The sickness that is my family

The sickness within

My family (not just my mother, but her mother and sister and probably other extended family members) believe in witchcraft and people putting spells and hexes on you. I shake my head as I am writing this, because it is just so insane.

When I was younger, my mother would take me to women who would get rid of the evil spell on me and also get rid of the demons inside me. I cannot even fathom how anyone could believe in such a thing.

So me, being the sensitive one, gets convinced by my mother, my aunt and also my late grandmother that I have to go see the exorcist to remove devils from inside me. You cannot imagine just how many nightmares this type of discussion gave me, how scared it made me feel, how deep the scars it left and how much it messed with my head.

The reason for me having to go to the exorcist? Because I wanted to go out at night with my friends instead of staying at home with my mother, doing needlework or other house-wifely things (of course my brother, albeit younger than me and not even legally allowed to enter nightclubs was allowed and even encouraged to go out at night and do what he wanted to do - his behaviour was considered absolutely normal). Or the fact that I liked a man who was from a different country to mine. Or that I talked back to my parents, telling them that they were wrong for hitting me all the time. These are the reasons why they believed I was possessed. Oh. My. God. It blows my mind to even think about it now, because it is just so ridiculous that any parents would subject their child to such further torture!

So one of the times I went to an exorcist, it was inside a really small room with all these religious images everywhere. It was really dark, I was in there with this woman I didnt know. It was stuffy (as there were no windows in there) with only candlelight to lighten the room. And this woman was yelling: "Devil begone from this girl", while putting this huge cross on my back, head and above my decolletage, dragging it on my skin (but thankfully not hurting me and not being sleazy as that would have made it even worse). Of course I started crying, because this was freaking scary to me! And of course, this made the crazy exorcist believe that the "Devil" was scared of her machinations and she was exorcising it from me.

OH. MY. GOD.

I realised after we went outside that the woman was full of shit. But that didnt mean the whole thing didnt freak me out and it did adversely affect me, because it was on top of all of my mother's superstitious beliefs that she put onto me, so everything together just totally messed with my head for years (and even to now).

For example, if someone she suspected of being a "witch" gave me a gift, she wouldnt let me have it because she believed that if I touched it, I would get sick or have an accident. And if someone ever said anything nice about me while she was there, she would always contradict them and tell them that, no, I wasnt pretty and no, I wasnt smart and all in front of me. Nice way to be totally embarrassed and put down by my mother. I had no idea she was doing this because she thought that if they were saying something nice about me, they would "curse" me and I would get sick or have an accident and if she contradicted them, she would short-circuit their curse. It's mind boggling that anyone could ever think anything like this in this day and age!