#( forgive me father for this is bullshit

[holyfailed]

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[redruined]

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[studying-inwonderland]

Becoming a Christian Witch

So I’m not here to preach to you.  I have no grounds to tell you how to live your life and what to believe.  And I know that.  But I want to talk a little bit about my journey through faith and what it means to me, where I started and where I am, and why.  So If you don’t care to hear about religion feel free to ignore me, you have that right!  But if you feel like something is missing try it out.

So I was christened/dedicated when I was a baby.  My mom (to my fathers protest) took me to her grandmothers church and had me dedicated to God.  God, not Jesus.   Now if you ask my mom, when I was very little I think 2, I saw Jesus.  I was sitting at a table and babbling, like kids that age do  and then I asked a question and when my mom answered me I told her that I wasn’t talking to her I was talking to the Sad Man. I said he was wearing a bleeding crown and bleeding from his arms.  Now I think I just had a very active imagination and my mom is a niave and hyper-religious freak.  She still swears I saw Jesus so whatever.  I was very religious until about 4th grade.  My mom said that God doesn’t like things that I really didn’t see anything wrong with.  Homosexuality? My hair dresser was a gay man and he was always nice to me and called me a princess and did my hair so pretty with sparkly sprays and nice regal up-do's.  Pre-Marital Sex? My mom had me before she was married and I didn’t think she was going to hell.  And if all it took for it to be forgotten was an “I’m Sorry” than obviously God didn’t care that much and how exactly do you feel sorry for who you are?  What kind of God expects that? Or maybe he just didn’t exist and was made up to make people follow dumb rules.  But either way I thought he must be kind of irrelevant and while I continued to believe in him, I stopped liking him so much.

Fast forward to middle school and my aunt, and my best friends mom, were both Wiccan? and I found this world where spirituality was about self love?  I was amazed and started to, rather appropriatively I’m afraid to say, Identify as a “Wiccan” I thought Wiccan was synonymous with witch, tried to talk to trees (not a Wiccan thing) control fire (not Wiccan) and lived without a deity.  Seeing as Wicca is a religion, with a pretty heavy emphasis on their deities (the horned god and triple goddess I believe?)  I was definitely not Wiccan.  I also had no idea what witchcraft was actually like in the real world, and my parents kept such close tabs on my internet use that I was afraid to do real research. About the only thing I did do right, was learn how to read playing cards and palms. I checked out books on ancient religions from the library, saying that I wanted to be an anthropologist, and read mainly about greek and roman gods and mythology, and a little about Celtic mythology too.  I read bits from the Torah and the Quran in an effort to gain some sort of understanding, thinking maybe I didn’t like the idea of multiple gods.  Some sort of love was just absent from my life.  But nothing fit right.  At this point it was that I didn’t believe in any god at all.

In 8th grade I moved to the Bible Belt.. I started to identify as an atheist/agnostic and stopped caring that I didn’t believe.   I just couldn’t agree with the things my new classmates believed about people.  The racist homophobic bullshit.  Assaulting my friend because she was gay.  And the adults were worse.  Not doing anything about the harassment and bullying?  I got pretty angry and it wasn’t until 10th grade that I got back into witchcraft.

With the help of Tumblr I explored other deities asking questions of more seasoned witches.  I started meditating, charming objects, doing glamours, cleansing rituals, and setting up wards around my room.  I started to collect crystals and trinkets and herbs and oils.  And was more open about it to my parents.  I learned that I can practice without a deity, and that was huge for me and the fact that I hadn’t chosen another deity pleased my parents.  People accepted that I can be whole without a god.  I accepted that I am enough and and that I have power and am beautiful with or without one.  But something was still missing.  I tried to learn more about the gods of my ancestors, thinking that might be a good place to start.  Well, my Native ancestors converted to Christianity rather easily.  And I haven’t found a reliable source of information on what their deities were like before that.  Only some information on their ceremonies.  I’m also Irish.  So I researched Celtic history, and I didn’t really connect to those deities either.  I did really like their symbolism and imagery and did start include that in my craft though.  I tried reaching out to Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, and Athena.  But it felt wrong.  I looked into Tao-ism, Buddhism, and every pagan religion I could get my hands on.

I was a freshmen in college when I stumbled upon a christian witch.  At first I was skeptical.  The God I had known couldn’t have supported witch craft?  But I got more interested anyway, and continued to research and found more christian witches.  I found out that so many of the “Bible Quotes” that had been being shoved down my throught were actually mistranslations.  That Jesus spread love and forgiveness and that God wasn’t a fan of divination and necromancy... well how many christians read their horoscope anyway?... not witch craft as a whole.  

So from there it was quite a journey.  Turns out God Jesus and I had somethings to work out.  I was mad and uncertain, but after about a year of trying I accepted that I have always been a Christian.. So that was my journey but I thought I’d share it.  Today my practice isn’t much different than it was in high school.  I occasionally divine, accepting that God will either give me the answer or he won’t, through scrying generally (I like smoke scrying) with the occasional use of card reading.  I use prayers to charge my crystals and wards, and when I glamour or do a protective spell it’s coming from God.  I look to Jesus to teach me kindness and compassion, and try to practice forgiveness in my life.

[foxthebeloved-blog]

So there is something that I have observed and thought alot about and finally I think I have some words to express these thoughts.

So I have been the way I am now, the way my brain has maligned itself compared to a "healthy" neurotypical brain. I have had family and ex-friends yell at and curse me and ditch me for being consistently the way I have always been. Looking back hindsight is 20/20 and depression and anxiety have been constant unwelcome companions.

I am simultaneously 1st and 2nd generation of my family. To be in the US as an Immgrant, especially Latinx and Caribbean descent, means that there are certain pressures and trauma that don't allow parents and grandparents to see their children as anything beyond goals. We carry on the struggles and hopes of our parents, we are the extension of them as well measuring stick with to judge their entire lives as a success or failure.

We are held to things that have happened before we existed and beliefs that often no longer hold up to the times we are living in. We can not be sad or angry because we were bestowed this chance. We can't take breaks because we do not want to squander what was so hard fought for. We can't complain about how hard things are because certainly our forebringers have had it far worse.

So to say that understanding mental illness was something unfathomable, to say nothing of having us handle the repercussions of generations of struggle, racism, suffering that has manifested itself into repressed mental illness. We as children dont have the capacity to coach our parents through a generational mental breakdown and come out unscathed.

We have passed the baton where it is no longer justifiable to survive in this racist capitalist state, we must also succeed. Every deviation from that mission is just to stain everything, being queer, being disabled, being metally ill. There is nothing that stabs you to your core then "why did I even have you?", the look of utter disgust on my fathers face when I was outted to my father and he called me a faggot for the first time, when my brother called me an "abomination" that I couldn't really be apart of their family because "Latinos have to be strong, we dont make faggots".

In this I have alot to make sense of and this is the tip of a depressing iceberg sitting on a volcano of bullshit laying just barely dormant. Its hard to do alone and its alot to take on. To the point where anyone besides me pulling back the layers of this trauma onion should be paid for their effort. It also because this level of horror requires a skilled set of eyes and ears to help make sense of.

Through popular media we have been taught to either to bottle up these feelings and horrors or put them onto are friends or loved ones. This comes to the point that people often take it as a sign of distrust that you wont come to them or burden them with your problems. However there is no signal for when something is beyond the capacity of your energy and experince.

I know this is more than one person can comprehend or otherwise I would be more well adjusted. And I have managed to survive thus far, through multiple suicide attempts, sexual assults, domestic abuse, medical malpractice, and more phobias and isms then it should be possible to completely compartmentalize. But for someone else to take that on that needs to be fully committed but so often is, that already instability, is taken up to only be dropped when it proves to not be solved within the span of an after school special.

It is demoralizing to feel unfixable. It is demoralizing to be compressed into a couple of soundbytes of patronizing fluff.

For people who will never see me softly crying on the couch wishing my dad had taken better care of his rifle. To those who will never see me pulling a muscle to keep my leg from from shaking in public. To those who only see the happy instagram posts of me trying to keep myself above water and decide to berate me for not being happier without knowing me. To those who dont understand what its like to be on vacation and pull yourself away from snorkeling because you've been off your meds and how easy it would be to let the life jacket slip off and just let yourself sink without being noticed. To those who do not understand running into traffic because at age 10 convinced it was the better choice then living as a faggot and then maybe god would forgive me.

I remind myself that its not up to me to cultivate understanding in others. That my need to make sense of all of this can not be based on its believability to other people. That I dont survive for anyone but myself and it cant be any other way because only living to keep others from being sad is not a reason to justify suffering. Its is hard as fuck and there no really good reason to keep at it that will make sense until after alot of these turmoils have been exorcised. Though I will say a 5 min check in, a copy paste of suicide hotline numbers etc do not fix things for me.

I got myself to help and have a medical plan to work through this.

(This post is temporary until I move it to my writing blog)

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