Knocking on a Door That Was Never Locked: A Confession About OCD, Whiteness, and the Sacred
Special thanks to Annie Windholz for her support to the OCD community and for reading through this article prior to me posting
Fellow Seekers-
Let me tell you of a kind of silence that happens right before I light a candle. My breath held- I scan. Is this mine to use? Did I read enough? Did I cite the right elder, credit the right lineage, did I do this right? Do I feel “right”? For most witches, that scan takes a second, maybe two, and then the hand moves to the match. For me, in some seasons, the scan never ends. It just kept circling, tighter and tighter, until the candle sat unlit on the altar for days while I read one more article, watched one more interview, hunted for one more thread of proof that I was enough and I did enough. Searching for the unobtainable feeling of “rightness.”
I want to tell you about a time OCD nearly took my witchcraft from me. Not by making me doubt the gods. By making me doubt myself so completely that the gods became unreachable.
The “Good” White Woman
I am a white woman doing spirit work on stolen land. I know this. I have always known this. Doing this work with integrity has never been optional to me — it is the floor, not the ceiling. I want to source my practices honestly. I want to know where a tradition comes from before I touch it. I want to give credit, pay practitioners, leave things alone that are not mine to take. This is simply what it means to be a decent person doing this work in this body on this Land. This is what it means to be a white person who deeply desires a spiritual practice but who’s has had their heritage cut off from them by great grandparents and grandparents trying to struggle to assimilate and find safety and success in a different land than their birth.
But here is what nobody tells you about moral conviction when OCD gets its hands on your spiritual work: it does not stay on your values. It becomes a hunt for “rightness”.
My hyperfixation did not feel like vigilance. It felt like survival. I would read a blog post about appropriation in witchcraft and instead of integrating it — instead of letting it inform my next choice and then setting it down — my brain would seize it and start running. Who else is doing this wrong? Let me find them. Let me catalog the violations. Let me build the evidence file proving I am one of the good ones, the careful ones, the ones who gets it. Justice seeking- some call it. And the compulsion wore the mask of justice. It called itself accountability. Really it was a brain that had found a socially sanctioned, even socially praised, channel for its cruelty toward me.
This is the trap for some white women in particular, I think. Our culture rewards us for performing the search for purity and perfection. There is status in catching the appropriator, in being the one who knows the difference between cultural exchange and theft, in publicly getting it right. OCD found that reward structure and built a house in it. The moral grandstanding wasn’t separate from the illness — the illness used the grandstanding as fuel, and the culture handed it matches.
The Voice
There was a voice. I don’t know how else to describe it except as a voice, even though I know it was just neurons firing in a loop that had nothing to do with my heart of hearts. It told me three things, on repeat, in rotation:
That I would be exiled if anyone found out the truth of how unworthy I was.
That every mistake I had ever made was proof, not of being human, but of being fundamentally and irredeemably bad.
That maybe none of it was real anyway — not the gods, not the magic, not the relationship I had built with Brigid and Bóann and the land beneath my feet over fifteen years — because why would anything real choose someone this flawed to carry it.
That last one was the cruelest. It didn’t just attack my ethics. It attacked my belonging in the sacred itself- my deepest value of connection to the greater web. OCD took the most intimate thing I have — my devotion — and rerouted it down a hallway with no doors, where the only thing waiting was the question of whether I deserved to be there at all.
I want to be honest: this is not a story where I figured out the trick and the voice went quiet forever. I still hear it. Some days it is loud enough to make me put the match down. But most days now it is quieter, and most days now I know its name, and knowing its name has changed everything about how much power it has over me. I also discuss a similar experience in my past article about pest control as an Animist here.
What I Know Now
OCD and conscience are not the same phenomenon, even when they appear and sound so similar. Conscience asks a question once, sits with the answer, and lets you act. OCD asks the question again. And again. It needs the doubt to survive, not the answer. I have learned to notice the difference by the texture of the thought — conscience feels like clarity arriving, even when the clarity is uncomfortable. OCD feels like a door that will not stay shut no matter how many times you close it.
I have learned that the work of being a good ancestor, a good guest on this Land, a good steward of practices that are native to my blood — that work is supposed to be ongoing and humble and a definitely a little uncomfortable. It is not supposed to be a cage. If a value can only be held through compulsion, through hours of searching for villains, through punishing myself into smallness, it has stopped being a value. It has become a symptom wearing a value’s clothes- a charade.
I still scan before I light the candle. I think I always will, and I think that’s right. But now the scan takes a breath, not a week. I ask the honest question — is this mine, have I done the work, am I acting from relationship — and then, more and more often, I let the answer be enough. I light the match. I let the gods in. I let the mean thoughts circle the house without opening the door for them.
The gods did not go anywhere during all those years I couldn’t reach them. I was just standing in a hallway my own brain built, knocking on a door that was never locked. I know that now. Most days I believe it to my core.
Stay wild and true,
Emily
A previous post on values colliding also comes to mind when thinking of this particular type of scrupulosity. This can be found here.
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