Communication is a strange beast, dear readers. What is the point of language, if not to express something to someone else in a way that leaves less room for error and misunderstanding? It’s odd, though, just how much room there is for talk to go awry. And it’s even worse when it comes to online spaces. 

((Note: this post is late by about 6 hours, due to a pharmacy delay causing me to go 4 (or 5?) days without my sleeping medication and birth control—which has lead to both a lack of sleep and one very, very long hot flash. Can a hot flash last nearly a week? Apparently so!))

What even is ‘Cringe?’ 

This is a word I hear a lot, especially as a pop culture magician. But, today is not the day for me to reiterate my old argument for ‘non traditional’ magical methods or paradigms. Instead, I want to look at this from the viewpoint of communication itself. 

Because as far as I understand, something is ‘cringe’ when it is ‘too much’ or socially unacceptable to display, but ultimately not harmful. Thus, for the purposes of this blog post: Cringe is Drama; it isn’t Dangerous. I am also compelled to make examples. “Cringe” is when a grown adult wears a My Little Pony T-shirt and may behave in an annoying manner, but ultimately harms no one aside from causing an Inconvenience to Others. It is not “Cringe” to have a tantrum in public over losing a Magic the Gathering game, or to refrain from engaging in basic hygiene practices when going to said Magic the Gathering game. At that point, you are a walking biohazard and you can and may actually cause harm to someone beyond an inconvenience or annoyance.

In that vein, it is “Cringe” for me, a 34 year old adult to have a locket with two of my favorite anime characters inside. But, I am fully able to participate in conversations with others in a civilized manner that does not relate back to those characters. However, it would NOT be “Cringe” for someone to send me threats on Tumblr because I headcanoned those characters in a different way than someone else—that would be an indication of an unstable mental and emotional state. 

And it was absolutely weird that I did get hate messages at one point in my life, merely because I shipped myself with the same FICTIONAL CHARACTER as someone else on the internet. Please, if you are reading this, I hope you are in a better place. If not, please seek professional help.

Are We Not All Being Strange?

Now what I find so odd about magicians is that we are already, by definition, on the edges of society. This is by virtue of the fact that we believe in magic at ALL. So it makes me wonder: why do magicians care so much about being perceived as serious people? I think this is true of the vast majority of magicians at that. 

I was reminded of the writing by Carl Jung that I reviewed earlier last year—about how he essentially imitated the formatting and process of writing an academic paper about the scarab imagery that haunted his life. Listen. Listen. The people who are going to take that paper seriously at all are not going to be convinced by the winding, academic language. 

Fundamentally, I think that’s the same as magicians who are very focused on the idea of presenting themselves as ‘real’ witches or ‘real’ magicians with very serious sounding names and tracking their magical lineages back to very important sounding people—even if those people did get kicked down a flight of stairs during a LARP fight with some poets. And I do recall a time when I felt that way, where I wanted people to understand that I was a very, very Serious Person about magic and I Wasn’t Like the Other Girls who opened up Silver Ravenwolf books at a Borders. EXCEPT THAT I WAS. They were still in the back of my closet, locked up in a particle board truck that I had begged my parents for because it LOOKED like I could go to a magic school with it. And I’m not just saying that because I took an occult oath of honesty! I think I got sick of everyone putting on airs when we’re all fucking goofballs. 

Many of us also fall in the neurodivergent category. You know, the type of person who might have been confused for ‘replaced by a fairy’ as a child. We are usually the type of people who had difficulty making long, lasting friendships, or were bullied a lot as kids. So why do some of us get on with this very desperate LARP to pretend to be the Cool, Popular Kid in occult circles. Because let’s be honest: what else is it when someone tries to gatekeep people and convince the world that they are the Most Legitimate and Most Special in comparison to the other magicians? It’s ‘Well, I have this Lisa Frank Binder and you donnnnn’t’ but with different words. The intent is the same. 

What did I really care about people knowing that? Well…I think it was that I wanted (and most of us want, fundamentally) to be liked. Or at least not shunned. 

The Desire to be Understood

Dear readers, bear with me for a moment. In my day job, there is one way to tell right away if a teenager or a pre-teen cares a lot about the way they are perceived—and that is if they repeat, very frequently, how little they care. And what makes that so odd to me is that people will do the same thing: a reversal of their intentions or acting in a way that you would normally think would be at odds with their desires. 

Case in point: consider the person who pretends to be so much more enlightened than others, and who has all this powerful magic. They will say, well, someone who does not have REAL power or who wasn’t from a REAL lineage could never understand. And that is in contrast to someone who will tell a new practitioner “you need to experience the Mysteries to understand them,” in the frank, but slightly tired way many of us do. And that’s because the Mysteries are fucking baffling and I don’t really trust myself to express them in a way that makes any sense, even to me. 

If I bring this back to my experience, I feel like I was misunderstood a lot as a child. And I think this still happens to me a lot as an adult. It sometimes feels like people approach me without the intention of good faith understanding. And I think this behavior happens to a lot of people, and people also engage in it. 

I will admit, I rarely to into a conversation with someone I have a long and negative history with expecting that either of us is participating in good faith. And sometimes I think people do make the choice to misunderstand others. I think some people are in a very bad habit of engaging with others online with ulterior motives, and who try to bait people into arguments in bad faith for…? I don’t know. Perhaps boredom? Perhaps a feeling that they want to feel they have some control? Even negative attention is attention. 

Does This Even Tie Togethers?

All of this is to say, magicians are a very odd bunch. And I think some of us do need to take a good, hard look at ourselves. I am cringe, and I am free. But that also means I have the responsibility to look at the cringe of others with good faith—and let them live their lives until they do something that is actively a problem. 

We are all very strange. And I think it is impossible for us to actively fear anyone believing anything but the narrative we want to be presented about us. I know for a fact that some people search through my Tumblr looking for ass-shit stuff I said 3 years ago now. And they’ll find something. But, I’m not going to hide it or twist myself up into knots to try to ‘make myself understood’ anymore. People sometimes make the choice to misunderstand intent. And some people are just assholes. 

I think we all are stuck in some unfortunate patterns in the way we seek reputation online. I do think it is a very legitimate (and perhaps the wisest) response to just choose not to engage in conversations and arguments that are likely begun in bad faith. I know my blood pressure can’t take it, these days. 

What are your thoughts, dear readers?