Day Eighteen: Community

I have had some incredibly negative experiences with the online pagan and witch community, particularly on Tumblr, but I'll probably get into those somewhere else. I started talking about them, but I just kept going and going because the one situation was so fucking stupid and it makes me so mad even though it's been like 6 years lol. People were making serious accusations against me over a text post about it being bad to shame people for enjoying sex and I got dogpiled into oblivion and larger blogs got involved because people were too dedicated to not understanding that I had no idea what was going on and they were like "you guys are being deranged, you need to apologize to this person, they clearly do not know who you're talking about" and it was a real shitshow. Anyway.

Despite the negative experiences, I do desperately want community. I used to be pretty active on the pagan/witch part of Tumblr both before it fell off and before everything went down. I will say that I kind of stopped vibing with Tumblr's site culture when I was in my early 20s, but there weren't really any communities I found that were both active, had people sharing useful information and were like. Not too...y'know. Like that.

I was in a Hellenic pagan discord as a mod for a while, but that kind of died out eventually. I don't think I would like discord for this sort of thing, honestly. I did recently get accepted into a pagan forum, but I haven't checked it out yet, I'll report back in a blog post, I suppose.

I have also wanted to attend in-person pagan events, but I've just never gotten the opportunity. I've been to witchcraft/New Age/etc stores before and I generally get on well with the people I've spoken to in those settings. There aren't really any stores like that near where I currently live though, at least not that I'm aware of.

I dunno! Community is very important, but can also be very difficult to find, particularly in the current social media climate. Living in urban areas generally helps, but I do currently live in an urban area, it's just not one with an active witch/pagan community (at least that I can find, I could probably try a bit harder though). I know the pagans are out there, because I've met several in entirely unrelated settings, we need to get together! It's especially important now that it seems like Conservatives have decided to pay more attention to us. Being a gay transgender pagan is so ass sometimes, man.