Enter the Coven

 A seal had broken in me.  A wearing away of intoxicating fantasies about love, worthiness, and power.  Screams echoed around my topography like growth rings in a tree.

When it breaks, the loose people who are barely hanging on fall away.  I am buoyant, freezing, and directionless, itching for people I haven’t met yet.  And the guiding flame I pay $115 a week to ask me why before I sob I don’t know tells me of the ancient stories of wild women.

My childhood best friend (snarky, nerdy, and frontal-lobe focused) was the first person to ever call me a witch.  He did it out of respect for a power that few people in his circle had–to create art that can affect a person’s emotions.  He wasn’t wrong–the baggage that comes with the term was also true throughout my life.  I was a pastor’s daughter.  Everything that made me a witch–voice, power, sexual freedom, creation, kinship with nature, respect for the divine–had to fall under the confines of God’s comfort level.

Even when I became an atheist, the scientific community where many of my friends thrived was too narrow-minded for me.  What they couldn’t measure wasn’t real, and wasn’t worth believing.  Even as the mysteries of human behavior continued to accumulate reliable data (psychology, sociology, physiology, etc), it was execrated as “soft,” or pseudoscience.

But now I am thirty-six going on fifty.  I am not interested in wasting headspace on people who deplete me, and my witch identity has nothing to do with them.  It has to do solely, exclusively, purely, with my power.

Enter the coven.  There is one thing every witch has in common.  She will not, she refuses, to hold back.  She wears what she wants.  She says what she wants.  She fucks who she wants.  Which is often no one at all.  

I walk into a circle of women whose power radiates from them and dances like a fire.  I am holding beer, and it spills as I excitedly gesticulate.  We cackle.  We scream.  We tell our stories and cast quick, shallow healing spells on each other, because we know the real healing happens alone.

I realize I have known these women my entire life, that I have been these women all my life.  We were in girl scouts, choir, and SAT prep.  We wore lace up boots to church.  We had Nightmare Before Christmas pajama pants.  We dressed up as characters from British fantasies for Halloween.

But I ignored them in my younger years, because we were all so quiet in public.  Instead, I was chasing people I thought were funny, but were actually just cruel.  I thought they were intelligent, but they were just articulately judgmental.  

Even after this realization, leaving them and learning to avoid these characteristics, I still chased after some form of acceptance that diminished me.  The love-bomber who all of a sudden becomes too busy.  The entrancing scientist who is conveniently vague when it comes to feelings.  The brilliant artist who is interested in a mirror, but not a whole woman who creates her own art.  The one who slips further out of reach the more you talk about “emotional load” or “repair attempts.”  The one who always describes you as “cool” or “will always be there.”  The one who says “You’re more attractive now than when I met you.”  (Neg me harder, crypto daddy.)  The one who is reading this right now and thinks, “None of those are me,” and is ready to mansplain what a feminist witch awakening is in the comments.

That’s when you’re supposed to leave.  But that’s exactly when my cancer came out.  Because acceptance from them felt like a lightning rush.  Because every representation of love told me to look for the surge of being noticed, of showing up and receiving eye contact, and I crumpled myself into antimatter to taste that rich, delicious drop.

We don’t see stories about the magic of communication and follow-through.  We don’t know how to receive someone who wants our disagreement, our difficulty, our loud opinions, our inconvenience.

Enter the coven.

Uncrumpling myself, I brush myself clean of the unworthiness festering in the wrinkles.  I realize there has been a societal effort to keep me crumpled since before Salem.  The first story of a woman in Western Christian texts is about the evilness of her choosing knowledge and power.  And her evilness of tempting (otherwise known as offering a pitch to) her male partner, who clearly can’t make this decision on his own.

I step into the power of women around me, and I feel my own expand outward and deepen inward.  I feel the divinity of women–even the ones I disagree with or have different vibrations from.

I am looking forward to all the exciting landmarks in this shift.  I’m done with stories about heterosexual romance.  They couldn’t be less interesting to me.  Give me Kaley Cuoco’s Harley Quinn.  Give me NK Jemisin.  Give me Mya Spalter.  Give me side-splitting 40-something lesbians at the back of the bar who answer to no one and smoke when they want to.  

It’s time to live deliciously.

Self-Care for the Empath Writer: The Letter that You Never Send.

Writing isn’t just for an audience or publication.  It isn’t just so you can wear a tweed jacket with thick glasses and “prove something” to the critical voice in your head–which by the way, never came from you, but is a combination of the least supportive (and most expensive) writing instructor you’ve ever had and the family members who keep asking how much you’re making on that skill.

Writing isn’t about any of that.  For one, becoming a “skilled” writer (whatever the fuck that means) is generally a financial waste, which is why you keep being bothered by your family members about it.  Secondly, that unsupportive writing instructor actually has no investment in your growth and spiritual development as a writer.

The question you need to answer is what brought you to the page in the first place?  What agony needs to be given shape?  What clogged scream needs to storm the barricades?

Writing is, primarily, a private act.  It is between your brain stem and your frontal lobe.  You cannot go backwards, logic to feeling, which means you cannot start with criticism.  You must always start from within and go outwards.  From the writer you were before you showed your writing to anyone.

Criticism does not belong at our centers.  Nor does anyone else.  Which is what brings me to the title of this piece–the letter that you never send.

As an empath, I consciously screen every word I speak through the ears of my audience.  Whatever I get across needs to 1) avoid their triggers, 2) validate them, and 3) empower them.  I endeavor far more messages that will be read by another, than will only be read by me, and exist solely for my learning.

The “Letter That You Never Send” is a letter that you pretend they will understand; not one they actually will.  When a 6-year relationship ended 3 years ago, I began letter after letter after letter, but kept stopping myself because I knew he wouldn’t get it.  I was allowing the outer world to influence the inner world.  Each time I stopped myself was with the same stifled disappointment I felt in our conversations–stonewalling myself and editing myself, because I knew I was speaking to an earless void.  In my stem, I didn’t know who I was writing that letter for.

It’s about you, honeybun.  Writing is always about you.  You have to start from the inside out.  That’s the whole goddamn process.  Those who criticize this writer or that writer for being “self-indulgent” have a funny idea of what writing is truly about.

The word “aubade” comes to mind here (allow me to flex my tweed jacket and thick glasses for a moment).  It is a 17th century poem (SNORE) written about the separation of love at dawn–originally, to a sleeping woman (perhaps she fell asleep during a lecture about 17th century poetry).  

What I’m saying is, we’ve always been doing this.  If the poem is written to a sleeping woman, who is this song really for?

Wherever the energy between you and your loved one diverged, garden the space with your words.  Not for them, but because you deserve flowers in the empty space. 

Post-Severance Reflections on Work

Growing up in a baptist home, my earliest ideas about Hell were quite primal–constant physical agony, fire, torture, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  They became slightly nuanced when I read CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce and deeper when I saw Richard Mattheson’s What Dreams May Come, which spoke to my developing agnosticism.  It wasn’t until Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (which spoke to my solidifying atheism) that I started understanding “modern hellscape” as an emerging genre of storytelling.  

Like science fiction, hellscapes give us an alternate reality where we can run through believable scenarios, change one thing, and learn something about our identity and values as humans.  Also like science fiction, the variable tends to deal with either new technology (Black Mirror, Westworld), environmental discoveries (Color Out of Space, Annihilation, Sphere, Solaris) or medical advancements (Maniac, Altered Carbon, and the show that inspired this piece, Severance).

Within the first episode, Severance tells us that it knows exactly what it is.  The boss of the company, Miss Cobel, advises the protagonist with the following:

My mother was an atheist. She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is, hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is, whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.  

What separates a hellscape from a horror is the believability.  Mark H isn’t trapped in a lake of fire or a pit of skulls.  He’s trapped in the same carpeted, fluorescent prison we’re all trapped in.  He gets worker appreciation in the form of fruit platters and paper weights.  His compensation for a work-related injury is a gift card to a bar & grill.  Those details are what make the horror of his daily life resonate deeply in us.

The sheer amount of time and energy Mark spends at work is amplified through the show’s use of lighting.  We only see the sun when it is low in the sky–either on Mark's commute, or briefly right outside of a building to have a quick conversation.  The rest of the show takes place either in the bright synthetic lighting of an office, or in the cold blackness of night where his only work-free life exists.  

Even at an indoor book party, the characters float in a poorly-lit abyss of a life that allows little time for connection.  At the climax of Season One, Mark fights his way through a current of meaningless interruptions–“You didn’t bring your own book?  Oh, shoot.  Hm.  Shoot.  Maybe you can share with someone”–to have one single, life-defining conversation with his sister.

Do we live in hell?  Are we stuck in a bottle episode of our careers?  Why does Mark’s horrific life look so much like ours?

“Let’s chat about something I bet you have heard of, the ‘work life balance,’ ” Mark tells his coworker Helly (hmmm.  Hell-y.) on her first day.  “To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw.”

That’s the moment I jumped out of my crumb-sprinkled couch and pointed at the screen.  Had they been reading my diary?  Yeah, of course I’ve fanticized cloning myself to be my work-errand-cleaning slave so I could write and play and have sex all day like a king.  

I love my career.  I know this because I ask myself every evening if I love it, as I put my bag down, look at my running shoes, and fight the urge to nap.  It’s a losing battle.  I can’t help but harbor a little resentment when so little of my energy is left for just me.  

Miss Cobel, I too am an atheist, which makes Time more powerful than either of us.  And this art witch refuses to die before it’s my time.  But I can’t snap my fingers and change the weight of the market, or the anthropology of economics, or the universal pattern of power and slavery.  And what Severance teaches us is that the fantasy of “leaving it at the door” wouldn’t actually make us happier, and it certainly wouldn’t give us more time.

So I wake up, center myself, hunt for joy through fervent meditation, and bring it to work.  Not Garden-of-Eden joy, mind you–I mean rebellious, stupid, silly, gritty joy.  I dance my way down the halls and make goofy faces at my coworkers.  I approach conflict as a challenging puzzle, which means that solving it counts as play.  I compose my prosody and body language like an opera.  When a compromise is reached, I sing a victory song from old video games.

I can do all these things and still meet 85% of my daily expectations, which is a fine number.  Severance might even call it a “happy” number.  Some things don’t get done.  But I can love myself enough to foster the joy I deserve in a work culture that I can’t change.

I’m not happy everyday.  Some days I message my husband, “Kill me please.  Have mercy on my dying corpse.  For the love of Christ, cut my arteries,” and I have to remind myself that the end will come soon enough.  The hellish truth to our lives is that work is a constant, inescapable shackle that occupies most of our corporeal allotment on this earth, leaving us paltry crumbs when it is time to clock out.

The good news about hell isn’t that it’s fake–it’s very real, and we’re very much stuck here.  The good news is that our inner world…our whole inner world…still belongs to us.  As Orwell wrote in his most famous hellscape (1984), “If you can FEEL that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”  

So maybe, definitely, shirk something.  Find one thing on your plate that no one checks, and banish it to fluorescent oblivion–as bright as forgetfulness, as invisible as the question, “What was that thing?”  Because our brains need space and stimulation to be creative.  Because creativity is a human right.  And as we can see from the diminishing sunsets in Severance, it actually can’t wait until 5 PM.

Unclogging Spiritual Chakras: Evolution vs Constance

In my Christian upbringing, the theme of constancy was holy and revered.  God never changes; He is always the same and always will be the same.  The Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.  We should be like God.  Therefore, we should be constant, or at least approaching a universal standard of ethics.  Our love should last forever.  We should always forgive.  There is Right, and there is Wrong.

I am learning to embrace the different women I become, and the different ethics I develop as I understand the nuances of being human, of being alive.

Being alive means sailing in a whirlwind of physics.  The chaos of electrons as they swirl around the nucleus like flies around a light.  As your prefrontal cortex grabs the windbag of sparkling entropy and steers it in a direction based on code.  The code that you are continuing to write every day.

Your ethics are supposed to change.  The universe is breathing and branching, and you are a glowing branch.  Which means sometimes you have to bend, because that's where the forces are taking you, and that's where your light will keep shining.

You're not inconsistent.  You're learning.  

You weren't wrong.  You're growing.

There is nothing more holy than that.

Kiss, Cry, Repeat.

Wednesday, at the peak of my spring break, I took care of a very sad girl.  It was the kind of day where playing video games was an accomplishment.  I believe this was my schedule:

9:00 AM:  Wake Up  

10:00 AM:  Get out of bed, figure out of I’m going out or not

11:00 AM:  Eat something, realize I’m not going anywhere

12:00 PM:  Video Games

2:00 PM:  Cry & nap

4:00 PM:  Wake up & cry

4:30 PM:  Rumination time–fight, give in, fight, give in…

5:00 PM:  Snack, cry, sit with an open book on my lap that I don’t read while I play Solitaire on my phone

6:00 PM:  Get ready for a date with my husband

Throughout the day, I had a deep fear of this kind of unsustainable, debilitating sorrow.  “I can’t love like this anymore,” I admitted.  “It hurts too much.  I get too vulnerable.  I can’t sacrifice days like this to just feeling.  I have things to do.  I can’t be a pathetic lug like I was in my twenties before I went on meds.  Monogamy is safer.  You don’t have days like this in monogamy.  Where does the pain actually end?  I can’t even wrap my mind around the immensity of it.”

And in that concerto of self-doubt, regret, and melancholy, the only voice of comfort was the knowledge that it would end soon.

I don’t like that the only comfort is temporality, because I don’t like temporality.  I want to believe in everlasting existence, in life-after-death, in eternal love, in “we’ll last forever.”  The very source of my anguish was that I missed my long-distance boyfriend who had just left for home–the temporality of our visits, our moments together.  To say, “don’t worry…this will pass,” is like saying, “don’t worry, you’ll die someday.”

There was another voice too.  Not so much a comfort as a law of emotional physics.  It was the symmetry of “I can’t keep loving like this.”  

This is the other side of love.  

This is the antithesis to “my heart is so full that I can’t contain all of this joy.”  It is the other side of the looking glass–a shadow to every beam of light.  Waking up and wanting the day to be over instead of at its beginning.  The immobilizing weight of nothing, of isolation, of the off-switch.  

How does oblivion cohabitate right next to connection and exuberance?  It’s just a few hormonal shifts down the hall from it.  They’re fucking neighbors, which seems to negate the very foundation of what oblivion is, or why we fear it.  How can death be final…but oblivion be temporal?

Whatever it is, it’s not a comfort; it’s a law.

Admittedly, I do find something grounding about laws.

Maybe all I’m realizing is how small I am.  Joy and grief are both bigger than me, but they’re a package deal.  If I make room in my calendar for one, I better make room for the other.  Because she’ll just let herself in regardless.

Keep your video games handy, my friends.