While avoiding this topic, for YEARS, and living my life to the best of my ability, I’ve come to the realization that this work is really quite important and it is now time to address it.

After finding, quite by accident, a web site (Grandma’s Grimoire), the decision was completely made. I will be writing here to do my shadow work. She has some great prompts! This is the first one:

“We can start by reflecting on why you might feel hesitant or fearful about expressing your interest in witchcraft or identifying yourself as a witch to friends and family.

• Are you afraid of specific outcomes?
• Do you think you’ll be judged negatively?
• Does it feel embarrassing to think about having these conversations with people around you?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, ask yourself the most important question of all: Why?“

All of which was answered “YES!”

Yes, I’m afraid of outcomes, Yes I do think I’ll be judged negatively, Yes I feel embarrassed to think about having any conversation with anybody around me where witchcraft is involved. But the question should not be just flat yes or no, it should be, as she states why?

I was raised with quite a crazy mother. Sometimes she was 7th Day Adventist, other days she was a raving crazy bitch with no beliefs other than her self-pleasing psychoses. She was ALWAYS a judgmental narcissist. If you did not believe like she, then you were wrong wrong wrong.

My father was raised Baptist with heavy influence of Quakers. Good girls don’t get their ears pierced (I did so at 16), good girls don’t get tattoos (35), good girls don’t play cards or board games with dice. Continue with the “good girls don’t” phrase ad nauseum.

Now to be fair, I was a practicing Adventist for 16 years, and not very Christian (that is to say NOT because of the Adventism). I just wasn’t very Christian. I thought I was modeling good behavior based on those with whom I associated. In retrospect, they weren’t very good Christians eithers. I just wasn’t comfortable within my head or body and always had the naggy-picky feeling that there had to be more than “works” with Christianity, regardless of the flavor. I left, officially, the Adventist church in 2003; lots of reasons, non of which anybody would understand unless you were in the SDA Church in St. George UT.

Upon arriving in the Elko area, I attempted to attend the SDA Church thinking it may be better here. It was not. A very bossy, arrogant woman was “running” the church in absence of a pastor. We shared the pastor with three other churches so we only saw him once every two or three weeks. She openly made the statement “the more education a person has the further away from G*d they are.” She then went on to brag she didn’t have a high school diploma, implying she’s the closest to G*d of anybody. Oy Vey! I left and did not return.

About the same time, I began exploring my likes and dislikes (sexually), paying attention to the natural world and realizing, since I was very small, I had a connection with the dead, graveyards, nature and herbal lore which my grandmother fostered. She was, unknown to most of the family, the offspring of Appalachian healers (aka Green Witches). From her I cleaned a ton of information, education, recipes and “recipes” I now know as spells.

20 years on, there is a general acceptance of those very near and very dear that I have this affinity for the dead and the natural worlds. I have uncanny sense of herbs, their healing and potential poisoning. I see, feel, smell things that others do not which, coming from a trained psychologist, are definitely NOT hallucinations. They don’t happen all the time, they don’t happen in only certain circumstances.

So, after going back and reading this, I guess my fear and embarrassment are only around those who are family. Only my dad, his girlfriend and three older sisters are left. Aunties and Uncles are dead or so in their dementia that they really can’t judge. My dad is elderly but sharp as a tack. My sisters, well they are so caught up in their own heads with their own dysfunction, I really do not care what they think of my proclivities. . .

Grandma’s Grimoire. . . thank you so much for this writing prompt. Very clarifying to self.