I never meant to show the witch side of myself so openly

In early June, I joined TikTok—a platform that felt like uncharted territory. My initial plan was simple: repost the same content I’d been sharing on Instagram, see if the numbers moved differently, learn something new. I didn’t expect anything to change. I didn’t expect to find my own reflection looking back at me.

Then I stumbled on a witchy spell video. The audio was a whispered incantation, soft as a breath, urging the listener to reclaim what was lost. On impulse, I created my own visuals—flickering candles, crumbling dried herbs, crows carrying their message on the wind—and layered the spell over it. I hit “post,” with barely a flicker of hesitation. My follower count on TikTok was in the single digits at the time. I had nothing to lose.

I went to bed without a second thought. And in the morning I realized something incredible happened: the video exploded. Views climbed well into the thousands overnight, and are still pouring in. Comments from fellow spiritual workers poured in, too —gathering energy from all over the world. My heart pounded, because for the first time, I’d been open in sharing my spiritual beliefs, and it had awakened something in me that had been lying dormant for years.

I was raised Christian, and for most of my life never I accepted those teachings without question. I was always the one to challenge how what I was being taught wasn't reflected in what I saw. I didn't know any other way, though. This was our life. But in college, a roommate who practiced Wicca introduced me to another way. I remember the first time I watched her cast her circle in our dorm room, whispering blessings to the night sky. My curiosity, long stifled by church “rules” that never quite matched what I read in the Bible, ignited. She lent me a well-worn book of rituals, and I read it cover to cover—spells, phases of the moon, herbal correspondences. I felt that familiar pull of something ancient, something authentic, in a way I never had in Sunday school.

For a while, I practiced Wicca—built altars, followed the Wheel of the Year, learned chants. But the structure and strictures didn’t fit me either: even modern Wicca felt like another set of rules I was meant to follow. So I began to study widely—pagan traditions, indigenous practices, global earth-based faiths—and discovered a common thread: at their core, these paths honor the balance of light and dark, beauty and disaster, creation and decay.

Today I run on intuition. Instead of a fixed altar or a rigid set of rites, I honor respect—of myself, others, and the world around me—as my guiding principle. That might look like choosing eco-friendly products, fighting injustice in my community, or scattering salt at my doorstep before a storm. It’s a practice born of quiet rebellion: I don’t need a handbook to remind me that the earth is sacred, that fire can both warm and destroy, that the moon’s pull is real.

That TikTok video cracked open a box I’d hidden away. It reminded me that silence was never safety. Silence was how they burned us, the women who ruled the hearth and home, who brought life into the world and held the hands of those who left it. Silence was how they buried our medicines beneath fear and shame and told us that our womanhood was something that should be hidden away instead of celebrated. Now, as I share these fragments of the old ways, small offerings of story, ritual, and remembrance, I am reclaiming the right to walk in both worlds: modern and ancestral, skeptical and enchanted, reasoned and wild.

I sometimes call myself a witch, though I’m not convinced it’s the only word for who I am. Maybe there’s another that suits better. But what I know is this: I feel a call to return to the ancient ways—the ones that predate church and crown, that honor the earth’s fury and its grace in equal measure. And I’m learning, every day, that magic lives not in strict lineage or perfect tools, but in our bodies, our breath, and the courageous act of respecting life in all its forms.

So consider this an invitation: remember what you’ve always known. Trust your instincts. Weave magic into your days, whether by candlelight or in the soil beneath your nails. Break bread with the old ways that never truly left us, and carry them forward—in the small moments, in the wild ones, in the quiet revolutions of the heart. Let the old ways rise again.