Tightrope walking with no safety beneath you, no hands waiting to catch you when you fall.
It’s terrifying.
Family estrangement is a particular kind of grief
one without a funeral, without a body to bury, without the permission to say:
I lost them.
Because sometimes you didn’t lose your family.
You had to leave them.
There is a difference.
Sometimes blood is not sanctuary.
Sometimes the people who share your name are the very people you must survive.
And sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is walk away from the Altar where they keep sacrificing you.
I know what it is to look behind me and find no one.
No familiar hands. No soft place to land. No chorus of voices calling me home.
Only the long road and the sound of my own footsteps becoming louder the farther I walked.
And yes, sometimes it is lonely.
Gods, sometimes it is SO fucking lonely.
There are moments I would give anything for the kind of family I should have had.
For a door I could open without fear. For love that did not come with conditions. For arms that did not become cages. For home that did not require the surrender of myself.
But I have learned something on this road:
loneliness is not the same as captivity.
And solitude is not the same as abandonment.
I would rather walk alone than be surrounded by people determined to make me disappear.
I would rather sleep beneath an unfamiliar sky than live beneath a roof where my existence requires permission.
I would rather carry the ache of absence than carry the burden of becoming someone I am not just to remain loved.
So I cut the cord.
Not because I was heartless. Because I was alive. Not because I didn’t love them. Because I finally learned that loving someone does not require the destruction of myself.
There are some doors we do not close out of hatred.
We close them because there is fire on the other side.
And sometimes survival looks like turning your back on the people who taught you that leaving would kill you.
Then discovering, you breathe better without them.
I walk alone now.
But look at me.
I am walking. No net. No safety line. No one holding the other end of the rope.
And still I do not fall. Because somewhere between the breaking and the becoming, I became my own ground.
My own shelter. My own witness. My own home.
They told me family was everything.
Perhaps.
But I have learned that self-abandonment is too high a price to pay for belonging.
So let them call it estrangement. Let them call it selfishness. Let them tell whatever story allows them to sleep at night.
I know the truth. I did not abandon my family. I stopped abandoning myself.
And there is a strange kind of holiness in that. A sovereignty that cannot be inherited or bestowed. A freedom no bloodline can revoke.
I am no longer waiting for someone to throw me a rope.
I have become the Woman who learned to walk without one.
And if I must cross this wilderness alone, then alone I will go. Barefoot. Bloody. Unbowed. Free. Sovereign.
On the Dark Moon, or on a night when your anger burns clean and bright, place a black candle upon your Altar. Set a mirror behind it (clear or black) and a glass bowl of clean water before it.
Light the black candle and stand before the flame.
Place both hands over your heart and say:
“Ancient Ones, Guardians of the Crossroads, Spirits of Justice and Right Order, Bear witness. I stand before you not as victim, but as one who survived. I stand before you not in weakness, but in Sovereignty.”
Take a breath and gaze into the mirror.
Then speak:
“The harm was theirs. The choice was theirs. The consequence is theirs. I refuse to carry another’s debt upon my back.”
Pass your hands over your body from head to foot as though gathering and collecting unseen burdens.
Cast them toward the mirror.
Then say:
“I return the shame. I return the guilt. I return the silence. I return the weight that was never mine to bear. As the river returns to the sea, as smoke returns to the sky, so too shall every deed return unto its source.”
Raise your hands and continue:
“I call upon the Powers that govern balance. I call upon the Spirits who witness truth. I call upon the Ancient Laws that bind deed to consequence. May what is hidden be revealed. May what is false be unveiled. May every mask crack beneath the weight of truth. May every action find its rightful harvest. Not through my hand, but through the turning of the Wheel. Through Fate. Through Conscience. Through the ancient law of return.”
Touch the surface of the water.
See the ripples.
See your reflection there.
Then say:
“I release the burden of vengeance. I claim the power of justice. I release the burden of carrying their darkness. I claim the power of carrying my own light. I release their fate to the Gods, to the Spirits, to the Ancestors, and to the turning Wheel.”
Sprinkle a few drops of water upon your brow, heart, and hands.
Anoint thyself.
Then speak these final words:
“What was sent returns. What was hidden is revealed. What was broken is restored. I call my power home. I call my Spirit home. I call my life home. So it is spoken. So it is woven. So it is. So it was. So it shall be.”
Allow the candle to burn for a time, then extinguish it.
Cover the mirror until dawn, or until you feel is appropriate. When you uncover it, a new light will shine.
Walk away knowing that justice no longer rests upon your shoulders alone.
There has been a lot happening in the Witch and greater Occult communities.
Even beyond these spaces, if I’m being honest.
There are so many intersections, adjacent communities, overlapping conversations, and places where all of this bleeds into one another.
I digress.
This isn’t about one particular event.
And it certainly isn’t about any particular person.
It’s simply a friendly reminder of a few things I think some folks have lost sight of:
1. Protection Magick is necessary Magick.
Make sure you have a solid plan.
Offensive. Defensive. Preventative.
Know the difference. Know what you’re doing. Know why you’re doing it.
And for the love of all things Holy and Unholy, don’t wait until you’re already in the fire to figure out how you’re going to protect yourself from it.
2. Mental health is Spiritual health.
Maintain proper Spiritual hygiene.
Take care of your mind. Take care of your psyche.
Hydrate. Eat well. Move your body.
Take your medications. Take your supplements. Meditate. Go to therapy. Rest. Get outside.
Do the mundane things that keep your vessel functioning.
Your mind is part of your temple, too.
You cannot continually neglect the human being while trying to tend the Spirit.
3. Flow like water through a stream, but stand like stone beneath the current.
Create your own opinions.
Build a foundation beneath them strong enough that nothing, and no one, can simply shake you from it.
But remain willing to change.
Be willing to listen. Be willing to encounter an opposing idea without immediately treating it as an attack.
There is an extraordinary amount of rage bait, manipulation, misinformation, disinformation, Spiritual projection, and psychological noise circulating right now.
Whether you call it psyops, propaganda, Spiritual warfare, algorithms, or simply the internet doing what the internet does best, be mindful.
Be mindful of what you consume. Be mindful of what you amplify. Be mindful of what you allow into your psyche.
Because energy is power.
So ask yourself:
Are you giving yours away freely?
4. Discernment in all things.
This one should speak for itself. I say it often enough.
Question everything.
Seek until you find an answer. Then seek some more.
And more. And more.
Use your intuition. Use logic. Use facts. Use evidence. Use your lived experience.
And yes, use Spirit.
But don’t abandon one form of knowing simply because another feels more comfortable.
Intuition without discernment can become projection.
Logic without intuition can become rigidity.
Faith without questioning can become dogma.
You need all of your faculties.
Use them.
5. To thine own self be true.
This might be the most important one.
We live in a world of (as aforementioned) algorithms, echo chambers, outrage cycles, manufactured consensus, and endless noise.
Everyone has an opinion.
Everyone has a platform.
Everyone has an answer.
And somewhere underneath all of that noise is your own voice.
You must learn how to hear it.
Because for many of the things we question, we already know the answer.
We’ve simply forgotten how to listen.
More importantly, we must become brave enough to trust ourselves.
To take the leap.
Even when it doesn’t make sense.
Especially when it doesn’t make sense.
Follow your path. Follow your beat. Follow your flame.
You do not need permission to become who you are.
You do not need consensus to know what you know.
You do not need the crowd to validate the path beneath your feet.
They connect us through unspoken bonds of blood, bone, and memory.
They are inherited like old recipes, family heirlooms, and names carved into weathered gravestones.
Except no one speaks of these inheritances.
Only the silence.
Only the tightening jaw.
Only the little girl who learns to apologize before she knows what she has done wrong.
Only the mother who loved the best she could with hands that were never taught how to hold themselves.
I used to believe the mother wound was born inside one Woman.
I know better now.
It is older than her.
Older than her mother.
Older than the grandmother whose laughter was swallowed by survival.
It travels. From womb to womb.
From daughter to daughter.
A ghost wearing different faces.
We inherit the unfinished grief of Women who were told their hunger was dangerous.
Their anger unbecoming.
Their voices too loud.
Their bodies belonged to everyone but themselves.
Until one Woman…
says:
No.
Not because she hates the Women who came before.
Because she loves the Women who will come after.
Do you know what it costs to break a generational curse?
Everything.
You become the family disappointment.
The difficult one.
The Woman who asks forbidden questions.
Who names what everyone else has learned to survive by denying.
You mourn people who are still alive.
You bury versions of yourself that were built only to keep the peace.
You become the fire alarm inside a house that has grown comfortable with smoke.
And no one thanks the alarm.
Not at first.
Breaking the curse is not beautiful.
It is ugly.
It is blistered hands pulling roots that have wrapped themselves around your spine.
It is learning that forgiveness does not always mean reconciliation.
It is discovering that compassion does not require your continued sacrifice.
It is standing at the edge of your bloodline and saying:
It ends here.
Not because I am stronger than my mothers.
But because their prayers finally found a body willing to answer them.
Perhaps I was never born to carry this pain forever.
Perhaps I was born to become the threshold.
The Woman who looked an Ancient wound in the eyes and refused to pass it to the next generation.
This is how the spell is broken.
Not with perfect love.
Not without grief.
But with one battered hand reaching backward to bless the Women who could not escape while the other reaches forward to children, to daughters, to sons, to every future soul I will never meet, unburdened.
Because I chose to carry the wound only long enough to teach it how to become an ending.
Days when memory arrives uninvited, dragging shadows behind it.
Days when your body remembers what your mind had long since tucked away inside Sacred vaults of survival.
And on those days, I hope you remember this: You were never the violence.
Not then. Not now. Not ever.
What happened to you passed through your life like a storm, but it did not become your Soul.
There are those who would measure you by what was taken.
I measure you by what remained.
And what remained was extraordinary.
Is extraordinary.
You remained.
The heart still beating. The lungs still drawing breath. The Spirit still refusing to surrender its song.
You do not need to earn your healing. You do not need to justify your grief. You do not need to explain why some wounds ache louder than others.
You are allowed to be tender. You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to be both in the same holy breath.
The world may call your scars damage.
I call them evidence.
Evidence that you walked through fire and somehow carried the flame home. Evidence that darkness met you and failed to make you its own. Evidence that even shattered things can become Sacred.
So when the memories come, when sorrow presses its hand against your chest, when the old ache whispers its familiar lies, place your hand over your heart.
Feel the rhythm beneath your palm.
Thump, thump Thump, thump
That is not weakness. That is not brokenness. That is your life.
Still choosing itself. Still choosing itself. Still choosing itself.
Thump, thump Thump, thump
And that, dear Woman, is a miracle.
You are a miracle.
Jaclyn Cherie
The Nephilim Rising Girl God Books
All Rights Reserved.
My poem from the upcoming release, Spells for Survivors: Returning to the Holy Her
