slipping into the shadows

As a child, I was always…odd. I cannot think of a time in my life that I didn’t exist in some way on the fringes of society and acceptability. I had imaginary friends long after such things were no longer acceptable for my age. I talked to myself constantly and was always much more interested in whatever I was doing than what anyone else was. In retrospect, of course, I was painfully aware of my own oddities, as were my parents who tried against all the odds to break me of my more unsociable behaviors, to no avail. I threw myself, eternally, into worlds of science fiction and fantasy, loving more than all else the idea of blending the two into one and leaving behind any semblance of mundane reality.

Societal norms were just never my strong suit, and it should come as no surprise to my reader (especially since it’s likely you already know me) that it was at an equally young age that I displayed a hopeless incapacity for the concept of strict heterosexuality. I remember a boy in my kindergarten class who was smaller than I, with a freckled face and similar hair to my own and describing him as “cute” to my mother. I also thought a lot of the girls in my class were cute, but this boy stood out to me. Small wonder that at the age of thirteen, I started realizing I was at least not entirely straight.

At sixteen, I began to question my concept of spirituality, as my understanding of myself broadened and I wandered in an endless loop of confusion. God created the universe and everything in it, and everything that comes to pass is God’s Will and God’s Plan, yet humankind has free will and can be punished for sinning against God. Chief among these sins, apparently, was the fact that despite all my best efforts, I still had a crush on several boys who played sports in my all-too-small high school. My fate was predestined; God makes no mistakes, and so He clearly intended for me to like boys, but should I ever act upon that (and by the age of sixteen I already had done so) I was condemned to eternal torment or something of the like. Well, if I was already bound for Hell because my hormone-driven fourteen-year-old self had made a snap decision with a sixteen-year-old friend who was spending the weekend, despite all my other efforts to be a kind person, that failed to make any sense to me.

I was eighteen before I discovered Anton and Mina Adams’ The Learned Arts of Witches and Wizards in the Bargain bookshelves at Barnes & Noble, and my love of fantasy led me to pick it up. Not a child’s tale as I initially expected, but an incredibly watered-down Witchcraft 101, I was suddenly hooked. Like the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians whose tales I so loved, suddenly I, too, could worship the gods of old and enjoy a whole different set of social mores. I could be Robin Tunney in The Craft, calling on forces beyond the comprehension of mere mortals and use magic. Real magic! And the gods don’t care if you’re gay!

The reality soon settled in, of course, that it wasn’t like the movies at all, but that revelation didn’t deter me from delving further and further into the idea of it. When I met my ex-husband, he introduced me to the works of Christopher Penczak, beginning with his titles Gay Witchcraft and The Inner Temple of Witchcraft. These works, in many ways much more informative and profound than what I had read previously, began a more serious exploration of what it really means to me to be a witch. It isn’t about power, or about stuff, but about learning to see deeper into the meaning of the world around you, understanding the cycles of the seasons, and the greater circle of life, death, and rebirth that surrounds us all.

In November 2008, my just-married husband, my best friend, and I had an opportunity to take Christopher Penczak’s Shamanic Witchcraft workshop. My compatriots had taken his Outer Temple class the year before, and we had integrated many of the techniques they learned there into our collective spiritual practice, so I was even more excited to take this class and be taught by the author himself. Like they had done the year before, we would take this class and then bring the techniques we learned back to the rest of our small coven, thus making us all Better Witches. The keys to enlightenment lay before us like an open treasure chest. Obviously, we would all advance through this five-degree tradition at the same pace, with the same end result in mind of being able to carry the title of High Priests and High Priestesses. Our little coven would become the center of witchcraft wisdom in the Midwest.

I had not yet actually read the book, and really had no idea what to expect from this class. Penczak himself is the sort of person who radiates kindness and love, but also no-nonsense. I was not prepared for the intensity of the course, and ultimately “failed” at several core exercises. Shamanic journeys are an experience, and while I had the capability, I did not have the capacity. Sometimes, I fell asleep. Sometimes, I missed the entire point of the experience. Once, I reached my intended destination only to be given the very firm message of, “you are not ready for this yet.” I didn’t understand how true that really was at the time.

In the years that followed, I tried, and failed, to convince myself to go through Inner Temple and Outer Temple again, to learn the material and lead myself to be “ready” for the experience of The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft and the spiritual enlightenment that would lead me on to this prestigious place of spiritual leadership that I so craved. Ever the Capricorn, I suppose, it was all about structure and titles, respect and recognition. When people asked why I was interested in the Craft in the first place, I always cited the same things; respect for nature and the cycles of the earth, freedom to practice in the way that made you most comfortable, and the freedom to be a gay man without persecution from my own religious leaders.

In 2011, my entire life began changing in ways I could never have fathomed. The company I worked for liquidated, and I found myself thrust into a career change I never anticipated or wanted. My marriage began falling apart, and as 2012 began, a freshly 29-year-old me started to chafe at the questions of who I was and what I really wanted. I left my husband, moved in first with some friends, and later into an apartment on my own for the first time in my life. I didn’t know how to be alone and began drinking, smoking, and sleeping around to cope with the fact that I still had no idea who and what I wanted. But it was all right, because in Wicca the only rule is, “an’ it harm none, do what ye will.” I didn’t yet understand I was hurting myself.

My grandfather got sick and went into hospice care the day I was fired from my full-time job. The part-time barista gig I had picked up to help me pay my bills was suddenly the only income I had, and I rapidly dug myself deeper into an already insurmountable amount of credit card debt, too proud to ask for help, or to admit to my family that I had lost my job because I had made stupid mistakes. With the help of two friends who were members of the coven that had splintered at the same time as my marriage, I finally found the strength to go out and apply for new jobs. I took a job as a delivery driver for a sandwich shop, and a week later I was hired on as a server at one of the most exceptional restaurants in downtown. The next morning, my grandfather died. I sunk deeper into depression. I spent the next week working, hooking up, barely sleeping or eating, and mostly stuffing it all at the back of my mind, filling my time with anything I could.

I met another boyfriend, and though they lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, a 700-mile trek from my home in Illinois, I decided we could make this work. For eight months, we traded commutes, living on Skype with one another and seeing each other in person about every six weeks or so. I poured myself into the relationship, but we had met a mere eight months after my ex-husband and I separated, and it was not enough time. They moved up here, and the same week, my grandmother moved to my parents’ house, no longer able to live by herself. Between family, friends, and Grandma being in and out of the hospital for most of August, when Labor Day came, all I could think of was having a day off, to be able to completely relax.

That morning, my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had died.

Looking back on it now, I was so deep in denial about how badly I was affected by this that it’s stunning to me. I started running entirely on autopilot. Work, smoke, drink, sleep, repeat. My partner needed more than I could give, and I progressively grew more insular, more taciturn, and more distant. We broke up on New Year’s Day, and I quickly added promiscuity back into the list of ways I kept myself from dealing with my emotions. My spirituality had long since taken a back seat to everything else going on in my life, and my capacity to deal with myself and everything around me was gone. I had no interest in accepting how I felt about anything at all, so I filled my time with everything I could for fear of allowing myself to really process.

In December of 2014, I met someone new. Our intent was for something on the order of casual friendship, maybe a hint of something more, but nothing serious. I didn’t do “serious” anymore, because opening myself up enough to really care about someone just kept coming back to bite me, one way or another. In retrospect, my intentions of not falling for him were doomed from the start. He was too honest, too caring and loving, not to feel something more than just baseline friendship. I say this as though I’m not grateful for the way things turned out, but as I am marrying him in 39 days, obviously I am not displeased with how events have turned out.

Our relationship has not been without its difficulties, some of which are greater than others. My fiancé’s stability has improved and increased over time, but he has mental health issues that are occasionally debilitating, and at times I fall into a role more of a caretaker than of partner. In turn, he has supported me through a lot of my own struggles, generally without complaint, but he also doesn’t settle for my bullshit. He is willing to be supportive and listen, but he challenges me continually to do better. Not for his benefit, but for my own, ultimately.

And now, dear reader, we finally come to the point of this post. I would say I’m sorry that it’s taken so long to get here, but the truth is that the path is so much longer, and more winding than I have even touched on here. I have glossed over so many things of significance to make a thin attempt at brevity, but 2,000 words will hardly ever be enough to cover a lifetime. How does one begin to explain the moment when they truly start to understand what they have been working for?

In May of this year, my struggle with alcoholism reached its peak. Drinking to numb oneself does not work, especially if you are doing it because you think you will escape all the rage, fear, and pain you are feeling. It will only magnify it. And if in a fit of drunken rage, you find yourself vomiting rum onto the carpet after an ugly fight and trying to ram your head through a bookcase, you begin to understand this. If in the days that follow, you find that you are overwhelmed with shame and guilt, but you are also too afraid of repeating your actions to even think of touching a bottle of liquor, you start to see things. If you look into the eyes of the man you love and see forgiveness, and not only an expectation of change, but a belief that it is possible, you begin to wonder why you’ve been running.

At midnight tonight, it will be four months since I last drank alcohol. It has been sixteen months since I quit smoking. I have no room in my life, nor need, to be promiscuous, as my relationship with my soon-to-be husband is more than fulfilling in ways that mere physical sexuality will never be. I have been in therapy for a year and a half, and will continue to go for a long time, I think.

Three weeks ago, I picked up my copy of The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft again and started reading it–really understanding it, this time. The focus of the work, and of the shamanic techniques he is teaching, is not about gaining power, or prestige, or influence in the greater pagan community. It is about healing what is termed in psychological and spiritual disciplines alike, the Shadow. In Penczak’s words, “The shadow consists of all the parts of you that you’d rather not face… The shadow is all the anger, fear, jealousy, shame, and guilt that we have not processed. Energy is constantly in motion, and if emotions are energy, then they have to go somewhere and do something. Denied emotions compose the shadow.”

I have spent the last few weeks delving into my past and my life, asking myself some really uncomfortable questions. As I have removed the availability of what my therapist calls “maladaptive coping strategies,” it has become harder to hide. Social media, of course, has been another one, and I have taken to more and more stringent methods to limit my access to it. It is not easy, and the emotions and memories that have surfaced have made it difficult to want to socialize or reach out to friends or family because it is just as hard to explain this process as anything.

“Hi, I’m using a combination of magickal, spiritual, psychological, and psycho-somatic techniques to deal with emotions and experiences I haven’t processed through or have repressed, to accept them and generally stop being a dick to everyone in my life.”

It doesn’t exactly sound sexy, and it isn’t. It’s painful, it’s frustrating, and it’s difficult. It’s hard to explain the process of distilling the shadow to anyone outside a mystical tradition and not feel like you just sound crazy. It feels like you are insane. I can’t stop thinking, analyzing, and digging deeper and deeper into myself and my past and my memories, starting to see patterns in my behavior and connections between actions that are decades apart from one another but are so intrinsically linked that they may as well have been two casts in the same play.

It’s been nearly ten years since the journey where I was told I was not ready, and only now am I beginning to understand how true that was, and why. Only after nearly succeeding in destroying my life do I know that ultimately, I have just been trying to escape myself. In the moment of that realization, it becomes clear; if you are afraid to face yourself, your problems will follow you, and you are doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over.

But when you reach the point that you stop hiding behind things, because everything you hide behind turns out poorly, your choice becomes clear. Either a lifetime of misery, self-loathing, and self-delusion, or slipping into the shadows of yourself and facing what you find. Different people do it differently, and some people never make a choice at all, but for me, this is the path I have to walk. I owe it to him, I owe it to you, and most of all, I owe it to myself. As it has been my entire life, doing it the weird way, with herbs and candles and deep meditative trances to the rhythm of a drumbeat and prayers to gods most have forgotten.