Coming Back to Writing: An Update

Wow. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? If we’re being honest, I haven’t felt inspired in quite some time and all of my writing and health and even spiritual projects have fallen to the wayside. I’ve found that my spirituality pivots between inwardly and outwardly focused. I’m sure it had to do with the natural energy of this winter that felt like it has been going on for years rather than months, but my practices have been very inwardly focused for quite a while now. I haven’t been engaging with the broader pagan or even polytheist community; I haven’t done a lot of theological work myself nor read the theology being practiced by others either. I’m months behind on reading blog posts by authors I enjoy. I’m months behind on writing any new content here. I haven’t touched the novel I’ve been working on lately. In a word, I’ve been drained. I’ve scaled everything back to only the basics. My simplest obligations to my Gods have been the only things I’ve been managing to keep hold of. Which means that even my relationships with Them have suffered slightly. While I’ve written time and time again about the necessity of daily practice and regular engagement with the Gods and our Ancestors and other numinous spirits, it is in the special depth of holy tides and holidays and spontenous offerings that relationships grow deeper. Daily practice is about sustaining, about setting a foundation. But it is through those deeper engagements that we grow our devotion into new avenues. It is how we discover new arenas of meaning.

If we’re being honest, detransition has been difficult. I’m lucky to have the support system that I do but even with the best system in the world, changing hormones puts a strain on the physical and emotional centers of the body. Especially if that change is moving from testosterone to estrogen. There is all sorts of emotional turmoil that comes bubbling to the surface when estrogen comes back online. It felt like the Pandora’s box storm of puberty all over again. Things have finally begun to stabilize a bit and I feel as though I can begin to pick up the pieces and make sense of things once more. One of those pieces involves getting back into this blog. It means catching up on reading others’ posts. It means rengaging with the Gods again in more than just the capacity of daily rote prayers. It means tranforming my life into the shape that I actually want it to be instead of allowing it to be something that is done to me without the use of my own power in shaping it.

I’ve found that through the processe of detransition, of working with cannabis in a spiritual capacity, of coming to terms with myself as someone on the autism spectrum, and of fully embracing myself as a lesbian, I’ve offloaded a lot of the shame that had held me captive for most of my life. I have become quite adept at masking. Of hiding the things that make me different. I’ve always felt like I needed to fit in and to please everyone to the detriment of my own wellbeing. I’ve had to come to the conclusion that hiding is never going to be healthy for me. I am weird and that is something to be celebrated rather than hidden. It was through this work of breaking up the blockages of shame and letting air into the cracks that has allowed me the breathing room that I need in order to take a good hard look at every aspect of my life and see what is truly bringing in joy for me. That joy can be euphoria, it can be ecstasy, it can be pleasure, it can be purpose, it can be renewal and growth. For so long, I avoided thinking much about the future and about broader questions of my own unique purpose. If pressed, I’d generically respond that my purpose was the same as anyone else’s: to worship the Gods, leave the Earth better than I found it, and to have fun. While none of this is wrong and I still firmly believe that this is the core of our lives, it doesn’t touch on what I’ve begun to realize is just as important and vital to our being human: creativity. We are called to be co-creators with the Gods. That’s what magick is. That’s what art is. And we’re not fully alive until we’re engaging in both.

You have permission to make bad art. I have permission to make bad art. You have permission to cast wild spells that don’t make sense and flow in random directions and might not pan out. Be messy and playful. That’s what being a witch is. That’s what being an artist is. And the good news is that we’re all that. We are all witches and artists. Sure, some of us are “better” at it than others. Some of us make art by writing code or studying the natural world and never once think of themselves as an artist. But art isn’t just in museums or comic books or in the kitchen. It’s everywhere all the time. Making meaning. Creating. That’s what’s important. For me, it took taking off every mask in order to find that messiness and playfulness that I needed so that I could find my creative self. In doing so, I was able to find and more fully align with my purpose.

Coming into realization of the activities that I need to do to practice proper self-care really opened my eyes to where I needed to invest my time and energy. Self-care kind of gets a bit of a bad rap as yet another avenue of capialism to tell us where we are deficient and then to sell us something to fill that perceived void. We’ve been convinced that it’s bath bombs and fancy lotion and spa days and an entire medicine cabinet full of tonics and tinctures to somehow wash the blues away. In reality, it’s just whatever practices feed our soul. It’s what recharges our batteries, not just in order for us to go back to a dead end 9 to 5 job, but recharges us in order for us to continue to be fully who we are in the world. For me, these practices at their absolute basic are: spending time outside (especially near/against trees and with my bare feet in the grass), goofing around with my wife, tidying up our house (this comes as no surprise knowing that I am a devotee of Frigg), praying and making offerings, reading, and writing (primarily creative prose, poetry, or journalling). In terms of what kind of witch, what kind of artist that I am, I am a story-teller. A wordsmith. And it is when I forget that and turn away from that passion for writing, that creative impulse, that is when I find myself adrift. I crave writing. Does it mean that I’m all that great at it or that everything I do is a masterpeiece? Of course not. And for so long I was discouraged away from the addictive power I felt in writing because of that shame of not living up to the expectations of perfection that I put on myself. But existing imperfection is better than theoretical perfection. Just creating now, creating imperfect art, is better than never putting pen to paper (or brush to canvas, or fingers to keyboard, or measuring spoon to bag of sugar) waiting for the perfect conditions to arrive in order to make the perfect piece of art. I’ve had to learn that there is sexy juiciness in chaos. That there is healing in a storm.

I’ve had to do a lot of growth in the last few months. And a big part of that growth was accepting imperfection and accepting that I can’t please everyone. Nor is it worth it to try.

Instead, I’ve decided to radically restructure my life so that I can fully embrace the byways that bring in the most joy for me. Those channels are exactly where self care happens for me. They are the replenishing waters. I’ve reached a point of utter exhaustion and have to rebuild from there. Burn out is no joke, and when you’re neurodivergent, it’s even harder to dismiss it, which is what I’d been trying to do for so long, pushing for a life that was unsustainable for me. In order to repair that, I’m scaling back down. I had to do a lot of inner child work lately, meeting and caring for young Kris. This youthful person in me who had become imprisoned in walls of shame, bleached of color. I had to think about what it was that young Kris was jazzed about. What shape did she see our life taking? Where was it that she thought we’d be now that we’re about to turn 30? It wasn’t this: working a job that feels stale and lifeless; spending more time mindlessly scrolling on twitter than anything else; taking months to read novels that young Kris would have read in days. I love the home my wife and I have created but the world-facing aspects of my life are not what I wanted them to be and certainly not what I dreamed them to be when I was younger. So in an effort to change that, I’m here.

Writing feels important to me. It feels like home. It feels like sustenance. I forgot that for so long and it’s absolutely mind-boggling to think about how it was that I forgot that. I used to write constantly. I was scribbling down bits of poetry or fiction during every moment I could. A neverending stream of full to bursting notebooks. I want to get that back. That sense of Awen flowing. So I want to start here: at the nexus of my spirituality. With a commitment to write more and read more and explore this center of inspiration more.

Things have been… challenging. Which may be an understatement. But peeling back the layers to see what is truly important has led me to see my own areas of growth. There is a hunger in me that, through depression and social media addiction and discouragement and shame, I forgot the shape of. I forgot how it felt to hold in my hands. The gentle chaos of it. I refuse now to forget it again.

So, here’s to many more blog post and much more writing:

Cheers, health heathens!

Skål!