The Enchanter's Theorem

Reading catvalente this morning and I realized I was doing it again.

Keeping my Silence.

And I hear my friend, Kevin, the Bear shaman *again*, telling me: "Every time you have kept your silence, it has been an affront to the Goddess." So while the Fourth Cornerstone of Magick is to be Silent, when the Bear Shaman tells you that your Silence is pissing the Goddess off?

You speak up. It's rather a theme in my life.

Do I have to tell you that I was bullied? No. But this is where my story diverges a bit from others.

In 5th Grade, a gang of girls (yes, a gang, I lived in the East Bay of Northern California), made it their job to do everything in their power to beat the shit out of me. I came home one day from one of their attempts, having escaped as I usually did, and told my mother. You know. The emotionally abusive, bipolar, insane woman. Do you know what she said to me?

"If you come home and I find out that those girls don't look worse than you do, I will beat the crap out of you."

Yes.

She threatened to beat me. So that I would be more injured than my attackers.

I believed her. Five separate times in my life my mother said to me that if I did not get out of her sight that instant, she would kill me because she was so angry.

Kill me.

So who was I more afraid of? Five girls my own age at school? Or my mother?

I was instantly feral after that. I was a cornered animal. About a week later, they ambushed me on my way home. Pulled me off the bike that my father said he would not replace if anything happened to it. They went to break my bike.

I don't remember what happened. I blacked out.

But the next day, one of the girls came to school with a broken arm, another with a broken nose, all of them looking like a wild animal had attacked them.

They said I had done it.

And then they said I was their new leader.

I shit you not, I won a girl gang by rite of combat. And even at that age, it was so ludicrous, I laughed in their faces.

I could have become a bully. They wanted me to choose new victims for them. I refused. We did get in awful fights with rival gangs. Literally, blood drawing fights. But I wouldn't be their procurer. I did the one thing I could think of. I asked them why they had been picking on me. Curiosity is after all, my one besetting sin.

"Because you read all the time. Because you think you're smarter than us."

"I'm not smarter than you." I knew this for a fact. My mother and my father told me all the time how stupid I was.

"Then why are you in the library all the time?"

I told them. I told them how books saved me. They didn't believe me. I asked them what they liked. They told me. I told them there were books about those things. They didn't believe me.

So I took those five girls who had never stepped in to a library before in their lives under their own power, to the shock of the librarian, and I handed them The Babysitters Club. And Sweet Valley High. I don't know why I didn't hate them. I don't know why I made it my mission to show them another way. But I had to. I had to believe that they could learn. That they could change. That we could be friends and not whatever broken thing we were.

My teacher, Mr. Milgrim took me aside a month later. He asked, "How on earth did you get those girls to read?" These were girls who were barely literate and now weren't.

So I told him.

Books saved me. Books could save them. And I was able to prove it.

And you ask me why I'm a publisher.

There were other bullies after that. But I always stood up after that. Defied them. Because the heroes I loved in my books, the ones that saved me, would have done the same. Defended others. Always went to the person I saw sitting alone and said, "Would you like to sit with me? I'm Angela." Even when someone threatened to kill me. Even when I was rejected and believe me, even the outcasts will reject you. They didn't know my motivation. They thought I was trying to set them up. I couldn't prove my honesty. Sat on a roof with a friend who was going to kill himself and said, "If you go, I go."

All because of that girl gang.

Yeah.

I hated my mother for a very long time. I don't love her. She killed that in me. But talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

I couldn't fix my mother. Nothing can fix my mother. She is and was broken in ways long before I arrived on the scene.

But together, those girls and I, we changed. We fixed each other.

So that's my story. It's a bit bizarre. I've never met anyone else who won a gang through rite of combat. Who dragged their attackers in to a library and taught them the penance of words. Even my teacher found me to be stranger than most kids he'd had.

I don't know why it worked.

I don't fully know why it changed me the way that it did.

But it did.

I saw how it only takes one person to stand up and say, "Stop." No matter the cost. No matter if they'll attack you next.

All it takes is one.

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

One...life

- One
U2