Demonic Chaote

Trigger warning for mentions of suicidal ideation

Time and time again I come to the computer to write only for nothing to come out. My mind goes blank. Words escape me. Why is this? I want to write the “right” thing. But what does that even mean? What would be the “wrong” thing anyway? This is supposed to be fun for me, something I love doing, so why can’t I just do it without worrying if it’s “right”, whatever that even means?

It’s not the first time I’ve taken inaction. “Taking inaction” sounds like a contradiction but it’s not. Not doing anything is still choosing to do something – it’s choosing to not do anything. I do this a lot (though a lot less than I used to). I often felt like my life was stuck. Working two dead end jobs, living paycheck to paycheck – I got used to not seeing a way out. But I put myself in this position, because I spent my early adult years taking inaction, though I didn’t see it that way at the time.

I try not to be too hard on my younger self. I had just left the religion that I was raised in. I was struggling with my gender and sexuality while also trying to push those feelings down. I had my first ever relationship with a partner who was mean to me and lied constantly. At nineteen I had what I refer to as “my mental breakdown”. I dropped out of college, quit my job without another one lined up, gained almost 100lbs, and blew through my entire savings account in less than three months. I recognize this now for what it was – suicidal behavior – but I was trying to ignore that at the time. I felt hopeless, and pointless. I didn’t know what the “right” thing to do was, so I did, in my mind, nothing at all. But it wasn’t nothing was it? I chose every day not to fill out job applications, to hit “checkout” on yet another online shopping cart, to eat fast food every day, to not think about the future.

I spent much of my time paralyzed in a haze of fear. I never went back to school because I had no idea what I wanted to do (or, more accurately, what I “should” do), so I chose to do nothing. As the years passed by, the fear grew, and I took more and more inaction. I woke up and chose to go to a job that didn’t value me and underpaid me, I chose to allow my partner to treat me poorly, and to give up on my hobbies. I felt lost and hopeless, but what could I do about it?

Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism were my entries into the occult world. I quickly joined online groups, forums, and threads. At the time there was a lot of talk about “spirit guides” and “your spiritual team”, and asking them what you should do in a given scenario. Many had tarot spreads for every occasion in which you might have to make a choice so that you could always pick the better option. The smarter option. The “right” option. For someone with high anxiety and who was already used to taking inaction, the idea that you could simply ask some higher power what the right thing to do was a comforting one. Taking a mundane approach to your problems before resorting to magical ones was, as a concept, unheard of in those spheres. And I mean that literally. I didn’t come across the phrase “mundane before magical” until I was at least a full year deep into my practice.

I’m a stubborn person. Even though I wasn’t getting the answers I was looking for, I kept asking, kept begging, and (though I’m extremely embarrassed to say it) felt very entitled to get what I wanted. It was years of a looping cycle: Connect with a new deity or spirit guide, ask them what exactly I should be doing, they give me tools to figure it out myself, I get anxious and frustrated they didn’t give me what I wanted, and the relationship would fizzle out as I stopped putting in effort.

When I first found my way into Demonolatry I had no idea the scope of this path I was beginning to walk. Demons are intense. They can be harsh. But (in my experience) they are also incredibly forceful in aiding their followers. Compared to the pagan deities I have worked with, the infernal divine have taken much more of a vested interest in my growth. It was during a meditation with King Belial that he shook me hard with a truth that has shaped my life more than the first five years of my magical practice combined.

You cannot wait for the “right” choice, the “right” thing to do, the “right” time.

You cannot wait for these – because they do not exist.

The “right” choice is not real. You cannot be guided towards or away from it. You must decide for yourself that it is the right choice. You cannot ask it to be revealed to you.

Similarly, there is no “wrong” choice. The only wrong choice is to delude yourself into thinking that your inaction is not a choice in and of itself.

I’m sure we’ve all seen enough people in the witchcraft and occult communities( newbies and elders alike) who have the same attitude towards spirits and magic I did. So even though it may seem obvious to some, I still feel it’s worth sharing.

That being said, it was an epiphany for me. I grew up American Evangelical and in my church they put a lot of emphasis on “God’s plan for you”. Throughout my entire childhood and teenage years it had been drilled into my head that I am not the one in charge of my life. That it’s up to a divine plan and I just have to pray a lot and figure out what that is. When I first became a pagan I unconsciously took this with me. I asked the gods for guidance constantly, but what I was looking for wasn’t really guidance. I wanted someone to tell me what to do so I didn’t have to make those decisions for myself. This attitude is one of the many Christian worldviews that has infiltrated witchcraft, occult, and new age spaces (though that’s a topic for another day). But why should I – why should we, as demonolators, as chaotes, as witches, as sorcerers – hold to this view? Isn’t the point of being an occultist, being one of the others, the weird ones, to take a hold of our power and our lives?

Five years after my mental breakdown I had the courage to come face-to-face with the monster that was my gender dysphoria and, for the first time in my life, decided my own “right” choice. I took a hold of my life, started hormones, and came out to my loved ones. Some didn’t take it well – but it was still the right choice. How did I make that choice at all? I had been paralyzed by fear and not knowing if it would be worth it in the end. There was a very real possibility of losing my marriage and my family. The “how” you make a choice to take action and what action to take ends up being different for every choice we have. Of course it is smart to weigh the pros and cons, to understand your options before pursuing something, but at the end of the day we simply must learn to trust ourselves.

We may have a fear that we could still choose “wrong”, even if we accept that there is no “right”. What if I get hurt? What if I lose? What if I fail? To that He said to me: so what? We will get hurt anyway. We will lose some things and fail at other things regardless. To take inaction is to resign yourself to choosing wrong every time. Taking action, any action, to manifest your desires is always the right choice. Failure is not really failure, it is an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and to grow. Losing something is not really losing it for the same reason. And getting hurt is inevitable; love and joy cannot exist without pain and grief.

I hope someone else out there found this to be helpful in some way. Feel free to leave a comment if you have other thoughts, want to continue the conversation, or disagree with me completely. Or don’t, it’s up to you. Either way, I hope you have a good one!

-J