But I still didn’t call myself a Witch. Witch was too dangerous and wild.
I’d go to Pagan gatherings, and complete strangers, people who knew me a little, people who knew me a lot, would talk to each other about how amusing it was that I didn’t know I was a Witch yet.
Strega Nonas gave me gifts of Tarot cards and crystals and Goddess figurines. They suggested books and shared spells. They waited patiently for me to claim my identity.
And it took a while. Shedding years of small-town conformity is not easy, even when you think of yourself as an artist and rebel. Some things are just too risky—like being who you really are, when who you really are isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen.
Even today, with Witches being trendy, there’s not a lot of public Witches in my area of the Midwest. Could be the suburban thing, of course. In my old city neighborhood, a girl could have walked down the street dressed in head-to-toe black with a pentacle tattoo and no one would notice.
I had assumed I’d live there forever. I worked magic with the nearby park’s trees, groves and ponds. I made offerings to the Fey beings that lived there. It was home.
Hermes, being a practical joker, had other plans. I met and married a man who refused to live in the city. I refused to live in his exurb across a river and an hour to the west. We compromised with a ranch house in the kind of neighborhood the Bradys might have called home.
I had a secret identity.
And it was sucking the life out of me,
and my business.
So I came out—as a Witch.
And finally, I felt free.
I should have known better. It was
trying to live in a socially acceptable
box that had almost killed me once.
See, I got married. I put my husband’s career first, even though I’d spent my early adulthood as a devout feminist. It seemed like The Right Thing To Do.
I left my job as a feature writer for a city daily. I tried to change careers when there were not writing openings for me in our new city. The only reason I didn’t kill myself was that I didn’t have the energy for it.
After years of trying to find a job that would feed my creative soul, what I had was a therapist, a psychiatrist, and a bottle of Prozac as big as my head.
And that was before I found out my husband was gay.
I looked for the answer to my failed marriage and shattered self-confidence in psychology and feminist
anthropology.
I explored Goddess spirituality. I started to do small rituals that I didn’t realize were spells until later.
I met my first Goddess, the Sumerian Inanna. And once that happened, I crossed over completely into the world of magic.
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