Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad

Content warning: trauma, child sexual abuse, incest

The house isn’t safe. The incest, subtle, implied, threatened and actual, is not safe. The sexual abuse that I grew up with that turned my body into terror, is not safe. The wilderness is safe, the trees upon trees, the endless forest, the animals that move through darkness. The night is safe.Popular representations of witchcraft, possessions, and exorcisms are tied up with scripts of incest and sexual abuse. Feminine bodies are positioned as inherently sexual, dangerous, and out of control. Literal conduits of evil. Have you ever wondered why the majority of exorcism movies are about young, teenage girls who are at the age of puberty? These are scripts about feminine sexuality as inherently disordered, as inherently "asking for it." These are male fantasies, locating sexual violence in the victim’s bodies, locating the source of violence in the "devil," the "witch."Stories about "evil witches" which present feminine sexualities, feminine bodies, feminine aging, nature, wilderness, and animals as the source and cause of evil, as the threat to the safety of the home, the family, turn reality on its head. I have wandered naked in the wilderness, under the moonlight, and I was absolutely safe there. Where it wasn’t safe to be naked, where it wasn’t safe at all, was the home. My home, my family was the source of violence. Not my body, not my sexuality, not the forest, not the night.Calling myself a witch is about more than naming my spirituality, my affinity with more-than-human worlds, my connection with the living universe, it is a political act, a political naming. Calling myself a witch is aligning myself with the forest, with the feminine, with my body, with the night. Calling myself a witch is declaring that I do not believe the misogynist propaganda about witches that has been used to justify violence for hundreds of years. Calling myself a witch is an act of resistance against sexual abuse and incest. It is survival.I lay in my bed, next to my partner, triggered beyond belief, pain ripping through my body. I feel utterly alone in the universe. My voice, the detached voice of dissociation, is caught up in compulsive telling. I am trying to tell my partner what it feels like to be an incest survivor, what it feels like to have lived a lifetime of sexual violence. The pain is crushing, overwhelming, the work of telling, futile, because I know it cannot be told.

The problem is not the bat, the witch, the wilderness, the night, the forest, the feminine, my body, my being.

I am staring out my bedroom window at the night sky and I see a quick flash of blackness. This movement stirs me and I look with curiosity, not knowing what I’ve seen. It happens again, and again, and I realize I am seeing a bat. When I recognize this bat, all the tension in my body suddenly melts away. I have never seen a bat out my bedroom window before, and tonight, as I struggle to tell the story of incest, to bear witness to the obliterating pain in my body, the bat appears. I know, as a witch, that this bat appeared for me. This bat came to me, as foxes and raccoons and loons have done, to show me that I am not alone. I am here, I am seen, I am known.As a child I would leave the house of incest and go into the night and wrap my arms around the trunk of a tree. Non-human beings and I have always had a spiritual understanding, a strong solidarity. I know that I cannot protect the bat and the bat cannot protect me, but we see each other, we know each other, we are in this together. The bat is a being, a part of this connected, living universe, and the bat has come to me to show me that I am, too. No matter what, regardless of the sickening violence, the violations, the narratives which cover over the truth, the fact that no one can see, the bat knows, and I know, and we are in this together.With the bat, comes calm. Far from being evil, the bat, like my body, is good. I suddenly realize how deeply I have internalized the message that I am inherently bad, inherently disordered, inherently wrong. I suddenly see how I have lost touch with night, how I have ingested the lie which turns reality on its head. I have located the violence within me. I have worked hard and long to redeem myself, to exorcise myself, to become "good." Suddenly the words form in my mind: Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad. The problem is not the bat, the witch, the wilderness, the night, the forest, the feminine, my body, my being. The problem is incest, sexual violence, and a culture that sustains these things.Being a witch is my safety, my power, my refusal. Witchcraft is my communion with so many other beings, it is my relationship, my solidarity, my connection with a universe that loves me. The wilderness is safe, the trees upon trees, the endless forest, the animals that move through darkness. The night is safe.

Clementine Morrigan is a writer, artist, and working witch. She writes the zine Fucking Magic. Their first book, Rupture, was published in 2012. Her second collection of poetry, The Size of a Bird, was published in 2017. She is a white settler of Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry living on unceded Kanien’keha:ka territory. They are a practitioner of trauma magic. Find out more at clementinemorrigan.com or follow her on Instagram @clementinemorrigan.