There was an invasion in our apartment earlier this week. It happened without warning, and before any of us knew it, we were all in varying states of incapacitation. We felt powerless to move much, let alone be productive or get much accomplished.
I’m not sure what the bug was, but it killed my brain by way of my sinuses on around Tuesday evening.
Caught in a miasma of enzymes, pain, face drainage, and general blargitude, I struggled to hold onto what I felt was a renewed sense of productivity. Unfortunately, my body did not agree with this intention. My immune system was throwing haymakers at whatever had invaded my body, and that required copious amounts of spoons. I rode it out until around this morning, mostly gaming through it.
Incidentally, I have no idea why it took me so long to get around to finishing the Witcher games, and I haven’t even touched the Wild Hunt yet. Which is odd, considering I made it into the Gwent beta — a pretty solid game, so far.
Still, in spite of the best efforts of the bugs (remember, kids, the only good bug is a dead bug — do your part!), I was able to crank out the words. Only a few hundred a day, but considering I was huddled in my bathrobe reaching shakily for coffee treated with special chocolate syrup and frothy hemp milk, I still consider that a triumph. I made good use of my time.
Time management can be extremely problematic for creative types. A lot of my time over the past year has been taken up by the Work, especially since Starbucks and I parted ways. Getting to a place where I’ve felt comfortable carving out the space to invest myself in the words that need to be written seemed less important than unearthing and celebrating my truest Self, investing in the best alchemist I can be, on a daily basis. It was my niece’s input on the novel in progress that rekindled the fire in me to get it done, to entertain as well as inspire, to give people like my niece a protagonist who neither falls into old tropes nor bores the reader. It’s important, now more than ever.
Time management is undoubtedly an ‘adult’ skill, and by their nature, creative folks may not have the best grasp of ‘adult’ skills. There’s a reason for that: we haven’t lost our whimsy. We still want to play. We still prefer the worlds in our heads. The key is to utilize that energy, focus it into what we’ll manifest, and help others see what we see, wonder at what we wonder.
It can be difficult to feel empowerment. To let others in like that. To believe we’re worthy of the accolades and success.
It’s risky to manage your time to make that happen, rather than playing.
But the things we play with were created by people who faced the same struggle.
In Hamlet, Polonius is a bit of a pompous windbag. Nobody really minds when he dies (spoilers) though the ramifications of that murder kind of tip things into the downhill spiral of death and despair that defines the climax of the tragedy. But before he reaches his stabbity end, he does utter one bit of legitimately good advice.
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Lately I’ve been tying Jungian psychology into the Work that’s occupied a good portion of my time. To put it in rather simplistic terms, there’s a difference between the Self and the Persona. The Self is who we truly are, deep down, in ways that may frighten us or seem to good to be true. The Persona is who we convey ourselves to be to the outside word and those around us, something we construct to defend ourselves or exalt ourselves.
Actively building the Persona in relation to the Self can be difficult, since the Shadow tends to get in our way. Our unconscious minds, which hold our fears, our instincts, our potential for greatness as well as our terrible aspects, have the power to distort our Persona. We can be afraid of getting hurt as we have been in the past, and construct a Persona that keeps people at a distance. We can seek to be liked by those around us, and make our Persona malleable to the point of unrecognizable when we’re alone. I have seen both extremes, and my own Persona has been pushed and molded in different ways, sometimes without my being aware of it happening. I’ve had to learn how to seize it and change it of my own volition.
Because here is the hardest, most dire truth to learn.
If you do not do the work to define your Persona as an accurate reflection of your Self, someone else will do it for you.
And it won’t be true. It will not reflect your Self. It will be, at best, tarnished; at worst, it will be strung up in the public square, crucified, and set on fire, while those around either watch in satisfaction, turn away in horror, or exalt themselves with drinks and revelry to celebrate their own righteous execution of their perverse form of justice.
And you will have nobody to blame but yourself.
I’ve been there. I’ve let the expectations, the fears and doubts, the outright toxicity of others influence my Persona. I’ve let impulses and nudges of my Shadow do the same. I’ve allowed my Self to become obscured by so many things, some of my own making, some to serve the agendas of others.
We must be agents of our own change. We must find our own way through the noise of the world and the falsehoods that barrage us.
We must be true to our own Selves.
We owe it to those around us, and to who we truly are, to honestly convey the nature of the Self, and the influence of the Shadow, and the failures of false Personas, for better or for worse.
I’m working on conveying that. Of acknowledging and wrestling with those influences. Owning up to those failures.
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Hundreds of years invested in study and spellcraft, and yet, I am scrambling for time.
Teferi was never one to panic. He went about his work diligently but in an unhurried fashion. While his temporal senses were definitely in an agitated state, he himself maintained his control and delicately worked the observation of the timestream. It was precise work: one misstep or incomplete calculation, and he could throw all of Dominaria — and perhaps multiple planes — into absolute chaos.
Perhaps more than any other Planeswalker, he was keenly aware of not repeating the mistakes of the past.
He worked alone. The presence of other mages would have been a distraction, and he could afford no division of his focus. Tomes and scrolled hovered in open states around him as he made his preparations. It would be one of the most powerful and reality-bending spells of his career, but it was necessary, if his home plane was to survive what was coming.
What irked Teferi, in the back of his mind, was the vague nature of the portents. He only knew something was coming. Something both familiar and unfathomable. He’d heard rumors of eldritch horrors on other planes. His research and curiosity had made him oblivious to the details, and disinclined to investigate, until his instincts had grown to insistent to ignore. As one of the most adept archmages with time, wasting it was perhaps Teferi’s biggest pet peeve. And now, even as he made slow and careful motions with his arms to pull the threads of mana together, he felt an urgency that threatened to overcome his concentration with irritation.
There was nothing else for it. Time was running out.
Teferi closed his eyes and let his mind sink into the timestream. It was an old, familiar feeling, a comfort more than anything else. It felt like slowly sliding into a cool, running stream of fresh water, the babbling of the currents a pleasant white noise. So many events and tragedies and triumphs flashed through the mind’s eye of the archmage as he began to search for his objective.
The past was a fragile thing. As he sped through the decades gone by, Teferi kept his mind focused and calm. He had no desire to disrupt the timeline, to split things into fractured alternate possibilities. Truly, if he was to preserve the future of Dominaria, he had to preserve its past as well. He decelerated in his mental movement, his astral form holding up its hands to slow the flow of time as it had been.
There.
One hundred and three years in his past. He was in the right time. Now to the right place.
He spread his astral arms and shot across the surface of the plane like a Bird of Paradise. He left colors of mana in his wake, bleeding the magic he had gathered to make his journey. Again, precision was the watchword; overshoot his destination, and he wouldn’t have enough mana to work the spell he’d spent so many sleepless nights preparing for this moment. The deep greens and pulsing power of Skyshroud was, thankfully, hard to ignore, and he dove towards his final destination, slowing time as he did.
This was the work of split-seconds, of the tiniest fractions of time. He followed the mana, the moments, until he found who he sought. And then, he waited, counting microseconds. He watched movements in slow motion. In his mind’s eye he could see synapses firing, decisions being made, resignation settling in along with satisfaction and acceptance. His heart twinged. This would be hard. He knew it would be difficult to accept. But his choices were few and his time was short.
Now. The space between heartbeats, after the spell had been completed and before the explosion took place.
He reached out with his own mana, the power screaming from his soul. He wrapped himself around the Spark in front of him and pulled. He had done this sort of thing before, giving up his own Spark to save Dominaria when he sealed the time rift over Shiv. This was different, but the concept was similar enough that he’d been able to cobble together this spell. The Spark resisted, having accepted its fate. Teferi set his astral jaw and pulled harder. The moment stretched almost to infinity as the mages fought. Finally, Teferi prevailed, and he mentally tugged the life-line of mana that connected him to the present, taking the Spark with him.
In the present, he pushed the Spark out away from him, despite the hole in his heart calling to it. To take it upon himself would be to completely obliterate the soul attached to it, or at the very least, cast it into the dark void between planes, scattered and fragmented, shades of its former self. This was the last step of his plan, and the most difficult one, as green and white mana had never been his strongest suits.
Sweat on his physical brow, short of breath, Teferi summoned the last of his strength. He drew the remnants of his mana reserves into the final spell, and though his fingers ached and his eyes watered, he finished the incantation and pushed his power into his intent. Slowly, before his eyes, a nervous system began to appear, floating in midair, an eerie scene made all the more macabre when bones and muscles spread from the bright light of the Spark. His teeth ground together as he carefully followed the patterns of the spell and tapped the very foundations of his strength and knowledge. Finally, in a burst of power, with a soft thunderclap and an explosion of force, a body crumpled to the floor before him, naked and steaming and gasping for breath.
He managed to find the green cloak he’d set aside and spread it over the figure before him before he, too, collapsed.
“Hello… Freyalise.” The words came out cracked and halting, his mouth dry and his lungs burning.
“How…” The half-elf’s own voice was wracked with pain and confusion. “How dare you.”
“I had no choice,” Teferi said, managing to sit up. “Don’t worry — you finished the spell. Skyshroud was still saved. Your sacrifice was not in vain.” He reached up to a workbench, pulling down an eyepatch to hand to his friend.
She snatched it from his grip angrily. “By all of the gods in all of the planes, you are an arrogant son of a bitch.”
“I had —”
“No choice, I know.” She donned the eyepatch and sat up herself, pulling the cloak around her more due to the chill in the study than self-consciousness. “You could have taken my Spark for yourself, to do whatever it is you need to do.”
Teferi shook his head. “That is not my fate.”
“Hypocrite!” Freyalise spat on the floor. “You dare speak of fate when you do this to me?”
“You completed your fate,” Teferi replied. “But your particular skills, passion, experience — they are what will be needed to face what is to come.”
“And ‘what is to come,’ Teferi?”
A shiver ran down Teferi’s spine. “I don’t know.”
Freyalise stared at him, the fire in her eye changing from anger to confusion.
“You… don’t know?”
Teferi shook his head.
Freyalise paused. He could see her emotions shifting. They had been allies, once, and had come to know one another well. Her expression softened.
“You’re afraid.”
Teferi nodded.
“That’s something I never thought I’d see.” She rose, looking around the study. “Do you have any clues? Any at all?”
Teferi, slowly, got to his feet. His legs almost didn’t cooperate. He reached out with a tiny, well-practiced spell, and pulled his staff to him with his mind. His mana, at least, was returning.
Not quickly enough.
“I know that something is about to happen here that is both unprecedented and familiar. Revenge and horror wait on the edges of my perception. While I cannot discern details, I know that without you, the plane will fall.”
Freyalise studied the archmage. “What must I do?”
Teferi had always admired Freyalise. In the time leading up to her sacrifice in Skyshroud, she had put aside her selfish ambitions and her pride in light of their association. Her anger at him had been a knee-jerk reaction based on old patterns. Now that she was here, she was ready to give even more to save their home. Teferi had been counting on that, but still felt a bit less terrified seeing it for himself.
Hope is all I have.
He turned to a bookshelf nearby, stepping over the fallen tomes and scrolls he’d needed to rescue Freyalise in that split-second between completing her spell and dying for Dominaria. He found the spellbook he sought, turned, and handed it to the half-elf.
“You need to take this to Karn. Find him, bring him here, and help him study the text. He’ll understand.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s the only thing I know for sure about the future. It’s so dark for me. And I think I know why.”
Before he could elaborate, the study shifted around them. Bookshelves groaned and flagstones rattled, slowly lifting from the hardwood beneath as the grout splintered between them. The mages turned as one towards the undeniable source. Freyalise reached instinctively for a weapon, and murmured an elven curse when she found none.
“Go,” Teferi said. “Get out of here.”
“I am not going to leave you after you just saved my life.”
“I did not save your life only for you to lose it here.”
“You are too weak,” Freyalise insisted. “I can help!”
“Help me by finding Karn!” Teferi looked over his shoulder. “Please! Go!”
Freyalise stared at her ally, swallowing. Teferi managed a smile.
“Seeing you here, Freyalise… I’m not afraid anymore. I can face this. Please. Go.”
After a moment in which she might have protested one more time, Freyalise nodded. With a soft pop of imploding air, she was gone. The trail of mana lead back to Skyshroud. Teferi worked a brief spell to mask that trail, mixing it with the ambient noise of magic in his study. The effort almost made him pass out. Freyalise was right — he was weak.
But he would face this the way she had faced her sacrifice a century before. Bravely, calmly, knowing he had done all he could to save his home.
The bookshelves bent out of the way of a dark, swirling gateway to another plane. Teferi turned to face it, mouth twisting in disgust. It had neither the elegance nor cleanliness of a Planeswalker’s transition from one plane to another. Dull, shadowy metal tendrils reached through the portal’s edges to keep the portal open as small creatures crawled through, chattering one to the other in an odd machine tongue. Darksteel Myr, carrying an undeniable corruption.
Teferi gripped his staff, readying what mana he could.
It all dissipated when the figure stepped through the portal behind the myr.
He — it? — was tall. Piercing blue eyes studied Teferi, dark brown hair rustling in the unnatural wind of the portal. Beneath the sideburns, Teferi could see tendrils of darksteel sunk into pallid flesh like claws. The figure’s clothes were a hodgepodge of magical armor and bare skin, married with splotches consistent with phthisis and more swirls of seething darksteel. Teferi felt tears sting his eyes.
“No.” His voice was a whisper. “Not you.”
“Teferi of Jamuraa. You have been chosen by the Expeditionary Forces of New Phyrexia. You shall serve as an example of the glorious new order.”
The response was not conveyed in one voice, but many. He heard grinding gears, skittering legs, bubbling oil. He heard the screeching of corrupted birds, the hiss of insidious soldiers, the soft whispers of Praetors.
And, under it all, the anguish of an old friend.
“No. Venser. Oh, no.”
The figure smiled. It was a parody of an expression. It was as if the Praetors knew how human expressions worked but were ignorant of their meaning. It was a chilling sight.
“The one you call ‘Venser’ serves as our voice in this plane,” the Phyrexians said. “He has been perfected in line of our unified vision. All shall be aligned under the banner of Phyrexia. From this moment forward, you too shall serve us.”
“I would rather die.”
“You cannot serve us if you are dead. You cannot help us bring peace if you our dead. Submit to us and you shall not feel pain.”
Teferi set his jaw. He knew this battle would be short and full of anguish. But he was buying Freyalise time. He was buying Karn time. He knew others would come, to stand against a new invasion, a re-ignition of old threats to Dominaria.
But other ignitions would take place. That much, now, he could see.
They were lights of hope in the darkness of his future.
“Come on,” Teferi said to the Phyrexian marionette made of his old friend. “Show me this ‘new order’ of yours. And I will show you how Dominaria will respond.”
The ‘perfected’ Venser hadn’t stopped smiling.
“There is no response to Phyrexia save submission. And you will submit just as Dominaria will submit. All shall be Phyrexian. All shall be beautiful. All shall be peace. That is the future you cannot see. Come; let us make you a part of it.”
Mondays are for making or talking about art.
Credits: Magic the Gathering copyright Wizards of the Coast. Teferi, Temporal Archmage art courtesy Tyler Jacobson. Freyalise, Llanowar’s Fury art courtesy Adam Paquette.
Let me say this first: the marking of days, months, and years is no more or less arbitrary than marking distance. The road is the road, and the milestones along it do not change it; it is how we measure the distance we’ve covered in our journey, and what lays ahead for us. How we mark time is very similar, save for the fact that we mere mortals have no clue as to how far we have to go. But in terms of where we’ve been, it helps to have a scale along which we can track our changes, our low points, and our triumphs.
So it is with the year a good number of us call “2016”.
During this time we’ve marked, there’s been so much loss, so much hardship, so much disappointment. I’ve dealt with this on a deeply personal level, as well as the general one. It takes time to process grief, and to transition from reflection to actualization, especially in a society that is focused more on monetary profit and material gain than personal growth or societal advancement. The expectation is that we will live to work, rather than working to live, and that we will kowtow to the whims of others, instead of taking care of our Selves.
The importance of owning our mistakes & drawbacks, and using negative events & energy as fuel for moving forward, has been brought home to me in a very real, visceral way in the past year. I’ve heard years like this one past referred to as ‘burning years’. As a Fire sign and a person feeling a draw towards the transformative potential of matter as well as energy, I’ve taken this interpretation to heart. When a final metaphorical nail was driven into a past to which I was clinging, I made the conscious decision that this time, this time, I would not succumb to my head weasels and become drawn into a miasma of despair from which I might not be able to save myself.
I did not lay in my coffin to decompose. I set that motherfucker on fire.
The inferno of the past is lighting the way to the future. It’s a path I’m walking as confidently and consciously as I can.
I’m so much more aware of my surroundings, those around me, the impact I have on people. I’m regaining things I’ve lost and sowing seeds for success in soil I’d let gone to seed. And I wouldn’t be capable if I hadn’t had so much twisted and broken that I had to burn away.
Between that, and the character of those around me being truly revealed, in a way, I’m grateful for all that happened.
I look to the luminary examples of the musicians, actors, and thinkers we lost. I admonish myself to be and do as well as they would expect, to live up to their example, and perhaps, to exceed them.
I’m curious to see what I will do, and what fruit will bear, in 2017.
So much loss has happened since the last time we celebrated a new year. So many luminaries have left us behind. But if we’re personifying the year of 2016, we can envision it holding back at least one more devastating punch to the emotional gut. And this one… this one hurts. It hurts a lot.
Carrie Fisher has died.
Putting my thoughts on this tragedy together is proving difficult. Star Wars has had a profound impact on my life. It is one of the first science fiction universes to which I was introduced, and many of its elements did and do resonate with me on a fundamental level. Princess Leia was a huge part of that from the very start. Back when the episode subtitled “A New Hope” was merely called “Star Wars,” the tall, white-robed, cinnabun-haired diplomat was a strong, defiant, patient, and even deadly character. She was, in a word, iconic.
Time did not dilute this image. While many may point to her character being forced into a position that could potentially be disempowering and humiliating, Leia rose up against her would-be master, and (bolding for emphasis here) strangled the lecherous slug to death with the very chain he was using to keep her prisoner. I cheered, as a child, when I saw this. And while, yes, as I grew there was physical appeal in the salacious nature of the outfit, I still felt more engaged and delighted by what she did while wearing it than simply seeing it on her. Leia was never an object. She was a person. And she remains so today.
Carrie Fisher managed to finish filming Leia’s scenes for Episode VIII before she left us, so we’ll be seeing her again later next year. But I am not going to let people forget that Leia is not her only legacy. Princess Leia fought Imperial forces bent on subjugating the galaxy.
Carrie Fisher fought forces within her own mind bent on controlling who she was and who she could be.
Bipolar disorder is an absolutely insidious and terrifying disease. The emotional swings and disruption to life that go along with them are devastating. It can lead to incongruous behavior. Outside observers can even attribute other disorders and explanations to what they witness during serious manic or hypomanic episodes, or disregard major depressive episodes as a form of manipulative overacting. And, in general, a huge stigma exists regarding even discussing a condition like bipolar disorder, and securing effective and proven treatment is incredibly difficult.
When she wasn’t struggling against her inner conflict, she was offering help and hope to those fighting their own. Many people see what occurs during mixed states, rapid cycles, and the extremes of the moods involved as a battleground. And navigating the trenches of said battleground is something that many people find intimidating, if not impossible. But someone who has been in those trenches, trying to navigate a minefield of awful moments and terrible choices and digging foxholes to try and escape the horrors of it all, can relate to the struggle. And Carrie Fisher did her best to do what she could for others. Just before she died, she wrote this letter to a fellow victim of the disorder.
“We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges,” she wrote. “Think of it as an opportunity to be heroic – not “I survived living in Mosul during an attack” heroic, but an emotional survival. An opportunity to be a good example to others who might share our disorder. That’s why it’s important to find a community — however small — of other bipolar people to share experiences and find comfort in the similarities.”
In light of her death, the way she closes the letter will give you chills: “Move through those feelings and meet me on the other side. As your bipolar sister, I’ll be watching.”
I feel that, for those of us left and still dealing with these challenges, our duty is to take up that vigil. And, for my part, we may not always be on the stable side of things. But we can always make it back there. It’s a hard road. A long one. And it’s often fraught with obstacles that we inadvertently placed in our own way. Human beings are very good at creating problems for themselves to overcome. We generate conflict on flimsy pretenses to justify our own agendas. We demonize those we see as ‘other’ in order to lionize ourselves and make ourselves the heroes in some sort of dichotomous, simplistic narrative. We’ve all done it. Some of us might even do it again.
We owe Carrie Fisher better than that.
I for one choose to keep talking about what happens in my head and my heart. I for one choose to keep telling my story, even the parts that people don’t want to hear. I for one will stand up for those too weak or scared or confused to stand on their own, and tell them — and you — that we are not alone. I for one choose to believe that light can prevail over darkness, and that whatever it is, the Force is strong with us.
We’ll miss you, Carrie. Your fight is over.
We’ll take it from here.
As Princess Leia put it, “somebody has to save our skins!”
Wednesdays are for discussing the whys and wherefores of our world.
