Or, how I learned to stop worrying about what everyone else appears to be doing on social media…
I was standing in the shower this morning, washing my hair and doing the one bit of (mostly) routine devotional practice I’ve been able to manage this last year: a prayer. I always use the same introductory bit, a mish-mash of bits from both my Wiccan and Druid practices:
Lord and Lady, Kindred of Land, Sea, and Sky, Ancestors, Shining Ones, and Spirit Guides, Thank you for this day.
And then I will go on to talk to my Gods. This morning, I added a bit of invocation specifically to Brigid and Manannán mac Lir. I don’t do it every day, and some days I can only manage to grump a bit to the Gods while I’m driving to work. But I persist, and for me, that’s the key to whatever I can do. I have perfectionist tendancies that frequently cause me to self-sabotage myself. The old “if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all!” attitude.
Maybe you can relate? I was that straight-As kid in school who got the perfect attendance rewards all the time. I actually did graduate second in my high school class, and if not for my stunning lack of skill in gym class, I might have been valedictorian. It’s not a problem of imposter syndrome per se, it’s more an issue of me expecting the best out of myself. Don’t be thinking that my parents pushed me to get good grades or study aerospace engineering in college. That was aaaaaaaall on me. (Pizza Hut may take some small bit of blame, they used to give kids free personal pan pizzas back in the 80s if you got good grades and brought in the report card.)
I had to become my own adult, grind through a few Ds in college (engineering classes are HARD, and my high school was ridiculously low bar, for all my gifted & talented and AP classes…) and start keeping my own household to understand the true meaning of “good enough”. My perfectionism/self-sabotage has been the key of my personal development work as a Wiccan (you can ask my teacher for corroboration on that, if you know her).
I decided at the end of 2020, dumpster fire that it was, that I was going to put forth a goal of doing something witchy every day in 2021. Building a sustainable daily practice is something that has eluded me all 25 years of my pagan life. But I’m in my early 40s now, I still have very little do to besides work and futzing around on the internet with the COVID pandemic still raging, so now… now was the perfect time!
Perfect. Yeah.
In a perfect world, I’d wake up well-rested at dawn, slide into my perfectly decorated ritual room for some soothing meditation and prayer, then do a little yoga before settling in with a cup of coffee and a pagan book for a while. Oh, and there’d be some time for a ritual shower, too, pulling a tarot card for the day, chanting over a crystal grid, and sending reiki. All before getting the cats fed, getting dressed, packing lunch, and going to work.
Ya know, like all those pagan folks do on social media. The really witchy ones, who seem to have all their shit figured out.
Yeah. Right.
For those of you out there who struggle with perfectionism, self-sabotage, an overabundance of enthusiasm and a dearth of time, or imposter syndrome itself, I’m here to give you a small bit of advice: don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Seriously. Get off Pinterest and Instagram… I know there’s a lot of cool witchy photos of altars there, and folks happy to lay out the 15 step morning ritual they do at dawn on the beach every day no matter what the weather does (though, of course, they all live in some utopia where the weather is always fabulous, the cat never throws up on your shoes, and mice never eat your ritual candles).
Back to this morning in the shower. As I rambled on to the Gods about how hopeless and ungrounded I’m feeling as this pandemic grinds on, inspiration did come on through: make the simple sacred.
My prayer is already pretty simple, and mostly free-form. To take that a baby step farther and build a routine, I will link doing my prayer with drinking my morning coffee. There’s rarely a morning that I don’t have a cup, whether it’s one my husband’s brewed for me that I sip in bed, one I drink in my home office, or one from Panera that I’m sucking down at work (still working out of the real office even with a pandemic on, because IT security and firewalls and other computery tech crap).
So this is my goal: from tomorrow until Ostara, I will do my prayer daily with my morning coffee. If that works well, I can consider adding in something else simple. Maybe I’ll dab on some aromatherpy oil while I’m brushing my teeth in the morning. Maybe I’ll charge my blood sugar medication with reiki. I don’t know yet. I don’t want to know yet. I know how this goes if I go too far too fast… like Icarus, I will crash and burn in a fiery hailstorm of self-sabotage, and welp, here we go again! Back to square one!
No. Nope. Non. Nyet. Nein. Ní maith liom é sin.
I’m getting too old to roll back to square one every time I trip over myself. My Weight Watchers leader asked folks to pick a word for 2021, and I picked persistance. I’m going to show up for myself, I’m going to press on with the goals I set, and I’m going to make some goddamned progress for a change. When you miss a turn on the road, you don’t immediately go back home again and start fresh. You figure out where in the hell you are, then you plot a course to get back to where you want to go.
Where do you want to go this year? What baby step will put you on course?
Oak and Clover 