But before I get into this heavy content that no one probably wants to read about, I want to make a small announcement that the trans/queer/intersex focused anthology on witchcraft I am a small part of has been released. I have read through most of it and I am honored to be featured alongside the stories and visions so many incredible witches and pagans. How we fight transphobia and heteronormativity in our religious structures is by speaking out, and Pat Mosley and the editing team have done an amazing job at collecting and getting this out there to speak out against those who silence our right to exist within the neo-pagan space.
If you would like to read it, the e-book is for free at the Cutlines Press website, and it is available for purchase for 99 cents on amazon.
The hard copy is up for sale through lulu.
And without further ado, enter the long and heavy diatribe of a little queer boy in distress:
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The truth of the matter lies in a small, compact reality that is often hard for people to swallow - life has gone off on different tract from what one expected in the shiny, ever optimistic days of youth, and now you find yourself snapping like an inflexible stick over the knee of a parent who never says no to the rod.
Three years ago, you woke up, you wrote. You ate, breathed, and dreamed in text scrolling out of your brain on great tendrils of light you imagine would accompany an angel on his descent to earth. Words poured out of you like spell work during the witching hour, and at twenty two you thought nothing could stop this promise you gave yourself in the small hours of the morning, when verse and character rose up like monoliths in the ocean of your mind, impenetrable, all seeing, and strong enough to carry you through their story to the shores of their fantasy.
It was fantasy, your world which fought each day with the one you found yourself in. As a collegiate student, you often found yourself on an insulated island of which none of the hard truths of daily labor could touch. Just over that graduatory wall was the rest of your life filled with story telling, editing, and coffee breaks in which you gave your mind a small break, in which, like resetting the ribbons on a typewriter, you found yourself after the pause more resilient, the thoughts pooling in your mind like rain in a barrel.
But after the degree landed in your hand, after the hours of studying, after the thrills of pouring over assigned literature and those hundreds of pages dutifully written, after walking out of that ceremony and into the light of the laborer’s day, you found that someone long before you were born had kicked the rain barrel over and it laid toppled on its side on a cracked and barren earth.
Depression, the doctor says, is often genetic.
But ah, you said to yourself, you have enough water to get by, just to make it through a couple of stories, a couple of novels. You pick up retail work and write as though through sheer effort you can block out that nagging, quaking fear that overcomes you whenever you think about trying to get the so called “real job” - a nebulous thought in your mind involving something like company requisitioned coffee and cramped knees in cubicles which segment yourself so cleanly from the rest of the world you might as well as be a well parsed dish in the midst of a Christmas dinner spread. You even try considering for a second that you can make it in the glory land of “corporate” and at the mere thought your chest seizes up, your teeth grind, and you feel your tongue thicken in your mouth.
And why can’t you, you wonder, as you pour every free second those first few post college years into stories you fly through, dashing though one and onto the next one with little thought of looking back - why can’t you try to get something easier?
The question often plagues you as you try to apply for a couple of different office jobs and find yourself at a loss as what to put on a cover letter. You can write whole plots in which mermaids eventually overthrow humanity but writing a damn exposition about work qualifications is like slowly taking pliers to a perfectly sound finger nail.
All you know how to do is write - it is what you have told yourself for years that you plan to build your life on, and yet, you can’t even manage to edit your own novels, much less work on submitting them.
And so you write for that faceless audience in your mind and all the while the desert expands, the positions open up in the retail castle, and you find yourself bedridden eventually, wondering why the stories stopped giving you the balm they always delivered, how the only pure thing that has ever come out of you just seems like so much a waste. Although you fight this darkness with a mantra
it doesn’t matter who sees it, this is for you
you have to go on, to write, to live for you,
Because if the desert which greeted you as soon as you tossed off your graduate cap has taught you anything - it’s that life inherently offers up only emptiness to the question of meaning.
But it’s funny. We humans have developed a rather thorough way of filling it - words, sentences, thoughts, pictographs, these hieroglyphs of intent.
When we come screaming out of the void out through our mother’s legs our first declaration of intent comes from our will to live - a scream and a gasp for air.
You spend your whole life repeatedly praised for how strong you are - look at that report card, those extracurriculars, look at well you represent the family - that when you fail to draw anymore breath, to give your life it’s own intent once it has left familial shores, you liken it to an failed embroyo, only here, the embroyo was you prior to the full concerns of adulthood.
You pick up the pen and the words scramble. They are trying too hard, you are trying to hard to compete with this image of yourself you built up for over twelve years, the writer at their work, always at their work.
And boy, I sure did write myself into a deep pit, in which the words lost meaning in the wake of my own mind and it’s long periods of withdrawal.
You wake up to find yourself surrounded by years of work, just sitting in great piles on the beach, but you cannot motivate yourself to pick them up before the tide comes in. It’s rip current creates a whirlpool in which the only meaning swishes around like so much brine your mind:
Nothing is the all thing.
And in the dark, in that moment when the moon turns its face from you and the papers drink up enough of the salt water they can before giving into disintegration, you find another image, glowing softly, of a little kid who once knew that the sheer space in nothing is a sandbox if you only remember to pick up your shovel.
So here I am, at 26, non-binary and clinically depressed, looking for the shovel, looking for the way to dig this expanse into shapes of story, of narratives that no longer equate worth with monetary value, with visible success.
Well fuck, I wrote that wife of god into a beautiful vengeful existence in Asherah, did I not? There I am, in her story, reaching out to stab the asshole who gave me a mind to write but crippling depression and malaise that prevents me from sharing it.
And didn’t I write of mermaids in peril, fighting against a terrible, phobic regime? Yeah, that’s me, the pervert, the lover, in those paragraphs.
So even if half the time I’m now a slow, unmotivated, hollow boy nursing his wounds in a cave circling the desert, at least now, there's enough to dig up even if you can’t even find the right tools to build up and match the edifices of grandeur you see in the distance.
Words are destroyers, re-aligners, re-defining and imbuing life in spaces the rest of the rational world doesn’t think to feel.
And I, Ecco, am defintely in one of those spaces.
Let’s dig, shall we?
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