Tonight the doorbell will ring and small witches will be standing on the step, in pointed hats from the supermarket, holding out plastic cauldrons for sweets. Some of them will have green faces. One will have forgotten her broom in the car. They will be thrilled with themselves.
I love them every year. I love that, for one night, being a witch is the most delightful thing a girl can be.
I also think about how long it took some of us to want the word back.
For a long time, witch was not a costume. It was a word used against women who were inconvenient. The woman who knew which plants eased a fever. The midwife. The widow who would not remarry and would not leave her land. The neighbour who said what she saw. The one who lived alone and seemed content about it. The one who was too old, too sharp, too odd, too much. Different places and centuries had different reasons and different horrors, and I will not pretend to summarize them here. But the shape of it echoes: a woman trusted her own knowing, and was punished for it.
We do not burn anyone now. We have gentler words. Difficult. Intense. Too sensitive. A bit much. Bossy. Shrill. Not a team player. Words that teach a woman, slowly, to doubt the cool warning at the back of her neck and to smile when she wants to say no.
So when I call this publication Witch in Progress, I do not mean the hat. I mean the woman underneath all those words, coming back.
She is not glamorous, mostly. She is in her kitchen. She lights a candle at the same time each evening because it tells her body the day is done. She notices the half-second before she says fine. She puts the phone in another room and listens for her own voice. She sets a place at the table for her mother. She stands at the window over the sink and lets a tree steady her. She carries a small stone between the rooms of her life so that she does not disappear.
None of this is spectacular. All of it is a kind of power.
The power to know what you know. To trust it enough to listen. To say no without wrapping it in an apology. To take up the space you actually occupy. To tend your own life the way the old wise women tended gardens and births and the dying: practically, attentively, without needing anyone's permission.
If that is what witch means, then yes.
Yes, I trust my own knowing.
Yes, I stopped gift-wrapping my no.
Yes, I light the candle on purpose.
Yes, I am still becoming, and I am not waiting to be finished before I arrive.
Tonight, when the little witches come to your door, give them extra sweets. They are carrying something older than they know. And when the door closes and the house goes quiet, you might light a candle of your own, and try the word on, just for a moment. Not as a costume. As a homecoming.
Yes, witch.
Ritual Invitation
Tonight, after the doorbell has stopped ringing, light one candle. Write down one word you were taught to fear being called. Beside it, write what you would like it to mean instead. Read the new meaning aloud, quietly, to the candle. Then blow it out and go to bed as someone who said yes to herself.
Your Turn
Which word were you taught to fear being called?
What would it mean if you said yes to it, on your own terms?
Keep the Thread
The Naming Ritual is a free seven-day practice for taking back one of those words. It begins tonight if you want it to. Begin the Naming Ritual
The four Witch in Progress books, Return to Yourself, Steady, Signal and Coherent, are small companions for the whole return. See the books
If this work has helped you say yes to yourself, you can help it continue. Become a patron
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