Thank-you, Mister Prachett.
Thank you very much for writing, I Shall Wear Midnight, you will never know how much you have helped me.
When I was very young and very stupid, I openly declared myself pagan... sort of. (I always rejected Christianity because it always just felt wrong... maybe it was because there was too much guilt in it, maybe it was the lack of balance of male and female or maybe its because my father used it to abuse me for so long, but it was wrong, to me, inside. But I still needed a God... a Goddess as well). But at the very least, I called myself a witch. Even if I am a Nanny Ogg sort of witch and... was very very very stupid when I started this all out.
It got me into trouble. It always does, I suppose. So one day whilst I was at boarding school, a girl came up to me and asked me to curse another girl, who was in fact a bully. My only justification was she really was a bad bully. Like a "oh are these your shorts that have blood on them from your period even after they have been washed? Let me steal them out of your washing and run through the dorms showing everyone" type of bully. Said incident happened to a friend of mine, a close friend. So when this other girl who we'll call E came asked to... do something about it.
So I did what made sense, I asked for a photo of the girl, lit a candle and asked whatever God that happened to be listening that if this bully had done anything really bad, that justice be done for it.
Two weeks later, the girl left the school crying. No one knew what happened, and in a effort to place blame over it, E babbled everything to her friends about me and about everyone else. She confronted me, crying, saying that it was all my fault, what had I done, she'd just wanted a little bit of revenge, like get sick or something, she never wanted her to leave. I responded that she couldn't shift all her guilt and suffering onto me. I understood it, of course I understood, but I had enough of my own guilt without taking on hers and she had to face what she'd asked me to do.
But after that, I thought it would die. But little did I know, or rather I pretty much forgot how much people in small communities love to gossip.
So a year or so later a younger girl (in fact the sister of another girl who I didn't exactly see.. eye to eye with, admittedly I didn't see eye to eye with a lot of my grade. yeaaaaaaaah) was pulling my hair in the line. I have very long hair, and she was very annoying. I must of snapped at her then turned around and muttered something angrily to myself.
A week or so later, the girl got a serious disease of some kind and was in hospital for the next three weeks and a month later, I sprained my ankle.
Apparently via something I had said earlier that via the things I had read, and I believed, there is the three times rule, that is everything you do will come back on you. Good by Good, Bad by Bad. She had gotten sick and I had injured myself for the better part of the month. And I was fair game to everyone.
Ever been Witch Hunted? This is about as close as I ever want to get. There was this odd silence everywhere I went, people whispered, my friends told me what they whispered. After awhile they stopped whispering and started saying to to my face, with their undeniable proof that I was in fact, evil. Half of them were doing it for amusement, I am sure, because people are bored and when else were they going to get to go on a old fashioned witch hunt? The more I tried to fight it, the worst it got, until one fateful moment in the dining room after supper and a boarding mistress walked in on it. It ended after that. Or at least, the worst of it died off, I was still a scary story told to grade 8s. It could of been worse, and I enjoyed tormenting grade 8s in the sense they were so much less likely to bother me while I was studying.
And so I learnt the lesson that stories like that don't actually die and there is a Cunning Man, in a manner of speaking, only he lives in the back of everyones minds.
Ever since it happened, I have felt so much... shame. But I never knew what of. But reading this book helped me... come to terms with it. With that part of people that is so ugly that they will turn on you even if the fear is half imagined. They do it because they are people and I suppose as long as I do this role, of the witch, of the person who does... as Granny Weatherwax says, not what is nice but what is right, I will always get treated this way, because the Cunning Man is always there, always malicious, always cruel and unrelenting and doesn't want an explanation, just wants destruction.
It gave me hope, that I can defeat that.
Thank-you. Thank-you for that, Mister Prachett, for finally freeing me of the shame of not being able to be strong enough at the time, and giving me the knowledge that I won't let myself be witch hunted like that again.
When I was very young and very stupid, I openly declared myself pagan... sort of. (I always rejected Christianity because it always just felt wrong... maybe it was because there was too much guilt in it, maybe it was the lack of balance of male and female or maybe its because my father used it to abuse me for so long, but it was wrong, to me, inside. But I still needed a God... a Goddess as well). But at the very least, I called myself a witch. Even if I am a Nanny Ogg sort of witch and... was very very very stupid when I started this all out.
It got me into trouble. It always does, I suppose. So one day whilst I was at boarding school, a girl came up to me and asked me to curse another girl, who was in fact a bully. My only justification was she really was a bad bully. Like a "oh are these your shorts that have blood on them from your period even after they have been washed? Let me steal them out of your washing and run through the dorms showing everyone" type of bully. Said incident happened to a friend of mine, a close friend. So when this other girl who we'll call E came asked to... do something about it.
So I did what made sense, I asked for a photo of the girl, lit a candle and asked whatever God that happened to be listening that if this bully had done anything really bad, that justice be done for it.
Two weeks later, the girl left the school crying. No one knew what happened, and in a effort to place blame over it, E babbled everything to her friends about me and about everyone else. She confronted me, crying, saying that it was all my fault, what had I done, she'd just wanted a little bit of revenge, like get sick or something, she never wanted her to leave. I responded that she couldn't shift all her guilt and suffering onto me. I understood it, of course I understood, but I had enough of my own guilt without taking on hers and she had to face what she'd asked me to do.
But after that, I thought it would die. But little did I know, or rather I pretty much forgot how much people in small communities love to gossip.
So a year or so later a younger girl (in fact the sister of another girl who I didn't exactly see.. eye to eye with, admittedly I didn't see eye to eye with a lot of my grade. yeaaaaaaaah) was pulling my hair in the line. I have very long hair, and she was very annoying. I must of snapped at her then turned around and muttered something angrily to myself.
A week or so later, the girl got a serious disease of some kind and was in hospital for the next three weeks and a month later, I sprained my ankle.
Apparently via something I had said earlier that via the things I had read, and I believed, there is the three times rule, that is everything you do will come back on you. Good by Good, Bad by Bad. She had gotten sick and I had injured myself for the better part of the month. And I was fair game to everyone.
Ever been Witch Hunted? This is about as close as I ever want to get. There was this odd silence everywhere I went, people whispered, my friends told me what they whispered. After awhile they stopped whispering and started saying to to my face, with their undeniable proof that I was in fact, evil. Half of them were doing it for amusement, I am sure, because people are bored and when else were they going to get to go on a old fashioned witch hunt? The more I tried to fight it, the worst it got, until one fateful moment in the dining room after supper and a boarding mistress walked in on it. It ended after that. Or at least, the worst of it died off, I was still a scary story told to grade 8s. It could of been worse, and I enjoyed tormenting grade 8s in the sense they were so much less likely to bother me while I was studying.
And so I learnt the lesson that stories like that don't actually die and there is a Cunning Man, in a manner of speaking, only he lives in the back of everyones minds.
Ever since it happened, I have felt so much... shame. But I never knew what of. But reading this book helped me... come to terms with it. With that part of people that is so ugly that they will turn on you even if the fear is half imagined. They do it because they are people and I suppose as long as I do this role, of the witch, of the person who does... as Granny Weatherwax says, not what is nice but what is right, I will always get treated this way, because the Cunning Man is always there, always malicious, always cruel and unrelenting and doesn't want an explanation, just wants destruction.
It gave me hope, that I can defeat that.
Thank-you. Thank-you for that, Mister Prachett, for finally freeing me of the shame of not being able to be strong enough at the time, and giving me the knowledge that I won't let myself be witch hunted like that again.