I haven’t spoken much about religious or spiritual matters here, focusing instead on popular culture and politics.
But I am a religious and spiritual person: I’m a practicing witch, meaning I worship nature and different deities, and use spells to connect with them and to affect change within the world.
Today, for the first time in a long time, I felt drawn to my craft in more than a rote way, and crafted a spell to sever ties with a person who abused me in the past, to end a spell I had cast on them in the hopes of preventing them from doing future harm.
Warning: below the Read More is a story about sexual assault.
When I was 14, I was molested by a girl I called a friend.
This girl, S, was in my grade in high school, but I had first met her when I was studying at one of my primary schools.* I had trouble making friends at school, so while this girl wasn’t an especially nice person, the fact that she wasn’t actively attempting to hurt me — at least, not at that point — meant that I thought we were friends.
* Fifth primary school of six…we moved a few times during my schooling, so I changed schools a few times.
We did things that school friends do: we hung out at school, we talked on the phone, we went over to each other’s houses. S could be mean and harsh and rude, but since she didn’t direct much of this behaviour at me, I tried to ignore it. Neither of us were popular, but S had an in with the more popular girls that meant she didn’t get bullied. I guess a part of me hoped that, by being connected to her, I could avoid some of the bullying and harassment directed at me by those girls.*
* Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.
Looking back, there was a slow escalation of aggressive and creepy behaviours that I didn’t notice or understand at the time, but which are painfully obvious now. Most of them were microaggressions that I didn’t fully comprehend, but there were a few stand-out incidents:
- Some of my things started to go missing: some coins I had taken to school to show a teacher, a large amethyst gemstone that my late grandmother gave to me. I’m not the tidiest person, so I thought I had just misplaced these things, and that when I tidied my room or dug through the moving boxes, I’d find them again. I never did. I later realised these items had disappeared when she over at my place.
- While speaking on the phone one day, she told me that she had to go get something, and put the phone down. Waiting for her to come back, I realised I could hear her laughing with her sister and another friend about what we had been saying, insulting me. Upset, I hung up on her. I eventually called her back, and tried to explain how she had hurt me, but in the end I was apologising to her for daring to hang up on her.
- One time at her place, S took me into the computer room and introduced me to an online chat platform. S then engaged in a lewd chat conversation with another anonymous user while I sat at her side, embarrassed and silent.
Anyway. We’d been friends, or friendly, for a year or so, and one night this girl was staying over at my place. I had inherited my mum’s old double bed when she got her new one, so S was sleeping in my bed.
We were staying up late talking; I remember the light creeping under my door from the hall, and hearing the sounds of the TV from the living room as my mum watched a movie. We were talking, and then S’s hands were on my chest, kneading at my breasts.
“I want to feel them,” she said. “I just want to feel them.”
I don’t know how long she molested me for. It must have been only minutes, but it felt like an eternity. I don’t fully remember all the things she said or did. I hope she just felt up my breasts, that she didn’t do anything more invasive than that, but I’ll never know for sure. Eventually, I managed to move her hands off of me and onto a pillow. I curled up on my side and tried to go to sleep.
And then, I forgot.
I don’t remember thinking about what happened the next morning…I don’t remember thinking about it the next week, or month, or year. Not long after this, though, our so-called friendship broke down: S and another girl I had been friendly with, L, became cruel and aggressive, joined forces with the popular girls, and made my already awful school like a living hell. I changed high schools, and tried to focus on making it through school alive.
Then one day, five years later, my mum and I were driving past where I used to catch the bus to school with S. And that night rushed into my head, a blur of sensation and horror and half-memories.
“S molested me,” I said.
The car was dead quiet. I now know my mum was shocked into silence, but at the time it seemed like she hadn’t heard me, or didn’t care. We drove home, and we didn’t really speak about it. But now I remembered, and it haunted me.
Several years after that, I bumped into S again while buying takeaway. She acted like we were still friends, and asked if I was still living at home and what I was doing. I mechanically answered some questions, and listened as she told me that she was working on counselling qualifications. That she wanted to work with children.
My number was called, and I collected my order and began to leave. But then I stopped. I decided that I should confront her about what she had done to me. I think the deciding factor was that she wanted to work with children…I was suddenly terrified not only on my own behalf, but on the behalf of all the future children she could hurt in some way. I wanted her to consider her past actions, and her future ones. But I also wanted to get some closure. I wanted to be able to move on.
I turned back and looked her in the eye. “You molested me,” I said to her.
The encounter did not end with the catharsis I sought. Instead, S denied that she had done anything to me, and then attempted to gaslight me into believing that I had molested her. Shaken, I got in my car and left. I’ve only tried that takeaway chain once since then, and the food tasted like ashes in my mouth.
On the way home, I was terrified and horrified and terribly, terribly angry. I immediately began a binding spell, attempting to bind S and prevent her from ever doing anything to harm anyone, child or otherwise, the way she had hurt me. I wove the binding as tight as I could, binding it to her fate, and binding myself to her as a warden to her life. And then I tried once more to forget what S had done to me.
The thing is, it’s really, really difficult to forget. Memories spring up at random moments; random things remind you of your abuser or what they did to you. You end up avoiding places, sometimes whole suburbs, in an effort to prevent the memories or avoid seeing them. You try to talk about it in therapy and find you can’t say the name out loud, can barely think it without shuddering. You go a department store, but since your abuser shares a name with a popular brand of homewares, it feels more like stepping into a minefield. You create a family name for characters in a story, then realise it’s too close to your abuser’s name and frantically rewrite your own lore to avoid it.
And all the while, there’s been this invisible, metaphysical bond between us, one that I wove in a fit of anger and desperation, forged with hopes and pleas for never again. A spell of binding, a prayer for intercession, that may or may not even be working because all it is is words and energy, spun together and let loose into the ether.
Which brings us to the here and now.
Yesterday was an OakSunday, day that coincides with a full or dark moon, a time when members of my coven choose to get together and check in with one another, maybe work some magick, maybe drink some tea.
One of my sister-witches mentioned a fellow witch had been ghosted by a girl, and that he wanted to do some curse-work directed at this girl in retaliation. The thing was, she didn’t think curse-work.
“It’s your energy attached to them,” she said, “and they’re not the sort of person you want to be connected to, if they act like that. You’re just binding yourself to them, and why would you want to do that?”
“You make yourself their warden,” I said. And you’re stuck with them, I thought.
For the next 12 hours or so, I subconsciously mulled over this idea. I studied languages, and played some calming games. I went to sleep, and then I woke up. I took my puppy for a run, and then I decided to plant a blueberry tree.
I got my hands into the dirt, digging a hole and excavating the tree from its pot. I set the tree in the hole, and pushed the dirt in around it, piling it up to support the tree and give its roots space to expand. I moved some logs to make a retaining wall for the dirt so it wouldn’t wash away form the tree, then got some water and watered the tree in, giving it the resources it needed to recover from the shock of being transplanted. I watered some of the other baby trees nearby, and then I brought all my supplies back up to the garage, put them away, and returned to the house to clean up.
Standing in front of the kitchen sink, dirt beneath my nails, the day after the first waning gibbous moon, I suddenly realised that I could be free of S. I could cut the ties that bound us, that I had created all those years ago in the hope of preventing her from causing more harm to the world, and accept that it was over.
I cast a circle about me, and began to ritually wash my hands. It was a strange feeling. I took a knife from the cutlery drawer and carefully cleaned the dirt from beneath my nails, letting it wash away down the drain.
“She is nothing but dirt and scum to me, and I wash it away,” I said. “I cut the bonds between us. I utterly sunder all the ties between us. I wash her way like I wash away the dirt beneath my nails.”
A sense of calm came over me. I lowered the circle and set the energy loose into the world, beginning the slow but sure dissolution of the binding spell I had cast. By the time the moon is dark, there will be nothing left between us.
I had a shower, and washed away the sweat and grime from the garden. I remembered the fact that most of the cells that make up our bodies are constantly being replaced, so that every seven to ten years, our bodies are more-or-less completely new again.
“She has not touched this body,” I said. “She has never touched this me.”
I am still uncomfortable thinking about S. Writing this post has been hard; several times I have had to get up and walk away, to have a cuddle with my puppy or one of my cats, to breathe and remember I’m safe and she can’t touch me.
But working this spell, cutting those ties, letting go of the binding that connected me to the girl who abused me and tormented me and hurt me so badly? This is helping.
The moral of the story? Use what you have to heal. Use what you believe in to empower yourself. Cut ties with what doesn’t help you. Don’t waste your time or your energy or any part of you on those who have hurt you.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t seek accountability from people who have wronged you. If I could hold S accountable for what she did to me, if I could see that she paid for her misdeeds in a tangible way, I would seek that out in a heartbeat. But I am not going to waste any part of me on her. I am not going to let her get any more of me than she has already managed to get.
She doesn’t deserve any part of me. She is dirt beneath my nails, and I have washed her down the drain.
