And I Am Now Nothing

Rage and grief are sisters clinging to each other under endless stormy skies filled with the hurtful words that make drown out anything beautiful or safe. And sometimes it feels like too much and I have been guilty for many years of just slamming the lid of the box shut and going back into survival mode because that's what had gotten me this far.

Right?

I have challenged myself this year to pick up my old skills and hobbies, to relearn them and see if they fit. This comes with a lot of fear because I have had to rebuild so much motor skill and function in the last 5 years and I have avoided things like illustration and painting.

Small successes today.

As it often happens, I've chewed on an idea long enough that I feel the need to put words to it. When I returned to college during COVID, I dove headfirst into a degree in comparative religion because weaponizing my special interests always ends up working out for me and I enjoy the hell out of it. If you don't think that's interesting this is your warning to scroll. XD

It's no secret that I'm one of those witch bitch types and I often find myself drifting into online witchy/pagan spaces. After a few years in the trenches of pagan Tumblr in the 2010s, I have little interest in online community as it pertains to spirituality, but I am an interested observer. And I think this bears saying.

I am not here to judge, as I am admittedly, going to describe myself as well, but you may want to buckle in your feelings for this.

There is a common character that we have all met. She is white, she either grew up conservative Christian or Evangelical, maybe she had a conservative marriage once. But no longer, now she is healing herself and finding new meaning in a spiritual practice that appeals to her in the form of goddess or earth worship., maybe she has even delved into Reconstructionist pagan practices and is trying to learn from the origins of that spirituality. That's all well and good, but alternative spiritual practices are mostly self-driven- and the only religious experience/context she has ever experienced has been under the rule of Christianity- which itself has been an active vehicle for imperialism, racism, and patriarchal abuse for over a thousand years.

One of the largest criticisms of pagan and occult practitioners is the rampant appropriation of closed spiritual traditions, most notably closed spiritual traditions from BIPOC cultures and communities- I'm looking at you Gardner, Kaldera, and Conway. Hell, we can throw Buckland in there as well. After years interacting and then studying paganism, one of the largest problems I often with the white pagan community as a whole is a screaming demand to be allowed access to, or a "spiritual calling" to a closed or inherited practice that they have no business even looking at. (Flowers, I'm looking at you too but there's a special rant for you, you Nazi.)

Exvangelicals flock to paganism but they often do so in a reactionary way, and don't do the work to deconstruct the colonization, the damage, the values, the racism, the patriarchal values- then all that has been achieved is an orthopraxic swapout, and the harm continues. Putting it frankly, it's colonizer behavior gone unchecked for too long and too couched in being fragile about a persons religious practice, especially when unpacking past religious trauma.

The process of editing and shooting the shit, however, is so mind-numbingly tedious that I would rather eat tin foil than sit here for another 35 minutes arguing with Adobe about where a frame marker needs to sit in the timeline.

Keeping in mind, also, that this is absolutely a skill issue and my reticence towards practicing my craft is the actual direct cause of my usual frustrations around creating art in general.

Yes, eldest daughter, incompetence was not tolerated in your early life but we're also unlearning that these days so if you don't get it right the first time, feel free to throw a reasonably sized tantrum about it and then figure out where you went wrong, because someone else has definitely made the same mistake before.

The world isn't actually made of spun sugar.

Coffee probably wasn't a good idea this morning...

Thank you. :) I am doing well, it's been a while.