What It's Like When Everyone Knows You're a Witch

A journey from hiding spellbooks to coming out of the “broom closet” to be the office witch

Photo by Halanna Halila on Unsplash

Whether I claimed it or not, I’ve been a bit of a witch for most of my life. 

I was fourteen years old the first time I bought a spellbook. A friend and I stumbled upon the spirituality section of our local Half Price Books, and my pocket money for the day covered the cost of a used copy of Everyday Moon Magic. I hid it under my bed in the hopes my parents wouldn’t find it. It thrilled me, holding this book full of magic potential in my hands. And it terrified me. 

Though I wasn’t raised with particularly strong religious leanings, my parents were vaguely Christian in that we celebrated Christmas and they generally agreed we all believed in God. My paternal grandparents were more hardcore in their religious leanings, so sometimes, we went to church with them. Perhaps sensing the woman I would become, this grandmother once gifted me an envelope with nothing but a printed Bible verse inside it for Christmas. 

So, the spellbooks stayed under the bed for safekeeping, coming out only in quiet, secret moments. Like the time my friends and I snuck out into the woods behind my house at night to cast our first spell. I confess I don’t remember what it was, or whether it worked. I just remember the thrill of leaving the house after dark, surrounded by the sounds of night. The experience settled into my bones, where it would remain for many years.

Throughout college, I identified as agnostic. I enjoyed learning about religions and the ways people built their lives around them, but as for me? None of it fit. 

The spellbooks from my youth were gathering dust back home when I bought my first Tarot deck. As I flipped through that tattered old copy of the Tarot of the Cat People, I felt that familiar feeling of power, of rightness, verging on overwhelm. It was the way I’d felt all those years ago, lighting candles in the woods with my friends. 

Tarot became my gateway back to what my child self had always known. Deep down, I was a witch. 

When I first began to explore what it meant to be a practicing witch, I kept firmly in what some witches call the “broom closet.” I took a few Tarot classes, and then a more in-depth class about magic and witchcraft. If it came up, I would say I was “spiritual but not religious,” a term I’d learned from survey options. 

The word “witch” carries a lot of weight, a cultural stigma that dates back centuries. Using it feels like conjuring up the Wicked Witch of the West, just asking to be tied to a stake and burned. For a long time, I didn’t use it, not even for myself. I was “interested in witchy things” but I was not a “witch.”

Yet as activities like following the phases of the moon and celebrating the seasons, pulling a Tarot card, and collecting crystals became parts of my daily life, this began to shift. These elements added something important to my life, enriching it and empowering me to step into my true self. Witchcraft, unlike so many belief systems I’d tried on for size, felt right. Softly, quietly, I began to call myself a witch, if only in my mind. 

It wasn’t until a trip to Salem in 2018 for a weekend witchy retreat that I really felt this identity settle into me. I’d recently finished grad school, and I could barely afford it, but something told me I had to drive from Pennsylvania to Salem, Massachusetts and spend the weekend in the company of witches. Perhaps I was trying to see whether I might be one of them. 

The weekend was nothing short of magic in every sense of the word. In our group, we explored the city’s magic shops and talked about astrology, made our own candles, and performed rituals for self-discovery and empowerment. I learned so much, but most of all, I learned what it felt like to fit in somewhere spiritual for the first time. 

Unlike when I’d visited a Catholic church with my father, not knowing how to follow the routines and patterns didn’t feel like a cause for panic or shame. It was an exciting invitation into a world I wanted to explore, to know. I arrived home with a bag full of magical goodies, including crystal bracelets, a personalized aura photo, and far too many candles, and a heart full of the feeling of finding your place. I arrived home ready to embrace the word “witch” even if I still called the weekend a “women’s retreat” to friends and family who asked about it. 

Over the last few years, I have slowly abandoned the broom closet, mostly by accident. As I got more comfortable thinking of myself as a witch, I hid it less. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I started wearing crystal earrings and openly making references to astrology and Tarot and the moon, even at work. If I was reading a book about witchcraft, marking it on Goodreads no longer gave me pause. I settled into learning and practicing my witchy ways, and those ways settled into how I showed up in the world. 

I began to realize my witchy ways were no longer a secret when colleagues began making comments about calling me in to smoke cleanse offices with bad vibes, or asked me whether Mercury might be in retrograde. I had become known as the office witch, without even trying. 

Of course, I assumed my family still didn’t know. I’d never proclaimed it to them, and while they knew I’d gone to Salem, I hadn’t mentioned it was a trip to hang out with fellow witches and cast spells in an old house there. Then one day while I was visiting home, my dad casually glanced out the car window at a strange wooden structure in someone’s yard. 

“Hey, you’re a witch,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

It took me a moment to respond, I was so shocked at his casual mention of something I always assumed would be a big issue for my family of origin. But there it was. My converted Catholic father who kept old Bibles tucked around the house apparently knew that I was a witch. And he seemed…fine with it? Not what I expected, but okay. 

I still don’t go around announcing to strangers or neighbors that I’m a witch. For one thing, my husband and I live in a relatively rural area, and I’m nervous the Trump flag crowd won’t so much enjoy knowing they’ve acquired a village witch.

But even without this wrinkle, the word “witch” is still a complicated word to own, like it’s too powerful and too misunderstood all at once. Something from fairy tales and horror stories, an accusation hurled at women with too much power and too much independence so that men might be able to burn them.

Yet here I sit in a room full of crystals and spellbooks, of Tarot cards and candles anointed with essential oils. I’ve studied moon phases and goddess archetypes, honored the changing of seasons and the Wheel of the Year. 

I am, day in and day out, a modern witch. A woman living her life, hoping that there’s maybe a bit of magic left in this world, if only you stop to let yourself feel it. 

Amanda Kay Oaks is a freelance writer and practicing witch who lives in a cabin in the woods with her husband and their dog. Her writing explores relationships, with ourselves and with one another, as well as how the media that surrounds us intersects with these relationships. To read some of her work and learn more, visit her website.