Coming out of the Broom Closet
Correfoc or ‘the running of the devils’ at Santa Tecla festival in Tarragona, Spain (photo my own)
There’s so much pressure these days to ‘just be yourself’, to show up authentically and visibly live your best life. But what does that mean? Is it an effort to truly excavate the most unique and original parts of you? To turn off your filters? To be the same person in every room you enter? All of those are quite a tall order, considering how quickly and harshly we tend to spit judgements at each other as a species, and how much we all crave (and need) social acceptance to provide our sense of safety.
I’ve recently come to a place of even greater respect for the people throughout time who have genuinely lived out their fullest expressions. What exquisite blazing examples they are, those folks who we don’t think of as perfect (or having perfect lives), but love and admire all the same. I’m thinking of people like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, with her jealous rages and affairs, and heavy eyebrows and incredible wardrobe, and miscarriages and disabilities, and swearing and smoking, and the most stunning, striking, dark, confronting art created from her sick bed. I guess they hadn’t heard of Instagram filters back then.
So… I am a Tarot reader... Which sounds like a simple sentence, but at various times it’s been a difficult one to muster. I didn’t grow up in a witchy household, this wasn’t an ‘obvious’ career choice for me. In fact, when I made the decision to take this path, I found myself faced with some super awkward conversations. Not only did I fear other people’s reactions (literally that they would suddenly think I was some kind of fraud, or ‘away with the fairies’ - no longer the ‘me’ I hoped they thought I was), but I also discovered that I actually held some pretty yucky internalised prejudices about it all myself.
Early on, I noticed I tried to distance myself from the idea of Tarot as a way to tap into something unknown and unseen - the Great Mystery - and talked about it simply as a tool or discussion point to open up different ideas. I would be extra hasty to explain away everything I, and Tarot, were not - not ‘New Age’, not a ‘fortune-teller’, not trying to predict the future, not scary or ominous.
However, talking like that just drew my attention to what I was avoiding saying - the fact that in my experience Tarot does, literally, make magic happen. And yes, by that I mean whatever your definition of magic is, in its truest and most beautiful form. The things that happen during a reading are frequently marvellous and inexplicable, just like all the best magic should be. 78 completely different cards, shuffled and re-shuffled, and yet the combinations somehow lead to personal sense-making, revelations and processing of difficult things. Clients and I regularly laugh out loud or gasp at synchronicities - the way a card’s character looks like their partner, or the symbols reflect unexpected resonances with their special people or events.
It’s not me that makes that happen. My role is just to share the meanings, and reflect back the way it all fits together. I don’t advise, or predict, I simply allow the cards to do their work and feel privileged to be a translator for them. Because ultimately, pretending Tarot isn’t magic, or magic doesn’t exist, is like pretending that the universe is all worked out already, that particles behave themselves and there’s nothing left to know. Which - even according to Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Maggie Aderin-Pocock and a multitude of other astro and quantum physicists - is just simply not the case.
Something true: science and magic can exist at the same time. It’s ok to hold both.
I recently watched an episode of Queer Eye; We’re in Japan!, and cried tears of happiness as a young gay Japanese man unfurled and grew into himself. It happened as a result of spending a few days bathed in the self-love and fabulousness role-modelled for him by the Fab 5. At the end he looked like a new person, spoke more joyously and confidently, carried himself vivaciously. All because he was shown that his whole self was welcome.
Coming out of the broom closet has much in common with coming out as LGBTQIA+ (and I really don’t take saying that lightly). The fear of judgement, of non-acceptance by family and friends, the shaming around what some people consider to be ‘life choices’ but are actually just part of who you are, are real in both scenarios. Even persecution and threats to physical safety have, sadly, been a shared experience for witchy and LGBTQIA+ folks alike.
So, all of this is to say… wherever you are on your journey of exploring your spirituality, integrating unexplainable experiences or otherwise allowing your full self to flourish privately or in view of others… I’m whole-heartedly here for it.
