Dead Inside

“These fits of depression are torturing me

The lives that I seen won’t breathe again

A sad child of madness, they’ll never be free

Born again to die, the agonies begin…”

— W.A.S.P., The Heretic (The Lost Child)

The one album that probably contributed the most to the constant ringing in our ears as a teen is 1989’s The Headless Children by W.A.S.P., especially the first three tracks. For hours on end, we’d sit with headphones on, crank the music, and suffer alongside Blackie’s incredible voice.

It’s funny that of all the possible songs that could pop up on random shuffle of our library of over 22,000 tracks, the opening song of that album popped up just as we started writing this blog entry.

Fate’s a bitch, ain’t it?

We’ve written before about our inner world, and have mentioned that a large part of Saoirse’s section of it is actually a concentration camp.  Now, we’re not here trying to compare our lives to the Holocaust – we’ve had the privilege to sit with elders who lived through it, tattooed numbers on their arms, and nothing in our life will ever compare to that dark time in human history. But, as inner worlds go, you don’t always get to choose where your mind decides to dump you.

Saoirse’s camp is empty and crumbling. She’s the last one there.  There are no guards.  She just can’t leave.  She’s bound to the place, because it’s where she died.

She wasn’t always dead.  Once the camp did have guards.  Above the gate were the words Arbeit macht frei – “Work sets you free”.  It’s a phrase we learned as a child from our father.  (The joke at Auschwitz was “Arbeit macht frei, durch Krematorium Nummer drei” – Work sets you free, through crematorium number three.)  Saoirse was made to work.  And for most of her existence, that’s all there was to her life – she came out, worked, and then went back to her camp.  The only freedom she expected from work was through death.  Even her name is a reference to this, Saoirse is “Freedom” in Irish.

We won’t go into the trauma that “killed” Saoirse, but she found that even in death, she couldn’t escape.  It was simply her fate to work, endlessly, whether she wanted to or not. She was robbed of her very humanity, and literally feels dead inside.

Yeah, it’s kind of fucked up.

Saoirse is having a really hard time being host.  She’s really depressed. We just aren’t sure what to do about it.  We can’t fully control our switches, so it’s not like we can just slot another one of us in… and even if we could, we don’t know who.  Only Janet & Saoirse know how to do Day Job, and Janet is adamant that she’s not going to be host. That means if we’re going to earn a living, Saoirse has to work. And she’s tired of her existence.  So uh…

Not sure where we’re going with this post, or if we’ll even post it.  Saoirse is here, she’s just really dissociated.

We wish we could give hope to other systems out there, that somehow we have this all figured out…  But no, we’re down in the pit with y’all.  We don’t know the way out, we’re just here to suffer alongside you.  Some days are harder than others.  Today was a harder day.