My personal exorcism

I have recently discovered that I am one witchy experience ahead of my witching visitor!
Well, not really ahead.
I have never been standing trial and almost gotten burned after having had a few too many miscarriages and a husband dying under mysterious circumstances, but I have made one spooky and painful experience she never has!

Layla crosses her arms deeply insulted, not touching her hot chocolate this midnight. “It’s not fair. I have watched it happening when my friend was thought to be taken.”
“Taken?”
“By a demon.” She rolls her eyes, deeply hurt in her witching pride. “Once they’re sure you’re the witch, they don’t even bother with anything but destroying you.”

Exorcism does not just mean torture. It meant taking every kind of action to force an evil force, a ghost or a demon out of a body it had taken hold of. This could mean discussions or negotiations, but also a lot of discomfort for the body thought to be obsessed. Discomfort strong enough to make a demon leave, and the real owner of the body had to endure it as well. Good luck!

Witches do not deserve demons to leave them alone, because they were believed to have summoned them and helped them enter this world in the first place.
Makes sense, right?

Still, 13 year old me faced just that experience ones.

Well, kind of.
This little tale from my past does not take place in a spooky small town having missed out on a few centuries of world history, or in a weird church (although I spent time in those a lot as well), but in another kind of hell most of us just know too well: A school trip.
A lot of teenagers and only very few adults alone in a hut in the forest, covered in snow. And almost no phone reception.
Not that phones were allowed, but still.
13 year old me was hiding one under her pillow.
The hair was freshly died red, and almost hip long.
The clothes were black, and had decorative holes.
My headphones (hidden under long hair or in sweater sleeves), were mostly giving away music made of screams, or dramatic violins.
But most importantly, dramatically and fatally of all the things I brought with me onto this trip was a cough.
Yes, that’s right.
A bad cough.
What could be so bad about a cough?
Well, besides the fact that we were out in the snow all day and I had to try skiing, only to learn that I hated it terribly, it would lead to a very difficult night.
A night in which it won’t let me sleep at all.
But not because I was coughing, or having a cold, or a fever.
No, but because I would wake up in the middle of the night, 4 pale faces staring at me, and the cough would become really bad. In fact I could barely breathe at all.
Usually, this would have made me panic, but a smell in the air I noticed shortly after waking up coughing like hell, told me what had been happening.
And one of the girls staring at me bursting into screams and throwing away a bag of peanuts.
“She is awake!”
And a few boys were also in the room, and watched me jumping out of my bed in my nightdress, coughing like crazy.
“If it works, it means it’s true”, said one of them, opening up another peanut, ready to hold it into my face again. “She actually is a demon, and this is like garlic for vampires to her.”
They were laughing very hard, of course not taking anything seriously at all.
The thing I took seriously about this was my allergic reaction to peanuts, and I escaped that room covered in those.
For a while I sat in the dark hallway.
Coughing.
Freezing.
Not knowing where to go to.
It was not the first time that others in this school had reacted weirdly to me being there.
I had even written into my school report that I was looking and behaving weirdly, and it had let my mother to buying a lot of dresses that weren’t black (as if 13 year old me would have worn them ever).
After a while, I knocked on the door of a few friends I had despite all in this school, and one of them would switch rooms with me that night.

Still, I stayed the girl that made demon noises in her sleeps for the rest my time in this school, and that meant 5 more years.
And I would never really forget the moment in which I woke up under observation while having a bad allergic reaction to the peanuts that were supposed to chase the demon away.
A very coughy demon, to be honest.

“The worst part is that the boy leading this whole private exorcism against me is the son of my mother’s best friend”, I tell Layla. “And my mother does not take his bullying seriously up until today. She sent me pictures of his wedding, and his first born baby.”
Honestly, the thought of that boy having married the most popular, blonde and christian girl in my school and having offspring with her makes me feel …weird.
Layla had uncrossed her arms and was carefully nipping her hot chocolate. “Okay, that tale was worth telling.” And after another sip: “It’s terrible what the world does to someone as soon as their body does something a slightly bit weird.”
Cheers

So, this is the tale of my personal exorcism.
Although, it wasn’t an official one, but rather people being stupid and falling for mass hysteria.
But then again, that is the core of everything witchy, so I’d say it counts.

The experience on this class trip and everything that followed had me seriously consider suicide several times in the following years. That was also the time my self-harm actually became a problem.

I am thinking about this tonight because I may be facing that person that started it again after many years, since my mother is still friends with that family and still does not acknowledge my experiences at all.
I am not sure if I will go.
I am not sure if I am confident enough in my weirdness to face them, these people that have always made me feel too wrong and broken to live.

I have a few friends from back then that were on my side, which is really good, and probably the reason I survived.
It still really hurts that my mother doesn’t have my back, though.
But yea, also one of those reasons why they could even come for me as a witch, I guess.

…Layla sighs deeply troubled and cooks another pot of hot chocolate for us.