How becoming a witch stopped me living in fear

Two years ago I decided it was time to stop living someone else’s life.

My education and upbringing led me to believe there is only one way to live life (9-5 job, marriage, 2.6 kids, and a mortgaged house in the suburbs). Studying science for years made me reject anything that didn’t have “proof” as rubbish. This narrow world view became as just stifling as a dogmatic religion.

But when the unbelievable happens, suddenly anything is possible.

You know something is off balance, and I mean majorly off balance, when you are told you have breast cancer at only 26 years old. In the months following that earth-shattering news, I started to question everything I’d spent the past quarter century believing to be infallible.

I realised I had been going for jobs that caused me stress and unhappiness, just for the pay cheque. My priorities had been being “sensible” and “responsible”; becoming a “real adult” with a career that proved my years of higher education hadn’t gone to waste. My only real aim was to earn enough to be able to afford to purchase a property, a goal I had blindly accepted as something I should aim for as soon as possible. With few other real interests or projects, I was bored, unfulfilled, and living in constant fear of being a disappointment.

When you are clearly on the wrong path, the universe has a way of chucking you off track. In the wake of the cancer diagnosis, it quickly became very clear my full time job now was to get my health back. I decided a vital part of this was to start living on my own terms, in a way that felt authentic and true to me.

It was at this time I began my studies into witchcraft. As a lifelong atheist and recovering skeptic, it was a challenge to suspend my disbelief and explore this whole new world I’d previously dismissed as nonsense. I learnt the tarot which taught me my intuition was what I should be trusting, not my ego, which screams with fear at the very notion of doing something unconventional. Learning to sense energies made me understand I have power and I am in control of my life.

I regained the rebellious spirit I used to have as a teenager but had lost as the pressures of becoming an adult took over in my early twenties. No longer was I willing to dance to the beat of society’s drum, just because everyone I knew from school had become an accountant and was applying for a mortgage. I wanted freedom, I wanted to feel alive, I wanted to be able to make magick every single day.

My intuition is now strong, and I can easily feel when I’m straying in the wrong direction. Glamour spells give me the confidence to dress as bizarrely as I want and not give a hoot what anyone else thinks. For me, being a witch is speaking and living your truth, providing your own validation and inspiration, and becoming who you were always meant to be.

Cancer threatened to take my life. Becoming a witch made me truly live it.