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Something crossed my mind this past weekend – about the spaces we choose, and more specifically, the spaces we don't.
You know the feeling. You walk into a job, a relationship, a social circle, and within minutes you've done the quiet calculation. How much of yourself is welcome here. Which parts stay in the car. What version of you gets to show up today and what version waits outside.
Most of us have been doing this calculation so long we don't even notice it anymore. It just runs in the background, this constant low-level editing of ourselves based on what the room seems to have space for. And for those of us whose spiritual lives exist outside of what the culture considers normal, that calculation runs a little harder, a little more often.
Here's what I want to say about that: the editing is not neutral. It costs something. Every room that requires a smaller version of you is a room that is slowly making the case that the full version isn't welcome anywhere. That is not true. But it starts to feel true the longer you do it.
When I went public as a witch last year, something happened that I genuinely did not see coming. People I had known for years started reaching out. Old friends. People I had worked alongside for a decade. Clients. People who had been in the same rooms as me, making the same quiet calculations, editing the same parts of themselves out of the same spaces. It turned out an enormous number of them were also witches, or pagans, or quietly deconstructing, or spiritually curious in ways they had never said out loud to anyone.
We had been in the same closet without knowing it.
That is what the silence does. It doesn't reflect our actual numbers. It just reflects how well the training took; the training that said keep it private, make it manageable, preemptively apologize for anything that might make someone uncomfortable. That training served the culture that created it. It did not serve us.
There is a version of this conversation that is about coming out, about announcements, about how to tell your family or your coworkers or your clients. And I have thoughts on that. But what I actually want to talk about today is something quieter than that. It's about the rooms you're choosing. Whether you are building a life that has space for all of you, or whether you are slowly assembling a life around the version of yourself you decided was safe to show.
Because here is what I know: the right rooms exist. The people who will meet the full version of you with a spark of recognition rather than a furrowed brow — they are out there, and there are more of them than the silence suggests. Living out loud, even imperfectly, even just a little more than yesterday, tends to find them. The unexpected message. The friend who resurfaces after years to say me too. The stranger who says I thought I was the only one.
You are not the only one. You never were. The closet just had good soundproofing.
With love, Cerissa
