Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Agnes who no one could hear. Everyone around her, including her own parents, insisted that she was a boy and no matter how loud Agnes yelled "No!" they couldn't seem to hear her. They would say ""He" is just being childish, "He" is just having another fit, "He" is just being emotional..." But nobody would simply take the time to listen to what She had to say. They couldn't hear her because they refused to listen and they only saw what they wanted to see.
So, Agnes got mad. Agnes acted out. Agnes made a mess and broke things and did everything she could to make a sound until she managed to make a racket. She refused to allow all the adults around her to tell her who she was, and she refused to be ignored.
Finally, one day, somebody did seem to hear Agnes. Somebody very, very bad. A young Catholic priest interrupted one of Agnes' desperate tantrums at her parochial pre-school and heard a child just angry and confused enough for him to take advantage of without anyone available to hear her scream "No!" over and over again. So, that's just what the priest did. He and another priest did horrible things to little Agnes. They touched her and forced her to do horrible things to them. She begged them to stop. She begged for her parents, for anyone, to save her. But no one could hear Agnes, even when she screamed.
It was then that being a child no one but the priests could hear simply became too dangerous and terrifying for Agnes to bare. So, she made herself disappear, Agnes became a ghost trapped inside her own body. Agnes became a ghost trapped inside my body.
After being molested and raped at the age of five while struggling to tell the world around me that I was a girl trapped inside a boy's body, I not only blacked out any memory of the abuse for decades, I blacked out entire portions of myself along with it. But those portions didn't go away. They became what are commonly referred to as dissociative identities; multiple independent and autonomous individuals who just happen to share the same skull. Most of them stayed dormant for a long time but not Agnes.
Agnes was who I was on the inside before the abuse, before being me became just too painful to consciously bare, and she has haunted me throughout my life, with terrifying flashbacks and a deep sense of guilt over some confusing notion that I had left something or someone behind.
For a long time, I didn't know what she was. I would get repeated waking visions of a little girl in pigtails and a black velvet party dress smashing all the stained-glass windows in my church. I took to calling her the little girl with the hammer, but it was only when I gave her the name Agnes and decided to listen to what she had to say that she began talking back to me, which quickly led to her involuntarily taking over my body and giving me access to all the horrible secrets from my blurry childhood that she had kept for decades.
Three more alternate personalities or alters followed her; Max, Ophelia, and Mona; each with their own stories to tell. Now, I can hear them in my mind like the voices of other people. I can visualize them and project them like invisible friends around me. And when one or more of them gets triggered, they take control of my body while I become a silent passenger observing from the backseat of my skull.
Modern western medicine calls this a mental illness. The technical diagnosis that I've been given is 'otherwise specified dissociative identity disorder.' Many modern western Christian churches would likely accuse me of being possessed by the devil and considering the seizures and uncontrollable spinal spasms I experience under the influence of Ophelia, it can look a bit like The Exorcist. But neither one of these interpretations really does me or my alters anything resembling justice.
Pre-colonial cultures and some of the more subaltern schools of the occult out west have a somewhat more expansive and enlightened take on this state of plurality. From Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, from the tribes of Africa to the native peoples of the Americas, many cultures across the globe have long acknowledged the existence of multiple spirits inhabiting the body of a single individual. Many of these cultures continue to view dissociative identities as a form of spiritual possession but most of them aren't so reductionist as to simply label such experiences under the binary of good and evil.
Many pre-Christian and post-Christian communities' actually view these forms of spiritual possession as being sacred, positive, and even downright healing. In fact, many tribes welcome or even seek out such experiences. In Haiti and the DR, Voodoo practitioners welcome spirits referred to as Iwa to possess their bodies during sacred ceremonies to dance, speak, and help settle community grievances. In certain schools of Tibetan Buddhism, monastics and oracles respectfully embrace being possessed by protective deities to aid them in offering prophecy.
The latter practices would strongly influence western occultists in the early 20th century Theosophy Movement who embraced a practice they referred to as Tulpamancy in which an individual psychonaut deliberately creates separate, autonomous, conscious companions within their own consciousness referred to as Tulpas in order to aid them in achieving enlightenment through deep meditation.
I and many other self-identified plural people lost in the west have embraced this school of thought. Though there was very little intentionality about my own ongoing spiritual possession, I have chosen to embrace it as a means of spiritual self-care in the wake of crippling trauma, referring to myself proudly as a "Traumagenic Tulpamancer" and even having the movement's Tibetan inspired sigil tattooed on the side of my neck, just behind the jugular.
With that being said, I still think the most accurate explanation for Agnes' existence comes from Agnes herself. She continues to see herself as a ghost but refuses to accept that label as a pejorative. To Agnes, all ghosts are merely unheard, unseen, and above all else unfulfilled spiritual beings with unfinished business on this plane of existence. More than anything, Agnes views being a ghost as being fundamentally misunderstood and unwilling to accept this status as anything other than a grave injustice.
In the beginning, all Agnes wanted was to be heard, seen, and loved as a little girl albeit a very strange (aka Queer) little girl who liked to pick up snakes and sing to spiders. But after the horrors she was subjected to at the hands of powerful and merciless institutions and after decades of observing such horrors replicated across the globe in various forms of systemic abuse against silenced children, from immigration camps to active warzones, Agnes' list of grievances has grown exponentially.
I don't just get triggered by steeples and white men in white colors anymore. I get triggered every time I see Agnes in the eyes of a Palestinian child being pulled from the rubble of another American bomb, silently screaming "Why?!" into the camera. In fact, I strongly suspect that these agonizingly existential feelings of connection with the totally powerless are likely what drew me to the antiwar movement long before Agnes even had a name.
I do not believe that it was a coincidence that the onset of my DID came in the wake of October 7th. I could no longer ignore Agnes. She was on every channel and YouTube video around the clock for weeks on end. Agnes is the witness who lives inside me. A relentless conscience throwing epic fits in my skull every time she sees another ghost being obliterated by a world full of sadistic adults who have blinded themselves to their own victims. She will not rest until every lost child is heard and until all of their abusers are forced to look them in the eye while they burn.
So, this is a blood curdling cry of vengeance and solidarity, for and with all the ghosts of this dying planet, from the ruins of Minab to the elementary school bathrooms of Tennessee, from the towering walls looming over the river to the tiny corpses floating in the sea. You are seen, you are heard, you will not be forgotten. The church will be burned, and the state will be smashed. They have created too many ghosts to ignore and some of them possess bodies with big mouths and heavy fists.
Agnes lives. Babylon burns.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs for Aggy
* Help Me Somebody by David Byrne & Brian Eno
* I Don't Like Mondays by Tori Amos
* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers
* Shadow Boxer by Fiona Apple
* Everybody Does by Julien Baker
* Hey Jupiter by Tori Amos
* Lost Boys by Phoebe Bridgers
* Appointments by Julien Baker
* Home by David Byrne & Brian Eno
* Geyser by Mitski
* Lithium by the Polyphonic Spree
* Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads
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