Alas, it just wasn’t me. I eagerly consumed all of the literature, but I couldn’t make peace with answering to a singular, unknown being for all the wonder in the world, to being relegated to the status of what felt like a mere pawn in a great game. I didn’t want to live a life that would be judged and met with reward or punishment at the end—I had already learned that those doing the judging didn’t always play fair. They didn’t allow for, well, the fragility of humanity. None of it felt true to me, as much as I had hoped it would. Finding peace in any of these places somehow felt like I would be playing it safe, because they were connected to my beginning: they shared the roots, if not the branches. They just weren’t mine anymore.
The Eastern philosophies had their own wonderful myths to share, their own cast of great and magical characters with which to fill my imaginings of the world. I adored the complexity and drama of Hindu and Buddhist lore. These tales were so different from the stories I knew, and yet absolutely familiar. They, in turn, led me to rediscover the classical Greek and Roman myths I had read and studied on my own as a child. I loved revisiting the stories my dad had excitedly shared with me when I was small, on afternoons spent envisioning the heroes and heroines, the gods and the Titans. I had always loved trying to imagine who I would be in these stories, who we were most like, who would triumph in the end.
I became entranced with the overlap of themes and creatures that appeared across all of these great myths. I gathered the stories like so many beautiful puzzle pieces: tales from the Egyptians and Greeks, the Romans, the Norse. I made a game of trying to seek parallels among them all—Aztec to Hindu to Christian to Greek. The commonalities seemed never-ending. In the end, I found they were all more similar than I had previously thought possible.
I also realized something else important. These great books, these tenets of faith, I consumed them like literature. I wasn’t finding my truth there. I wasn’t feeling connected, I was only playing at connecting them. It wasn’t the same.
And so, after reading countless books, attending numerous church services and some truly wacky prayer circles (A church of psychics! Who knew such a thing even existed?! The one I found was in Sarasota, Florida, and I highly recommend a visit, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else; it was frightening and fascinating all at once), I still had found nothing that felt quite right. What I had discovered was that most religions all believed in basically the same thing: Live a good life. Try not to be an asshole.
I was completely down with that, but I wanted more. I wanted to find a spiritual home. I missed the one I’d previously had; I felt unanchored in a way I had a hard time putting words to.
Then one night in my second year of college, as I sat in my friend Karen’s dorm room, she mentioned she had a book she thought I should read. It was yet another book about religion, which she knew was right up my alley. The book was called Drawing Down the Moon, by Margot Adler. My heart skipped a beat at the possibility: something new! Then she explained that the friend who had sent it to her was a practicing Wiccan.
What?
Um, no.
I was looking for a spiritual path—I was not looking for a Goth makeover. I immediately put the book down. She insisted I take it, assuring me it was right up my alley—all about that “what-makes-the-world-spin mumbo jumbo.” She pointed out that at the very least I would discover what paganism was all about; I might as well round out my research. So out of reluctant curiosity and, truthfully, being too lazy to continue finding reasons not to, I caved and brought the book home with me. In the midst of a fit of insomnia weeks later, I cracked it open.
I read it twice.
I was Wiccan—no incantation or ceremony needed.
In the end, finding a spiritual home wasn’t entirely as easy as turning my back on a closed door—it required me to not give up on finding an unlocked window. Eventually I found a path of my own, a line of belief that felt right to me. Wicca was both something I could hold on to and something I could define on my own. It was exactly what I needed. It was me.
I know it’s not right for everyone. Something I’ve held on to all these twenty-plus years since leaving Catholicism is the idea of how wonderful this world is, how amazingly fantastic it is that it provides so many paths to peace, so many traditions to walk in, that we can all find something that fits. I don’t believe in any one universal truth. I believe we all do our best with what we have and what feels right—that whatever great power spins this world also gives to all of us the capacity to find a way to inhabit wonder. There is the possibility of enlightenment and harmony for all to find, if only we wish to find it.
That’s the true magic that exists in this world.
And I should know about magic. I’m a witch.
I can say I’m a witch with confidence now, but it took me years to get here. In theory, becoming Wiccan made perfect sense; the beliefs and system around it spoke to me like nothing else I had previously found. It seemed natural to me to recognize the turning of the year, to call to attention the points of change and pause to recognize them. I felt absolutely at home building traditions around the solstices and equinoxes, recognizing how the darkness of the winter and the brightness of the summer could affect my being, figuring out how to embrace the natural turning of the world and find my place in it. I began to follow the phases of the moon and fell in love with the idea that every month there was a chance to start anew. Always, no matter what else was happening, the cycle of reinvention and reemergence continued. I learned that even the moon took time to disappear and find quiet before it allowed itself to grow as big as it could and shine bright. I started to feel connected to the world around me like I never had before. I began to feel less lonely.
Yet when I went to learn more—wanting to research in order to be sure, to understand, to find answers to the questions that now popped up in my head on a regular basis—it became outrageously intimidating. Suddenly I was right where I had thought I’d end up, where I had feared to be from that first moment when I saw the book in Karen’s dorm room. At Pagan Pride festivals and coven meetings, in small occult stores and workshops, I found myself surrounded by people whose names sounded fetched out of fairy tales, images of black candles and smoky cauldrons, books enticing me to cast spells for love and money and luck. At first glance, I found none of the pillars of belief that had so called to me before. Instead, I found every stereotype I had ever heard or imagined. I felt lost in an itinerant Renaissance faire, surrounded by pixies and people who saw witchcraft as more Eastwick than east rising. I started to doubt where I was and whether this spiritual journey was truly right for me. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that this was it. I wasn’t willing to give up this place of peace I had found over a few black corsets and spiked jewelry. I thought there had to be more—or rather, less.
It took a few awkward coven meetings and even more awkward conversations before I learned the phrase “solitary practitioner.” Someone I had become friends with (the original source of the book I borrowed from Karen, in fact) eventually shared with me that he wasn’t so into the whole coven thing and the culture of a lot of it and had found his place as a Wiccan who chose to follow the basic tenets without involving himself with a coven—he simply lived life as a witch, in the way he chose to define that. This seemed revolutionary to me. It changed the way I saw myself as Wiccan—it helped me truly see myself as Wiccan.
With this new perspective, something began to turn in my heart. Step by step, season by season, I became a routine practitioner. I began to talk about it freely, and being a witch started to be just another aspect of who I was. I began to meet other witches like