Metaphysical rant: In Which I actually label myself, omg

[railenthe]

Before I begin-this track is $#%@! beautiful.

Recently I have found myself put on the spot more and more often to identify myself as something or another. Now, I am a firm believer that labels equal limitations, and as such I haven’t called myself anything besides a generic ‘Pagan’ or ‘Witch’ in a long while, even though even these seemingly simplistic labels are also by nature loaded ones. So, given the choice, I don’t usually choose to give myself a label.

However I am under increasing pressure from my BF to do so. He’s curious as to what goes on in my head (a curiosity that has spelled the end of many brains), and so I think that I should probably answer it as best as I can. Of course, this usually defies verbal explanation so it’ll get turned into a piece of work itself.

It started quite a while back, when I first started getting into alternative thought. I’d been burned out with the Catholic church for a while before then, but the events of that year just served to complete my personal schism. I was fourteen edging fifteen at the time, and confused as all hell. So I did what came naturally to me when I get confused: ridiculous amounts of research into different things. I spent most of my time after classes, if I wasn’t nursing new bruises or something, on the computers at school on the internet, trying to find any information about any faith that I could. I don’t know how many that I looked at before I decided to pick up a few things about shamanism, which to be fair isn’t technically a faith, it is a system of practices. Meh, technicalities. So I printed as many pages out about it as I could get away with, trying to figure out a way to store them so that I wouldn’t get found out. I live in a rather strict religiously structured family, so I would have to keep this endeavour a secret as well as I could.

Soon I had the perfect cover: School research project! I had been taking information processing and computer classes at the time and had at the same timeframe acquired an old PC best fit for word processing. I drew a number of forms that explained my actions as necessary for the purposes of research and kept several copies on hand at all times in case someone asked questions about what was going on.

It was a matter of spiritual life or death. I could ill afford to fail at this; I had this strange certainty that failure would mean my own death. Shit, I felt half dead at the time anyway, but I kept going.

It took a few more months before I had a passable knowledge on anything related to shamanism to actually attempt something. But the attempts were a little later than planned, because, while I felt that the techniques were working-and they were; random passers-by would comment on something that had changed about me, putting it off to a haircut or something new that I was wearing, even if all I had changed was the color of my socks-which, by the by are impossible to see in calf boots. I knew that something was changing, but I didn’t know what it was.

It wasn’t until almost two years later that I figured out what was off with my practice, and it was quite the shock to the system. It isn’t every day that you’re walking around the house doing random cleanup, that your senses get assaulted all at once with a mindblowing vision. I don’t know if I’ve described it before in the past, but right now I don’t think that I could do it justice and still be able to keep to the subject at hand. Irregardless (yeah, I know it’s not a real word) of all that, it helped me figure out what was missing. I had all the techniques, but I hadn’t had a connection at all. A scant thirty-six hours later I found myself outside in the light of a waxing moon, having snuck out of the house with a hiker’s backpack full of slowly accumulated ritual tools, and dedicated myself to pagan ways. I didn’t select any patrons. I still didn’t even feel at the time that I had the right to do something so presumptive. But after that night, something was different about the way that I looked at the world. I didn’t see things the same way that I had before. Now, part of that was due to the high that ritual tends to induce in a person, and the other part of it was the high that I still hadn’t come down from with the vision. During those four days of mystical high, I drew up an extremely elaborate plan to learn as much about Witchcraft magicks (spelling intentional) as I could. It came up to a five-tiered, evenly leveled system. Each ‘level’ was comprised of things that I had to do a number of times before trying something higher on the list.

During that time, a lot of interesting synchronicities came my way, not the first of which was literally having a book that I’d been searching for a long time fall of the shelf and hit me on the head as I walked by the shelf. I put it off to coincidence until it happened a second time-this time with a book that should have been out of print and not on the shelves at all! As I went through the ‘levels’ that I drew up, I started throwing around things to call myself in my mind. To this day few of them have proven satisfactory in my own sight, and so I continue to identify myself, when asked, as a simple "pagan" or "witch," preferring this option over the more long-winded explanation of why I can’t just go an come up with a label about it. Lately, however, with a number of new experiences under my belt, I’ve gravitated to one base identifying label.

Mystic.