Hi, you made it. I’m so glad you’re here. Things are scary right now, and no doubt they’re going to get worse before they get better, but there’s one really important thing I need you to know first.
We need you.
More specifically, I need you. I need to know I live in a world where there are other people who are scared, who don’t know what to do and don’t think they have anything of value to offer but they’re still trying their best (and yes, you are doing your best even if your brain is shouting the exact opposite at you).
It’s not one static level of performance, it fluctuates because your life fluctuates. Some days waking up and breathing is a victory, and I need you to count those little victories up with the big ones, because little victories is what it’s going to take to get through this.
I want you to do me a favor. Give yourself one act of kindness, right now. It doesn’t have to be big.
Take a breath and focus on blowing out one long exhale. You can stretch, drink some water, get up and move from the chair or bed if you’ve been doomscrolling, find one beautiful thing around you, have a delightful snack, make yourself a cup of something warm and cozy, or, if you can, change your clothes and put on something warm and cozy.
How did it feel?
Congratulations, now you’ve got one small victory under your belt. Now imagine all the friends and allies you hope to find, think about them having little victories of their own too. Of taking the unknown chaos of the day and finding one small moment to stop and change the narrative.
This is your resistance. They want you scared and exhausted, unable to think or do anything but obey. They are big, but we are many, and those many tiny victories will add up, I promise.
Tag: neurodivergent
Spiritual Toe Dipping, Pt 1 of 2
Or How Dionysus Shoulder Tapped Me
Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to Dionysus. Life has been much stranger since I invited you inside.
Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand
I have spent a very long time being a lapsed Pagan: Falling off the sabbat wagon, letting monotheistic epithets sneak into my lexicon, letting our child periodically destroy the altar space, tucked away as it was on a pull out keyboard tray. I did not expect a random chunk of polished amethyst to both re-establish my entire spiritual practice and then lead me into personal beef with fifth dimensional parole officers.
Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in a house where both my older sister and mother were in the same coven. It was not unusual for me to pull back a curtain and see warding pentagrams drawn on the windowsills. We had an extraordinarily robust lavender bush that I was not allowed to cut under any circumstances, and my daily experiences included the smokey incense flavor of the month wafting through the house or walking in on my sister talking to a jar of moon water. This was my life and my prized possessions as a pre teen were a tiny leather pouch of rocks (Botswana banded agate, amethyst, malachite and falcon’s eye) that would live under my pillow, a bag of terra cotta runestones, and the pentacle medallion I got stamped at my first Renaissance Faire.
Insert a vicious divorce, high school, a long bout with depression, a desperate need to leave home and escape to any college that would take me, and a long stint with poverty.
Eventually I came out the other side with a fantastic partner and a residency in a multigenerational household in the suburbs, complete with a rescued pit bull that I adored, even after she ate the aforementioned leather pouch and those prized stones and waning spirituality vanished from my life completely. Or so I thought.
Fast forward to becoming a parent, a Saturn return I didn’t even know was a thing until I was far beyond it, and a blue collar career path after going to college for a pre-med degree.
Now throw in the Pandemic and reconstructing sixty percent of a fifty year old house during lockdown while seven adults, a dog, and a five year old were living in it. The detritus of our lives and the two generations preceding it were rapidly cleared from affected rooms, tucked away, reshuffled, and then crammed into every shelf, corner, and flat surface available to us.
COVID raged and as an immunocompromised essential worker I kept my head down and my mask up and hoped every day I wouldn’t be the one to bring home the virus and infect our family pod. Vaccines rolled out, the construction finished, and I began a sourdough culture free semblance of life.
It was fairly empty facsimile. I realized my friends had all been inherited from activities with my wife and that I myself had not acquired a new friend of my own in….
Years, it had been years, and my very dear internet pen pal had been lost in a flurry of 5G paranoia and tinfoil hats as my five years of daily emails transformed into empty, aching silence.
So I did what any lonely queer person would do, I turned to fanfiction.
Sweet sweet hyperfixations, I have not tasted thee since A Dance with Dragons fell from the nearest Barnes and Noble (because in 2014 Amazon had not yet become the monopoly it is today and we weren’t smart enough to understand how important it was to always buy from local independent bookstores, or local independent anything, for that matter…). Nothing had touched the razed earth ground of my fandom soul since the travesty of Game of Thrones Season 8, and then came Motherland: Fort Salem.
Witches with deep, lore heavy world building and alternate US military history? Sign me TF up.
And that was before I knew it was queer.
It kept me rivetted, and deep in the bowels of our collective lockdown trauma, it gave me back my words.
Those words gave me a community, a community of likeminded neurodivergent genderqueer weirdos (most of that likeminded-ness I have just figured out for myself in the last year, thank you, Discord and Betterhelp).
And it just so happened that these weirdos like to pull Tarot cards…
Where Queer Nerd and Soul Collide 