Advice So Many Nonmonogamous (mostly) Dudes Need

There's a polyamory group on Facebook that I'm in. It's about half memes and half requests for advice. I like about 5% of its posts asking for advice or help. They are interesting questions or serious introspection about what tools would be best to navigate some of the complexities that come up around nonmonogamy in a monogamous society. (Things like how to handle holidays when your family doesn't understand, or what tools are particularly useful when someone's going through bananapants new-relationship-energy and you feel like the old shoe.) The other 95% are posts by one in a couple who have recently opened up (we call them "polywogs"), usually in ways that are ethically….let's say inexperienced for the benefit of the doubt…although "questionable" might be more accurate. These posts (regardless of which member of the couple is asking") retread the same handful of questions over and over and over again. I wish I could blanket these posts with the following advice: 

• Date separately. If you've recently opened up, do this deliberately and for a long time before you try to date as a couple. Trying to date the same person when you haven't even figured out nonmonogamy yourself is less ethical than you might think. It takes a lot of self-awareness and no-small-amount of experience to navigate a world that inculturates us into monogamy. Trying to onboard another person into a relationship that isn't absolutely nailing it with communication, open honesty, and each individual's introspection is a recipe for disaster and is going to hurt at least one person you care about.
• Hey, this is mostly for the dudes. Okay, so what if you ARE dating separately. First of all, good on you! But also….THERE IS NO DATING APP THAT IS GOING TO DO THE WORK FOR DUDES. They won't sign up and just….get attention. Femme-read folks tend to get too much attention. WAY too much—the vast majority of it crapfully crappier than the first half dozen Strongbad Emails. (Although they generally have to be considered conventionally attractive to really have their inbox explode.)  Theirs is the curse of going through all the dross. Dudes get crickets. And tumbleweeds. And the old prospector sitting on the porch of a burnt out husk of a building who slowly lights a pipe and says "ain't no one been here in….oh, I'd say…fifty years." Theirs is the curse of silence. A moment's thought about how our culture does courtship, who has power, and who exposes themselves to violence every time they spend time with an unknown dude should make it obvious why this is. But everyone is cursed to struggle for genuine connection, and no app is going to be as easy as filling out the information and letting the sweet, sweet interest just roll in. That's not how it works. Ever.
• Okay, so you decided not to date separately. I warned you in my best "Beware the groove" voice, but here we are. You're looking to date together. And because of a number of factors almost always including the dude's fantasies and the dude's insecurities, you're looking to date a bisexual woman with your partner. Yes, what you're doing is unicorn hunting. No, it's not a problem if everyone gives enthusiastic, informed consent—and might not even technically be unicorn "hunting" per se. (Yakov Smirnoff voice: "In enthusiastic Russia, unicorn hunts YOU!") But HAVE they given informed, enthusiastic consent? Or are you missing one or both of those ingredients? Usually the "informed" part, because this person is some polywog who doesn't understand what couples' privilege looks like, how it will affect them when things come crashing down, and how to set up healthy boundaries around it. They have NO IDEA what they're about to get into. And that's not informed. That's predatory—on your part. Or maybe it isn't actually enthusiastic. Maybe someone isn't sure. Or maybe they're along for the ride because they want to gain (or don't want to lose) access to only ONE of you. Now you've created a situation in which it is only a matter of time before you detonate—not very ethical of the two of you.
• And for fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…(~deep breath~) uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck's sake, the above doesn't even consider power differentials. If someone is moving in because they're homeless, joining a "family" because they're being financially pinioned, don't feel like they can say no to this relationship without losing something, are being socially manipulated, are being pressured, badgered, or guilted, are obliged by some kind of arrangement (that isn't explicitly sex for money—got nothing against sex work here!) or otherwise are being cajoled into this dynamic, that is absolutely fucking deplorable and you need to stop interacting with anyone. For any reason. (Except maybe therapy.) Until/unless you knock that shit off. 
• If you really care about this stuff like ethics and consent and open, honest communication, and preserving this relationship that you claim to value, you should be assimilating the advice of almost everyone who came before you, and having a lot of good conversations. You should NOT be pretending that the entire community of veterans just collectively woke up and decided to make up how problematic these dynamics can be in order to harsh your very entitled squee. It is INCREDIBLY specious of you to blow off as "kinshamers" literally entire communities who have done—or seen done—this very thing over and over and over and over (and over and over) and watched it fail spectacularly in the same way every time.  It WILL. be. harmful. to everyone involved. And if you don't blow up every vestige of all four relationships*, one of the three of you will very likely end up "left" by the other two and have to mend a broken heart. Then, if you haven't sworn off nonmonogamy altogether you will be tomorrow's eye-roller trying to convince the next generation of unicorn hunters that this is an advanced move for a polywog, and they are not somehow special.
• I love group sex. I can't say enough good things about it. It's about as much fun as you can have without breaking the law—except in the states where it IS breaking the law and there it's tied with some….uh….OTHER stuff that…I absolutely never do. And I'm including Disney parks in that assessment. But you can bang it out (even regularly) in an ethical way that doesn't involve the dynamics of "trying to find a third" and all the deeply problematic tropes that this type of search so, so, SO often falls into. 
• Is that third you're looking for an independent person? Do they get to date separately from the two of you? Do they get to bang either one of you while the other isn't there? Are they allowed to not like threesomes that much? Can they keep their own living arrangements? Will they be encouraged to have their own activities, interests, income, and life outside of your relationship? If you've answered no to ANY of these questions, this isn't ethical, and someone's going to get hurt. Does one of you have veto if it doesn't work—the ability to slam the breaks on the whole thing and just go back to monogamy—dumping the third? Will you make big financial and life decisions without them like when to have kids or buy property? Are you going to keep right on telling family and friends and coworkers that you're a couple and keep them as your dirty little secret? If you've answered yes to ANY of these questions, someone's going to get hurt. I'm not saying you can't stay "in the closet" strategically, but this person is going to exist outside of your bedroom and it isn't fair to them to act like they don't.
• Another one mostly for the dudes. As a reformed whiner about how hard it is to meet femme-read folks, even in non-monogamous circles, please let me assure you that you won't whine your way into anyone's DMs. You. Will. Not. EVER. Do This. Self confidence is hot and this is whatever the opposite of that is. They don't owe you attention. They don't owe you a chance. They don't owe you a date, sex….anything. I hear your complaints that some people are better at this. Some are hotter. Some are suaver. Some have the skibbidy Ohio rizz, They are so sigma. You're right. They are. They do. But don't be L-rizz about it. There will ALWAYS be someone to compare yourself to unfavorably. If only you were a blistering hot extrovert, right? If only you could work a room. If only you had a six pack and chiseled pecs. Maybe, but whatever. Stop whining—I absolutely promise you up one side and down the other that your lack of confidence is literally 90% of your problem. The whining isn't doing you ANY favors. I'm an introvert too. I'm cute but I'm not some unfathomable smoke show. I don't get messages on dating apps except to be immediately benched. I have to meet people. I have to talk to people. I have to form relationships, and then ONCE in a while….cute people tell me that I'm starting to smell like a legit snack. 
• Dudes need to go do shit they enjoy and just…..meet people. They need to stop thinking there is some door in the nonmonogamous world they can walk through…some app they can download…some group they can be a part of…some party…some place…SOMEWHERE where they don't need to put themselves out there and meet people and to get to know their potential sex partners. Somewhere where women and femme-read folks will just walk up to them and say, "I am for you James Smith," without them ever having to be interesting or charming or funny or just…fucking outrageously hot or SOMETHING. And asking women to do the propositioning or ask "where should I go to meet…" isn't really going to change this answer. 
• Date separately. Seriously. Either date separately, go be swingers (got nothing against that if it's your jam), or be ready for everything to fall apart after a couple of encounters. Group sex is fun. (No, seriously, it's a LOT of fun.) Cruise together. Invite the people you're dating separately to join both of you once in a while. Have fun with it. But fuck, listen to me when I promise you to infinity and beyond that group RELATIONSHIP dynamics are basically impossible to try to engineer intentionally with such a specific result in mind. Add one person to a dyad and you've added THREE additional relationship dynamics. If you can't date separately, you're definitely not ready for that.
• *That's right. A triad has four relationships. Each person has their own unique dynamic with each of the other two, and the three of you have a relationship as a trio that has its own dynamic. Two of you might be hot and heavy sexually while the other two talk for hours and the three of you may enjoy neither of those things but love watching Netflix together. They're EACH their own relationship and you can't force ONE relationship to be what you want it to be—never mind four. Each of those relationships needs its own emotional availability, nurturing, and support for this to work. No relationship involving more than one person is going to have every member liking every other member equally. Ever. EVER. If someone is going to be insecure about that when it happens (and it will), the entire thing is going to explode. Every time. Always.
• If you and your partner have intentional hierarchy with veto, you have to understand that it will get used EXACTLY when you don't want it to the most. Always. THE MOST. Your enthusiasm for what is happening is going to be a threat, and if they have the power to stop it in its tracks, they will—even just to know you WOULD stop if they demanded it.
• Date separately. You'll know when you're ready when something organic starts kind of just…happening, and trust me that it'll STILL be incredibly difficult to navigate all those emotions and relationships and logistics. But when you're first starting…just…. Okay, you know those video games that "let" you go anywhere, but there are clearly ways that are WAY too hard until you've leveled up and have the gyro cannon powered over 9000? This is like that. Yeah you can, but…like…I promise you shouldn't. Pinkie swear. 
• The reason so many of the poly vets avoid folks with hierarchy and veto is not because every single independent polyam community has been struck by cultish groupthink…somehow simultaneously…and all the same way. It's because we've had our fucking hearts broken by people who we weren't in relationships with and didn't consent to give control over our relationships to. If some jealous spouse is controlling when, what, where, and even IF we can have a relationship, we're going to be super extra wary and vigilant. You fall in love and their partner gets insecure and vetos you…that's a stepped-on-Lego to the heart that you don't want to go repeating. 
• So you're dating (hopefully separately) but now you have….rules. When and where and how and who and how often and… and…and….  Okay fine. Polywogs tend to start with a lot of "Thou shalt not…"s and evolve into talking about what's coming up in their feelings and what they need or want (as a positive request) later on. But hear me on this: One-penis policies are gross. At the very very very least, they are assuming sex with a penis is somehow "real," and two people with vulvas getting together is not going to be a threat to that penis-haver or (worse) is there for some dude's enjoyment. That's some unmitigated heteronormative crap. And that's the BEST-CASE scenario. When you actually unpack that shit, you're probably going to find homophobia and transantagonism driving the fear of "certain plumbing" before someone has even finished the first couple of sentences doing their best diplomatic effort to explain why the OPP is not wildly problematic.
• Okay, so you're dating. And she's only "allowed" to date other women, but says that's okay because it's all she wants. Is she REALLY not into other guys or is this relationship at a resentment "simmer" already? Because that's going to go okay until it doesn't. Look, there are a few reasons the guy she opened up with might be the only dude in her life, but none of them is likely to be that she just magically desires ONLY the relationship structure that he finds least threatening. (If she's really mostly gay, for example, but that's likely to be obvious and not about what makes him insecure.) In twenty-five years, what I've found far more likely is that the guy in this couple is just being controlling and misogynist in a way that does not belong in ETHICAL non-monogamy. Either his behavior when she dates dudes is SOFA KING awful that it's simply not worth it (gross), or they explicitly have some rule about her dating other dudes (extra gross), which if anyone gave a moment's thought, they would realize this couple wouldn't actually need (as a "rule") if this was what everyone enthusiastically wanted anyway. I've seen too many weak smiles well away from the tender egos of husbands and boyfriends (along with the confessions of "well, that's all he can handle right now, so I just have to deal with it") not to be very, VERY skeptical. 
• Watching sapphic relationships blow up heterosexual relationships just as fast (or often faster) than their dude counterparts, or watching women fall for guys even though they’re not "supposed" to want such a thing (~or~ the PARTICULARLY telling case where the relationship involves someone trans who has a penis [oh noes!], and then all kinds of problematic shit hits overdrive where penises are magical and vulvas aren’t attached to “real” relationships)….  if there is one thing I have learned, it is that when a heteronormative dyad tries to convince everyone that their one-penis policy is on the up and up by swearing that everyone is enthusiastically consenting, somebody is—and usually two somebodies are— not being fully honest. That shit has some real, "I'm GLAD you wished Pa into the cornfield" vibes. 
• Have I mentioned date separately?
• Dudes, if you opened up a monogamous, heterosexual dyad  for all the hot sex in the world you were sure you'd be getting just the MINUTE the ink dried, and now she's off having hot dates with people she cares about, and you can't handle it, so you shut the whole thing down, understand that you are about to create a swirling vortex spew of your entitlement and her resentment, and that every fourth or fifth damn post in ANY polyamory group is going to be about a person JUST. LIKE. YOU.
• Fucking date separately. 

The Case of the Eloquent Bigot

Someone can come up with a beautiful, elegant, well-thought rationale for their bigotry that insists that all the moving parts are actually adjacent to the prejudice itself and that there is no camouflaged intolerance behind the pulsing heart of their impetus, but at the end of the day the same people who are hurt by outright, overt, naked bigotry will be the ones crying that "this hurts us," and the bigot-writer's ardent supporters will be ones slipping up and saying aloud the part they're actually probably just DYING to say. 

I'm a professional writer, and though there's a book around here somewhere that I'm going to get back to, I pay the bills blogging. I make money trying to convince people of things. I know how to make a case for something. How to emphasize this point and avoid that one. I know how to imagine how something is going to land and how to work around the rhetorical points that make me look bad. I know how to lean in on the spin and give something a coat of paint and a polish. 

We've all laughed (bitterly) when Trump said, "I don't have a racist bone in my body." We've all seen the person who claims their racism is about states' rights or that anti-choice legislation is somehow actually about 35th week pregnancy even though it targets everything after the six. We've all seen the argument that makes some case about child molestation when they really are just being transphobic bigots or claiming that sexual assault is the issue when it's not trans people sexually assaulting folks. We know that study after study after study says that people understand that anti-sex-work laws can be crafted to be harder on trafficking and exploitation, but what people really want is a reason that plays a little better at parties than for them to just come out as openly anti-sex worker.

Believe me when I tell you that a professional writer with time to revise can obfuscate their bigotry quite well. I say this as a writer. I say this as a reader. I say this as a lifetime activist who has read more elevated and genteel versions of "I'm not racist, but…" than I want to remember. These writers are the ambassadors for the version of the arguments that most people know JUUUUUUUST enough not to utter in mixed company.

So when you read some writer's manifesto, just keep that in mind. One of literally the best and brightest writing minds on the planet might using their host of skills to make sure that you don't see what's going on behind the curtain. They want you to focus on the sleight of language that will never come out and say it. But you can watch the people reacting—the people in the groups that are affected. (The ones they are assuring you they would never stand against.) You can just ask these people, you know. You don't have to assume they're okay with something just because you read something with formal diction. You can just look and see that they are hurt. (Though this may require actually doing so and not just assuming.) And while most people know that it's better to check with BIPOC rather than Trump to find out if Trump is a racist, all those big vocabulary words sometimes mean people forget that the same rules apply to everyone. White people don't get to decide who's racist—no matter how good at writing they are. 

You can also watch the allies—the people who have the writer's back. The people crowding in, in throngs and mobs and hordes. The ones who aren't quite so good at the misdirection and who slip up (often) and say the quiet part out loud. The comment sections and the conversations they think are just "their people" that begin to fill with the real sentiments. Glance at who is on the writer's side and it's piss easy to tell if maybe their diplomacy is covering up the truth.

Suddenly it will be crystal clear that all the fifty-cent words in the world won't change the fact that a marginalized group is being harmed, and the writer is doing it. 

They just used more paragraphs.

Working Woo Practitioner—The Next Steps in a Great Journey

I'm going to pause in the story of my being called by The Morrigan three years ago to talk about something with Her that's going on right NOW in my spiritual practice and life.

Recently—through dreams mostly—Herself has been calling me to change the entire shape and nature of the work I do in my day-to-day life, the devotions I take and make for her, and the way I serve my community. My physical and mental and emotional presence as I move through the world. It's this whole….package of new tasks she wants me to undertake to serve my community. Everything from holding space for grieving folks to learning Irish pagan lore to a deep proficiency in martial arts training to getting certified to do marriages. There is some question about how I'm going to do all this new work and community service and still get the rent paid, but I think most of these skills—if not all of them—can contribute in some way to an income. I also don't plan on stopping my current writing, although I'm learning the hard way that I'm not sure I can stay with it as intensely as I have before.

So I've got this whole breakdown for learning times for the new work and how I can continue to survive capitalism while developing these skills and then later serving my community in all the ways that have been coming up for me. I have this information on a spreadsheet, but I'm posting it here to kind of use y'all as an accountability buddy and to let you know how much is going on. 

Things that are going to take years:

Irish Harp (5-10 years): 

Yeah, I'm still on my bullshit with this one. (For those who've been following me for a while, I've been trying to get going on this for years. It turns out even BUYING a good Irish harp becomes a whole fucking adventure, and can quickly turn into a lesson on what NOT to do. I almost bought one right before I met Rhapsody, but I was in the middle of figuring out exactly how many strings I wanted and what makers made good instruments when I met her and got sidelined for a couple of years with everything from miscarriages to marriages to cancer to a death in my immediate circles.) I need to get back to making a steady income that does a little more than barely paying the bills before I'm willing to drop the front end cost on even a starter instrument—they are SPENDY!— but I'm kind of serious about getting back into music (I've missed having it in my life), and I really want it to be the harp. I don't know that this'll ever be a part of my "survive capitalism" strategy. I don't have any ludicrous fantasies of rocking the electric harp on stage or anything. Also, mastery takes a long long time. Harps are notoriously hard—their proficiency used to be a sign of the kind of years of study only nobility could really invest in. But it's a way to return discipline, routine, focus, and music to my life.

Krav Maga/Martial Arts (2-4 years): 

I found a Krav Maga school pretty close to where I live that incorporates jiu-jitsu and some Thai kickboxing (which sounds an awful lot like the ground fighting/striking combination I was doing in my twenties in a Jeet Kune Do school). I know martial arts are a "journey" type thing that takes a lifetime to master, and I'm not going to be "done" even in four years, but if I'm putting in 2-3 classes a week, my recollection of my late teens/early 20s is that within about 3-5 years, one can start to teach. In most schools, that teaching lets you either get free tuition and/or some pittance pay for teaching the new recruits. I signed up last month. I start now that I'm back from my road trip. Even in my introductory class, I noticed that there seems to be a lot of overlap with what I already know, so I'm thinking dedication can get me to that paid tipping point JUST a little sooner.

Fitness Training/Fitness Instruction (2 years): 

This I'm going to take at Diablo Valley College (the local community college—where I used to work for those of you who have been around long enough to remember my posts about teaching and students) with actual official structured units and a learning curriculum. There are two certificates. The first gives you enough basics to do things like run fitness classes, and the second focuses on personal training. Each is about 15 units and would only take one semester if I were going to school full time (a year for both), but given everything else I want to accomplish (including continuing to write and some vestige of a social life) within that time frame, I'm going to take four half-time semesters. I'll finish the first certificate in Spring 2024 and the second in Spring 2025.

This will probably translate into one of the most obvious things I can use to make money. I want to do physical training and physical coaching. Running classes and personal training in a way that absolutely rejects typical "weight loss" or "look hot" language in favor of just raising energy levels, feeling better, and achieving fitness related goals.

Things that are going to take months:

Woo "Facilitator" (2 years?): 

There's something I want to do, and I don't exactly know what is even involved. There's a friend doing this work now, and I want to pick her brain, but we've missed each other the last few weeks because of our respective vacations and scheduling. So I have no idea if this is going to take a couple of months or a couple of years (or a couple of weeks?) From what I can tell, it's somewhere at the intersection between energy work and craniosacral massage, and it works sort of like being a signpost for woo stuff. (There are some pedestrian and humanistic psych benefits too for the skeptics.) But just making the space and facilitating those kinds of journeys is work I want to do. Maybe it's one of those things I can DO right away, but it'll take me months or years before I can ask for more than a pittance. 

My friend isn't going to get rich doing this work, but she is able to ask a lot for an hour. 

Irish Pagan Lore (6 months x 2): 

The work I'm going to be doing is going to carry me deeper and deeper into a higher-profile community role and place me right in the middle of at least a few questions. Questions about who The Morrigan is, what She wants, and how someone who wants to work with Her can start that journey. Right now I can deflect questions like that to authorities I trust—and I can still do that for the most arcane high-speed curve balls—but I'll need to be able to handle a few of the basics on my own.

I'm taking the Morrigan Intensive—a six month rigorous course in The Morrigan lore, modern practice, priesthood, and devotionals—so that I can navigate, and perhaps speak to a few more things with comprehension. (I won't go so far as to say with "authority" although I think the end of this class is going to raise the question of priesthood. I don't know that this will necessarily turn into anything specific to help me keep the rent paid so much as simply direct the focus and direction of my work, but I think that everything else I'm about to undertake will be served by a rock-solid understanding of the lore and a deep grounding within the theology that I mean to carry into those acts of service.

This is an intensive, six-month course, and I am already planning on taking it again (although with a one or two year break in between) to maximize what I get out of both runs.

Tarot/Ogham/Divination (2 months [Tarot]/6 months [Ogham]):

This is another one I can see translating into a sidegig without a lot of difficulty. I've seen people regularly charge $50-$100 for an online reading. It's probably going to be a few more months of practice before I can really charge for this, though. I can do tarot readings already, but I'm pretty slow. I have most cards memorized and understand the way they interact in the gestalt of a reading, but I don't trust myself, and I end up looking a lot of things up that I knew but wasn't confident about. If I include doing a write-up, it would probably take me a few hours per reading right now, and what I would need to charge for that to make it worth it would be a little more than I feel comfortable asking for before I've had a lot more practice. 

Ogham is a much more complicated subject. I don't really know or understand it at all…particularly how it gets used in divination, so I'd be starting from square one with that one. Not that I need mastery of both to pursue one. But what I can probably be proficient in in a couple of months of dedicating myself to Tarot is likely to take me at least six months (longer) with Ogham.

Death Doula (7 weeks?): 

Going through the grief process with Rhapsody on the outside of the grief itself was probably one of the hardest things I've done that I had a choice about. (Cancer was certainly worse, but I couldn't exactly opt out.) But being there to hold space for grief was also deeply and profoundly rewarding work. I could really feel the difference I made from day to day. During a moment of reflection and meditation, I had a very powerful sense that this was work The Morrigan wanted me to do. This was a calling. 

All these things on this list have involved a similar sense of work I'm being called to do, but this one was particularly strange since I had never even heard of anything like it before. In fact, I was describing what it was that I wanted to do—just help people through the process of their end of life and/or families with grief—and someone said to me: "That sounds a lot like a death doula." I looked it up, and that's pretty spot on what I was envisioning. 

This is another one I'm not sure on the timing. I'm seeing everything from a three day intensive to a seven week course. I have someone I'm going to talk to, and try to get some answers about where to start a reliable and credible program.

Things that will be instant, very fast, or I'm already doing:

Officiant:

It doesn't take long to be able to officiate weddings. A few hours in an afternoon can get you going in California. It's more about bureaucratic paperwork than anything. Cross a few T's. Dot a few I's. Start marrying people. I don't really expect this to be a cash cow (or even a side gig), but I do know that the officiant usually gets some kind of gratuity for their time. 

Writing:

Writing. Writing more. And writing more on certain topics. 

While I have no intention of stopping Writing About Writing, the kind of writing I do will probably shift focus as well. As I've mentioned, I plan on writing more about my woo-woo adventures, the things I'm learning, and how I am incorporating stuff in my life. And for those of you who have enjoyed my social justice posts in the past, I'm being tasked with getting back to that work as well. All this and of course the same writing that I've been doing on process and craft…and more.

It's an exciting time. I have spent my life being excited about how to better to build and serve community. However I need to figure out how to monetize all these acts of community service. Not because I particularly relish the idea of being a mercenary about what should be given freely. I don't mind passing the hat or using sliding scales or even giving people services they can't otherwise afford, but I will need to keep the lights on as well. 

Flashback to Addiction (Woo)

[CN- Prescription drug abuse.]

There has been a significant pause in my Morrigan posts while I took some time off to help one of my partners grieve the loss of a friend and boss who was violently killed in February.

I want to remind everyone that this series of posts has some ground rules for commenting. I welcome feedback, but there are a handful of boilerplate responses that I’ve heard a million times before, already spoken to, and am really tired of. I already know I can’t "prove" any of this. I already know it sounds crazy. I already know that this could all be in my head. I find these distinctions meaningless in the face of my experience.

I also welcome you to go back and see the first steps in my journey. The most recent part is here if you just need the recap. But you can go all the way back to the beginning here.

To go forward, I first have to go back.

I have to tell you a story of my very-nearly-fatal addiction and my deeply flawed coping mechanisms. The important part of this story doesn’t require that much background or a precise timeline. But here is what you need to know.

-In late 2011, I was diagnosed with adult ADHD. My mom had dealt with the diagnosis when I was a child but refused to put me on medication at the time. I was hoping for coping mechanisms and techniques, but it was Kaiser, so instead I got a script for generic Ritalin.

-There’s a lot I could tell you about how it happened and WHY it happened—I was struggling with a difficult relationship—but the important part is that I got addicted to the ADHD meds. Nothing like a little bit of P.G. meth to liven up the life of someone who craves stimulation.

-Within only a couple of years, I had a problem. A big problem. I won’t go into everything I did, but it was bad. I did things I’m deeply ashamed of trying to chase that high including partaking of other people’s meds. I learned which ones I really liked and which ones were not that interesting. 

Amphetamine salts were my favorite.

-Then, around 2014, I stopped taking ADHD meds. I was going to therapy. I was beginning the process of extricating myself from the bad relationship. I started to move away from my addiction. It was a hard and cold-turkey process that freaked my psychiatrists out, but I wasn’t willing to taper. 

-There were hard and tempting moments (especially as a pet sitter who sometimes ended up in a house with a client’s ADHD meds), but I dealt with them.

And then one day, in 2019, my clients died while I was watching their pets. It was a couple and they both died in a boat fire off the coast of Santa Cruz. I was in the house with their animals waiting on family to arrive to start making arrangements. And I was alone in the house with probably 300 amphetamine salt pills. 

Addiction is a terrible monster. It will never die. Not completely. And it will never stop. You can overcome physical dependence, but still get cravings a month…a year…even a decade later. And just because you can make the healthy choice once, twice, ten times…twenty times…doesn’t mean that the twenty-first time that compulsion comes knocking that you will have the same willpower to resist it. It’s why addicts can’t be around people who get high on their drug of choice. It’s why they remove themselves from situations where they’re tempted. It’s why they often don’t even hang out at their old haunts.

Because they know…eventually…they’ll be stressed, weak, low-resourced and they won’t face those moments of temptation with the same willpower. And the addiction will win. Their brain has been rewired. Once they start….

I had been in that house a dozen times. Watched their cats. Noticed that one of them clearly wasn’t using their amphetamine salt prescription. Bottles everywhere in the third bedroom—dozens and dozens of them—none of them touched. Clearly nothing that would be missed if a few disappeared here or there. For months I fed the cats, scooped the boxes, slept in the house and just said “no,” whenever the thought of those pills came to mind.

I don’t say this to make excuses. I can’t justify what happened. They died, I was an emotional wreck (try sleeping dead people’s house!), and alone with those pills day after day. I did not make a good choice the twenty-first time. I knew the pills wouldn’t be missed and I took a prescription bottle absolutely filled to the brim. It's one of the most shameful things I've ever done.

I got high as fucking balls the day I came home. I sobered up and did it again a couple of days later. Then again a couple of days later. Pretty soon I was high more than I was sober. When one didn’t make me high enough, I started taking two. Sometimes I would take a second or third pill to stay high instead of coming down. I would sit for hours, locked in place, staring at porn, my heart slamming 160 beats a minute in my chest and every light on the dashboard of my brain lit up like a thousand watt flood. 

I couldn’t tell you how long this went on. Each time I sobered up, I would promise myself I was going to wait to do that again—that it needed to be a rare treat. Each time I stayed sober for less and less time between pills. Soon, I started to go about my daily business with one pill in me all the time, and take a second and third to get high. 

I remember few surrounding details about what happened next. I remember being high and wanting to stay high. I remember tapping out three pills into my hand. I remember being up for two days straight. I remember thinking I would never get enough sleep to be functional the next day, so I might as well stay up…with a little help from a three pill bump.

“You’re going to kill yourself.”

It’s a curious sensation when a voice in your head isn’t yours. You might think any thought in your head would be yours, but your internal monologue has a distinctive voice. If you’re like me, you have an ensemble cast, depending on what’s being said. My mom is my voice of prudence (and maybe sometimes criticism). My therapist is the voice that asks me what it would feel like if I were kinder to myself about something.

But a voice you’ve never heard before—even if it is clearly in your head—sounds strange. Invasive. Alien. It doesn’t sound like the voice (or voices) you’re used to, and has a dissonant quality quite like you’ve heard another person casually using your head to think. It was firm, not compassionless, but also matter-of-fact. A woman’s voice. Like a mother telling their child they’re about to hurt themselves, but being willing to let them fuck around and find out.

I put the pills back in the little brown bottle. I slid the child safety lid closed, threw them out, and took out the garbage. Then just to be sure, I fished them back OUT of the dumpster, and poured them down into the rain gutter, watching as the water dissolved dozens of pills into a shapeless white sludge. That was the last time I ever took an ADHD med. It’s been four years. 

I know how human memory works. I understand the fallibility of years old memories and how we go back and rewrite things to conform to our narratives of who we are and how we got here. I know that I probably had a salient moment of clarity and listened to myself, then years later decided to ascribe something more to it. 

I also know that I really DID almost kill myself. My heart had arrhythmias so bad I had chest pains for weeks. I spasmed uncontrollably for a month. My liver still shows signs of cirrhosis years later. But it’s healing. (Because livers regenerate if you stop kicking the crap out of them.) And my doctor pointed out that if it looked that bad three years after I’d taken my last pill, I probably came SO close to acute liver failure that there would have been nothing anyone could do.

But I also know that I recognized that voice. From the moment it answered my question of who it was and I woke with the word “Anu” in my head, I recognized the voice.

Because that was the voice I heard that night tell me I was about to kill myself. And when she started talking to me in my dreams, I knew that she had at least stopped by that night to give me one last chance to stay alive.

Discovering Anu—The Second of the Great Dreams (Woo)

[Please remember my disclaimers and rules (linked here) if you'd like to engage this post here or in any of my social media spaces.]  

Despite a lifetime of atheism, in the summer of 2020, I was called by a prehistoric Irish goddess of war, death, prophecy, and magic named The Morrigan. This is my story of Her contact (and eventually our work together).

You can go back to the last part here. 

Or you can go all the way back to where the journey begins in the link here. 

In late summer of 2020, I learned the name of the woman who haunted my dreams…or at least what she called herself—Anu. There was only one problem. I didn't know who or what an "Anu" was. I'd never heard that name. (And yes, I've spent the last three years considering that I had somehow heard it and forgotten.) I knew almost nothing about polytheism or pagan deities outside of the Greek myths I studied in middle school, the ones that are very, very popular like Shiva, or the ones that have characters in the MCU.

Google searching Anu leads to a Mesopotamian sky god—sort of a hands-off deity who is mostly there to explain where the other gods came from. I did a day of reading, but just…NOTHING about that fit. Not the imagery I'd witnessed in dreams. Not the months of strange experiences during my waking hours. Not the magical awakening. Not the things that had been said. Not one damn thing. 

There was one other reference to Anu. It took a little more digging. I added crows and "big trees" to my search parameters and found an Irish deity that was typically considered to be one of the several aspects of a goddess called The Morrigan. (There's a pair of hills in Ireland called The Paps of Anu.) I had to admit that seemed like a slightly better match. There was something in Celtic lore called the Tree of Life, which seemed to be about as big as the tree I'd been dreaming of, and the crows were a very special animal to Her.

But even though the imagery sort of meshed a little better, it didn't make fucking sense. The Morrigan is a fierce goddess—like way, way epic ass-kicky. A deity of destiny, war, and death. Her purview in Irish mythography is predicting death and delighting in battle. I'm mostly a pacifist—at MOST, a reluctant participant in defensive violence or property damage. I certainly couldn't be said to be at all interested in death. Why would any entity this potentially violent—and distinctly Irish—be interested in a soft, diplomatic, quickly-approaching-middle-age American writer?

It just didn't track.

To understand the mindset I was in when I fell asleep that night, it is important to explain how frustrated I was with my entire woo-woo journey of the past few months. I was frustrated with all the dead ends in my research, frustrated with how tapped out I felt from spelling (that I couldn't seem to laser-focus my intention—"cast a spell" if you prefer that language—without wringing myself out for a day or two after), frustrated at how overwhelming all the changes to my life had been, frustrated that I couldn't sit down to the kind of meals I was used to eat, frustrated with my personal life, and just generally feeling kind of like I was fucking done with this "magic/spiritual fucking awakening," and that I would like my life back, thank you very much.

I didn't ask for what was happening. I didn't ask for any of it. 

I was starting to understand how certain things worked. Being open (meditation, energy work, whatever words people want to use) could be made more difficult if I ignored my body. Junk food. Being sedentary. I could kind of "turn down the volume" by deliberately treating myself like crap.

So to really get where this dream was coming from, it's important to understand in that moment just how “Take THAT, Woo!” I was feeling. I sat around all day, didn’t even go for a walk, ate cheese dip, cookies, Cheez-Its, and a couple of hot dogs in some baked beans for dinner that night. I was so sick, but it felt good to kind of rebel against my body.

I had a hard time falling asleep with the indigestion and a bout of restless leg (from sitting still all day), but eventually I drifted off.

In the dream, I was trying to pour out the liquid from a cup, but it wouldn’t stop coming and the Queen of Cups (from Tarot) was watching me with sort of a sad-but-compassionate look on her face. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works. It can't be emptied now."

And so I threw the cup and tried to walk away. “SHE’S not going to like that,” the Queen of Cups said.

Next I ran into Justice (another Tarot character). And one side of Justice’s scales were tipped below the other. “You seem a little out of balance,” Justice said. 

"That’s right,” I said, and I started eating a hot dog as I locked eyes with her. And in one of those dream logic moments, even though we were roughly the same size I stepped onto the scale on the heavy side that she was holding. The more hot dog I ate, the more the scales shifted.

“You know what you’re doing?” Justice asked. 

I shoved in the last quarter of hot dog in a single bite while I stared straight at her.

“Okay,” Justice said. “But SHE’S not going to be happy.”

Next I saw the Hermit. (Yes, another Tarot archetype).

"I don't think you should go that way," he said gesturing to an easy and downhill path. "This one is your way." He shone the light of his lantern up a difficult and overgrown path bristling with craigy rock formations and thick with treacherous switchbacks.

"Fuck you," I said, and headed down the hill along the easy path.

"SHE'S not going to like that," he said.

A regal looking woman in a thin but plush white robe sat on a throne between two pillars. However, her throne was affixed to the ceiling and she sat upon it upside down. Behind her there was a path through thick foliage that stretched for miles. Standing lamps glittered magnificently with crystals that somehow hovered, suspended in the air swaying and spinning above the lights themselves, and I was lit from below by glowing tiles in the floor.

Even upside down, she looked exalted, majestic, and her eyes glittered with a fearsome intensity. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“The High Priestess?” I asked, recognizing yet another Tarot character. "But more…"

“I am called many things,” she said. “But you already knew that. You’ve seen how many names I have….WE have.”

At this point I can’t remember what was said. There was a conversation (or was there?) but I don’t remember what it was. The next thing I remember was the sudden dream realization that she was upside down because she was reversed. (Like in a tarot read.) I can’t remember if I said something or she could somehow hear my thoughts, but she was aware of my realization.

“Am I reversed?” She asked. “Am I really?”

And then I realized the lit floor panels were skylights and the standing glittery lamps were not standing from the floor but were chandeliers––the floating crystals simply hanging from thin threads. The land stretched out above me and the sky was below. 

Because I was standing on the ceiling. And everything was upside down.

“Or are YOU?” she finished.

Realizing I was the upside down one led to a moment of climbing “back to the floor” that made dream sense (but not gravity physics sense) at the time.

From my new vantage with my feet on the floor, I could see that the two pillars were two other “versions” of the Empress, standing still and tall to mimic pillars. They now looked like the trio I had so often seen, the left wearing black and the right grey.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I've answered that question," she said.

“But there's more to it. You’re so often three,” I said. "But sometimes five…and sometimes one. And sisters sometimes…but not always."

"To understand me is to be comfortable in ambiguity."

"And sometimes it's like it's all names of one thing…"

“You’re so close,” she said.

And then, in the altered consciousness of my dream, I experienced one of those “flashback collages” that you see in movies when they’re going through the information they got through the movie that makes them realize that thing that they should have noticed all along—tallying up the clues that were there the whole time. I remember I flashed back to a dream where there were triplets in the restaurant and another where a giant crow was talking to me in the woman’s voice as the smaller crows filled my hands with rocks while I balanced on a giant tree. I remembered the dreams I've written about here where there were five crows and one transformed. I remember seeing her alone, as three, as five, and sometimes more. I remember seeing her transform, shifting between visages as easily as some people change expressions. I remembered seeing her as sisters, but usually simply…ASPECTS. 

And then I got it. Not the online research "WTF" moment, but really really GOT it.

“No….” I said.

“There it is,” she said, standing from the throne she sat in. And as she stood, the scintillating colors of her robe and those of the two flanking her to the left and right began to grow darker and darker until they were black. But like Anish-Kapoor black. Like suck-in-the-light black. 

“That's not possible,” I said. “You can't be......"

"It is your choice to accept me, but I will NOT be ignored."

"I don't…"

“Let me divest you of a few assumptions you seem to be laboring under. The first is that you wouldn't be interesting to me. The second is that I am capable of being thwarted by a FUCKING HOTDOG.”

And that is when I woke up. Fully. Refreshed after 8 hours. I almost never wake straight up. There's always drifting upwards. But that day I snapped awake instantly, completely rejuvenated despite the previous night's exhaustion and indulgences.

I would discover and learn more over the coming months, but now I understood at least this one thing. Anu was a single aspect of what was trying to contact me.

I was being called by The Morrigan.

More to come….

First Contact (Woo)

[Please remember my disclaimers and rules (linked here) if you'd like to engage this post here or in any of my social media spaces.]  

Despite a lifetime of atheism, in the summer of 2020, I was called by The Morrigan, a prehistoric Irish goddess of war, death, prophecy, and magic. This is my story of being called by Her (and eventually our work together).

You can go back to the last part here. 

Or you can go all the way back to where the journey begins in the link here. 

Today I understand more than I did in the summer of 2020.

I don't understand everything—I don't understand MOST things, really—and I've given up attempting to understand those things that seem to exist in the liminal space of what can be quite easily explained with transpersonal psychology, and what in the 21st century we're calling supernatural. These days I can look back on some of what was happening that summer, and at least understand the fundamentals.

At the time, of course, I had no idea.

Learning to close and open ("shields up") was a fundamental shift for me in whatever the hell was going on. I didn't know what I had met in my dreams or if its explanation of what was happening was accurate, but it worked. Whether it was a mindset or actually magic, it worked. I was again able to do simple things like go grocery shopping without being overwhelmed by people's energy. I could sit in a drive-through without sensing everyone's impatience. I could talk to someone I sensed malevolent intentions from without my skin crawling in revulsion. I could go about my life.

But I also had to learn new ways of doing almost everything. I was undergoing a transformation, and my old habits no longer served me. I couldn't eat in the same way I had before. Junk food was abhorrent to me—I could handle some salty, but greasy and fatty would make me sick, and didn't taste good anymore. I didn't dislike sweets, but I'd lost all cravings for it. I could barely stand how bright and vivid colors were and how intense music sounded. Light seemed too bright. Simple tactile sensations felt like almost as much as I could stand.  I came home from work every night, ate bland food and raw vegetables, and tried to figure out how magic worked.

I had trouble sleeping—shaken awake night after night by dreams of a woman (or women) in black. After she taught me how to close myself, so I could (mostly) function from day to day, she went back to saying cryptic shit about how I needed to open my eyes and know her. 

After a month it had begun to pass the point of an oddity and a novelty. I was starting to get desperate. I was hearing voices. My entire taste palette had been scrambled—my favorite foods made me sick. I couldn't sleep through the night. I felt drenched in how unhappy most people were. And the volume on sensation had been turned up too high. 

I was still Chris The Little Skeptic™ at this point. For me, magic was a concentration of will that steered the unconscious. Spells were rituals of focus. Accoutrements were affectations. This all had a perfectly reasonable explanation. And I wasn't quite ready to imagine that something outside of me was trying to get my attention. I thought I was working something desperately urgent out in the deep corners of my psychology at night, and this woman represented something that I needed to grapple with.

But my confidence that I had all the answers was wavering. Magic was working for me in ways that were technically not impossible, but at least seemed implausible in their statistical improbability. I was experiencing more and more events that were not so easy to dismiss as an overactive imagination.  Maybe…just maybe there was something beyond what I could easily and rationally explain as purely natural. One way or another though, I had to figure it out. My life was upside down, and I was sure I was going crazy.

I desperately reached out to all the magic practitioners I knew to help me figure out what was going on, and their advice was unanimous. 

"Something is trying to contact you."

I felt a curl of terror corkscrew up my spine.

All the people I talked to had differing advice about how careful to be and what I should do about something trying to contact me (from warding my bedroom to invoking protective spirits), but they all agreed about what was happening.

"How do I figure out what she is?" I asked one of them.

"Have you you tried asking her?" she said.

I hadn't. It hadn't even occurred to me. I knew how to lucid dream at least to the point where I could control myself. Why hadn't I simply asked?

That night I fell asleep with a mantra going through my head. "Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?"

In the dream I stood on an ancient battlefield after the carnage had completed. Bodies and arrows and swords and spears and shields littered the ground all around me, and in the distance a fire burned and curls of black smoke smudged the sky. Crows (or ravens, I thought, but now I know it was crows) stood cawing amidst the bodies, bloodcurdling caws that sounded like screams. In particular five of them began to hop towards me, and they transformed into five women wearing black. The one in the front—the one that most often did the talking to me—wore something between a duster and a dress (with open legs) over leather armor. 

"You must prepare for battle," she said. "You must know me."

I could feel the dream fading away, but I suddenly realized I was dreaming. I remembered what I had to ask.

"Who are you?" I asked. "Who are you? Who are you?"

Her eyes looked at mine. "I am She. I am Queen. I am many. I am all. Among us you can call me…"

I woke up twisted into my sheets, my hands clenched into fists around my blanket, with jagged breaths hitching out of me.

But I had heard it…in those last seconds between dream and wake, I'd heard a name. A name that I had never heard before. 

Anu.

[More to come soon…]

Three Gifts and a Lesson—The First of the Great Dreams (Woo)

[Please remember my disclaimers and rules (linked here) if you'd like to engage this post here or in any of my social media spaces.]  

I am a heathen witchcrafty heretic pagan, and I work with The Morrigan, an Irish goddess of war, death, prophecy, and magic. This is my story of being called by Her (and eventually our work together).

You can go back to the last part here. 

Or you can go all the way back to where the journey begins in the link here. 

July 2020 was well under way, and I was actively trying to explore what magic could do, could not do, and how it was going to fit into my life. I was still a skeptic trying to fit it into a rational-sounding box. But that was becoming more and more unconvincing.

I was delving deep into "magic" as a function of focused willpower and concentration—more a series of brain "hacks" designed to focus the unconscious than something "supernatural." I didn't need to worry about what was "true" in the claims about why magic worked, because I was putting a lot more energy towards what it could actually do. The unconscious can make connections the conscious mind doesn't, see opportunities it misses, and help guide behavior. We are constantly synthesizing a deluge of complex information and only ever actively thinking about a fraction of it, so by "steering" the unconscious towards a goal, one could change their mundane experience of reality. I didn't care if that was because the universe was sentient and we could get its attention, because there was a supernatural power could be tapped by people who owned a lot of candles and crystals, or if it was the power of our attention and focus used in a constellation of oft-misunderstood techniques that science already acknowledges.

I was beginning to come to the conclusion that trappings of magic—anything from an altar to spells to crystals to wands to candles—served as remembrancers, foci, and zeitgebers. An essential oil might not itself physiologically help a human relax, but if one made it a point to relax every time they smelled it—and it was a pleasant scent all over them—it COULD come to fulfil that function. A wand might not have any actual ability over a random bit of wood, but when infused with symbolic meaning to a person—much like, say, a flag or a uniform is so much more than mere cloth—it could represent much more. As creatures of habit, ritual, routine, and rote, we could surround ourselves in meaningful symbols, give significance to emblems, engage in purposeful visualizations, and repeat our desires in a way that would help us keep our concentration. This would steer our unconscious minds to adjust some of our "autopilot" functions towards outcomes we wanted to see. People might try to explain their magical tools with pseudoscientific terms like harmonic resonances, energy fields, or whatever, but those basically worked as props and landscape in deepening self-hypnosis.

It was all very neat and tidy, and fit cleanly into my understanding of science and human psychology. I could almost forget the things I had been going through that weren't quite so easy to explain away, like my anxiety symptoms shutting off or the fact that I could feel people before I could see or hear them. 

And life was about to get even more messy.

Of course, there were the dreams. Almost every night I would dream about a black-clad woman (or a trio of them or a quintet or sometimes more) who would cryptically enjoin me to know who she was (who they were) or tell me I was "spilling out everywhere" if she (they) said anything else at all. I had no idea what any of that meant or who she was or why she was in my dreams night after night.

It wasn't just my dreams that were going bananapants. In my waking life, I had begun to feel like something was ineluctably following me. I had the distinct sensation of being watched and of a presence in my peripheral vision. Always it was just a shadow or just a weird tree or bush when I turned and looked, but it was becoming more and more frequent. And I know what I'm about to describe is a very subjective feeling, and I'm labeling it through the lens of two years of revisionist interpretation, but it fits. And it fit at the time even though I didn't really think about it in these terms.

I felt like I was being hunted.

There was one other thing happening, but unlike the dreams and the weird feelings, I didn't realize the significance of it at the time, and maybe I'm remembering it inaccurately. It barely pinged my radar, and certainly didn't do so as something extramundane. I was seeing a lot of crows. Everywhere I looked there were crows hanging around. Small groups. Big groups. A few small murders even though it wasn't quite the season for it. They seemed particularly bold—waiting until I was very close to fly off, landing close by to cock their heads and stare, or screaming unrelentingly at me from the telephone wires on which they perched. I didn't think much of it until later when I started realizing how important crows were in the iconography of The Morrigan.

There was a lot of dismissing these feelings and events because of the pandemic. I thought maybe I was jumping at shadows and suffering from an overactive imagination. I had read stories about people dreaming intensely because of the stress and isolation. I even thought the crows were just enjoying the fact that there were fewer people out and they…uh…ruled the roost…so to speak.

In mid-July I had a dream. It was the first of many dreams where the woman/women who had been haunting me spoke in words that were less cryptic (though far from straightforward). I was standing on a branch of an enormous tree so large and wide that I could have played a game of doubles tennis on it without ever worrying that I'd fall off. It was only one woman this time, and she wore a black sheath dress with deep slits on either side and a pattern that looked like overlapping feathers, combat boots, and a black jacket with the same pattern. 

"Open," she said, and I could feel her energy. It streamed off her like a crackling power plant. 

"Closed," she said, and her energy tamped up. I could still feel it, but it was like a humming power cable wrapped in insulation. 

"Open," she said. I could feel her again, pouring out energy.

"Closed," she said. I could barely feel her. 

"Now you," she said.

"I don't understand," I said. 

"Close yourself," she said. 

"Close what?" I asked.

"You've been open for weeks, bard," she said. "You're attracting attention. Your magic is powerful. Your theory is sophisticated. But you're making incredibly basic mistakes. You have to learn to close your energy off and close yourself off from all the energy outside of you. You're spilling out and attracting attention. And not everything out there is…benign."

"Wait…don't you usually just tell me to know who you are or something?"

"YOU WILL KNOW ME IN TIME!" she snapped, and for just a moment I could see a deep and timeless power behind those intense eyes. "But right now you need to learn to protect yourself because I won't keep doing it forever."

"I don't understand what to do," I said.

"Imagine a wall between you and the world. Visualize it. Give it your energy and purpose and will. Much like your other spells, it will depend on your visualization, but this one is quick. Easy. Become practiced at it. Make it second nature. You want to be able to protect yourself at a second's notice. Open yourself to be sensitive. Close to go about your mundane life or protect yourself. Open. Closed."

"Okay…" I said.

She took a step towards me. She was fierce and fearsome and terrifying in ways I'd never experienced, but I sensed a tutelary motivation behind her eyes.

"I already know you won't trust your senses. You won't believe what is happening if you can't readily explain it. I've understood your skeptical nature and accepted its…disadvantages. I chose to approach regardless. But I also know that right now, you do what works. And working with me will WORK, bard. I can assure you of that. So let me give you something that will make this a lot easier. Let me give you something that works, and then you can trust me even if you don't understand me. Three gifts. Yours no matter what you decide…

"But I think you'll be back," she finished.

I nodded. Somehow that's all I had in me. The dream had a surreal crispness to it, and I could barely speak for the sense of gravitas around the interaction.

"And stop using yourself as the energy battery for your spells," she said. "That works in a pinch, but why not avail yourself of better means if you have the time? You'll just be exhausted the entire next day. Learn to use other sources."

"What should I use?" I asked.

"In time," she said. "All in time."

And then I woke up.

The next day—and I'm still sensitive to how outlandish this feels…even writing about it two years later…even after all I've seen and experienced—I noticed three things as I went about my day. First, I no longer needed my reading glasses. At all. I could read without them. At the time I was needing +2.50 magnification to make out anything smaller than a title or heading. (In the two years since this event, reading glasses of +1.25 magnification have gone back to being helpful with small font.) In ten years my eyes had only ever slowly gotten worse, but then overnight they improved to the point that I could read without any correction. 

Second, I regained full motion of my left leg. My hip had always popped when I raised it sideways. I could get it up pretty high for a front kick, but never had that sideways range of motion—even back when I did martial arts, I had to let my instructors know that a sidekick off my left side was never going to go higher than my hip, and one off my right side would be limited by how much my left hip had to get involved in the bend. But suddenly I could move it without issue. 

Third, an old injury disappeared. There was a car accident I had been in when I was nineteen or so. I was driving a minivan (full of people, I'm chagrined to say) and I rear-ended another minivan (also full of people—it was terrible). It was probably one of the most mortifying experiences of my life, and it left me with an abdominal injury. The airbag deployed into my torso, and the explosive impact caused me internal bleeding and a life of low-grade chronic pain just below my rib cage, especially after core exertion.

That was gone. 

I've sat around and wondered about this a thousand times since. Every possible rational explanation has crossed my mind. I even wondered if I healed during the pandemic and somehow now my unconscious sort of "let me know about it," but in the WEIRDEST possible way. Maybe it was the placebo effect? Covid? I can't imagine what could make three unrelated things better, but something did. 

The next day I started to practice opening and closing. My "Yoda" friend helped me by telling me that it could involve any kind of protective metaphor that worked for me—energizing a circle, building a wall, putting on a suit of armor—and I quickly settled on Star Trek shields. My love of Star Trek is formative and deep. A quick "shields up," and I could SEE the bubble around me glow with activation and fade into transparency. Soon I realized that when I was "closed"—or when my "shields" were "up"—I could handle the world and crowds and go shopping and deal with people again. Open, and I would be sensitive to energies around me and people's "vibes" and could kind of be in tune with the ebbs and flows of magic. 

I had the ability to live a pragmatic life again, even as I explored further whatever the hell was happening to me and what new worlds I was finding the edges of. She'd taught me how to do the most basic magical protection so that I could live life again. 

There would be more dreams. (So many more dreams!) And more experiences. And eventually I would learn what was haunting me…and hunting me. But that was to come as summer wound into fall and will be another post…

Continued…