By Ellie & Elena Patrick
See Rebel Witch, Journal 1 for more information.
Write an account of your journey in and out of the broom closet so far. If you've only just started out on your path, you could write about your current intentions, musings, and worries relating to coming out as a witch. If you're a more seasoned practitioner, you could write about decisions you've made regarding openness and secrecy along the way and why you made those choices.
When we first started exploring magic more seriously last December, we were very hesitant to let anyone know about it at the time. The only person we talked about it in any real depth at first was our then boyfriend, who was also a witch, and who was heavily encouraging us to explore this. We told our family little bits here and there to explain the things we were bringing to our dorm from home, and the things we needed from our dad's shed. But we heavily downplayed what we were doing, saying the things were merely decorative, or our rituals simply gave structure to our day, and while we used the trappings of magic, we didn't really believe in it. In all honesty, we didn't know what we believed yet, but I think we believed more than we claimed.
This year, we stayed on campus for most of winter break, which gave us a month to get more comfortable with our practice with only a few friends around, before everyone else moved back to campus. By the time that happened, we were comfortable enough that we could leave our altar set up prominently in our room, and though we didn't really talk about it, people kind of knew it was something spiritual, and didn't touch it or anything. We had our own room this year, so we didn't have to worry about a roommate around it.
At the end of the semester, the person who would become our partner started staying in our room pretty regularly, and because we usually did our main ritual when we got up in the morning, we kind of stopped doing it for a bit, because we were self conscious about doing it around them, since we hadn't actually talked about our practice with them. We've since opened up to them about it, though that gap in practice made it difficult to get back into the routine after we moved into our apartment.
In our apartment, we have a fairly large walk in closet, and we had our altar set up in the back of it. That served the dual purpose of protecting the very fragile items on it from getting broken out in our room, but also kept it out of sight from prying eyes. However, being in an unventilated closet in summer, made it very unpleasant to be in there, which deterred us from practicing regularly.
We've been trying to figure out ways to move our practice physically out of the closet for a bit now. When we came home yesterday, the wire shelf that went over part of our altar had ripped out of the wall and fallen. By some miracle, nothing broke, despite there being so many fragile things on the altar and on the shelf. We emptied out the entire closet, including our whole altar setup to make space for maintenance to come fix it, and to force us to actually go through things, which we didn't really do when we moved in. However, once we go through stuff and the shelf has been fixed, it gives us an opportunity to reconsider how we have our altar, and perhaps begin to move our practice out of the closet.