The season of the pagan

Yes, it's happening. And no, you aren't alone!

all the ways I have tried to solve the puzzle of what kind of political/religious movement I was born into

When I look at the shelves of books in my office, I am overwhelmed by how many relate to white evangelicalism.

This has been my obsession for a long, long time. Trying to figure out the puzzle I was born into. Trying to figure out why something I was told hundreds, thousands, millions of times was “good news” felt so very bad.

I wrote multiple books, hundreds of articles, I blogged and I posted on social media and I read and I read and I read. For almost 14 years now I have been writing to, and then about, white evangelicals and their hypocrisy. Their narrow-minded view of the world that begins and ends with only them being blessed by God. The trauma of growing up with parents who choose their religious and political cult over their children, and who did everything in their power to keep me under their control and to usher in a theocracy in America.

Well, my parents — and many like them — have gotten their wish. At least when it comes to the political sphere.

And today, I am regretting the amount of time I spent studying and warning people about what is now our reality. I wish my special interest really had been healing. I wish I had known long ago I would never get the love from my parents I so desperately craved. I wish I didn’t know the patterns and the Project 2025 playbooks, but I do. I wish my shelves were crammed with books full of ancient wisdom instead of evangelical drivel. But they are, and I can see it staring at me every day. How will this serve me going forward into our new political reality? A part of me has been whispering it won’t.

So it is time to move on to something new.

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I don’t know how to say this, so let me just rip the band-aid off:

I think I’m a witch.

The past few months to a year I have been experiencing a profound shift within myself. The colors of nature have shined brighter. I will experience stillness and peace when I notice a clump of mushrooms, a crow in my neighborhood, a hummingbird in my backyard. I am drawn to crystals and rocks and herbs, touching them, marveling at them. I started researching my ancestry, to the Irish pagan people before Christianity colonized them. I have started using tarot cards for myself and my creative practice. I have a coven of witchy friends and we gather regularly — not to cast spells, but to further the connections we have with each other, our bodies, and nature. We are wild and untamed and in charge of our own lives.

I am the kind of witch who screams at god and demands that he answer for all of his followers and all of the pain and suffering he has wrought. I am the kind that has poured over the ancient texts to see what wisdom there is to be gleaned. I am the kind that scoffs at hierarchy and who is overwhelmed by the amount of technology, cruelty, and exploitation that make up the backbone of our supposedly civilized society.

I am a baby pagan, slowly reaching out and connecting to the ones who have come before me. I am a baby non-binary witch, drawing on my own intuition instead of solely looking at the patterns. My body is slowing down from the onslaught of years spent in a savior complex fueled life of activism. The very earth itself is asking me to stop, connect, and be grounded in something more ancient than the headlines and politicos can ever know. I am invested in the long arc of creation caring for itself and course-correcting those who purposefully ignore and desecrate it. I am a witch who has no power over others but who has all the power within myself, a cycle of sustaining love and care and connection and curiosity.

I haven’t known how to write about this because:

a). It’s so predictable! (white person socialized as female getting into Tarot . . . yeah I’ve seen this a time or two. There is nothing wrong with this, and I think it is actually really interesting and really powerful to note this pattern, but as an iconoclast I sometimes resist thinking of myself as someone who is “on trend”)

b). It’s very important to me, but I am learning I don’t HAVE to share all my personal discoveries and many are just for me.

c). There are a lot of pitfalls / ways to be appropriative / the witchy community still seems to have issues with capitalism and racism and blah blah blah. Nothing is perfect, even though a part of me so wishes it could be.

d). I have activist parts of me that demand I go back into my old patterns, and they are really resisting this new (and more grounded) part.

e). I’m not sure where everyone else is at, and if they too are feeling a shift in the world towards connecting with nature and our bodies, if we are to survive this next season of exploitative white supremacist capitalistic meltdowns.

f). I haven’t seen a lot of people writing about the connection of neurodivergent folks and paganism. But all of my witch-y friends are autistic, and this is really intriguing to me! But I don’t know what to make of it exactly.

So, here we are. I am laying my cards on the table to say that for the next season (and who knows how long that will last), my personal interest is shifting towards all things witchy, pagan, and nature / somatic based practices. I will still be writing about religious authoritarian parenting methods for STRONGWILLED, which, sadly, continues to be ever more relevant. But here, in this space, I want to cultivate a community of people who are going deep and going inward and exploring our connection to the earth and to long-ago ancestors and to ourselves.

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If this shift isn’t your vibe, I totally get it. There is a season for everything, including following specific authors. Perhaps this is your time to leave, or your time to dig into these themes and topics.

Moving forward, the majority of the posts at Healing is My Special Interest will be behind a paywall, partially to protect myself (and you!) and create safety. I also am moving out of a season where I feel compelled to share my thoughts and writing and work for free out of a compulsion to save everyone. As always, if you cannot afford a paid subscription and identify as autistic/ADHD and feel like this content would be helpful for you, I happily offer free one year paid subscriptions. Just email me at dlmmcsweeneys at gmail and we will get you sorted. If you have the means to support writers like myself, thank you so much. In the coming months and years we will need to invest in the voices we want to see continuing on more than ever. If you choose to support my work — either here or at STRONGWILLED — I hope you know that I aim to spread those resources out as widely as I can. Witches need to support each other, after all :)

I’ve read and written and said SO much about white evangelicals, and I am ready to move on¹ — even, or despite, the fact that they now control the power structures of the United States of America. What I have dreaded and warned people about for so long has come to pass. And now I, like so many others, have to live in this reality and find ways to not just survive — but even to thrive in the face of white patriarchal capitalist Christian authoritarianism.

And that’s what I aim to do.

I’m a non-binary autistic baby pagan who used to write cover stories for Christianity Today and was the golden child of my family. Life is a wild ride, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels so scary, but sometimes it feels like a gift. I have the dread just like everyone else, but I am also building up a rich practice of “rituals” that connect me to the earth, to myself, and to others. And if this is what you are already doing, or something you feel drawn to, I hope you stick around. I’m not an expert or a guru, just someone who is on the journey of connecting to themselves.

We will need each other more than ever. And I am so happy to be here with all of you.

These are the cards I pulled yesterday as I was trying to process the election results. The death of the old ways, and moving towards investing in my intuition and inner power.

1. Again, I will be writing about these topics at STRONGWILLED for the next while, so that is where I will be channeling a lot of my research energy.