I have tried a dozen times to sit down and write this article for Into The Gloaming. My chief difficulty wasn’t having nothing to say. If anything, I have too much to say on a wide variety of topics that are somewhat irrelevant to what I have designated this space for. No, the root of the problem, as it turned out, was failing to acknowledge my own in-betweenness. I had stepped away from writing the “how-to” and the “why-do” articles because I felt like I was playing the role of Priestex instead of embodying my Craft as one. I hadn’t yet stepped into the deeper reflection of my Craft that would allow me to put words on the page again. But once I sat in the liminal space of the Circle and cried my tears of grief and relief and acknowledged that closing one chapter didn’t automatically open another, I was able to re-center and decide what I wanted to write on the blank page of the first day of the rest of my life.
So here it is.
For a period of years, I gave up so much of myself that I could barely sustain what I kept in reserve. I kept wanting to be just as important to someone as they were to me. I kept wanting an equal partner. I thought if I just kept giving and providing and taking care of that eventually the tipping point would be reached and that person would give and provide and take care of me in return. Patience turned into resentment. Hope turned into cynicism. Love turned into anger. And even after the light came on in the attic and I realized that I couldn’t make that person love me — and it seemed to me that if they ever had loved me, that spark was long since extinguished — I was still trapped in the cold reality I had created for myself by giving up my power and will to another. Cutting all those losses and letting them go was the most freeing experience I’d had in a long while, and I am grateful that I have family with the means and wherewithal to have extricated me from the mess I’d made of my circumstances and offered me a safe haven to start over again (for the second time).
What kept me going was my Craft. Every morning, I would wake up and my first thought would be “Oh Goddess, here we go. Please just get me through this day.” Every night, I would fall into bed and my relieved prayer would be “Thank Goddess that’s over. Please just give me enough rest to recover from it.” They were crude prayers, and perhaps ungrateful, but they were honest, and they reminded me that even when wind and tide were against me, I was still a Witch.
It was a test of endurance to keep the helm steady and adjust my sails at the same time as I realized I could save no one but myself. But I don’t think I could have done it without my very special magickal partner, a person with whom I have no romantic connection whatsoever and a very deep spiritual one. Vivian kept me honest even when I wanted to believe my own lies. She offered me a safe space in the form of couch and kitchen table; a space where we could chat about occult philosophy and comedy game shows in the same conversation; a space where I could laugh, cry, and rage; a space where we could consense on the teachings and values that we would bring into our own barely conceived coven. She reminded me through her own actions that a priestex is a way of life, an identity, not a job description.
Despite the distance of hundreds of miles, she and I still talk regularly. A lot of the time it’s about mundane things, since I’ve had a lot of change going on, but there are still sparks of magick to be embraced and celebrated. Art has been a huge outlet for me, both as a creative person and as a magickal practitioner, and it’s got me thinking in new ways about lessons in the Craft that I’d thought I’d learned and experienced only to come around to deeper ways of understanding them. My past is a long story, and there are places where no one comes out looking good, but it has made me who and what I am today.
A Witch.
A Priestex.
A Seeker of the Mysteries.
And like the Hermit of the Tarot, I seek the Light within so that I may be a Light to others as we all travel into the gloaming.
May you be well.
~A