then I was reborn, as a witch

When I was a kid I always loved stories about witches. Not because I thought I could be one, but because I thought they were cool.

I had never been religious growing up. My mother and father baptized me, but we never went to church (after my mum was judged by elderly participants because me and my toddler brother weren’t perfectly quiet one time).

But one thing that was important to me, was that my family was ok with me being any kind of religious I wanted to be. They said, “hey, we may not be Christian or Jewish or Muslim, but if you want to be you can and that’s cool.”

With that being said, I didn’t really have any religious affiliation until I was well into adulthood (and even now, I call my witchy-ness more of a spirituality than a religious affiliation).

But let’s get into the meat of the whole point of this blog. How becoming a witch changed my life.

Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic. A lot of things changed my life in the last ten years, but one of them was finding my spirituality in a way I hadn’t before.

I’d never thought that I’d connect with spirituality, especially in high school and my late teens when I was a very loud atheist.

But I did, I learned about wicca at first (I think a lot of witches have a similar story, they wandered into books about wicca before learning they didn’t HAVE to be wiccan to be a witch).

After that, I started to research spellwork, the use of crystals and mantras and manifesting. It started with things like that, using mantras and manifesting to learn to love myself.

But I started to feel like there was something missing, a routine or a knowledge base, something that could connect me to healers and witches in the past that I may or may not share lineage with.

I started working with candles, and following the moon cycles. A huge part of this era was also becoming in tune with MY cycle, which has made me feel more feminine and powerful than I ever have.

I made spells jars, did workings. I wrote sigils on my windows and planted rosemary at my gate. I made simmer pots and cleansed spaces, and every little thing I did, made me feel more powerful and more grounded.

Sometimes I still get side-eyed when people find out I’m a witch, because I just say it. I loudly work with tarot and love astrology.

Becoming a witch allowed me to get in touch with paganism in a feminine way. Witchcraft has always been seen as an evil thing women have done to cause harm or to seduce men, and I feel like those of us practicing now are taking that rhetoric and showing how it can be helpful, beautiful, and protective (and sometimes baneful).

Speaking of the Witch Trials. They’re horrific and I think people don’t think about the sheer volume of lives that were lost. There were towns with no women left, entire generations of families wiped out and gone. How much herbal medicine and history was lost with those lives? In the name of witch hunts?

I could go on and on, but we’re here for more than a history lesson.

Being a witch feels like the final missing puzzle piece in my identity. This thing that had been missing and I couldn’t quite find.

It encouraged my Mum to step into tarot, which she’d always been interested in but never felt like she could. She’s incredible at it.

It truly felt like I was being reborn as I cast my first spells, and I’ve never felt more me.