In second grade, I co-founded an onion grass-themed cult. The schoolyard was overrun with tufts of the tall, curly-topped, subtly bluish grass, which were obviously much more appealing playthings than the surrounding swings, slides, and monkey bars. Who could resist plucking out the bulbs and smelling the pungent onion on your fingertips?

We centered a loose religion around the harvesting of the grass. We spoke a simplified, arguably racist language based on dropping out certain sounds and cutting unnecessary words, resulting in chants of "onee-gas, onee-gas" and quick, chirrupy gibberish. As a priest of this order, I officiated worm funerals and encouraged the construction of onion grass bracelets. Using dandelions, we painted personalized patterns on our faces. Our God of Onee-Gas smiled upon us for at least a couple weeks, until our religious fervor was overpowered by the arrival of Pokemon cards on the playground.

Sometimes, after a mower shreds a patch of onion grass and releases that green scent into the air, I reflect on the bizarre peace that my first cult experience granted me.

Most of the time, I feel out of control. Lots of folks probably share that feeling, especially those who suffer from anxiety or depression. It's like life keeps dropping plates out of the sky, and I'm supposed to catch them before they shatter, except I'm on a unicycle and there are live bears chasing me and someone is shouting "BOO, YOU SUCK" from the ringside and that someone is also me. It's a one person disaster circus out there.

Inevitably, human that I am, I drop plates (and wine glasses, and Christmas ornaments, and text conversations because I'm a Pretty Bad Friend sometimes). There's a thing that happens when you drop a lot of plates, or even think you're dropping a lot of plates. You can develop "learned helplessness," which is the perception that you have no way of escaping an adverse situation, so you shouldn't even try. Fail enough, and your brain gives up on finding ways to avoid failure, since it seems that nothing you do has an impact on the final result. Things are bad, and will always be bad, and you have no control over that, so why bother?

Logically, you really should bother. One of the early experiments in learned helplessness (conducted by Dr. Martin Seligman, known for his impact on the field of positive psychology) featured administering electric shocks to dogs (yeah, I know). By jumping over a barrier in an experimental box, dogs could avoid the painful shock. After a few rounds of this, the dogs learned they could jump over the barrier to safety before receiving the jolt in the first place.

However, if the dogs had previously received inescapable, unpredictable shocks (YEAH, I KNOW), they didn't even bother with the barrier. They might run around a little, but then lie down and give up. And they'd do this over and over, until the dogs made no motion to escape when the shocks started, even though there was the option of hopping over the barrier.

Even on the occasion that a dog so conditioned did jump the barrier, and discovered safety on the other side, it would go back to its passive acceptance of the shock in future trials. That's how tightly the sense of helplessness locks to the brain.

And if that isn't the saddest thing, then you can get right the heck out.

There's a reason the concept of learned helplessness is tied to mental illnesses like depression. The real or perceived absence of control hinders your ability to get that control back. How unfair is that?

My relationship with onee-gas gave me a sense of control in a chaotic world. Like I've mentioned once or a thousand times, I was(am) a super weird kid. Making friends could be difficult. Reading situations was even worse. A more socially savvy kid might have seen some downturns in friendships coming, but I was blindsided every time. I was dangerously blunt, and hurt people's feelings without realizing it, and that created complicated, painful friendships full of pranks gone too far and unintentionally mean behavior. Plus, unabashed weirdo that I was, I was ripe for mocking, and it took me too long to even know the extent of my ridicule.

As an acolyte of schoolyard weeds, though, I had a specific role, and the authority to be weird, and a set of rituals that calmed me.

I've always liked rituals. I used to have a specific order for saying prayers, and compulsively finished with a song I'd learned in Vacation Bible School (composed of saying "hello" in about 10 languages, which I added to all the way through college). I tapped a specific rhythm when shutting down my laptop. I counted sidewalk lines on my way to classes. I ate certain meals in a complicated order, originally for luck, but eventually just to avoid inevitable bad luck.

I don't have the same rituals any more, and they never interfered much with my life. I've learned other ways of overcoming my sense of being out of control. It took a lot of trial and error and for a while, those errors were ridiculously unhealthy.

But I've found a weird way of reintroducing that calming control, and all it took was revamping my dusty and long-disused spirituality.

Of course, I'm not the type to take a yoga retreat or revisit the Good Book. Oh no. I'm getting in touch with my spiritual side by declaring myself a witch, and here are a few reasons why:

I already have a crooked nose and unladylike hairs on my chinny-chin-chin
I've been called a witch before, in that you-know-what-I-really-mean-when-I-say-witch kind of way women (and those who appear womanly) are called sometimes, and I sort of liked the image of me cackling in the woods somewhere, surrounded by cats and the bones of my enemies
I look suave in a pointy hat (by the way, the tall hat and iconic broom were actually taken from beer brewers in the Middle Ages. Making beer was "women's work," and one of the few ways a woman could be an entrepreneur. So of course the Catholic church took notice of these women making moolah, got all pouty, and started demonizing them. Like, full-on bringing back the idea of witches specifically to weaponize the concept against all women. Having filled society with the notion that women are corrupt and prone to devil-worship and unfit for business, the men of the church moved in on the market and claimed it for themselves, cutting women out of one of their only means of accruing independent economic power. The repercussions of stripping women out of their pre-1300s healing and brewing roles continue to this day. Isn't that heckin' interesting, and by interesting, I mean infuriating.)

Alright, fine, I'll get a little more serious. I realize that there is a practice of modern witchcraft, and while I'm borrowing some ideas from that, I'm making this my own thing, all about positivity, spreading kindness, and gently correcting my own negative behaviors.

Some tenets of my witchhood:

Creating sigils as meditation and self-affirmation: Sigils are symbols created to embody an idea, like, "I am smart and capable." You turn that into a drawing, repeating it until it's completely comfortable, a visual mantra. You can discard it, set it in motion through a ritual, or keep it as a reminder.
Conducting rituals to assist with visualization: Mental rehearsal leads to improved performance in both mental and physical tasks. However, I can find it difficult to focus my intent, so creating a ritual as simple as lighting a candle and speaking a phrase can help get me in the right mindset.
Being mindful of my environment and my fellow creatures: I can often get lost in my own head. I'm making an effort to notice my world, both the good things within it and the parts I can improve. I must direct goodness out into the world through acts of kindness and compassionate corrections of my negative impulses.

What has scared me off of spirituality in the past is a focus on organized religion or a specific supernatural belief. For where I am in life right now, I simply don't know if there is a world beyond the physical one. I like the idea that there is, but I don't know that I believe it. My spiritual practice, however, is one based in positive psychology more than actual spiritual belief. Even the bits that border on mumbo-jumbo have the placebo affect going for them (and placebos can work even when you know they're placebos).

Maybe I won't be riding around on a broom (or a Hoover) any time soon, but I do like the idea of calling myself a witch. It's sort of the spiritual equivalent of saying I'm a "nasty woman." It's restoring the strength of something broken, and that's the sort of effort that my heart is here for.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a worm eulogy to deliver.

A couple weeks ago, I went out to lunch with my uncle/boss/landlord (it's a whole thing). Because I am a fool, I ordered a sandwich, knowing full well my crooked little puppet mouth would struggle with it. Sure enough, I had to stop eating a quarter of the way through, because the meat was too tough for me to sever between my tongue and top teeth, which is my normal method. My uncle noticed and asked if the food was alright.

"It's good, I just, you know." I gestured to my teeth.

He did not know.

So I explained that my teeth don't meet in the front, which is something I thought was obvious about me. You can see it in my smile: this hanging, partnerless row of jagged, chipped, sawlike upper teeth. I fear it alters my speech and forces me to be deliberate with certain sounds. I worry it juts my upper lip too far out and gives me a dopey look if I don't hold my jaw a specific way.

I stuck my tongue through the gap to demonstrate the lack of slicing action, and explained my tongue method, and my not-in-public alternative of ripping into tough food with my back teeth, like a famished hyena.

"It's because I didn't wear my retainer," I told my uncle. "I got braces earlier than most of my classmates, because my adult teeth were large and came in very fast. At least, that's how I remember it."

I did not tell him about the time I plucked out a handful of teeth to distribute to relatives at our foreign exchange student's swim meet, but the memory did surface.

"I tongued out the retainer in my sleep, so it was difficult to use overnight, and I was teased pretty bad for the speech impediment it gave me at school. After a few months, I couldn't stand it anymore, and stopped wearing it. I was already the weird kid, and in middle school, I was finally starting to realize that wasn't a good thing. I couldn't give the other kids more fodder."

I wish I had written down my uncle's response, because it took me by surprise, and I can only communicate the gist. He praised the experience of living a parallel life, of existing just outside of the beaten track and experiencing the world from an unusual angle. My messy teeth shape a unique set of experiences for me. They change what foods I order in public (sometimes, because as I've previously stated, I am a FOOL who likes SANDWICHES), and they force me to create work-arounds. Maybe my jaw and tongue are stronger for the slack they have to pick up. Maybe my teeth are more ridged and serrated than other folks' because they have to tear instead of cut.

It's a small shift, but a shift indeed, and my uncle found that interesting and meaningful.

I've been thinking about ma vie parallèle ever since, all the little things that remove my experience from the standard human experience, and give me insight into other worlds. I think about my shortness, and my thin thumbs, and my large chest (I mean, I'm telling it like it is, folks. I got titties. They turn seatbelts and button-ups into my worst nemeses). These are small physical differences that minutely change how I interact with the world (step stools or climbing on counters, not being able to repurpose too-large family rings for my creepy aye-aye thumb, looking like a damn table-clothed picnic bench when I wear flowy shirts).

Small, small differences, right? I'm able-bodied (and look like it). I'm right-handed. I'm white in a world that rewards me for it. I'm, ahem, reasonably attractive, creepy thumbs and buck teeth aside. There are worlds upon worlds that I never see. I don't have to look for wheelchair ramps or accessible bathrooms wherever I go. Scissors fit properly in my cuttin' hand. The only time people follow me around stores is when they think I've lost my mommy, because I'm small, acne-prone, and maintain a generally dazed/frightened expression. Sometimes people hit on me... I think.

There are meaningful differences out there, parallel worlds that most of us don't see. There are benefits and drawbacks. There are stories that ought to be told.

And it's not all physical, either. Invisible disabilities create new angles of viewing the world as well. A topic I bring up a lot (because, and there's a theme here, I am a FOOOOOL) is mental health, and how I'm frequently in want of it. My brain does these things that I've learned to laugh at. I've talked a bit about my face-blindness, and how I've developed alternative and sometimes funny means of identifying people, and then there's the anxiety/depression/who-the-heck-knows bucket of mental illness. Like, sometimes my brain goes, "Wow, you better off yourself with this stapler so you never make that mistake again, you vacuous burden on society," and I'm like, "Whoa, my guy, I just forgot to attach a document to my last email, so maybe we leave the stapler out of this."

Sometimes I get overwhelmed and have a panic attack for seemingly no reason. Sometimes I reflexively hit myself for making innocuous mistakes. Sometimes my self-image swings from "I'm pretty sure I'm an actual wizard" to "I'm pretty sure no one would notice if I was replaced by a dummy made out of old gum and chewed up pencils for a week."

I live many parallel lives that, sometimes blessedly and sometimes cursedly, most people rarely see. I take what I experience, and I make it into stories, distributing my slices of the world to different characters, like a musician coping with depressive episodes, or a lesbian overcoming irrational guilt. I research other worlds as well, so I can allow glimpses into wider physical and psychological experiences.

What do your parallel worlds look like? Are you willing to share them? To tell stories about them, so more people can see what you see, and take your perspective into consideration? Because if you have the power to do so (and it is fine if you don't, because you ought to take the best care of yourself that you can), you can spread understanding across multiple worlds. You can unite with people who share your parallel track, and educate those who don't.

In a time when human empathy is in high demand and short supply, I think that sharing your unseen worlds is an important thing to do, if you can. And if you can, I invite you to share your stories with me. I'd love to post some guest entries, or link to your writing (or other media, if that's more your speed).

If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can email me here.

I wish you a year of empathy and kindness, and as always, I'll be here to listen.

Bad at Spirituality

La Vie Parallèle