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I'm absolutely godawful at starting new projects. Once I have the concept in mind, I do an absurd amount of planning and preparation, but then once the time comes to actually Do The Thing, I sit around looking for any excuse to put it off. That's why this blog has been sitting empty for weeks before I managed to pull together the will and energy to write. I told myself that I should just jump in headfirst and start writing as if I'd been writing on here for months already. But it didn't convince me. I needed to start it off right.

So, I'm dedicating this new phase of my journey to all the people, groups, communities, and systems that brought me to this point, but that no longer serve me.

I was raised by the internet. I've been getting up to no good in various online social spaces since I was around nine or ten years old. No, I do not recommend that other children that age get into what I got into, granted it's not like I was getting into that much trouble drawing Warrior Cats OCs on DeviantArt. My point is that all of my formative years were shaped by the internet and social media culture, from social media's infancy to now. Was this healthy? Probably not. But has it greatly impacted that way I've continuously interacted with my peers and the world around me? Absolutely.

Some of it was awesome and introduced me to lifelong friends. Some of it, in my opinion, has done enough damage to my mental health and social skills that I'm probably gonna be working through it for a while.

I made my first Tumblr account when I was 12. I started running in metaphysical circles (which from here on out will be referred to as "witchblr") when I was around 15-16. I've been on Discord since a month or so after the app launched, and I started joining magical and occult-focused servers around that time. I still do a bit of both, though I'm heavily pulling back on them.

When the pandemic hit, I was a freshman in college, and I was suddenly left with a LOT of time to think. I mostly thought about my metaphysical practice and what it meant to me. Since I was, you know, 19, I did the very 19-year-old thing of wanting to look extremely knowledgeable on my personal practice (at this point, it was just revivalist hellenic polytheism), thought I told myself that I was doing it because I wanted to help people. This was what really got me into the weeds of what metaphysical social media has become over the last few years. I'm now realizing that I remained stuck in those weeds for much longer than I really wanted to admit. As in, I'm really only breaking out the gardening shears now.

I was a textbook example of the blind leading the blind. I did plenty of research, sure, but I was really only scratching the surface, reading the same things over and over, sometimes reading more substantial work but not really processing it. I read tarot with my gods all the time, but I was still heavily clouded by intense confirmation bias. But I thought I was a whiz. What's worse, the people around me started to think it too. It was a shame that those people, also all entirely teenagers, were going down the same path as I was, and we formed an incredibly unhealthy clique that I eventually abandoned after less than six months.

That was when I originally thought I was out of the weeds. In reality, their grip on me just got a lot more subtle.

I floated around for a good long while after leaving that friend group, but I was still convinced that I wanted to teach people. So I made a blog and got a lot more active on Tumblr. My blog was mostly summaries of books I'd read, with a heaping dose of ignorance of the contexts from which those texts arose. It was extraordinarily mid, and it only lasted a few months. But I was really starting to gain a following on Tumblr, and I interacted with others a LOT. This led to some friendships, sure, but it also led to an intense internalization of the cutlure of witchblr as a whole.

It was arguing. Just like social media at large, it was a lot of disingenuous, half-baked-but-extremely-passionate arguing.

I'm not entirely sure what the breaking point was, even though it seems like it was incredibly recent. I just sorta vibed like that for a while, and in the meantime I graduated college, left behind the majority of my in-person social life, and quit my minimum wage job for a 9-to-5 in an office. Oh, and I stopped drawing for months on end and began to have regrets about the entire path I took during college. So I did sort of tailspin into an existential crisis. I think I might have just answered my own question.

Anyways.

After years and years of focusing on the "doing" aspects of my practice, I've taken a considerable turn inward and begun reprioritizing. I put some space between myself and those platforms, lurking for weeks at a time or taking internet sabbaticals. Upon each return, the spaces I came back to felt more and more unbearable and unhealthy for me. Thankfully, I was able to shed my deeply-ingrained people pleasing mentality for a few brief moments and make the decision to pull back. Not leave, just take a few giant steps backward.

I don't want this to become a condemnation of witchblr or occult Discord servers or any of that. Plenty of people far more articulate than I have been doing that for a while anyways. But it very often made me angry. It made me want to slip back into my old, toxic ways of picking fights for fun, but with some fake semblance of a moral high ground this time. However, I don't think I'm better than the people I would provoke or write vague posts about. I think that social media culture has poisoned all of us collectively. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I just experienced some sort of mental shift, guided mostly by one burning question:

Who cares? No, seriously, who gives a shit?

The vast majority of discourse in online metaphysical spaces is simply manufactured nonsense about shit that genuinely does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's making up guys to be mad at so that you can feel good about yourself when people agree with you. Even a good deal of the people who claim to be informative can be seen straight through. It's legitimately just all nonsense.

In part, this realization was probably brought around due to how eclectic my practice has become. I interact with gods and spirits from several disparate religions, a few of whom don't like each other very much. Any attempt to form some kind of coherent mythology, philosophy, cosmology, anything, has failed because of this. But honestly, I really like it that way. It's allowed me to be much more fluid and open with my practice. It's allowed me to welcome and embrace contradiction. And if these parts of my practice aren't even a problem to me, then why should anyone else give a shit about them either? And why should I give a shit about what any of them are doing?

However, I cannot deny the place that these people, these communities, and these pointless arguments have had in my practice and my general ways of interacting with the world for a long time. Without these (incredibly messy) learning experiences, I would not be where I am right now. Hell, I'd probably still be deep in the weeds and content to stay there.

So thank you to all the people who humored my ridiculous arguments. Thank you to all the people I've blocked over petty disagreements. Thank you to all the friend groups I've abandoned. And thank you to the platforms that made it all possible.

Most of you suck, but I'm glad you pushed me towards who I am now.