Magick From Scratch

I’m avoiding my ex.

I spent decades with this man. He was kind, and he was cruel. I set boundaries and he ignored them. When I brought up grievances, he made extremely coherent arguments about why he was allowed to act the way he did.

If he hurt me, no he didn’t. If he did, it wasn’t that bad. If it was, it couldn’t be helped. All he wanted from me was for me to be “good enough” by ceasing to be myself, and becoming who he wanted me to be. In his mind, he was always in the right.

And I can’t help but think about people who frame deities *exactly* like that. That the hurting will stop when the practitioner becomes good enough. That the gods have the right to violate boundaries. That you can’t control them. That they have to be that way, to help you stop being who you are, so that you can become someone they like better. I have heard this story from too many damned people. It. IS. Abuse. It hurts. It does damage.

But the important question, with my ex, after a time, wasn’t “how could he do this?” Or “does he have the right to act this way?”

It was how much it hurt, and whether I could survive it if I stayed. And I couldn’t.

For a time, there was no safe way to leave. So I lied to myself about how bad it was. I made excuses. That was how I survived.

And what I eventually did, to get out, was to turn into a grey rock. To emotionally disengage entirely. It worked. He filed for divorce, and now I am free.

If you have priest people telling you that god, or the gods, won’t let you leave? Become uninteresting. Do the absolute minimum. Feign benign incompetence. If you can’t leave physically, leave *emotionally*. And when they get bored of you, slip out the back door.

Don’t be a dick: Do not use your big emotions to hurt other people. If you notice that you are having a big emotion, step back. Do not attempt to communicate until you are calm. Do deep breathing. Use grounding exercises.

Don’t be a weenie: when you have a grievance, once you are calm, formulate that grievance into an “I…” statement, not a “You…” statement. Not, “You’re a control freak,” for example, but, “I feel really minimized when you give me orders. I would appreciate if you would frame your ideas on a more open-ended and less directive way.” Or, “I feel unsafe when you frame that in and if/then/or else kind of way. I want to hear your ideas, but I don’t do well with things that feel like ultimatums.”

Don’t be a tyrant: If you feel passionately about a subject, ask a framing question, and let everyone give their perspective, rather than trying to insult or frighten people into agreement. It may feel efficient, but it’s invalidating to others, and builds resentment. Your group will fracture.

Remember that people are people: No one is perfect. No one is the exemplar. Putting someone above or below you is pushing them away. People make mistakes (see rule 2). People have skills to teach, and roles to play. That doesn’t make them greater-than. It may feel “respectful” to treat an elder like they are better than you, but this may make them feel isolated, and serve as a barrier to treating them with compassion. This is how sources of knowledge are lost — through burnout.

And I understand that all bigotries must, on a personal level, be unpacked and understood, if we are to get better.

But on a movement kinda level, I dunno if this is a helpful discussion.

The most important thing is to understand that White Supremacy isn’t just about being white, that it demands heterosexuality, an able body, and immutable binary gender roles.

The root, if we must find it, is that a bunch of people really did just say, “here is the hierarchy for who gets to use whom. Here is who it is ok to threaten and subdue. This is who is master, and who must obey.”

When you hear someone lament that comedy is dead because there is no one left who its ok to be cruel to, that’s pointing the root of the problem. Why do we value hierarchical cruelty?

I’m Tired All The Time, Am I Cursed?

1. Have you been drinking enough water? Did you know you need more water if you weigh more? 80 ounces of water is fine if you weight 160 lbs. If you weight 200 lbs, you need 100 ounces of water. Chronic dehydration can cause exhaustion, body aches, feeling yucky, and poor quality sleep.

2. Does your job suck? Are you stressed out constantly? Are you doing enough to manage that stress? Like meditating, exercising, doing rage rooms?

3. What about your home life? Is it toxic? Are you setting appropriate boundaries with the people you live with?

4. Have you tried doing a ray cutting to remove the influence of people who might want to control you?

5. If you did all these things, and there is no improvement, might you have a chronic illness? Have you taken inventory tests for depression, EDS, autism (which can come with sensory burnout), or similar?

6. Ok, we’ve ruled all the above out as a cause. Now let’s start to look at themes in your ideation and dreams. What, in your daydreams do you not seem to be able to control? What themes do you see in your dreams? What stories do you tell yourself? What pain have you suffered that feels invisible and like it needs to be seen?

7. Ok, none of that helped. Time for an exorcism.

And, like, there would be an entry for every common magical problem. In each case, solutions to try would start with the simplest explanation, and things to try, and slowly increase the level of difficulty or metaphysicalness, until the problem is solved.

We tell ourselves a thousand stories, and reject the ones that don’t feel like our lived experiences.

"What if a magical tradition was autistic... and sexy?"

I was thinking, today, when I was younger, my mother ragging on people who needed mental noise to drown out their own thoughts, saying that this was why society was so unenlightened, and why people couldn’t tap into their psychic senses, because they didn’t want to be alone with their own thoughts.

And now, I’m like. Yeah, mom. Trauma does that to people. There is no singular part of my life that has not righteously sucked. A combination of growing up lower class, being neurodivergent (and being severely bullied as a result), and having a narcissistic parent, led to poor self-esteem, and me latching on to people who chose to mistreat me. My husband was just the latest in a very long line of people who chose to mistreat me. And divorce is digging that up. All of it.

Does not wanting to be trapped with those feelings every minute of the day make me a less spiritual person, mom?