As I’ve been more public about my occult and spiritual practices it’s opened me up to a lot more judgment and a lot more ways of being attacked. This is natural, but it still sucks.
The other day a friend of mine posted asking for alternative wellness advice, and a lot of people on his friends list commented just to talk shit and make some vague noise about “science.” I pointed out that they were not only contributing nothing of value but also insulting the OP by implying that they didn’t trust him to know what he was asking for.
“I just checked out your profile and saw you read tarot,” one of them replied. “I might as well be arguing with a table.”
I told him that was an irrelevant ad hominem attack that was a means of avoiding actual debate with me, and that he should at least make a point first before he insults me. He either deleted his comments or blocked me (or both). *shrug*
Coming out of the broom closet was not easy for me, even though the alternative would have ultimately been untenable. Like I said last year when I did it, as a survivor of childhood gaslighting on multiple fronts (e.g., your abuse is not real, you are overreacting, this didn’t happen), the feeling of my safety is strongly rooted in whether people believe me. That may not be a healthy way to live, but for now, it still feels real.
And what’s especially ridiculous is how long I dismissed the occult precisely because of a need to appear palatable and relatable to men like these, how much internalized misogyny I held in favoring only what was
quantifiable, how deeply I turned to magick’s masculine cousins NLP, hypnosis, strategy, and stoicism. I did the western medicine approach to mood disorder (by which I mean trauma response) and it put me on pills that made things progressively worse until I was barely a shred of myself. I have been that rationalist, that materialist, and that side will doubtless always exist in me. That’s the irony – I took that path harder than homeboy did. My rationalist could beat up his rationalist any day.
But in adding to my skill set, rounding out my left brain with my right, my analysis with my intuition, in some parts of society I lost more credibility than I gained. This makes no mathematical sense when you think about it, but then neither does materialism.
I would really like to be able to feel that the world will still be a safe place for me even if many people don’t believe me and my experiences, and then maybe it wouldn’t feel so awful every time some douchebro feels he can dismiss my intelligence based on my spiritual practices.
It’s just a logical fallacy, really – there’s no way that learning to read tarot made me dumber than I was before.
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