Your Art Is Your Witchcraft

A guide for coming into your powers.

When I was sixteen, my first boyfriend brought me a kitten on our one-year anniversary; it died an hour later. The next Saturday, I woke up to Mom accusing me of using witchcraft to bring the cat back from the dead.

Turns out another black kitten identical to the one I’d buried in a Tide box the week before had shown up mewling on our porch, scaring the shit out of Mom while she was out watering her plants that morning. I might’ve thought the cat's appearance spooky too if not for the fact that our house was basically a pet motel — we were the last house on the left down a dead-end holler where the road suddenly became a river. Assholes were always driving down to dump their pets, leaving the half-starved animal to stagger its way up the hill to our front porch a few days later.

Mom’s religious fundamentalism combined with a smidgeon of mental illness meant she couldn’t believe such a simple coincidence didn’t have a deeper significance. On top of that, there was the boy who’d brought me the cat in the first place.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing in his car when he drops you off at night? Why your mouth is so red like that when you finally come inside?” she’d accuse.

Besides humiliation, I didn’t know how to take Mom’s sudden suspicion. One night I’d been a child playing board games with her and the next I was being accused of blowjobs in the driveway and small animal necromancy. As a teenager, I thought she was crazy; as an adult, I still think she’s crazy, but also that she might’ve been onto something — I do have powers, and so do you.

Coming into Your Powers

According to Teen Witch, witches come into their power around their sixteenth birthday. That didn’t happen for me, even though Mom seemed to have been waiting on it — maybe all that jizz I was swallowing in the driveway jammed up the pipes. Whatever the reason, I didn’t come into my “powers” until I was 27. Maybe I’m a late bloomer, which would be a new experience for me since I got tits in the second grade, but I don’t think so — I think powers are intensely personal and you find them when you find them.

Sometimes I hear artists talking about how they were two years old and already composing symphonies or sculpting the turds they found in their diapers. That wasn’t my experience — I wrote as a kid, but only for school. Art as a verb would’ve been looked at with scorn in our blue-collar household, and had I called it a magical power, Mom would’ve chased me with the holy water until I took it back.

The only reason I finally found writing again was that it was the thing I always did when everything else fell apart. I’ve started no less than ten blogs, one for every rough patch I’ve hit in my life. I’ve always quit inside a month because the writing made me feel better — so much better I was able to resume the shitty behavior that had brought my life to such a crisis to begin with. I had to fall on my face over and over before I finally saw the pattern — when I was writing, I was happy. When I wasn’t writing, I was irritable like a constipated old man.

What’s the thing you do when everything else falls apart? Besides drugs, and eating a lot of food, and drinking — those are what we call the “dark arts.” If meth was off the table, what would you do? Would you write a play about your shitty life? Sing a song about being the villain in your own story like Rachel Bloom? Paint a tubby self-portrait? Do it!

When Your Magic Gets Clogged

Why should you give a shit about finding your powers? Maybe you’re perfectly happy getting by as you are with your 9 to 5, coming home to Netflix and Hulu and your drug of choice. Carry on! But if you start to have any of the following symptoms, revisit the possibility that you’re a witch whose magic is all clogged up.

Symptoms of Burgeoning Witch-hood

1. “I keep crying and I don’t know why!”

2. “I feel dead inside. Does anyone else feel dead inside?”

3. “Oooh, what kind of shit can I start on social media today?”

Once, when my magic was all backed up, I wrote a 1,500-word rant on my friend’s Facebook wall attacking her political beliefs. An hour later, I took it down and messaged it to her privately under the heading, “I’m sorry, this was misdirected creativity.” What I meant was I hadn’t been making time to write, so my magic, like an ornery kid trapped in a house, had ran out screaming and left graffiti all over her Facebook wall — misdirected creativity.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think a lot of what’s wrong with our most “evil” people is that their creativity is being misdirected. Even Hitler just wanted to be a painter, and if he’d gotten into art school, perhaps he would’ve become a good witch instead of Voldemort.

“But I suck at art.”

Of course you do! And when you were born, you couldn’t even hold your head up or shit off yourself, but look at you now — you can shit with the best of them! My point is practice makes perfect, and the reason you got so good at shitting is that you did it every day. Sure, there are some people who were born good at shitting, maybe those with really long arms who are like super efficient with toilet paper cleanup, but most of us had to go through the humiliating trial-and-error process that taught you how much toilet paper to use to keep your finger from poking through to your asshole.

Ten minutes of wand-waving a day is enough — do you want to start drawing? Have you recently looked back at your art from when you were a kid and caught yourself thinking, “Hey, I wasn’t half bad…” Start drawing for ten minutes a day. Do it for 30 days and see what happens. If at the end of the 30 days, you aren’t totally in love with drawing, stop drawing — that’s not your magic but something else is.

There is one catch though — you only have to work for ten minutes a day, but once you start a project, you have to finish it. That means if you want to start a new project, go for it, but that project won’t count toward your ten minutes a day until after you’ve finished the first one. Otherwise, it’s too easy to keep starting and never finish anything. With nothing finished, you’re more vulnerable to left-brain thinking, which will antagonize you and accuse you of wasting your time. When you’re finishing your work, there’s nothing to criticize because every single thing you do is building toward a body of work.

On day 30, you’ll be surprised at how much you’ve done with just ten minutes every day, and you’ll even think some of it’s pretty good. Keep going — don’t stop at day 30 or you might get all backed up and start spewing antisemitic rhetoric.

Channeling Your Magic

You know how when you lay down at night and the harder you try to go to sleep, the harder it is to go to sleep? No matter how hard you try, you can’t force yourself to sleep — you have to let yourself sleep. Your magic is the same way.

You can’t force art — you just have to get out of the way and let it come through. The best stuff comes out when you focus on your senses and your breathing. Instead of sweating your brain to come up with something astoundingly creative, just write or draw what you see and hear, whether it’s right in front of you or thousands of miles away. Let it flow, but don’t think flow, because then you’ll just draw pee.

Using Your Darkest Material

That stupid cat dying was the saddest shit ever, and not just because at sixteen, I thought it was a sign of how my first relationship was going to turn out — it was, but it also made for an interesting beginning to a story.

Same goes with Mom. Having a parent with mental illness isn’t something easily lived through in the moment, but the residue of experience like that is invaluable. You can sprinkle it like fairy dust throughout your work to add depth and texture and all those other words that critics (Hogwarts dropouts) like to use when they’re trying to pin down the indescribable.

I tell my writer friends who are trying to write about their lives for the first time to write about the hardest thing — whatever that is for you. You don’t have to show it to anyone, ever, but it makes for good practice. Think of it like when Harry Potter has to learn his Patronus spell by confronting his worst fears coming out of a closet. By all means, include the happier pieces of your life too, or you might get a case of the dark and twisties, but in moderation, your darkest stuff can make for the best launch fuel.