therivercrow

I’m old enough to remember when physical bookshops were a big thing, and in those places there was a small section, usually in a hidden-away corner, where occult and witchy books sat shoulder to shoulder with vegan cookbooks, self-help guides, pop psychology and anything “wellness” related. The name of this miscellaneous selection was invariably “Mind, Body, Spirit”.

This vague and commercial-friendly term also poses an interesting framework for looking at oneself holistically. Descartes did a lot of damage with his cogito, ergo sum, positing the essential self as being ultimately the mind, with the body reduced to a machine to move the mind around. Industrial capitalism did the rest – arguably an unholy fusion of Cartesian rationalism, Calvinist puritanism and colonialist dominionism.

But we are not just brains in jars. And sometimes I forget that.

As a trans woman, my relationship with my body is…complicated, to say the least. As a witch, my relationship to spirit should be the foundation that grounds me, but when my mental or physical health is not doing well, it’s the first thing to be neglected.

So I find myself returning to that tripartite vision of the self and wondering if behind the shop-window slogan there might not be something useful after all.

Let’s be honest, I’ve not been looking after my body. I got covid back in ‘21 or ‘22 and it did a number on me. I’ve not been regularly working out since, and I’ve got years of lethargy, junk food and too much boozing (heeey depression and dysphoria) to overcome.

I know how to do this, there’s no great secret – make better food choices (I acknowledge my privilege in being able to do this) and get more exercise (again privilege but I’m reflecting on me here, not generalising).

But that threefold schema starts with the mind, and I reckon successful change has to as well.

For me, that’s going to mean cutting back on social media – I love the friends I’ve made through the Fediverse, but I’ve made over a thousand posts in the last two months, and that is excessive. I recognise that I am falling into old habits from when I was on the big corporate social media sites – doomscrolling, comparing my life to other people’s, using it as a distraction.

I want to read more, so I need to make the time to do that. Which also means cutting back on TV and even gaming (still going to play my beloved Veilguard and BG3 because they spark my imagination like nothing else, just in smaller doses). It means carrying a book with me so when I have five minutes of downtime, I reach for that instead of my phone. It might mean investing in an e-reader.

Looking after my mind means not exposing myself to distressing news, especially news from other countries that I can’t do anything about. It means choosing what I focus on and not being pulled in a thousand directions at once.

And it means learning how to give a shit about myself. I’m not going to reach “self love” any time soon, heck I don’t even like myself, let alone love myself – but I need to figure out how to not hate myself at the very least.

And from that foundation of tentative self care, I can start to look after my body too.

Spirit is the challenge – I want to develop a regular witchy practice again, but right now I have no idea what that might look like. For now, I’ll settle for making tea and reading cards at the new and full moon and see how I go from there.

Spirit is also creativity, and I want to write more – which again means making the time to do that. I enjoy writing, but then I second guess myself because all I do is tiny fanfic scenes for my Veilguard/BG3 characters, and it seems frivolous – and not even that good (seriously, I envy the AO3 writers with their multi-chapter epics). But, I enjoy it, and I want to do more.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now – feeling the need to make some changes to my daily life and routines to try to be less … whatever the hell is going on with me at the moment.

Probably I’m going to be a lot quieter online.

See y’all when I see you.

River x