Life as a siren

Trinidad is a siren on the spectrum. Her spirit comes from the ocean. She is a heart savant with ultra-sensitive electromagnetic radiation senses and an eidetic memory. For Trinidad these traits are not mystical or mysterious. They are ordinary but rare, and misunderstood. With her sensitivities, Trinidad can sense a wider part of the electromagnetic spectrum like many other Autistic people. As a child with mermaid origins, Trinidad was nonverbal and experienced periodic Autistic catatonia. As an adult she experiences selective mutism and other physical limitations. She hopes to dismantle misconceptions about Autism, especially modern, materialist re-tellings of the ancient Autistic experience.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Trinidad was born during a powerful storm, like Nikola Tesla. In fact, they share the same birthday. Typhoon Gading flooded her parent’s home on July 10th, 1986, the morning that Trinidad was to be born. A sirena, a sea being or merfolk, came to bless her birth underwater. Trinidad’s birth mother, who is also her namesake, is known locally in her seaside neighborhood in the Philippines as la sirena due to her own birth story. Her family believes that this sirena showed up to help their fellow mermaid who was in labor. The sirena helped move debris with her father and this allowed the flooded home to drain. Then, Trinidad was born. Her parents gave her to another Filipino family from California so that she could go to school and live a better life away from the detrimental poverty of her imperialist-battered motherland. Those who are blessed by diwata like the sirena are bound to have difficult but fulfilling lives. One of the consequences of being from the sea is that these people can interact with spirits and other beings from neighboring realms. Trinidad’s mother knew that she would have a hard life abroad, especially due to Trinidad’s destiny as an anitera, or diwatera, or one who works with the dead.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Trinidad renounced the Catholic Church before she reached high school. The Catholic beliefs and teachings that her adoptive parents tried to instill in her at a young age greatly contradicted the knowledge that Trinidad contained in her mind as a savant. As a savant—or an Autistic person who seems to have been born with extraordinary skills or knowledge— Trinidad had a firm understanding about complex subjects, like past lives and complex emotions, with evidence showing up as early as age three. She was a nonverbal, hyperlexic Autistic child. This means that she only spoke with a couple of safe people but showed signs of advanced vocabulary acquisition and application. Some of this evidence showed up in her many childhood spiral notebooks that depicted stories of people’s suffering and the ways people experience injustice in our world. She learned through meditation and time with her guides that many religions that require patriarchal initiation, permission, are also the religions that oppress the poor and disenfranchised.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Trinidad started meditating in early childhood. Her spiritual teachers over the years were elder kitchen witches, bone-setters and diviners, curanderas and root workers in Texas, Filipino hilots and herbalists, and Buddhist lamas and laypeople. Her teachers instilled in her the animist understandings of the world as well as the secret teachings, rituals of indigenous Buddhism. She has Buddhist empowerments to work with her principal deities, Tara and her wrathful forms, as well as sky-walkers (also known as apsara, Dakini or orbs). Her life as a devout layperson is modeled after a Thai laywoman, the honorable Upāsikā Kee Nanayon. Trinidad was personally initiated by the deities Dalikmata (Inanna/Tara/White Buffalo Calf Woman) and Magauayen (Tiamat) as a child. Some of Trinidad’s most valued spiritual teachers were nonverbal disabled people that she worked with as an independent skills coach and supported living aid.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

After years of disciplined study and practice Trinidad pieced together the savant aspects of her disabilities with her relationship to the spirit world. Her efforts to de-colonize her life naturally included a healthy examination of the spiritual practices that she grew up with and practices that better suited Trinidad’s goals of shaping the world around us because we could, by connecting with the spirits around us and caring for the land. Indigenous animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and folk belief systems helped her solve the puzzle of her savant traits— traits that are rarely studied in children and people of color.

Trinidad developed her own practice as a diwatera. works predominantly with necromantic, war, and siren diwata by borrowing from Buddhism’s open practices and also its secret teachings. She is also connected to the spirit of a giant who lived in a lagoon in the Philippines and who helped the local fishermen for over five hundred years.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Trinidad has had three Near-Death-Experiences (NDE) and has guided her community as friends and family died over the years. She shares her knowledge of death and the afterlife, communicating with spirits, and consciousness at her art workshops and lectures. Her life as a diwatera includes assisting her friends, family, and community with difficult life transitions like illness and death, and with difficult emotions like grief. She offers intuitive and art-making sessions over Zoom as well as in-person community workshops.

Her comics and activism are merely threads of her mediumship.

Trinidad’s favorite mediums include Angela Angel, Yeshuani, Lolo Lavish, and La’Arni Ayuma.