The Dream

A clan of mystics
and various spiritual misfits.
They said I should choose
my witch name.
I told her,
“I’m not a witch,
and I push back on that term.
It’s nothing but misogyny.”

Thinking of my name—
what name
would best express
me becoming
who I am?

Their names
sounded like Pokémon characters,
their attire,
like fantasy avatars.

But I’m just me,
I thought.

—

On the phone,
someone offered to pay
for me to stay at home and study.
I never responded,
my partner was standing next to me.
When I started to speak,
the person hung up.

—

My mother sat down.
Frail.
I looked down upon her.
She should have been tall
and strong—
but her mother-line
had starved her
of who she was meant
to become.

Then it dawned on me:
maybe the woman
she thought was her mother
wasn’t her mother
after all?

The Meaning

the group
I want to belong but to something real not projected.
I’m me, that’s enough.

phone call
Scared of fully embracing an opportunity.
I’m afraid to offend or alienate my partner.
A lost chance if not seized when offered.

mother
The maternal line stripped of power and truth.
What if the whole foundation was fiction?

What Lingers…

What if belonging didn’t need a costume or the right label to count?

What if naming only heals when it honours what was erased, not what was performed?

---

Marginalia

This dream can be taken literally, but for me it feels inseparable from my ancestry and my mother’s ability to pass as white — how that meant acceptance in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I’m not about to negate for one hot minute how that speaks, not just to colour but to gender also. I wish it wasn’t so.

In my dream, I ask: Aren’t I enough?
Can’t I just be enough as I am—
without the aesthetic trappings,
without the cost of approval?

I talk more about my maternal ancestry in It Began with a Name.