I’m revamping this blog. I went on a hiatus but it doesn’t mean my life was anything but uneventful. I have more art and so many stories to share, I just didn’t know where to start. I also lost family members, I became a Grand Aunt, and am slowly adjusting into becoming a young Crone. As the world becomes more troublesome, my life has become more quiet, and this is precious. I used to complain that I’m too isolated and alone, now I love being on my own and share the healing silence of my home with those who seek healing. Being something of a “hermit priestess” I counsel with the Tarot, provide paranormal consultations for those who experience spiritual disturbances in their homes, and have no need to advertise online or in the newspaper, those who need help arrive on my doorstep (actually by Twitter feed, Instagram direct message, or Facebook private message, etc., you get the idea) and we deal with it. I have no complaints. I need people as much as they need me.
I love being a modern Witch!
It’s not a crazy or spooky life. However, I am very outspoken. Like all Witches, I am an outsider, a rebel, and quite bitchy LOL!
So what will you find to read here? Well, coming up I will be addressing some hotbed issues I meant to write about but held back because I once had people in my life who berated me for speaking up — about anything! But why exactly did I start writing about my personal life so candidly in the first place? What spurned me on to just let everything out? And what drives me to sometimes not give a f— when I talk about myself?!
When Someone Finds Your Life Interesting Enough to Steal, You Have to Take it Back BOLDLY!
I had this incident that happened to me back in 2002 when I trusted someone, we’ll call her a “Karen”, with watching my apartment while I was gone on a seven week long stone circle study. This Karen had the nerve to go through ALL of my private hand-written journals, seeking any juicy details about my life. Oh, and darling? SHE READ EVERYTHING! But you know what else she did? SHE PHOTOCOPIED ENTRIES AND SENT THEM OUT TO MY FRIENDS, INCLUDING MY LOVERS!
Oh, but it didn’t end there!
Have you ever written unsent letters to your unrequited love? You know those special kind of unsent letters you’d never want anyone to read? Well, Miss Karen thought they were so GREAT that not only did she think my crush needed to read them, she took it upon herself to send them in to a local newspaper columnist! THE NERVE, right? The columnist wrote about this submission as being the most eloquently written, yet strangest series of letters he was ever sent. BUT IT GETS WORSE! Karen found nude photos of a mutual friend of ours and decided to make it seem like those photos were of me! So not only did she violate my privacy, she also violated my other friend, whom we’ll call “Lucy”, and made it seem like we were one desperate woman writing to a newspaper columnist who frequently wrote about the sexual hang-ups of people.
I didn’t find out about what happened until a year later… See, I was wondering why some friends were acting “distant” towards me, afraid to tell me what happened for fear I’d kill Karen. See, I was already angry when I came home from my long trip to find my apartment had been ransacked by Karen. She went through my closet, left boxes emptied of their contents everywhere because she went on this massive hunt through my most personal of belongings. Jewelry and other keepsakes went missing, and I felt completely devastated. When I confronted Karen? She felt she did nothing wrong. How? Well, long story ended: her mental illness was finally exhibited, she had no sense of boundaries, and I thought, “if someone finds my life so interesting enough to steal, I better take it back and publish it in my words then!”
A Short History of My Web Logging: 1993 to 2015
Originally, I first started blogging back when the internet was still green and black screens, back when things were still just “web logs” where you told people what your plans were for your web site, back when web sites were all text! Then those web sites, such as, oh, I think it was called “homestead” where you were given a number, and just one page to write about yourself, like a call sheet. You couldn’t be heavy on images since it took forever for them to down load on dial up. Such were the early 1990’s back when I was in my early 20’s and was slow to catch on to the World Wide Web until I had a best friend who was something of a wizard at it. She talked me into presenting my artwork online. I learned quickly by looking at code, really eye-balling it, and simply copying, at first, what everyone else was doing, then tweeking the pages to fit my aesthetic. By the late 90’s, I was on Xoom.com until 9/11 killed the servers at the towers and I lost all of my old web logs. But I always hand wrote everything before I published it all online. Having hard copy drafts of things was a great history of my life to keep, and a deep hurt to lose again when a crazy person walked into my life and literally stole them!
Okay, skip ahead to 2004… I started a blog at a lovely site called Mindsay! I kept that blog as my most personal, most revealing, most private diary-like place for a whole decade. It was there I met many best friends I continue to correspond with today. Some I lost during petty online conflicts where, quite frankly, I feel were just differences of perspective and clashes of disposition. You never know how friendships will work out until you meet offline and interact in person! But you can only grow after these confrontations. Some friendships only became stronger afterwards. We learned more about each other and grew to be better adults.
Just like other free hosting web sites, Mindsay did not last. But, like I said, the friendships continued on other social media sites. I tried to download all of my old blog pages, but then one day when my well-meaning Uncle Doug was helping to update my desktop computer, he accidentally deleted everything on my hard drive! Needless to say, I also lost beloved photos, too. Just tons of memories gone in seconds. I still have the old hard drive in the hopes of reclaiming the data, yet it was too late to go back to Mindsay to reclaim my old blog site. I had to accept it was gone.
And so we must let go of things passed.
Originally, I Started Writing “Postcards” Here to My Lost Mother
I started this blog on November 1st, 2011, with the hopes of starting over and also trying to make up for lost time with other old friends I eventually lost contact with, too. I also began a series of entries called “Postcards from Home” that I wrote to my mother who passed away on March 23rd, 2010. Originally I wanted to write these “postcards” to a friend who was traveling, but the subject of writing to “someone” I could never talk to again? That went deeper than just trying to write to some guy who was galavanting around! My Mom was dead! I was angry about it. Not sad. ANGRY. My friends around me had their mothers. I didn’t. I even felt angry at them for having their Moms! No one understood this. Except maybe my own mother who wasn’t “there” and so I wrote postcards to here about how my life was going and how I was feeling.
Some people I knew thought I was addressing them.
My thoughts and grief aren’t about anyone but me. So sometimes when I write here, it’s a venting point. My blog is part diary, part info-article writing station, and the sharing of my drawings and paintings and what-not. Oh, yeah… about my art.
During these last five years hiatus from blogging, I also dealt with artist’s block. I suspect this has to do with grieving. I not only lost my mother, I lost my father. Both my parents are dead.
I get angry about that, too.
I also get angry about suicide. I lost a nephew-in-law to that. Nothing hurts worse than seeing a child grow up to be a young man, only for him to seemingly disappear over night. It’s like he went to college, you catch yourself almost talking about him as if he’s still here, but then you remember depression took him… his “college” is death, and he won’t be graduating back to life… or at least not in any incarnation I’ll get to see. So the comforting spiritual stories you once loved before tragedy hits you don’t work anymore. You end up rewriting them, knowing that traditions must change.
Well, I wrote much too muchness here. If you read this far, then you must like me, really like me. Next time I’ll edit better. I just thought you’d enjoy a new kind of introduction. Later I will have to clean this blog up. Photobucket is no longer a site I can use to store my images, so this means I have to go through all of my pages here and basically “clean” everything up.
I hope you like the new look of the blog. I’m going for better “read-ability”(look out, I use a lot of kenning with my word salads) and an orderly theme. But if I get bored, I may change it.
Catch you later.
