People often ask what would you tell a witch who’s just starting out, but what would you tell a seasoned and exasperated witch who’s ready to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ their altar and whole practice? I’m not in that headspace right now but I have been before, and I know lots of us have been.

hellboundwitch:

I love this question, and it came at the perfect time, because I’m preparing for Self Season, which resulted from my own altar flipping frustration!

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, so let me state upfront that what I’m about to say has a GIANT caveat attached to it, but when I feel the overwhelming desire to just abandon something I love, and to give up? I give up. That’s my advice!

Okay, so the caveat – when I say quit, maybe I mean…pivot?

I’ll give an example! I mentioned Self Season, so we’ll look at those origins. 

At about 22, I had been practicing witchcraft for 13 years, and I hated it. I didn’t feel like my practice reflected what I wanted out of it. There were some things I liked, but at the time I had been trying to force myself into a Neo-Wiccan mold for over a decade that didn’t fit me. And I tried to change myself to get there, and that didn’t work. And I changed it to suit me better, but I never felt comfortable.

After realizing I’d forgotten Lughnasadh YET AGAIN, and that I honestly did not care, I finally felt like I had to accept it. Witchcraft mattered to me. Paganism mattered to me. 

But Wicca? I didn’t give a fuck about it and I never did. And I was miserable because I’d been trying to force something to work that just wasn’t meant to, mostly just because I wanted a label to give me comfort and structure, even if it didn’t fit.

That was the moment when I said, okay, well I have no idea what I am now. I guess I’m just your average hellbound witch. And thus the seed of my blog began to take root :’)))

But right after that is when I sat down with a sheet of paper and wrote down the things I was ACTUALLY interested in. The kinds of magic I wanted to do, or at least learn more about. 

And then I made myself a reading list, because I love a good reading list. And I added podcasts and blogs as well. If it was related to one of my areas of interest – animal magic, local witchcraft, potions, and more – I put it on my list. 

And then I spent the next year or so reading and learning and figuring out how to be what I wanted to be and not what I thought I should be (based off of criteria that had nothing to do with what I wanted or what made me happy).

And it was awesome.

I haven’t wanted to quit since then, and I think part of what has helped that is that I made that self-auditing period I took in August an annual thing. I check in every year on where I’m at and what I’ve learned and what I want to learn. I look at parts of my practice that maybe don’t make any sense for who I am anymore and I see if I can evolve them or I cut them out if necessary.

For example, a lot of what I learned about in the realm of animal magic was very useful even across other areas. The influence that my animal magic studies had on my card spirit work isn’t often acknowledged, but it’s there. Still, at the end of the day, I just didn’t care that much about working with animals. And rather than try and force that, I said, okay, I’ll let it go.

My general opinion is that if something makes you want to quit that badly, then something is probably wrong. 

So my advice is to find out what’s wrong, and a LOT of the time the answer to that is “I’m trying to make this thing work for me that isn’t supposed to work like this.” and the answer is to step back and try it a different way or do something else. 

I think people feel like they want to quit because it’s hard, so they just need to power through it, but it’s hard because you’re not supposed to be doing it….

Which like, the witchy/pagan/whatever community is very much built on this culture of suffering. If you’re happy then you’re doing it all wrong XDD and I don’t think that helps at all!

So yeah, to recap:

1. take a look at what’s not making you happy
2. stop doing that thing
3. figure out how to do it better or:
4. figure out what to do instead
5. do that

And that’s my advice :’)))