“Why do you want to work The Darkness in the first place?”
A lot of people shove their pain and traumas into the darkness… if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist right? So much emphasis is put onto the TRAPPINGS of happiness in our society that people fail to realize that the trappings are not what happiness is made of… we are taught to desensitize ourselves, ignore our feelings if they are “Bad”… so many things get shoved into dark corners, and stay there so long they begin to look like monsters. There is very REAL power in reclaiming all of yourself… and that process is gonna involve a few trips into your own darkness.
Again, it’s all about taking the time to really think these things through. I spend actual *days* in full process thinking/writing/working these things out. As for balance? I don’t think I have it. I have carefully crafted my life to be built *around* my affection for Night and Darkness. (You think the 12 hour night shifts were an accident?) Being present for my children’s lives is the only thing really holding me to ANY semblance of social normality. My balance really does not look like balance from the outside… But I really do function better this way. Happiness for me is a Desert Night with stars and silence.
Trance work. Sleep Magic. Staying up all night until Dawn ruins all the things. Blood-binding-trance-sigil-creation… Oh yea, and sometimes sex. I guess I should also mention that I spend a lot of time doing devotional writing for M’Lady Night, and that I often scribe them on scrolls of Persephone paper, recite them once, then bury them outside under Her gaze. Because *Poet*.
“How do bad habits affect the spirit? Does something like addiction affect the Will and its Power?”
After my first surgery in 2012, and the year of fuckery that followed, I found myself addicted to a certain pain killer that the Dr.s had been feeding to me like candy. I would say it had devastating impact on my ability to function in a spiritually healthy way at the time.
What other people have to do to get by with their pain is absolutely NONE of my business, and you won’t see me making judgments about it or them either. My own issues with pain are just recently getting resolved in ways that allow me to actually function anywhere near where I was before I had surgery. I still have pain. I still have bleeding bones inside my face, and splinters of bone working themselves out of my jaw, but at least now have a migraine medicine that actually *works*. When I was taking *un-named, very popular painkiller* I was NOT me… I was hostile and aggressive, and I was not in any amount of control of my… well, my more dangerous nature. I detoxed *myself* out of stubbornness and with the help of my BF and my Mom. I thought I was going to die that entire month, but you know what? If I had NOT had the meds during that year, I might have very well offed myself due to just too much pain too much of the time. Hell, I came close to it even with the meds. No, you absolutely do NOT have to feel like you should have to make excuses for managing your pain. Not now or ever.
Being addicted to pain killers was *for me* a really shitty time, that in no way should ever have to be taken that Pain Killers=BAD! No. NONONO! It effected me negatively because 1: I really, REALLY need to have my emotions and instincts IN FUCKING HAND at all times. That’s 100% a *me* problem though. and 2: While I was aggressive and stoned as balls, I did not have the tools needed to mourn my face, and deal with the shit tons of weird stuff that the surgeries poured into my life. And after a year, when all that finally hit me after I detoxed, I think it hit me twice as hard. It’s still hard. And yes, there are times (mostly when Im kicked back into the hospital) when they shoot me with *all the drugs* and usually Im in so much pain that I don’t care. As long as its kept short term, Im good. (Yay, stubborn streak!)
The SnapDragons Lair 