The melancholia of the early days in spring had me thinking about what keeps me going.
Or what kept me going in the past, when a lot more good things seemed to have happened, than these days.
I spent the spring equinox with a fever and an infected throat in a bed from where I could at least observe the sunset over the fields I usually enjoy walking, and while it calmed my soul to see day and night in a relaxing embrace, all the answers I found for myself seemed very fragile.
I don‘t seem to have a strong faith in anything.
Maybe one of the most useful facts about my upbringing considering all my witchy interests seems to be that I practically grew up in a church. My mother stills spends most of her time there. She organizes activities for old people, has all her friends there – it‘s her home, and it was mine once.
But not anymore.
As soon as I could think for myself, at some point in my teenage years, I realized that I did not believe in god. I had no reason to. Scientific explanations for the origin of life seemed much more calming for the logical part of my brain, and the thought of someone always watching and judging was one I could not easily swallow.
My mother still tries to explain to me that the christian god she believes is one of love. „It‘s so nice to have someone watching out for you“, she always says, and I feel as if she excludes a lot of other aspects that are part of Christianity and are written in the bible, if she wants them to be or not!
But she can easily ignore the god testing your strength or bringing cruel punishments to you and only focus on the love she finds in the community around the church. “We are not catholic”, she likes to remind me, whenever that comes up.
I myself return every year for a music project with children that I grew up in and love to recreate.
Doing that feels like home.
My mother tries to convince me that it is the love of god that I feel in those moments, but I am convinced it is just the presence of people I knew all my life and the purpose we share for this one week.
Still, when the others pray (for which I don‘t join them anymore), I wonder how much better life would feel if I could believe in something.
Recently, I saw a doctor over my long lasting fever and throat ache, and while hesitating to give me antibiotics (which is reasonable I think), I was sent home with homeopathic pills, which I did not take. Here in Germany, they are very popular, and I know that many doctors just hand them out to give the patient the feeling of doing something for their health, if in reality you can simply sleep and wait for it to get better. But since I have read about homeopathy, I just know that there is nothing in it that could work and decided not take it.
My mother was upset, and tried to convince me that things did not need chemistry to work and that they would strengthen my body if only I believed in them, but the word placebo she did not want to hear.
I often spiral into worst case scenarios.
I would like to say that spending the best years of my life during a plague and a war in the culture I came from caused this, but I had those tendencies before.
Still, they increased when the pandemic stopped things I needed in my life.
And I was fast to conclude that they were over forever and I would never be social again.
I also feared for every pimple I ever had to be cancer, and it‘s tough, because the chance is always there!
I regularly check if people I am fond of have blocked me on social media. It drives my boyfriend crazy, especially after he wrapped me into a blanket on his couch, knowing that I still doubt if he really likes to have me around enough.
Recently, I found motivation to finally take my very final exam and put all my energy into really getting my degree, but when the paperwork took a bit too long, I immediately thought I had done something wrong and would never be allowed to finish.
When something scares me, my thoughts lose any hold and spiral out of control, and my gut feeling supports that. It always feels right.
It may be because I experienced things that are rare and not supposed to be real very early in life.
I cannot say more about them at this point.
But I tend to think back to the little church I was raised in, and to the new minister I was introduced to, and her sweet and high little voice when handing out blessings from a god this young woman so deeply believes to be good, and I also think of how I decided to run from her blessing.
I think of my mother using chemistry as a threat and trying to convince me to believe in little sugar balls when I have tonsillitis, and I hear her voice talking about the nice feeling of god watching again, and I wonder.
I wonder how much easier life would be if I had faith in something.
In something that would make it seem unlikely for the worst case to happen.
I wonder what life would feel like if something could convince me that most likely things are going to be fine, or at least not super bad.
How far would I have gotten already if something could calm down my gut feeling?
I can only wonder, because I never found anything to have faith in.
I like to work hard to achieve things and to always double or even triple check to make sure.
Maybe, I would not wonder about this if I had not been raised among so many religious people. I live in Germany, and while my family name still shows my Polish roots, this influence came from my German site.
Being raised so deep within a protestant church in Germany is rare these days.
And I could not find any faith in it.
If anything, it made me doubt any reason to have a blind trust into anything I cannot triple check at any given time.
But faith in something is needed sometimes.
Mistress witch writes 