Written 2022 by Anima System Member, Pilot V
PRELUDE
When you are told you are mad at the age of 13, your sense of reality becomes dislodged. You wonder what is real when the things you understood to be real are being read back to you by a doctor as signs of mental illness. If your whole life up to that point becomes distilled into a diagnosis, you become self-conscious about normalcy to a sickening degree. What is normal if the mental health professionals have informed you that you are expressly abnormal?
When you are told you are mad at the age of 13, your sense of reality becomes dislodged. You wonder what is real when the things you understood to be real are being read back to you by a doctor as signs of mental illness. If your whole life up to that point becomes distilled into a diagnosis, you become self-conscious about normalcy to a sickening degree. What is normal if the mental health professionals have informed you that you are expressly abnormal?
This was my reality as a youth at the turn of the century seeking help for depression and getting much more than I bargained for, as a result of being honest about my lived experiences with therapists and psychiatrists. I have since experienced being within the world of mental health care for over two decades — off and on. During that time I’ve suffered numerous harms at the hands of both ill intended and well meaning mental health care providers. Paramount among these abuses and oversteps was the blatant removal of my humanity — I was treated like a curiosity at best in the vast majority of my experiences. Many of these so-called professionals responded to my experiences or medical chart by degrading me with remarks questioning my intelligence or refusing to take anything I said seriously (because I was assumed too mad to be worth listening to). The result of this, among many other struggles and traumas, was a loss of a sense of self-worth that was once so total, life itself felt meaningless. My work now turns to face these old wounds and the pains that continue to haunt my bones and nerves. SPIRITS WE ARE is the initial response to this feeling of worthlessness and of being less than human (whatever that may be).
Part I: (Re)Claiming My Home On The Margin
I began wearing masks when I was seven years old — not literal masks, but the sort of masks you create to hide the truth of yourself. These masks grew in size and number as I became older. Each year new masks were added, ever increasing as I learned that more and more of myself was considered unacceptable, shameful, bizarre, and abnormal. My entire world provided me with feedback that what I am must be hidden — family, peers, teachers, doctors, therapists, and even strangers reinforced existing masks or demanded new ones. In this way I became someone trained and tailored by the world around me. My identity was lost to the external world — what remained was kept locked away deep inside the muscles and blood of the body where no one else could find it.
What others saw of me was me, but it was a highly orchestrated and repressed self. I was something of a caricature of what I came to understand a normal person to be; guided by years of intensive therapy and modeled after observations of friends, family, and even television. By my mid-twenties I was heavily burdened by the weight of so many masks layered one upon the other. I could no longer tell the difference between truth and mirage.
My survival strategies were clearly failing me by the time I’d reached my late twenties. I was disillusioned and lost, grasping for some idea of who or what I was. I was too afraid to look back at my past, so I attempted to create new masks of my own imagining. Masks that I thought would help me to remember who I was, yet they only served to weigh me down further. Depression and anxiety have always been the result of this juggling of masks and I soon sank into the deepest depression I’d known since my late teens and early twenties. I was utterly lost both within myself and in my daily life. I spent several years exploring ways to address this resurgence of anxiety and depression, eventually returning to pharmaceutical medications. This provided some relief, but the sense of being lost and weighed down never went away.
One day, a mask began to crumble apart. Slowly at first and then more rapidly. Then another began to crumble. But it wasn’t the medicines that had spurred this, it was a return to something I once knew in my whole body. Something that, as a child, I had not questioned until the society I live in sowed seeds of doubt in me. This something was animism — a return to acknowledging spiritual presence in my daily life. This one simple shift began a chain reaction that has gradually been shattering and tossing asunder the myriad of masks I’ve been burying myself under for decades. It has been a joyous and excruciating process; to rediscover the truth within and to be made raw and naked with each falling mask. Like shedding an exoskeleton, outgrown, then lying white and soft in the cover of shadows as the armor hardens enough to withstand exposure to the bright world.
Up until very recently, my spirituality was never reflected back to me as a positive thing. It was a thing to keep hidden, to avoid being called “evil” or “mad”. The most difficult masks to shed have been those that I created to avoid being labeled as mad. After many decades of carefully crafting them, I’ve held them tight to my being. Yet, like jumping into cold water, there is that release into joy after the initial shock of change. With the masks discarded (and medications ended) the true self can be felt in the body once again — it is a sort of rebirth. In truth, it is a reawakening to an awareness of things that had been numbed and blocked out. Things that, once awakened, have shifted the course of my life towards everything I’ve tried to avoid. Things that demand to no longer be ignored, forgotten, repressed, and hidden. Things that require me to confidently claim my home on the edges of the society I live in. Nothing has felt more daunting nor more necessary than this.
What others saw of me was me, but it was a highly orchestrated and repressed self. I was something of a caricature of what I came to understand a normal person to be; guided by years of intensive therapy and modeled after observations of friends, family, and even television. By my mid-twenties I was heavily burdened by the weight of so many masks layered one upon the other. I could no longer tell the difference between truth and mirage.
My survival strategies were clearly failing me by the time I’d reached my late twenties. I was disillusioned and lost, grasping for some idea of who or what I was. I was too afraid to look back at my past, so I attempted to create new masks of my own imagining. Masks that I thought would help me to remember who I was, yet they only served to weigh me down further. Depression and anxiety have always been the result of this juggling of masks and I soon sank into the deepest depression I’d known since my late teens and early twenties. I was utterly lost both within myself and in my daily life. I spent several years exploring ways to address this resurgence of anxiety and depression, eventually returning to pharmaceutical medications. This provided some relief, but the sense of being lost and weighed down never went away.
One day, a mask began to crumble apart. Slowly at first and then more rapidly. Then another began to crumble. But it wasn’t the medicines that had spurred this, it was a return to something I once knew in my whole body. Something that, as a child, I had not questioned until the society I live in sowed seeds of doubt in me. This something was animism — a return to acknowledging spiritual presence in my daily life. This one simple shift began a chain reaction that has gradually been shattering and tossing asunder the myriad of masks I’ve been burying myself under for decades. It has been a joyous and excruciating process; to rediscover the truth within and to be made raw and naked with each falling mask. Like shedding an exoskeleton, outgrown, then lying white and soft in the cover of shadows as the armor hardens enough to withstand exposure to the bright world.
Up until very recently, my spirituality was never reflected back to me as a positive thing. It was a thing to keep hidden, to avoid being called “evil” or “mad”. The most difficult masks to shed have been those that I created to avoid being labeled as mad. After many decades of carefully crafting them, I’ve held them tight to my being. Yet, like jumping into cold water, there is that release into joy after the initial shock of change. With the masks discarded (and medications ended) the true self can be felt in the body once again — it is a sort of rebirth. In truth, it is a reawakening to an awareness of things that had been numbed and blocked out. Things that, once awakened, have shifted the course of my life towards everything I’ve tried to avoid. Things that demand to no longer be ignored, forgotten, repressed, and hidden. Things that require me to confidently claim my home on the edges of the society I live in. Nothing has felt more daunting nor more necessary than this.
Part II: we remembered ourselves
I took it for granted that I was never alone — that there were spirits who orbited and shared this one fleshy body. It felt normal until I was told it wasn’t. That there should only ever be an “I” and never a “we” when talking about things the body experiences. That the only voice echoing inside the mind should be my own. (But even that voice wasn’t the same as the one that spoke words aloud with the body’s physical mouth.) It took over two decades to accept that this is my reality (our reality) and to see how important it is to remove the masks of imagined normalcy. To be human is to have varied experiences as diverse as the stars in our universe — normalcy is not monolithic.
As the masks fell, our faces rose to the surface of the dark pool of the mind. At first, it was difficult to understand what was happening — I thought that I had shoved this particular part of my past so deep it could never resurface. Yet there they were, starring at me from my sketchbook pages. The same people I sketched over and over again as a youth — the ones I shared my body with — were all there. I was thirty and sitting in my therapist’s office. She had asked that I draw a portrait of myself and all of my aspects (not knowing I had ever identified as “we”). I was shocked by my own drawing. For nearly ten years I had ignored them and told myself they did not exist. But they remembered themselves and they felt that they very much do exist.
From that point on there was no going back to the denial and forced forgetting I had imposed upon us all. This one sketchbook drawing, by opening a door I had long ago padlocked shut, began a several years journey of rediscovering ourselves as multiple. This time the journey was one we directed, rather than following the clinical frameworks presented by a psychiatrist or therapist. So began the challenge of rejecting the labels of madness that had been forced upon us; the first of many acts of healing.
It’s a powerful thing to have agency over one’s own healing. The feelings of hopelessness subside and there is an understanding that healing is not held as a commodity by doctors, therapists, or pharmacies. Suddenly healing exists within the self, the home, and the family (however that may be defined). It’s in this space that labels dissolve and give way purely to experience and getting to know the self. Arriving in this space wasn’t easy and it took several years to be able to remain there for any significant length of time. After five years of concentrated focus — seeking outside help at times — the self has found a way to stand in this space of self healing as a whole, multiplicious being.
Now the self is recognized once more as “we”, as having several “I’s” with unique perspectives, desires, interests, and propensities. The difference this time is the conviction to stand in the face of “madness” and assert our humanity in spite of labels that dehumanize. If we are to heal then we must live authentically, regardless of societal pressures. This last piece is particularly important because it extends beyond the self — authenticity can be recognized by others and can build invisible bridges between people. Invisible bridges are the connections that occur between two or more people with a shared experience and may occur without the awareness of the one offering the bridge. Essentially, by living authentically, one can offer bridges to those who are unable to live authentically (out of fear, repression, denial, etc). Indeed, these invisible bridges have been extended toward us many times and we feel compelled to do the same for others.
We know that we are not alone in our experiences: that many others know themselves as collective beings, perhaps even as spiritual and gender variant beings on top. We also know that we are in a unique and privileged position to have the ability to be authentic (due to our environment and life circumstances). Thus, in presenting ourselves as we are, we are not looking only to be seen and recognized as ourselves, but to reach out to others who may be fearful, forced into silence, confused, or feeling alone — all as we have felt before. By sharing who we are we desire not only to reclaim our humanity but to affirm that our experience is merely a facet of the multifarious human experience.
Being more than one self, sharing a body, and channeling spirits have not always been considered signs of madness in human societies (as remains true today in some cultures and communities). Yet, when one lives in a society that does define such things as madness, they are left to make sense of their experiences alone or through the mental health system. This path led us to identify with labels of madness and eventually a rejection of the self and our experiences altogether. However, when we chose to take a different path — one that went against the current of our society — we found positive reflections of our experience described in history and by people living today as healthy multiples, spiritual practitioners, artists, or healers. These stories, however, are not always easy to find and many were only learned after several hours of reading academic anthropological papers or stumbling upon the writings of spiritual healers from cultures that have maintained some distance from modern conventions. Given the obscurity of positive reflections of internally collective experiences (such as multiplicity), we strive to be one more point of light in the vast human web, in the hopes that we may connect with someone else who is afraid to shed their masks and accept themselves as human (not a mad human, just human). As we have been taught by our ancestors: to heal the self is to heal others, to heal others is to heal the self.
As the masks fell, our faces rose to the surface of the dark pool of the mind. At first, it was difficult to understand what was happening — I thought that I had shoved this particular part of my past so deep it could never resurface. Yet there they were, starring at me from my sketchbook pages. The same people I sketched over and over again as a youth — the ones I shared my body with — were all there. I was thirty and sitting in my therapist’s office. She had asked that I draw a portrait of myself and all of my aspects (not knowing I had ever identified as “we”). I was shocked by my own drawing. For nearly ten years I had ignored them and told myself they did not exist. But they remembered themselves and they felt that they very much do exist.
From that point on there was no going back to the denial and forced forgetting I had imposed upon us all. This one sketchbook drawing, by opening a door I had long ago padlocked shut, began a several years journey of rediscovering ourselves as multiple. This time the journey was one we directed, rather than following the clinical frameworks presented by a psychiatrist or therapist. So began the challenge of rejecting the labels of madness that had been forced upon us; the first of many acts of healing.
It’s a powerful thing to have agency over one’s own healing. The feelings of hopelessness subside and there is an understanding that healing is not held as a commodity by doctors, therapists, or pharmacies. Suddenly healing exists within the self, the home, and the family (however that may be defined). It’s in this space that labels dissolve and give way purely to experience and getting to know the self. Arriving in this space wasn’t easy and it took several years to be able to remain there for any significant length of time. After five years of concentrated focus — seeking outside help at times — the self has found a way to stand in this space of self healing as a whole, multiplicious being.
Now the self is recognized once more as “we”, as having several “I’s” with unique perspectives, desires, interests, and propensities. The difference this time is the conviction to stand in the face of “madness” and assert our humanity in spite of labels that dehumanize. If we are to heal then we must live authentically, regardless of societal pressures. This last piece is particularly important because it extends beyond the self — authenticity can be recognized by others and can build invisible bridges between people. Invisible bridges are the connections that occur between two or more people with a shared experience and may occur without the awareness of the one offering the bridge. Essentially, by living authentically, one can offer bridges to those who are unable to live authentically (out of fear, repression, denial, etc). Indeed, these invisible bridges have been extended toward us many times and we feel compelled to do the same for others.
We know that we are not alone in our experiences: that many others know themselves as collective beings, perhaps even as spiritual and gender variant beings on top. We also know that we are in a unique and privileged position to have the ability to be authentic (due to our environment and life circumstances). Thus, in presenting ourselves as we are, we are not looking only to be seen and recognized as ourselves, but to reach out to others who may be fearful, forced into silence, confused, or feeling alone — all as we have felt before. By sharing who we are we desire not only to reclaim our humanity but to affirm that our experience is merely a facet of the multifarious human experience.
Being more than one self, sharing a body, and channeling spirits have not always been considered signs of madness in human societies (as remains true today in some cultures and communities). Yet, when one lives in a society that does define such things as madness, they are left to make sense of their experiences alone or through the mental health system. This path led us to identify with labels of madness and eventually a rejection of the self and our experiences altogether. However, when we chose to take a different path — one that went against the current of our society — we found positive reflections of our experience described in history and by people living today as healthy multiples, spiritual practitioners, artists, or healers. These stories, however, are not always easy to find and many were only learned after several hours of reading academic anthropological papers or stumbling upon the writings of spiritual healers from cultures that have maintained some distance from modern conventions. Given the obscurity of positive reflections of internally collective experiences (such as multiplicity), we strive to be one more point of light in the vast human web, in the hopes that we may connect with someone else who is afraid to shed their masks and accept themselves as human (not a mad human, just human). As we have been taught by our ancestors: to heal the self is to heal others, to heal others is to heal the self.
Part III: Spirits We Are
In the late 1970s, folklorist Luisa Selis interviewed ‘Antonia’, a 75-year-old maghiarja (sorceress) from central highland Sardinia. Antonia reported being possessed by three spirits who helped her with her healing work: a priest, who helped her foretell the future; a physician, who helped her cure illnesses; and a bandit, who helped her recover lost livestock.
Trancing healers and diviners like Antonia demonstrate a link with pre-Christian practices that was often recognized by their fellow villagers. About one such healer, an informant of De Martino surmised ‘these are people who were born before Jesus Christ . . . [they] know ancient science, and maybe remember something that [they] tell us now’.
— Excerpt from Witchcraft, healing and vernacular magic in Italy by Sabina Magliocco
The Navigator called out to his ancestors, begging them for guidance along a darkling path made cryptic by fear. Fear of madness once drove them apart when The Navigator decided calculated conformity was the only way to survive this world. He hid them even from himself with clever lies. But all lies degrade eventually and nothing can keep the truth from seeping out of the cracks like the morning sun sifting through pine needles to the forest floor.
He gave tears as offerings to his ancestors. They answered: “We have always been with you. We will be with you always.” He had forgotten their whispers, their forms that pressed against the skin from within — desirous for sensation and the pleasure of living. He had even forgotten himself, once mute and battered, trapped in solitary chaos — a disturbed presence the body expressed without words. The body began to remind him of the shattered being he had arisen from.
The body knew that the pain The Navigator felt within the body was not from true illness. The pain came from the others within, from being forgotten and ignored. They cried and turned the stomach in knots and kept the body awake for days. They called out through visions of terror and suffering, begging to be remembered. “Remember us, your blood is our blood. Remember us, your darkness is our darkness.”
The Beloved Guide, the Sun Darkened Moon, asked gently with a voice like black soil and the warmth of shaded summer sand. “Remember me. Your heart is my heart. Your eye is my eye. I will guide you in darkness.” The Navigator welcomed his old friend, the one who had never led him astray even in the most treacherous journeys. How had he forgotten? They embraced and pressed forehead to forehead.
The Healer, Eagle of the Sea Mountain, rises in fiery passion from weighted shrouds of shadow. Her blood pulses through the body’s veins as she dances, reveling in feeling the Earth beneath bare feet and Fire at her back. The crow returns her voice to her and she cries out in lament. “Remember me! My brother, my twin. Our blood is one.” The Navigator rejoices in reunion with his twin, her ancient soul overlapping his. How had he forgotten? They embraced and sang.
The Shapeshifter, Burden of Our Blood, weighs heavy upon the body, calling through soured guts and flesh that burns without heat. They showered The Navigator with visions of horror, regret, and chaos. “Remember me! I am the wound of your fore-bearers, the darkness that follows all. I am your true muse and bringer of visions — without me you are blind.” The Navigator recoils in fear at first, to see the one who has brought such turmoil in the past. He knew how he had forgotten: it was deliberate. But how had he missed the truth? They faced each other as equals and The Navigator promised there would be no more forgetting.
As spirits we are united around the fate of this single human body. We stumble as we walk with one foot on the Earth and one foot led by the spirits. We shudder beneath our collective weight, invisible to the people around us. We weep for the losses of what we can never return to. There is no ease or expectation of comfort each day, regardless of what surrounds us. Nevertheless, we can imagine no other way.
Our path is one of ecstasy and joy for the act of living. Our way is winding as we weave ourselves into the fabric of the world. Our voices sing of compassion as we extend what simple gifts we have to those we walk the Earth with. Our body is a ship with a course set by those who stitched our bones and strung our nerves. There is no grand destination, only to live, to breathe, and to tell stories of balance in turmoil. We are merely a joining of the silk strands, one of billions of points in an infinite web.