Where Are You?

1

What is your biggest secret? And who are you keeping it from?

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I'm secretly a witch, and I have to keep it from my Christian family. This is something I've only just begun to dive deeper into, and frankly it has shaken me to my core. For context I was raised in a very strict Christian family. My mother, who was only 19 when she had me out of wedlock, struggled to make ends meet and so we lived with my great grandparents through my early childhood. Let me start with I love my great grandparent, they've taught me a lot about life and love. Unfortunately they also raised me under the Law of Christianity with the basic simple idea that if you do good you go to heaven and if you do bad you go to hell. Sounds simple enough right? But when you start placing this in the categories of Good and Bad that is when things go gray instead of being black and white. For example I was not allowed to watch the show Gargoyles as a child because the characters were to "demonic" in nature. This was hard for me because I love fantasy anything and the idea now that aspects of fantasy were too "demonic" was all that flooded my brain. My love for a genre now filled me with guilt because I began to believe that it fell into the category of Bad and would land me in Hell.

This continued throughout my life but as I got older I began to sneak these things I couldn't get enough of and my internal conflict grew bigger and bigger. Finally the age of 18 came around and now I was legally in charge of myself. I attended church more then ever at this time but my inner turmoil was bubbling over. I began to challenge my family on everything I could. One day I felt like I started World War 3 when I said I didn't believe God had a gender. I fought with the people I loved most on a daily basis and unfortunately it was during this time that I began to chase away the few people I had outside of my family. Before I knew it I was alone, hiding away in my room from my family with no one to talk to. I was lonely and had no outlet, I simply existed.

This continued for almost 6 years. I simply went to work, came home, ate dinner in silence with my family, and then retreated to my room to hide. I'm not entirely sure how but one day when I was out I managed to meet a guy, we were both comfortable with one another instantly and we exchanged numbers before continuing on our ways. It felt like something out of a romance novel but I also felt like I couldn't share it with my family and unfortunately I had no friends to share it with. So in secrecy I continued to talk with this guy and learned so much about him. He began to encourage me and build up my confidence over the next 2 years, so much so I was able to finally demand a raise and move out on my own. I had never felt so free in my life then I did at this point.

I began collecting everything I never could have at home out of fear that my family would throw it away while I was at work. I got all kinds of fantasy books and movies, anime figures, and stuffies to heal my inner child. I felt so at peace and genuinely happy. My relationships within my family also started to heal during this time, but my family never truly visited me at my home. Instead I had to make the trip back home to visit with them. It was one of those trips recently that I decided to stop at a new store that had just opened in town. I walked in and the first thing I spotted was a wall of herbal teas which admittedly I about ran to when I saw it. I was looking through all the different blends when one of the ladies who owned the shop snuck up behind me. She was super friendly and guided me to a couple different blends she thought I would enjoy. I was so distracted by my haul that I didn't notice anything else in the store as I followed her up to the register.

That's when she pitched me a question I wasn't expect "So what kind of Witch are you?". I nearly fell over when she asked me that. My Christian roots flooded through my body and I panicked, I probably had that deer in the headlights look to be honest. I think she could tell my panic because she then asked if I was a Christian. I have to give major props to the woman because she began to talk to me about how Christianity and Witchcraft can coexist and I knew my face said everything I was thinking but she just continued to explain. Everything she talked about resonated with me though and it was on my mind for a solid week.

The guy I mentioned before is still apart of my life and still my partner to this day. He's a Catholic at his roots but he's alway been open to different ideas and learning about them. He can also read me like a book and call me out when I'm hiding something from him. So I'm sure you can tell where this is going but regardless one day he called me out wanting to know what I was bottling up and hiding from him. So I spilled my guts to him, almost in tears at that, about everything that had been circling inside my rusty little pea brain. I was fully expecting him to have the same reaction I did to the lady at the store but instead he did what he always does best. He encouraged me to learn more about it. I can't thank him enough either because as I began to dig and learn about Witchcraft I found that things I was already doing in my life were normal practices. I still have a lot to learn about the craft but unfortunately I can never share any of this with my family. This is my biggest secret and the one I will probably take ti my grave.