Witchcraft from an Artistic, Anarchist Queer.

An Introduction, of Sorts

This blog is for me to record my craft—and I invite you into it not so much as a speaker upon a stage, but as one might carelessly leave a poem (sometimes unnecessarily intimate) scrawled on the inside of a bathroom stall—both private and almost horrifically public at the same time. My logic is that I need somewhere to record my craft, and that others like my past self—a baby trans witch with no idea what two of those words meant—might find it valuable.

My journey into witchcraft started like so many others, I suppose—deep existential dread, a smidgen of rebellion, unexplored trans angst. That first night, sleepless at one am, I started to explore the depths of witch tumblr, scouring long-abandoned blogs full of references to ‘cleansing’ and ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘negative energy’.

I had always been a witch, but I didn’t know it. As a child, I collected rocks—not pretty rocks, not unique rocks, but these little golden almost-agates that my best friend and I found one day. They were sacred rocks to me, little pebble worry stones that symbolized my friendship. I think I still have some of them, squirreled away in my wish box. I collected feathers from birds even though Mom said I wasn’t allowed to touch feathers (something about bird germs). If I didn’t pray over my food, it felt unclean—which was obviously from my Christian upbringing, but the ritual still had an intense hold over me.

But that night, I decided to make it official, although I had no idea what I was doing. Over the next few months, I scoured the internet, trying to figure out how to have power.

I never found the power that I was looking for. I never found the ability to transform my transphobic family into an accepting one, I never found a way to cure my depression with sparkly rocks and sweet smelling herbs.

But over the years, I would return again and again to the idea of witchcraft, until it finally clicked:

The power wasn’t over the world. I couldn’t control the world—how could I? I was a tiny piece of it, a minuscule cog in a vast machine, a grain of sand on the bottom of an immense ocean.

But what I could control was myself—or at least, I could nudge the cog I was, the grain of sand I was, to a position where I was more likely to end up being moved by the machine or ocean of the world to where I needed to be next.

And that’s what witchcraft is to me, now. It’s pulling on those few strings of fate that I have to move myself a little closer to my goal, whatever I determine that to be, absurdist as I am. This is a sacred power. I cannot change my family, but I can cut the ties to their intolerance that cause my suffering. I cannot ‘heal’ the broken pathways in my mind with a spell, but I can encourage their healing, like watering a wilting plant and cutting back the dead branches.

I understand that that kind of witchcraft isn’t for everyone. I respect those who do manage to believe in a greater power—I, for now, cannot, probably because of the tetragrammaton of YHWH that haunted me through my childhood. I am scared to look upwards to a higher power, having the eyes of that almighty seared into my childhood soul.

But I know there are others like me, who need this kind of witchcraft. And that is who this blog is for: be you queer or questioning or certain, be you secular or spiritual or somewhere in between. I want to share this journey. At the very least, I want a place for my thoughts where I’m encouraged to do more than scribble “fucking tired again, sorry journal, ‘night.”

So if you are still here, enjoy. There will be art. There will be rituals. There will be cats.

I welcome you, and I welcome myself. So may it be.