On where I’ve been

Notes on becoming a ghost

Or, where tf has my head been at?

I share my personal stories as a form of resistance to the expectation that anyone offering healing or counseling services is healed. That expectation is a modern and ahistorical one, unaligned with anything I’ve ever read about the roles and lives of “healers” prior to colonialism and capitalism, and ofc unaligned with my own and others’ lived realities. I share it as a form of peer support.

I also share it as a glimpse into what it has looked like for me to seek both individual and intergenerational healing as a settler and psychic medium with multiple marginalizations, messily, who seeks to live in solidarity with anti-colonial and abolitionist movements and has been (and still is) learning in real time what that does and doesn’t look like, especially when faced with what some may argue (not me) are the contradictions within those movements. I do not claim any moral superiority in this, only earnestness, for whatever that’s worth in this strange world.

cw: trafficking, domestic violence, psychological abuse, colonialism, genocide, life [under eugenicist capitalism]

Image descriptions are listed below the essay. A visual access version for those who struggle with high-contrast design and large blocks of text can be read <here>.

“You just want to be a ghost. To disappear. You want to be somewhere where no one knows where you are and no one knows your name. Invisible,” said the Airbnb roommate sharing the NYC park bench with me.

I scoffed. “No I don’t. Does anything about me look like I’m trying to be invisible? I’ve tried to be invisible before. But I’m an Aquarian with Leo rising. I don’t think that’s really possible for us.” I laughed, subtly scanning his body language and checking my own.

He gave a confused look, one I observed many times over my 2 week stay in the summer of 2021. One that seemed to maybe say something along the lines of, “Wait, why didn’t that work?” Every time I saw it, I also observed a pattern. A confusing, sometimes completely opposite statement would be made with a sideways glance as though to check if it landed better. I’d think, umm…idk this feels eerily similar to a covert hypnotic confusion induction (the type politicians and businessmen are so fond of). But maybe he genuinely is confused and I’m overthinking it? Even when it was literally followed up with statements like, “I’m really interested in social engineering,” “I’m all about fear and terror,” “You’re worth a billion dollars,” and questions like, “Do you have a passport with you?”

I thought, it’s probably just in your head. Don’t make meaning out of it. Check your assumptions. Even when my tech started showing signs of being compromised. Even when I could feel psychic attacks (the occult and spirituality had been an extensive topic of conversation, too) and hear my guides saying run. They (the spirits) had also told me, repeatedly, across multiple states on the way, to pack light. Instead, I’d packed lighter and my suitcase was still too heavy to slip out unnoticed. And anyway where would I go so soon? And wouldn’t that be giving up hope?

I was in one of the most painful chronic pain flares I’d had in years, wincing as I walked, fatigue weighing heavy on my frame, feeling defeated by my attempts at exploration and assimilation into the city nearly every artist and musician dreams of living in at some point. All the cute dates I’d lined up long-distance before arriving I left uncalled as I asked myself, who among them would want this? (internalized ableism is a beast) and, how do I even begin to answer the question, “how are you?”

He knew this. He kept saying, “Let me take care of you. I’ll free you from your burdens, pay for your living and travel expenses. There’s no catch. I need someone trustworthy like you around. I just ask for your loyalty.”

“In my experience,” I said, “there’s always been a catch. Plus, the meaning of loyalty is pretty subjective. But maybe. I’ll think about it.” In the state I was in, what were my options, I wondered? All my attempts at independence post-divorce seemed to eventually fail because of illness. Maybe he really cared. I knew it wasn’t adding up, I knew I didn’t want it, but then ‘what do I know tho,’ and ‘well, what that I want can I really have anyway’, would kick in, writing clever and convincing stories about the “real” meaning of the alarms in my bodymindspirit. Friends said, “Wtf?! Block him!!” The elder I’d befriended at the local health shop read my energy and said, “You’re too trusting!”

I’d done this before. I’d learned it so young. Be charming. Be grateful. Be so good at fawning and feigning trust that you nearly forget that you don’t. Boundaries equal anger, exile or worse. Don’t close the gate, just let it swing, in hopes they don’t make it inside. He’d shared personal traumas, violences breeding violence within. He shared many things that most people refuse to hold space for. I, a lifelong spaceholder for the unheard and often-othered, listened, aware of the many systemic oppressions and horrors that weave stories like his. I did not feel separate from his pain, even the pain [of this world] that had crafted the absence of it when he faked it.

My mum, having also been a chosen mum of formerly trafficked children for years, orphaned by war and despotism fueled by U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia like she was, recognized all the red flags I was minimizing when I recounted the sequence of events over a tearful phone call. I had asked her, “But isn’t that how cycles of trauma perpetuate? By ostracizing and erasing people? Should I unblock him and be his friend?” She reality-checked my long too-porous boundaries and said,“You’re being primed. You’re in danger. Dump your sim card, change your number and passwords, and get out of town. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going until you’re there.”

When I said [in a prior essay] that I was traveling until my body told me I was home, what I meant was I was staying alive.

I can’t say how much of that was because I was being hunted. I don’t know how much I was. PTSD is like that, especially when the trauma doesn’t stop. In caution, I (mostly) deleted myself off the internet. Wiped my tech. Started going by a different name online and with friends and comrades. Refused to post or text photos of where I was when I was there. Told few where I’d been until I’d moved on. There are still old friends I haven’t given my new number or name to, who have had no idea how to reach me, because I haven’t known how I’d answer, “OMG, how have you been?!”

I survived major surgery for life-threatening PMDD, acquired a couple additional late diagnoses including neurodivergence, found ways to stay alive longer despite the instability, housing insecurity, persistent signs of surveillance and stalking (that have continued into the present for reasons unknown to me), and yet another predatory and manipulative roommate who’d divulge, uninvited, their graphic violent fantasies at the breakfast table, telling me, for example, how much pleasure it would give them to light a body on fire and how the U.S. military was a healthy outlet for their pathology.

They felt no [emotional] pain, but I sensed the pain [of this world] that had crafted the absence of it when they faked it. I, a lifelong spaceholder for the secrets of the often-othered, listened to them too, aware of the many oppressions and horrors that weave bodyminds like theirs, continuing to also hold weekly peer support space for suicidal queer PMDDers through it. Meanwhile, my own bodymind unraveled as my money, my executive functioning, and my options for escape dwindled down to dangerous margins as I did my best to play it really. fucking. cool.

Sometimes people will tell us exactly who they are and we still won’t want to believe them. Sometimes no matter how educated we are on a subject, we still won’t believe it when we see it because this isn’t what I wanted this isn’t what I needed please god not this again it can’t be this again my god is the only knowledge we can seem to access in the moment. That is not by accident; that is by design.

Last summer, as spirits visited me to help me tend to the deep wounds of immense loss I’d incurred over the past few years, I realized something:

I’d become a ghost. I disappeared. I’d gone from place to place, many not knowing where I was or who I was, and I was in a home and city where no one knew my [new] name. I’d become, in many ways, invisible.

For those who have known me as miro, hi, I’m Kris. For those who have known me as Kris, hi, I’m miro and I’ve been thinking a lot about the fine line between prophecy and the power of suggestion.

I’ve been thinking even more about how we respond when we feel threatened. How power is a dynamic thing between those with intersecting and conflicting marginalizations and how hard it is to track its movement within a room sometimes. My Aquarian af mind zooms wayyy tf out (to outer space). My Mars in Pisces in the 8th house feeeeeels into how it moves like water and how elusive and vapor-like it can be when we try to pin it down. I intuit the truth of where it lies before I have words to explain why it’s seemingly left my bodymind. And I try to consider, amygdala-willing—in this world, which one of us is more likely to be rescued if we lose our power to the other? And in the murky borders between spiritual and psychological warfare, what does autonomy and sovereignty look like? When does my free will impede upon another’s “do what thou wilt”?

Sadly, I know and love multiple people who have been trafficked, and of course even more who have been entrapped within domestic abuse. (I also know and love many who survive marginalization with consensual sex work--to be clear, this is an important distinction to me and many others.) Their stories are far more traumatic than mine, and their stories are not mine to tell. All I’ll say is that I’ve witnessed the very real barriers to our safety and our healing. I’ve seen how even more real and dangerous they are to those who are racialized, colonized and queer, trans. I’ve observed and I’ve experienced the ways people are misjudged, vilified and abandoned when they try to find any way to cope with having to confront how truly terrifying life can be, and how few people are apparently emotionally capable of witnessing that terror with them.

I’ve been asked, “How could you let that happen after everything you’ve learned?” I’ve been told that I’m blocking my own healing and stability when I’ve resisted help and I’ve been slandered as manipulative when I’ve finally caved and accepted it. There is nothing about that experience that is unique. It’s language every marginalized, targeted person has heard repeatedly, and the mental health spaces we’re urged to engage with as the ultimate resource for overcoming our tribulation are often the worst perpetrators of it. Given psychiatry’s long history of eugenics, torture of the marginalized, and asylums as sites of colonial repression, this is ultimately no surprise.

What has surprised me, though, naively, is the ways the disposability of our bodyminds within the mental health and medical industrial complexes has been replicated within my interpersonal connections and “advocacy” spaces. Intellectually, I understand that we are all subconsciously conditioned into a system of dominance that ultimately, unless we are consciously assessing and choosing to subvert power, has us aligning with and protecting power. As I’ve said in a previous letter/essay, the reality of revolution (violence, the crumble and collapse of empire) isn’t one most of our nervous systems are prepared for. Counter-revolutionary liberalism lulls us into denial that it’s needed while so many remain targeted, enslaved and exploited domestically and abroad. The most marginalized hold space for the most marginalized until crisis or death do us part.

The first lesson in my hypnotherapy program asked us the question, “What is the most powerful force in nature?” Their answer—homeostasis. This was posed as the most formidable force for all counselors and would-be changemakers, and one hypnotherapists were uniquely positioned to address, because we are trained to attune to what a client’s subconscious associates with familiarity, and are equipped with tools of re-association so that what a client consciously values or imagines for themselves can, with their consent, be conditioned through trance and the power of suggestion to feel familiar, comfortable, and therefore desirable to the subconscious. They said, the human mind would rather lie to itself to protect what’s familiar than to be honest and change what’s harmful.

Protecting those that abuse their power is something we’re all very familiar with. We learned it so young, and there are levels to it. I’m protecting the identities of the people I mention here, and some other people in my life who I’ve witnessed abuse power, because I know that we in the U.S. live within a nation-state that abuses power to such a magnitude that it is unrivaled in human history, and I do not wish the violence of our internal colonies of incarceration upon them, nor the violence of the masses conditioned to replicate them upon marginalized people, even when they are marginalized themselves.

Most people in my life would describe me as someone who does not shy away from calling out abuse of power, and in fact may, in their opinion, perceive it and call it out too much. Frankly, if we were to fully deprogram our subconscious minds from protecting abuses of power, we would not consent to the world as it is. We would revolt. We would revolt. All of us. Instead, we are conditioned into concessions, and a series of daily moral compromises to protect what little power we feel we have left for fear annihilation is the alternative.

Throughout and in years preceding this experience, long before this last year’s escalation of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, likely not a day passed that I didn’t internally reflect on the colonial project called Israel and what it exposes about the level of harm and violence that can be caused when seeking refuge from oppression. We have been begged for nearly a century by Palestinians to witness the devastating potential of trauma that’s weaponized against the also-othered, especially if or when we, as humans, believe our history of oppression is exceptional.

As a white queer frequently navigating crisis in an interracial family and interracial community, both encompassing multiple colonized diasporas, this has felt imperative to me to remember. Each time my distress and the circumstances that caused it have triggered my self-preservation, I have sought to answer within myself, with the help of god, my spirit guides and the guides within anti-colonial abolition spaces, safety at what cost? and, are there parts of myself that I can self-sacrifice to preserve the self of another who is othered? These ruminations have woven their way into my journaling, poems, lyrics, regrets. (Palestine is more than a lesson to me and Palestine will be free!!!)

Sometimes the answers to those questions meant removing myself from spaces because I had the privilege of somewhere else to go, even if only temporarily. Sometimes it’s meant being silent when I know I’m being misrepresented and threatened because I know how to be alone, I know how to move, and I know not everyone could survive the levels of isolation, uprootedness, ostracization and poverty I have in my life, or they already have and, either way, I do not wish that on anyone. Spiritually, it’s often meant transmuting instead of returning to sender (or redirecting the energy to institutions of power). Tangibly, it’s meant not. calling. the. fucking. cops.

But sometimes, the questioning hasn’t been enough. My choices haven’t been the right ones. I’ve caused harm. We are interconnected beings and struggle cannot always be siloed, contained. Even if we cannot be blamed for our conditions, even if our behavior is understandable given what we’re living, thresholds of capacity are filled and any interpersonal discontent on top of that is too much for those around us. We lose our words, our wits, our will, and our friends. Sometimes, even with distance and the passage of time, what the better choice would have been is still unclear to me and all I know is that I was earnest, and I tried, and we have not lived in a world that has often rewarded either earnestness or effort. More often, it has rewarded power—individual, societal or institutional.

I say this in the past tense because I am a writer, a hypnotist and a mystic, and I believe in words as world-building, in hypnotic suggestion and in the ability to prophesy. I believe great care should be placed in the sharing of all three lest our own unchecked assumptions and biases about their meanings cause chains of events that we did not foresee or intend, and our imaginations terraform realities we do not want to inhabit.

Some of what has transpired personally these past years I saw in dreams before it occurred. I’ve had moments where I felt I was walking through some kind of fever dream I’d foreseen weeks or years before, and I felt the grief of wondering what the point of knowing what’s coming is when you can’t stop it my god why can’t I stop it. Some of what is unfolding now, globally and domestically, I have foreseen in dreams since I was a child. Like most of us, I want to dream of a world beyond all this. Where we share and redistribute power to the level that no one is at risk of becoming a ghost, to themselves, to others, or to the land they belong to against their will. Perhaps I have not because I won’t live to see it.

Our society is designed to limit our ability to imagine any way out of oppression without becoming oppressors ourselves. Our empathy has been weaponized against the collective good by focusing solely on liberating ourselves, our madness and sadness reduced to a “mindset” issue to be transmuted into a grindset, manifesting an endless cycle of recirculating the dollar rather than abolishing the tyranny of it.

There are few things that I’m clear on at this point in my healing from these years, but one thing I do know is this: the individuals who have targeted me are ultimately not my enemy. My enemy and theirs, whether they choose to see it or not, is the extractive, abusive, colonial empire that has subconsciously conditioned us to tear each other down instead of tear it down. (Disclaimer: I do not equate accountability conversations/call-ins with tear downs—I reject white leftists’ conflict-avoidant issues with what is often called “cancel culture”.)

One of my favorite prophecies is the biblical one also quoted by Fanon—the last shall be first and the first shall be last. I think of it daily and smile when I do. Jesus is quoted speaking of it in terms of heaven, Fanon in the context of decolonization on Earth. I admit, tho I wouldn’t at this time call myself an anarchist (aside from a relationship anarchist), ideally I’d rather dream of a world beyond hierarchies and horrors. Healing over a humbling. Not because I’m so holy or because I believe nonviolence is the only valid form of resistance. As monastic and prayerful as I am at times, I am not, and it is not. But because although abuse of power may come as no surprise, I refuse to accept it as an eternal thing.

There’s a dream I had many years ago that has been on my mind lately, particularly in the context of anti-colonial struggles, wherein I was standing outside of the gates of heaven. There were hordes of us in line, in multiple lines, as concierges of sorts reviewed our identities and entrances. All of the sudden the tall white walls surrounding heaven began to shake, the material cracking and crumbling as we all looked on in surprise. Living bodies emerged from within the walls, the very barrier to heaven having been encased and enclosed around them, hiding the evidence of the horror that heaven was built upon. They stumbled out, coated in white dust, coughing, falling to the ground along with the wall. The concierges scrambled to assure us all was well as we, in shock, questioned the cost of our salvation.

When I heard this past spring that the rubble in Gaza, buried bodies and all, was to be used to build the foundation for a pier for “aid” to Palestine by the U.S., I remembered this. I groaned. I thought, too, of the Congolese covered in dust from cobalt mines powering technologies we’re told will preserve our futures and ensure our present individual liberations. (And, and, and…) I thought, no, no, god, please, make that one a metaphor, not a prophecy. [Somehow, in whatever ways, we must revolt. We must revolt. All of us.]

Whose pain are we attempting to bury or displace today to protect our own peace? (Some days it’s our own—to maintain the illusion of separation of self from other—I do not feel the pain of this world, I do not feel the pain of this world, this world does not cause me pain, I am fine it is fine this is fine I’ll be fine…) Is it possible to excise it, truly? And if it is, is it worth the cost to our souls?

What is the mouthfeel of all the pain you’ve been forced to swallow for fear of all your screams might shatter within and around you?

I pray all the architects of colonial dystopias and the many exploitations born within and from them be exposed and subverted, be they in our subconscious minds, Langley, Virginia or beyond—not to exile any other but to exhume all it’s killed within us so we can breathe life into what we deem most human. May all the disappeared be returned, may all the eras of our abuse be ghosts that can no longer haunt us.

Share your favorite non-carceral resources for domestic violence, trafficking and sex worker advocacy in the comments—I’d love to update my rad resources page to include them <3

ID 1: photo by Arielle Bob-Willis

a melanated Black person stands in an angular choreographed pose in a residential neighborhood, one foot on a crumbling sidewalk and another on a patch of dry earth within a green mowed lawn. their head of buzzed, curly light blue hair is bowed into their left arm. their right arm reaches above their crown, their green skirt balled in their fist. their right leg is adorned in mustard yellow hosiery, their left in a burnt orange hosiery, their feet in white vintage-looking loafers. a long shadow of a street light cuts diagonally across the wide lawn. beyond it is a fence, a tree line and various homes or buildings underneath a grey overcast sky.

ID 2: photo of the artist Nayoung Jeong with their sculpture ‘Cocoon’.

a large sculpture that appears to be made of wire and caked earth is suspended by a pulley against a white gallery or studio space. a light-skinned person, the artist, stands within or behind it, only their bare feet and long black skirt showing below the jagged bottom edge of the sculpture. fragments of the cracked earth material are scattered on the floor near their feet.