Guest Post from Caitlin Hall
November 28th, 2005
I think I took the song Life’s a Dance to heart. I screw up things all the time. I say the wrong thing or do something wrong, even when I try so hard to control myself. The more I try to keep it all in, the worse things get. I just really need to do what I’m supposed to do. My priorities sometimes get all screwed up. My mouth is huge too! I have a feeling sometimes when I joke it makes people upset.
I try not to change who I am, but tone it down a bit. I do what they ask me to do. I really need to get my life straightened out. If I don’t I’ll always feel terrible because I can’t do anything right. I feel terrible now all the time because Dad is so disappointed in me. I know he wants to lock me up… or kill me, but he’s handling himself very well in this. I know I wouldn’t act the way he is now, and tonight I completely disrespected him. I feel like a complete screw-up right now.
I want to crawl under a rock and die, but I can’t. I must face this music. Tomorrow is a new day, and it has its own problems. Hopefully, I can mend the hearts I’ve broken. I don’t like having people upset with me.
But life’s a dance, and if I keep telling myself this, maybe things will get better. Maybe God will help me.
That was me at fifteen—asking permission to exist.
Read like a spell, the entry reveals the lessons I’d already been taught about who I was allowed to be. What looks like adolescence and remorse in the entry is actually social training: the slow work of good-girl conditioning. This conditioning has girls believing they are responsible for adult emotions and that they can never disappoint or upset anyone around them. It has us believing our role is to get other people to like or approve of us in social settings. We are not to “rock the boat” or upset anyone. In the process, we betray our own needs. Good-girl conditioning trains the body, voice, and imagination to shrink; by prioritizing obedience and shame, it dulls the sensory, intuitive, and boundary-holding capacities that are the scaffolding of our innate magical abilities. Before fifteen, I knew my role in the family was to be the big sister, the caretaker, the maid—“she’s our little cleaner. The house sparkles when she’s done.” To be anything more than the role assigned to me was to be against the ideal Proverbs 31 woman.
I try my best not to change who I am, just tone it down.
First, the body is taught to make itself small, and magic, which lives in sensation, goes quiet. “My mouth is huge… I have a feeling sometimes when I joke, it makes people upset,” is a key line in conditioning magical little girls to learn censorship and hypervigilance. I learned early that my words were upsetting, and learning to speak my truth was dangerous. So, instead, I internalized my grief, my rage, every unspoken boundary I never got to speak because it was easier to be the “Good Girl.” No one punched the Good Girl in the face for hugging the cousin who had assaulted her in bed, even though it made her skin crawl. When we shrink ourselves to be agreeable, we pay the cost of chronic compliance, which looks a lot like misalignment of the body, mind, and soul. Our lives may appear impressive on paper, but we often feel empty in our bodies and disconnected from our souls. I thought love required legend, so I devoured international politics, earned a job in the Capitol, and found the gods of power no holier than the ones at home. I was exiled from nature and turned to alcohol and sex for an escape from the volcanic pressure building under my skin. My body, a raging inferno, trapped behind thick walls, my nervous system built to keep me safe. I was a fawn disconnected from my body's responses and my power.
When speech becomes apology and consent is replaced by pleasing, the very spells that require clear intention fail. “I don’t like having people upset with me” is voiced by someone with a deep fear of disruption, and when we fear disruption, we don’t allow ourselves space to grow. Our voice, the projection of our power, when clear, is crucial for the spells we weave into our becoming. Once, in an elevator with a senator, I watched in silence as he touched an intern’s hair and led her out like property. My voice froze in my throat, my body stiff as stone. Shame flooded me. My lack of power that day shook something inside me so deeply that when I was assaulted by the former student council president of my alma mater, I knew it was my fault. I had earned this treatment and stayed silent.
Magic is a practice as much as a miracle; the mistakes, the “screw-ups” are the apprenticeship. “I screw up things all the time… even when I try so hard to control myself,” is the internal monologue from a child who was removed from this natural apprenticeship early in life. This child doesn’t trust their voice and is afraid of the visceral responses their body now makes after years of burying trauma and magic that can no longer stay hidden. So, when they are desperately seeking magic to craft boundaries against abusers, the ritual misfires because they aren’t aligned. Somewhere deep down, fear blocked the full action, and the cycle of feeling not good enough continues.
If our creativity and experimentation remain stifled, the shame, internalized self-policing, fragmented identity, and stunted agency become internal laws. I must be small, I must be correct, I must not be seen—“if I don’t, I’ll always feel terrible.” Eroded boundaries leave us susceptible to energy vampires. Dulled interoception makes for poor omen-reading. And a censored voice won’t stir life into any incantations. The antidote to the Good Girl is the Witch: wild, embodied, boundary-holding, attuned to body and omen. To walk from one to the other is not an overnight spell, but a daily practice.
To move from the Good Girl into the Witch is not a rebellion of one loud act, but the slow weaving of counter-spells. Every line of obedience written into the flesh has an antidote, and the work of the Witch is to remember them. Where the Good Girl shrinks, the Witch expands. Where she censors, the Witch speaks. Where she complies, the Witch claims her ground. The first practice is to reclaim the body. The Good Girl is taught to fold herself into corners, to keep knees pressed tight and voice smaller still. But the Witch unfolds. She stretches long as the river; she shakes herself loose from the fear of being too much. She lets nettle run fire through her veins, ginger warm her belly, and rose soften her chest. She lies belly-to-earth, remembering her body is not a cage, but an altar. And when she’s ready, she will remember her body was meant to be worshipped.
Once we reclaim our bodies, we must reclaim our voice. The Good Girl swallows words, fearing the crack of disapproval. The Witch spits them back out, vowel by vowel, like sparks from a coal. She hums, chants, screams into the wind. She writes letters she never sends, letters that taste of salt and fire, until her throat remembers it was built not for silence but for spellwork. That spellwork is the foundation for reclaiming our boundaries. Chronic compliance is a poison; sovereignty is the cure. The Witch casts her circles not only in ritual but in daily life—“this is mine, that is not.” She salts her bath to remember her skin is holy. She holds a mirror to herself and names her edges. She learns to say “no” as though it were an incantation, because it is.
Reclaiming the body, voice, and establishing boundaries is the key triad for the Witch to fully move away from Good Girl conditioning and delight in pleasure. The Good Girl dulls her senses, fearing what delight might say about her worth. But the Witch takes her tea like a sacrament, lets oil glide across her skin, and calls cacao or damiana into her dreaming. She revels in her nakedness and rides original sin like a current. It is the power that keeps the cauldron simmering. She reclaims creativity and play, knowing when to compost. She makes messy art, burns lopsided candles, draws sigils with crayons, and dances ridiculously under the moon. She remembers magic is an apprenticeship, not a performance, and failure is just another spell in progress.
If the Good Girl has made it this far in her reclamation, she has most certainly been exiled from the land, from her ancestors, from the marrow of belonging. But as the Witch returns, she presses her ear to the stone, listens to rivers, touches trees without asking them to perform. She digs in the bloodlines and finds the scraps of herbs, crafts, and stories that once kept her kin alive. Even on cracked sidewalks, she offers thanks to the earth that holds her. The Witch knows the Good Girl survives alone, believing her worth lies in pleasing the authority who holds her leash. The Witch knows to thrive is coven-work. She gathers her people, sings with them, eats with them, and grieves with them. Together, they remember that survival was never meant to be solitary.
I screw up things all the time… even when I try so hard to control myself.
That was the Good Girl, her diary ink a confession booth, her pen a leash. But read again, and you can hear it differently. These were not screw-ups, but spells misfiring because the Witch had been bound too early. Every “I feel terrible,” every “I don’t like people upset with me,” was not evidence of failure but the raw material of initiation. The shame itself was the cauldron bubbling, waiting for heat enough to transform. The Witch looks back at that page—November 28th, 2005—and sees not a child begging permission to exist, but a girl already apprenticed in the hardest magic: surviving disapproval, swallowing fire, shaping herself against a world that asked her to vanish. The diary entry is a spell fragment, an incantation of longing, proof that even the Witch-self was alive, pressing against the cage.
When the Witch reads, “My mouth is huge too. I have a feeling sometimes when I joke it makes people upset,” she does not hear shame. She hears a prophecy: this mouth will one day speak spells, incantations, and dangerous truths that will unsettle not just people but whole systems.
When she reads, “Tomorrow is a new day, and it has its own problems,” she hears resilience disguised as an apology. Even then, the child knew renewal was possible—that the sun would rise again, and with it, another chance at becoming.
This is the alchemy: the Good Girl’s diary becomes the Witch’s grimoire. Every confession becomes a counter-spell, every apology becomes a lesson in boundaries, every ache becomes compost for new magic. The Good Girl may have written, “I want to crawl under a rock and die,” but the Witch answers: “Then crawl into the dark earth, and there, in the womb of stone and soil, be reborn.”
The circle is unbroken. The fifteen-year-old wrote her pain into paper. The Witch writes it back into power.
The Good Girl asked for permission to exist.
The Witch writes herself as an invocation.
—Caitlin
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