathon. All the Others gone. Demon. Calm. Bleak. Midnight. Even Nameless is not the same, regardless of the memories it has inherited. So what is this taboo of death? Why do so many cling to such a fearful notion? It is so human.

[damnthedesign]

Happy Person Having a Pleasant Conversation in Public  9x12″ charcoal, acrylic, pastel

https://www.instagram.com/randyortizdtd/