Expected one kind of bad news, got a DIFFERENT type of bad news! (Part 2)
This is copied from Tumblr as well, but it's fresh and hot off the press from today, October 6!
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All right, so my attempted break from the spirit-world is going about as well as I thought because like, the spirits just refuse to stop talking.
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The reading I got says that the anito have deserted me (which is why I’m having spiritual “ulcers” from stress), and yet this whole situation started with someone calling himself Haik, the Tagalog sea-god. He’s mostly been telling me sea-stories and getting extremely close to me, but I was told in the reading that the anito do NOT interact with people in such human manners? So who would he be, and why do he and other spirits hang out so much with me and assume the anito’s names? They are certainly Tagalog, since they speak it way better than me :( .
Other tricksters have a weird relationship with whoever is calling himself Haik. They keep laughing at him when they see him, and warning him that I might be “crazy” and a barely-trained spirit-worker, but I am also smart and that gives me a lot of “trickster-like” qualities myself.
Like, the tricksters constantly tell him that he and I are too much alike, and they’re waiting to see what happens with us.
I do not like being an introverted “cousin to tricksters” or whatever I am :/. This would be so much easier if I could just get a warning from the spirits ABOUT tricksters.
Behind the cut for length, spiritual weirdness, and finicky consent musings.
The anito are supposed to be detached from humans, and so writing heavily spiritual stuff like The Crocodile God where Haik marries a mortal woman and generally cares about people’s wellbeing is actually not a good thing, because it’s treating the anito as too human.
Which is a problem for me, because as my dear readers probably know from my constant bitching about lack of support, A LOT OF MY RECENT WRITING IS FUCKING SPIRITUAL. AND A LOT OF IT DEALS WITH THE ANITO, TOO.
As for “who the fuck is calling himself Haik, hanging out with me, and telling me tall tales?“ that’s even more confusing than when I started.
As mentioned above, literally none of the other tricksters seem to view him as a THREAT to me. They’re just waiting for either him to finally come clean or for me to finally find out who he is, so… I don’t know why he’s just hanging out and having misadventures.
Spirit musings are behind the “Read More” cut for some heavy relationship issues. Also, the spirits are constantly calling me and the Filipino Water Spirit both “idiots” and “stupid” for like… this whole mess. I am also called “crazy.”
So, mixed messages I keep getting about The Filipino Water Spirit:
-The tricksters just keep laughing at him and saying he fucked up BIG TIME. They never really treated him as a threat to me, they just constantly shook their heads at him and went “bro, you know she’s crazy and half-trained, but that makes her reallllllllly close to a trickster herself. Eventually she’ll find out who you really are.”
-They have also confirmed that he’s telling me SOME of the truth (in that he’s a Filipino water/sea-spirit who just likes hanging out with me). The problem is that I’ll have to beat the REST OF THE TRUTH out of him somehow, because it’s not in a trickster’s nature to just give people straight answers. Rest assured that I am constantly asking him “who are you?” and “what’s your real name?”, and it’s obviously not working.
Uh. I like to think of myself as discerning when it comes to “bad job ads” and “double-speak,” but yeah, my one weak spot is relationships because… I’m not good at those in the mortal world. Family relationships, friendships, jobs? Why would I be any better with the spirits?
-My grandmother’s spirit is usually pretty hands-off, and her “teaching” me about spirit-work is usually to tell me “IF YOU WANT THE SPIRITS TO LEAVE FOR A WEEK, JUST YELL AT THEM! YOU’RE TOO NICE!” (Hence why my “break from the spirit world” is not going that well.) But like… she ALSO does not view Filipino Water Spirit as a “threat” so much as “that guy my granddaughter’s dating, who I don’t like.” She called him an idiot for letting his not-quite-truths get so far away from him, and she wonders if he’s one of the bantay-tubig (merfolk), seeing as that’s the main suspect for impersonating a sea-god.
To be fair, my grandmother also calls me an idiot for just trusting nice, handsome men right off the bat, but he is definitely the BIGGER idiot since this whole fucking time, he knew who he was, and I did not.
-The Morrigan has flat-out told me she let him do this because 1) I really needed a close relationship like he was offering five years ago, and she was worried that I might have died(!!!), and 2) the only thing he’s NOT lying about is that he just… likes me.
I am like, the only person pointing out how the whole relationship was built on him not telling me his real identity, and certainly never CORRECTING ME on thinking that he was Haik, but the Morrigan constantly tells me that you have to walk a fine line between “lying in a relationship is bad” and “tricksters are NOT inherently bad.”
Like, she went on a whole speech that went something like this:
“He didn’t tell you his name, but he tells you stories and protects you from threats, and he has not once made you do anything you didn’t want. He had plenty of time to yank the rug out from you, but he did not. So what is ‘lying’? What is ‘rape’ or ‘consent’ or ‘fraud’ if the relationship by itself is a good one? You are too close to death on your own-you spend so much time with the spirits because this world is unkind to you, and so you stay with the spirits more than living people, and then shit happens and you spend MORE TIME with the spirits. At some point, a lot of people like you either want to die or stay up here completely.”
“And then he just came up and started… being nice and telling you stories. I don’t pretend to know Tagalog spirits, but he’s not lying about EVERYTHING. Sometimes you have to weigh people out and pick certain things they do that are good, and you hope the things that aren’t good end up okay.”
And uh. That just reminds me of what the Fianna told me about ten years ago, where my life will not be a straightforward “point A to Point B” situation. I’ll be spending a WHILE going from “point A to point D to point 32 and FINALLY reaching Point B.”
The fuckers were not lying, were they?
Part 1 is here, and any later updates would probably be on my spirit blog, the_bears_wife .