click the categories below to drop down more info!

         When I was a kid and they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the term “streamer” wasn’t even a concept.  We didn’t even have the internet yet, let alone livestreaming. (I wanted to be a zoologist, btw) It wasn’t until my early middle school years (2002-ish) that the internet came into mainstream existence, and I started building my first (hideous) websites on geocities.com, which consisted of a bunch of Sailor Moon and Pokemon pixel gifs.  Later when I was in high school, this would evolve into purchasing my own domains + web hosting to show off my InuYasha fansite, J-Rock mp3 rotation sites, personal blog, anime podcasts and other silly obsessions.  Blogging, podcasting, and what would later be coined as “content creation” was a very early natural interest for me.

          In 2012 I was fascinated by the phenomenon of “youtubers” and the ability to create a career by recording videos of yourself doing your makeup, or talking about a random subject you were interested in. Certainly many of us watched in awe throughout the mid 2010’s, wishing and wanting to dive into our own YouTube channels.  (Just me?  Wait… you too? I thought so.)  So I gave it a try around 2013 focusing on my freshly woke hot takes and journeys with lucid dreaming and astral projection, esoteric book hauls and rambly vlogs and makeup tutorials.  I’m glad I only made a few videos before I shut the channel down, because *cringe* BUT I did learn a lot, and it left a taste of “I want more” in my mouth for several more years. 

my original setup back in fall of 2015

        Flash forward to 2015 when I have a shiny new DSLR camera (my trusty Canon rebel t3i) and I boot up a new YouTube channel focused around my witchy lifestyle. Some of my first videos were focused on makeup and nail art tutorials (with an edgy mystical twist), and “storytime” style videos where I talked about my spiritual journey as I tried to find my place in the online Pagan community.  This venture went pretty well for me overall, I even received a little over 10,000 views on some of these videos (which was a big deal to me!)

          I coupled my YouTube venture with a Twitch channel, a platform I was very inexperienced in… I was just excited at the idea of sharing my long-time interest in video games.  At this point, I had been watching an indie game be developed for several years (through screencaps reblogged on Tumblr)… this was a game that looked like the updated Harvest Moon game I’d been waiting for since I was 12 years old.  Enter: Stardew Valley.  My very first day of streaming on Twitch was the actual release date of this game: February 26, 2016.

instagram post marking my very first stream on twitch            I fell in love with the format of Twitch during the first few weeks of streaming.  The instant gratification of creating content and receiving interaction right there in that moment was something YouTube hadn’t really fulfilled. I dove in hard for several years with Twitch, and kind of let my YouTube channel fall to the wayside, save for a few viral videos focused around the up-and-coming niche of “Twitch Tutorials.”   I also let my website fall away and only had eyes for the shiny, “in the moment” payoff of Twitch Streaming.

 

          I’ve gone through my share of burnouts (some more dramatic than others) and have finally found here in 2022  that I’m coming back to “myself” and what I feel should have been my focus from the get-go: a central hub of content on my own website, and supplementary content branching out on all of these fancy social media platforms to “get the word out” about me and what I do. 

my late 2021 setup

          I’m looking forward to sharing the rest of that journey here with you through the format of blogs, podcasts, videos and more.  The world of content creation is a strange, nebulous environment… but it is also the perfect soil for whatever strange species of plant I am to grow in.  Thank you for joining me on this path!

          I didn’t always consider myself a witch.  I was raised in the Southern “Bible Belt” of the United States, and in spite of a few childhood summers spent at Vacation Bible School, I still found myself entering an Atheist phase during my teenage years which eventually evolved into Agnosticism.  I was happy to spend my “college age days” partying and truly living in a state of YOLO, ignoring everything most people would deem important so long as I had some vodka, a blunt, and a group of friends to share them with.  Eventually these innocuous parties started to involve the occasional psychedelic, and ever the curious little adventurer, I experimented to my heart’s reluctant content.  Several of these instances, I can now look back on with certainty and say, blasted my lil third eye wide open and forced me to acknowledge the Spiritual nature of mere existence.  Before acid, I didn’t think there was a God. After acid, I realized I *WAS* God, and so was everything and everyone else.  I’m not sure that I ever would have embarked on a spiritual journey without a little psychedelic influence.

          One night I was getting home late from work, and there was a party already happening at my little hipster house. As I walked up the sidewalk leading to my house, I noticed a grungy hippie boy I’d never met sitting cross legged on my front porch directly in front of the door.  There was a couple other stragglers outside, PBR cans in their hands, engaged in idle chit chat.  Our dim porch light was casting a perfect orange, cone-shaped halo around the hippie: ripped baggy jeans and bare toes wiggling around as he flipped some cards over in front of him.  I stepped up to stand in front of him, expecting to see Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards (since most of us in that house were of the Nerdy variety), but I didn’t recognize the artwork at all.  The boy used his free hand to tuck a lock of his long, messy hair behind his ear, pulled the half smoked cigarette from his lips and looked up at me.  “Do you want me to read your Tarot?” he asked, gesturing to the rest of the card deck in his other hand.  I had no idea what this meant, but I plopped myself down in front of him, took a drag of his proffered cigarette and nodded eagerly.

          The contents of my first Tarot reading back in 2012 are lost to me with time, and I doubt I ever even learned his name. But I left that experience knowing one thing: Tarot was wild af and how could he possibly have known some of those things about me.  I wanted, nay NEEDED, to know more about Tarot.  I couldn’t stop talking about it for days and eventually my roommate’s boyfriend, who also had a few Tarot decks of his own, gifted me my very first Tarot deck, and my journey officially began.  I read Tarot constantly for friends, family members and strangers at parties alike, constantly referencing book after book and desperately needing to understand every tiny symbol of each card.  I was surprised at how easy it was to connect most people with the images on these cards, and a true romance blossomed between me and the story of Tarot.  I eventually let go of the left-brain analytic need to define, and relied more on intuition to guide me in the readings, but I’ve recently circled back around to try to marry both sides of my brain together on my Tarot journey.

          Now how did I settle on the label of “eclectic witch” after all this?  I’ll tell you one thing: as a Sagittarius Moon, settling on any label or box has been a very difficult task, indeed. I don’t like feeling trapped by any expectations, but I think that’s why I felt so drawn to the idea of including “eclectic” in my title.  The very nature of the word lends itself to a fluid state, which allows me the freedom to flow and evolve over time.  I find myself drawing inspiration and practices from all over, and couldn’t satisfactorily classify myself as any one term.  Even when I was considering the word Pagan for myself, it felt loaded and as if there were a certain set of rules and expectations in order to be accepted as that.

          To more simply describe what it looks like daily for me as a practicing Eclectic Witch: I follow the Lunar rhythms, and set my routines and schedules based around the phase of the Moon.  I keep up with the astrological goings-on in the sky above, to better navigate the patterns of my life.  I regularly consult the Tarot, not only to check in on my feelings about situations or circumstances, but also to help guide my friends and followers throughout their journeys.  To further elaborate: Tarot is a tool I use to let my intuition lead me.  I’m surrounded by DIY herbal concoctions, candles with mindfully crafted spellwork from small witchy businesses, a varied assortment of crystals: all which I swap out as needed for different intentions and happenings.  I worship nature with a childlike wonder: excited to see what critters are hiding under the rocks in my front yard garden; pulling my shoes off to walk barefoot in the creek, even if the winter chill hasn’t left the spring time water; matching my outfits to the soft gradient fade of colors throughout the four seasons I’m so lucky to have up here in the Appalachian mountains.   And I practice a mindful, holistic approach to self care as often as possible: my body tells me what it needs, it’s just up to me to listen and provide for it.

          Witchcraft for me isn’t flashy. It’s something I did effortlessly as a child, and it seems to me that my life’s purpose is to strip away annoying layers that were added on throughout the years to get back to that beautiful, shameless, effortless inner child.

At my core I’m driven by curiosity, and a need to understand how things work.  I could definitely explain this with Astrology (Gemini stellium in the third house), but we’ll deep dive that another day.   Growing up, I was an overachieving student until I wasn’t (and decided to just let myself flunk out, because Teenage Rebellion™ amirite?).   The overachieving bit follows me through to adulthood, as does the “all in or all out” attitude that I developed early on as well.  I think I rely purely on my ADHD-driven moments of hyper focus to fuel my research episodes.  My area of focus often feels utterly out of my control.    Some nights it might be a strange occult symbol I spotted in the background of a hit Netflix series; other nights it’s just deep dirving variations of cat breeds.

The trick for me has been “forcing” hyperfocus, even when I’m not necessarily ignited at the thought of deep-diving a specific topic.  This takes a certain kind of discipline that for some comes naturally, but I fear for me it is only developed with mindful practice and constant vigilance.   This is where my newest series Midnight Study Sesh has come in.  Creating a co-working space where I share the process of researching and deep-diving topics, creating mindmaps during my livestreams, and fostering an interactive environment to form community around the research I’m doing has served to motivate and elevate the research itself.

Funnily enough, I really didn’t realize I was as deeply analytic as I am until I was told so.  Some of the YouTube videos I’ve made that lucked their way into the algorithm have resulted in a vast amount of eyes upon my work.  With the influx if individuals who don’t know me personally leaving their thoughts on their short and one-and-only interaction with me as a person, I received quite a few comments about my “analysis” on things; how I intertwine intuition with philosophy and back it with analytic research.  So I decided to double down on this trait a bit, and focus more of my content around analysis. 

          Tracing Success is a new video series I’m hoping to expand upon on my YouTube channel in the future, where I take a look at popular creators who have reached a “celebrity” status from their work creating content on social media, and reverse engineer their path, analyzing how they were able to grow their brand.  I ‘accidentally’ did my first analysis on other creators back in 2016 with “How to Talk to Yourself when no one is there” where I took a look at 6 streamers/youtubers who were very successful at the time (some still are to this day), and analyze their technique at entertaining and filling space while they play video games.  That video idea came organically to me when I saw some of my friends struggling to fill empty space while streaming, and it seemed like the best way to help them learn was to showcase other creators as examples of “how to do it.”

          It’s hard growing up with body image issues and fluctuating eating disorders. (Let that serve as your content warning for this section lmao). Every January when I sit down to write up my New Year’s Resolutions, there has always been one consistent goal on my lists: get in shape.  I don’t think a day goes by that my health and wellness isn’t on my mind, whether in the form of how winded I feel walking to check the mail, or how much sodium was in my dinner that night.  

         As a teenager, I was overweight and incredibly self conscious of it.  It wasn’t until my early 20’s that I lost nearly 100 pounds in the course of a year, which dropped my BMI 10 points, just barely knocking me into the “healthy” category.  This happened gradually, and I didn’t even notice it was happening until I caught a glimpse of myself in a reflective building one afternoon and had to quadruple take because I didn’t even recognize myself.  What lead up to the weight loss was just a lifestyle change that happened naturally after I moved to a new city: I got outside more with my dog and my diet changed drastically to match with my roommates; I took up yoga daily, and started dancing recreationally.  My mid 20’s was the healthiest my body has ever been.

        But of course that’s not where the story ends because following a traumatic year of my life, I picked up a lot of bad habits I thought I had left behind, and the weight slowly came back on, plus some.  But it wasn’t just weight gain this time: a lot of concerning health issues started edging their way into my life too (heart palpitations and breathing issues just to skim the surface)  In some ways, I feel like my body is screaming for me to take care of it in a different way, and I think that’s a lot of what this “wellness journey” is all about… me trying to listen and take care of my body the way it needs.

         There are a few things I’ll be primarily focused on for my wellness journey: more activity, healthier diet and a better work/life balance.  I’m going to be focused on yoga, hiking and dancing; and lowering carbs, sugars and dairy in my diet.  A huge part of my wellness journey will have to involve good planning as well, which is where my lifelong love for planners comes in!  My trusty Good Notes planner combined with my FitBit’s fitness tracking will surely keep me organized, and I’ll be updating my blog here regularly!