I am too tired to be a coward.
What I mean by that is, I no longer have the energy to pretend to be something I’m not. I have to ration spoons just to get through the day. I’m not about to waste precious energy and effort trying to conform to a standard that was never meant for me in the first place. I am a Fat, Queer, Disabled, Kinky Witch. I live in the heartland of America under the oppression of the Trump regime. I have been out and proud as a Queer person and a Pagan for over twenty years. I couldn’t go back into the closet if I tried – and the thought of trying routinely occurs to me because I need to protect my home, my family, my employment. It’s during those times that I remember that I am a Wiccan priestex and I took an oath to serve the Gods and preserve the Craft. Serving the Gods necessarily involves stewarding the Land and safeguarding the People. Preserving the Craft necessarily involves teaching, writing, speaking, living as an example of what it means to walk a contemporary pagan path. And I can’t do any of that if I’m hiding.
So I’m not hiding. But I am minimizing my exposure.
I made the decision a while ago to get off of mainstream social media – no Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Threads, any of that. Part of that decision was to preserve my mental health and limited energy from being drained by doomscrolling and drama. I moved to Mastodon and Bluesky, but I wasn’t satisfied with either platform and recently left those as well. I left Pinterest because just about everything I would want to look for on Pinterest can be found now through a Google search. All I have now as far as a “platform” for my “personal brand” (if you’ll pardon the marketing parlance) is my website, and I’m perfectly satisfied with that. If people need to contact me, there’s a contact form, and all the really important people already have my phone number.
What I’ve discovered by being off social media is that the parasocial relationships I had become attached to have dissolved. I no longer waste time and energy on people I don’t have an authentic, real-life relationship with. My social circle has contracted to a few friends, several acquaintances, and many associates. There’s security in that.
I have also struggled for most of this year with finding my voice again. After a period of looking back and looking inward, I discovered that my voice was never lost, it was being stifled by fear. Fear of retaliation. Fear of rejection. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of standing alone. I’m old enough now to recognize that those fears come from a lifetime of Autistic social trauma, of not fitting in and not knowing why, of not understanding the rules and being ridiculed for it. As a result, I’ve tried to live more mindfully and deliberately, drawing strength from the words of Maggie Kuhn: “Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes.”
In the deepest part of my heart, I decided at some point that I will live free with what time I have, and when the time comes for me to die, I will do so as authentically as I lived. Queer people have always found a way to express ourselves. Witches have always found a way to resist oppression. People in positions of power can legislate us out of public life, but they cannot ban our very existence. We exist. Nothing can change that – not marginalization, not persecution, not revisionism. And while some of us may revert to less visible ways of interacting with the world, it is not because we are afraid. It is because we are doing the sacred work of caring for ourselves, our communities, our histories, and our legacies.