A witch with no regrets

This night feels cozy.
Midnight has passed.
No sleep, but another cup of tea in vanilla scented candlelight.
“Are you saying you have no regrets?”, my witch giggles.

When I was younger, I was often warned that I would regret the things that I did.

I remember being 10 years old and finally telling my family that I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write novels, I wanted to leave something behind for people to wonder about!
Adults who previously had only been looking at me with a kind smile suddenly frowned, and I eventually was introduced to the pressure of paying bills. “How are you supposed to own a home and sustain two cars with writing?” “Of course you need two cars. What if your husband is at work and you need to go to the grocery store?” “You are going to regret this.”
I was ten years old. I was dreaming.

My witch plugs in the fairy lights.
“Are you saying that owning a second car was never your dream?”
“Not even the first one.”

As a teenager, I became a rebel. I died my golden hair first black, then red. The last choice was the one to stick with me, as you can see. At 13, I wrote my first own songs with my guitar and violin. The instruments were supposed to help me play at church, but I soon began touring Europe with an orchestra. I had adventures in Italy, Switzerland, Czechia, and I was convinced that I wanted to contribute something to art and culture.
The Christmas I came home from my first tour, I was introduced to the mechanism of unemployment help in Germany. “What is playing an instrument worth if you can’t even buy a new pair of shoes?” “Our company doesn’t even hire people with eccentric hobbies.” “You are gonna regret this.”
I was a teenager and had just spent weeks on the road with other artists. I was enchanted by Europe’s complex history.

Somehow, a sip of rum finds its way into our tea.
“It takes a lot of strength to sustain a dream.”

In my late teens, I started to do theater work. I wrote for the stage, I performed wherever I could. I even got a (performative and abstract) part in a play on the biggest stage in Hamburg. All while finishing school with good grades and then waitressing. I saw my future studying something to support my creativity. I started with literature and philosophy, and in that moment fell in love with doing research.
I was often warned of my insecure future. Each family meeting meant another horror story about what it meant to be poor.
I still remember the moment when I snapped. When something inside of me broke. When I stopped singing, shut away my violin, and enrolled in university to become a teacher. I suddenly thought that art was for girls with longer hair, thinner upper arms, and sweeter voices.
For the three years that I studied a teaching degree, I was happily accepted during Christmas dinners. A great uncle second degree even gave me instructions on how to negotiate my salary in the future to keep up with the wider family’s wealth.

My witch turns up the music.
We lay on the floor, listening to Daughter, Lucy Rose, Emily and the Woods (whatever happened to her?).
“What to do you really regret?”
“When my soul was dead.”

I am currently planning a business trip to Paris for some archival work related to my thesis in history and philosophy of biology. I am publishing short stories occasionally, working on my novel, have been back on stage, and have found friends who make music with me. My museum work allowed me to work in Budapest and Helsinki, and I have found a lot of friends through all of this.

The only thing I regret are the years that I have been quiet.
My family however, expects me to regret a lot more. I am being kept at a polite distance to my cousins, so that they don’t learn about people with my biography. Once I joked about my “heaviest goth phase” as a teen, and my whole family joined in to tell me their relief about my regret. But I have not regrets. I love the weird things younger me did. Hell, I still sometimes dress up goth. My heart beats for anything dark!

I have no regrets.
Still, I am expected to ask for forgiveness for being me.

There were years of my life when I did not really feel like myself. I wrote in silence, never played music, did not belief in arts and culture, and or even doing research anymore. I was numbed, but accepted. In the pandemic, I had a painful moment of realization, and it all came back to me.

If you have someone in your life giving you these kinds of warnings, this post is for you. Nothing is more painful than not daring to be yourself.

I am 31 years old. My life is a bit insecure. I have built a network for freelancing work in museums and similar institutions, and sometimes I even get a little pay for writing. I am not entirely sure where I will work after finishing my thesis, but I am confident that it will be good! I am also confident in the novel I’m writing, and can’t wait to find my way back on stage.

I am not regretting being me, as everybody told me to. I only regret the times when I was too broken to be me.