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.