April 2022 Newsletter
Hello and welcome to my first newsletter. April has been quite a month. I restarted my YouTube channel and even tried out something new. I’ll go into more detail later in this newsletter. But first, I’d like to share a few thoughts.
Celebrating Twenty-Six Years of Being Openly Gay
[Content Warning: This section contains brief mentions and allusions to suicidal ideation. Please skip it and go to the next heading (“Witchcraft is Transgressive”) if you are not in a place where you can manage that talk. Your well-being is important to me.]
The start of April brought my twenty-sixth coming out anniversary. Yeah, I came out on April Fool’s Day. It was also my last semester in college and I almost didn’t graduate. What can I say? I have terrible timing. But then, I did what I had to do. To be honest, if I didn’t come out that day, I probably would have ended up dead instead. So timing be damned.
For me, my coming out anniversary is primarily a moment for me to take a look back and see where I was back then, particularly mentally and emotionally, and look at where I am now. The day I came out was the day that I started to reject negative messaging about myself. I wish I could say that I rejected all negative messaging about myself that day, but that would not be true. That has been an ongoing process in my life, and probably one that still isn’t complete twenty-six years later.
But wow, I’ve made a lot of progress since then. I’ve gone from seeing myself as a terrible person who had to cling to an external source of redemption to someone who can look in the mirror and think, “You know, I definitely still have room to improve, but damn, I’m worth making that effort to improve myself.”
I think that’s a shift in self-perception and mentality that a lot of people would still benefit from. If that includes some of you who are reading this, I’d invite you to start that process. If you’re already on that journey, I’d like to cheer you on. No matter where you are, honor yourself and work to see yourself as someone deserving of that honor. Because I guarantee you that you are someone deserving of that honor.
Witchcraft is Transgressive
Let’s be honest. Witches don’t like to play by the rules. We don’t like to be told what to do. There’s probably not an authority — not even our own gods, for those of us who are theistic witches — that we will not question and challenge if we feel it’s justified. And let’s face it, we’ll often feel it’s justified.
This doesn’t mean that we think “anything goes.” We actually tend to have very clear opinions on morality and proper behavior. It’s just that they are our own opinions based on our values and our understanding of the world and the situations we find ourselves in. As we grow in our practice, we become quite clear about what the right thing for us to do is in most situations.
We just don’t trust other people’s rules. We don’t trust society’s rules. At best, we see them as an attempt to codify something that isn’t always so clear-cut. Or we see them codified in ways that are clearly unjust. We see how the rules of society often favor those who made those rules and otherwise are at the top of the societal hierarchy. And that just doesn’t fly with us.
So we frequently flout the rules of society in favor of the rules of our heart, the rules that tell us that the person society ignores is important too. We empower ourselves and seek the empowerment of others who have often been disempowered. Those who are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
And if we’re very lucky, we manage to not become one of those who are doing the exploiting. But if we do, there will hopefully be other transgressive witches who seek to redress that as well.
YouTube Videos Published in April
I decided to restart my YouTube channel this month by finishing off my series exploring a Pagan theology of the sacred. In the final video of the series, I talked about what it meant to see others (both people and things) as sacred (which to me is defined as having inherent value) and what it means to relate to the other as sacred.
After that, I decided to talk about the nature of Pagan deities and what a relationship with Pagan deities might look like. I started this conversation out with my first live stream event. I even had a couple of viewers while I was live, which I’m very excited about. The next week, I followed up with a recorded video talking about how I don’t believe my deities are eternal. That is, I believe they came into existence at some point and didn’t even start out as deities. At the end of the video, I talked about the theological ramifications of that belief for me. I then continued this deity talk trend by releasing a video discussing how we bring our own interpretive lens to our contact with and experiences of the Divine.
Being a Podcast Guest
I started listening to the Thereafter podcast by Cortland Coffey and Meghan Crozier at the beginning of their second season. I’ve become pretty good friends with both hoests over the past several months. The two of them invited me to be a guest and we met online to record an interview. That interview won’t be out until sometime next month (so you can look forward to me talking more about it in my May newsletter). Since I was already in the virtual studio, they invited me to join them for the introduction and TwitBits segment of Episode 47. That’s available, so be sure to check it out. And check out Meghan and Cortland’s podcast in general. It’s awesome. (It’s my newsletter, so I’m allowed to promote other people’s work if I want to, right?)
Tweets and Threads in April
I decided to live tweet my viewing of “Ex-Witch Exposes Satan’s Secrets!” on YouTube. The original video was put out on the “Deep Believer” YouTube channel. The ex-witch who was interviewed is a woman named Julie Lopez, who I had never heard of. I watched and live tweeted the video in 30 minute installments, as the whole thing was just under two hours long. Here are the links to each thread.
There’s a part two video, and I’m mulling over whether I want to watch and live tweet that video as well. If so, links will be in the May newsletter.
Addressing abuse in Pagan and witchcraft communities is something I’m passionate about, as I think it’s something that doesn’t get enough attention. To that end, I tweeted a thread about the challenges of rooting out abuse in communities where total autonomy is the norm and some ways that we can meet those challenges.
Branching Out to TikTok
The end of April saw the announcement that Elon Musk and Twitter have reached a deal for Musk to buy Twitter. A lot of people — myself included — are concerned about what this might mean for the future of Twitter. Some people have already started leaving and telling their followers where to find them elsewhere on the web. At this time, I have no plans to leave Twitter, but I decided it made sense to have a fall-back plan in case any of the worst-case scenarios I’ve imagined end up happening.
To that end, I’ve started building a presence on TikTok. I feel that it would be fairly easy for me to translate a lot of my tweets and threads into short videos, so I’ll most likely start using TikTok to do what I’ll think of as “video tweets.” Here are the TikTok videos, I release in the last week of April:
I’ll also be releasing a video to YouTube each weekend where I’ll stitch together all the TikTok videos I put out that week. Something like this.
Thanks for Reading!
I think that wraps up this review of April 2022. I hope you all have a great month of May. I’ll be back with a new newsletter around Memorial Day. In the meantime, share this newsletter with your friends. There’s even handy buttons to share it and refer a friend down below!