Earlier this year my YouTube channel took off. I amassed 43,000 subscribers. It seemed like all of my dreams were coming true after two years of hard work and bitter struggles.

To the audience watching, it looked like an aspirational practice which afforded me powerful gifts like divination. I was manifesting my best life. I was woke. I was tapped into the truth and the correct path of contributing to society…

Except I wasn’t.

Behind the façade of social media was someone who’s life had crumbled around her and who was desperately scrambling to understand the continuously elusive cloud of truth. As soon as I uncovered one secret, I had a dozen more questions.

Perpetual questions with no solid answers.

My mental health began to decline as my marriage collapsed, I lost my home, gave up my career to chase the clouds, lost all of my belongings except my clothes, my car and my pets, then started to succumb to depression and anxiety.

For some reason, this practice which had supposedly been the key to health, wealth and happiness was destroying everything I had achieved in my normal life. I was isolated, broke, living in a house which had no interior wall linings, had begun yet another abusing relationship, and surviving on welfare while I struggled to keep up with my university studies which were the only option out of poverty.

Even in the midst of evidence that doing tarot readings for clients was detrimental to me, for some reason I persisted in the misguided belief that I was serving God…

Yes, you heard that correctly.

How does someone become so deceived that they genuinely think they’re serving God through witchcraft and divination?

A large portion is very much cultural these days. It’s frightening to say this now, but I had so much positive reinforcement from all over the place that I seriously don’t think that most people know what the bible actually says, including priests and pastors. At one point, I actually got an email from a female pastor saying that she believed I was doing something good.

In my previous career as a librarian I would be surrounded by groups using the meeting rooms for yoga, meditation and energy healing. The group of mediums I joined held their weekly psychic sessions in a church hall. As a kid I went to church with reiki teachers.

I had been raised “Christian” in a mixture of episcopal and charismatic churches (my mother moved frequently) and given a very superficial version of the bible aimed at ignoring the real dangers of straying from God and instead permitting all sorts of un-biblical ideas to be given equal weight through cherry-picking verses out of context and misapplying them. My mother is still fairly well deceived by the progressive church’s prosperity and tolerance gospel, but she watches my videos now and is getting a bible studying in the process.

Even the other witchcraft channels I watched talked about angels, Christ-consciousness and God as though this was completely complimentary.

I had no idea. None of the people I knew had any idea. We were all completely deceived.

The lie is so slick, well-packaged, and sincerely promoted by devotees like myself, that a lot of people don’t even have a fighting chance. The cultural shift is so anti-Christian that it is swiftly becoming illegal to go to Church or quote the bible and the rhetoric says that to be Christian is to hate people and to be bigoted.

I doubt anyone wants to be either of those things.

However, that’s a manipulation which I had seen before when dealing with narcissists and I started to push back against the culture, even while still being a witch. Narcissism will tell a victim that to deny the abuser their “right” to exploit the victim, well… that makes the victim a big fat meanie who is infringing on the narcissists’ pound of flesh. How dare they!

The process of waking up from the deception started with an increasing awareness of the narcissistic sickness within the culture. From there my research led me to Marxism and Nihilism underpinning a great deal of education and secular philosophy.

Even without becoming Christian the witches were turning on me.

My politics was not “correct” according to the Facebook tribunals which would pop up behind my back, even though I had never advocated for removing people’s basic human rights or treating anyone without kindness. I was deemed “too conservative” despite having lobbied for unions and voting Green my whole life.

Merely stressing the importance of critical thinking and research was sacrilege in witchcraft.

I was officially politically homeless.

I was also becoming more isolated and stressed, having moved interstate and then forced into lockdown. Accessing mental health services was a slow process which took months and in the meantime I needed to figure out how to help myself.

I quit giving tarot readings.

They sucked a lot of energy out of me, often making me dizzy to the point I would be afraid of dissociating, which is a scary thought. My hands shook badly and I would suffer occasional panic attacks when put under merely mild levels of stress.

I needed a community and I needed to meet new people and get out of the house from time-to-time. In the small communities of Tasmania, most people can be found at church, so I decided it might be a good idea to tap into a community that way.

Boy, was I in for a bad time.

Apparently, when you dabble in mediumship, divination, manifestation, shamanic journeying and witchcraft… you make contact with the demonic realm.

They do not take kindly to people making contact with Jesus.

The first sign I was under spiritual attack was when I tried to go to church the first time. After such a long night of disturbed sleep, it was not possible to drag myself out of the house on Sunday morning.

Then I tried to buy a bible. For an entire day I drove to three different towns trying to get to a book store which might stock one. All of the potential shops were closed precisely within half an hour of me arriving at that destination. The next week when I made the trip again I got close to the destination and started feeling light-headed. I was only just able to park my car and then sat on a bench for a while to steady my breathing and gather my wits before I could walk to the shop and make my purchase.

But I did it; I finally had a bible.

For the first time I could remember I was properly reading the word of God and it actually made sense to me. So many things clicked into place. Stories which had seemed absurd, or superfluous, or purely mythical, or downright disturbing… they suddenly took on all-new meaning which I had not previously understood because I hadn’t learned about how sophisticated and thoroughly evil the devil really is.

That weekend I scoured the area to find a church service which wasn’t on a Sunday morning. Luckily, there was one that very Saturday evening and I loitered outside for the doors to open so I wouldn’t become waylaid again. My strategy worked out and I attended church for the first time in 15 years.

After that was when the nightmares started.

When demons take their gloves off, you really know about it. I was visited in my dreams by entities whose eyes would turn black as they lunged to sink their teeth in. however, far from being intimidated or deterred, it solidified my resolve to get them out of my life forever through prayer and obedience. If Jesus had already declared victory over the powers of darkness, there was no way I was going to be bullied by a snivelling loser.

That being said, the devil knows how to work through other people, not just messing with your dreams, and he turned friends against me when I came out on the YouTube channel. The attacks may have been deeply personal and highly derogatory, but once more it fortified my resolve to burn that bridge forever and I ended up deleting both the channel and the website.

So here I am, starting over.

In true smiting form, Jesus of Nazareth has sent the Holy Spirit to purge the unclean spirits from my life and break the chains of my bondage. Anxiety, confusion, insecurities, depression, fear… I’m finally free.

I can start living my life in truth and light.

Amen.