Random Chaos

I'm baked and I wanna talk witch shit for a second.

(For those of y'all who have missed the memo—I'm a witch.) There are a lot of misconceptions about all things witch out there, and I am by no means the ultimate authority on all things witch, but I think that I have a little bit of pull in this area at least. I mean, I've officially been a witch for an entire two-thirds of my life. I've officially been a witch longer than I have NOT been a witch.

...I'm going to warn you now, at some point, much like it has to me while I'm writing this, the word 'witch' might start sounding/looking like a fake word because we've said it so many times. OK. Let's tackle a few things.

"But Rai, don't you have to have been born a witch to be a witch?"

Ehh, nah. There are people who were literally born into witch...hood? Witchness? Witchdom? ANYWAY—this doesn't make them any more or less valid than those of us who came to the path later on. Blood isn't everything. I will grant you, some of us have a few useful innate skills, but the majority of the little skills that you associate with being a witch? You can train those, to the point where you catch up with the 'naturals' or even exceed them. So yeah, you can pick this up whenever the path feels right to you.

"OK, so you don't have to be born a witch. Isn't there a ton of training that you have to do then?"

YUP. The narrative of 'I picked up a witch book and now I am a witch" is all wrong. You have to do the work to be a witch. What that work is differs depending on the skill you're trying to pick up at the time. It's perfectly doable, though: I learned a lot during the chaos that is high school—

"Wait, it isn't a high school fad?"

Listen: people have been calling witchcraft a high school fad since I was in middle school. Though a lot of us indeed get into it in high school, calling it a 'high school fad' is dismissive of those of us who got into it in high school and stuck with it. It also dismisses high schoolers as flighty teens who can't make a decision about their spirituality on their own. That leads me to two points: 1) give teenagers more credit, and 2) people can find their path at any time. Any time.

"Do you hex/curse?"

Ehh. I do. Not all witches do. Ask two witches, get three answers.

"Does that magick business work? Also, why the k?"

First of all, it works! We wouldn't bother if it didn't. But it's equally important to note that not all witches do magick. As for the 'k', it started with Aleister Crowley if memory serves me. Due to this source, there's a split between people who use it and people who are against it. I use it because it puts my mind in a different headspace when I see the spelling: a 'not stage magic' cue to my brain that it's time to get to work.

"So you're Wiccan then?"

Not all witches are Wiccan. Wicca is a specific religion with many different branches. Some witches are as far from Wiccan as the sun is from Neptune. Basically, unless you know the specifics, don't just label a witch a Wiccan. They might not be!

"Ok. But...why?"

Here's a place where I'm confident my answer will mesh with a lot of other witches: it just feels right. My entire life before I became a witch I was told that I needed someone else to connect to the divine. It was supremely empowering to find that I could do this myself, without fear of being called a sinner or something.

"Does that mean you've got church trauma?"

A lot of us, yes. Me? YES. Fuckin hell yes. But not all of us do. This is another one of those cases where it's important not to just make an assumption.

Well, that's it for now. If you have questions...well, you know where to find me.