I spent most of one morning last week texting a witchy friend who is also a public defender in California. Our lives are really nothing alike, but our brains circle the same drains. We were commiserating over the fact that people in our “real lives” have little frame for how to read the mess of our homes outside of words like “crazy” and “delusional.” Ours are spaces laden with discarded spells, burnt-out candles, tarot cards laid out in strange but strategic places, altars to the unimaginable.
Callie and I have little illusion that we’re the only ones who live this way—the Neptune in Pisces grift over the course of the last decade has spun out Instagram witch upon Twitter astrologist, everyone with the premiere candles and the quirky Squarespace, hawking their access to the divine or else distracting themselves online with the aesthetics of it all.
I’m mostly fine with the popularity of all of this occult striving, to be honest, mostly because I have this “not like me” script running in my head that may or may not be true. Sure, I’ve got my altars and my tarot clients, my niche tweets about devotional practices to Mars, but my stuff is really real, my stuff is so not delusional, my tarot clients ask questions about money and get answers about the devil, my prayers to the planets are not aspirational so much as strangled cries, my stuff is not co-opting a metaphysical cosmology to pay some medical bills.
If you’re reading the italics as doubt and self-criticism, yeah, me too.