The last two nights, a dark fairy came to our house, hung out with us and gifted us with healing herbs. My depression lifted for the evening. I laughed with Uruk and the fairy, and I felt ok after many days of not feeling ok. She was very generous and I’m frankly a little stunned with gratitude. I’ve felt like that a lot lately─bowled over by the generosity of friends and strangers.
The timing could not have been better. I did the math a couple of days ago and it really freaked me out: together Uruk and I make less than $21k/year, and that’s with me pushing myself to my absolute physical limits. Our rent is $1k/month (actually cheap for Seattle) and our green meds are about half that.
This has haunted me the past few nights, keeping me awake for hours while I wrestle with the stress. It doesn’t seem possible that we can survive on that, even living in rags like this. My stable life seemed suddenly just a mirage, and my already precarious hold on hope slipped. My strength of will and personal power is nothing against the brick wall limits of my worsening disability.
But tonight reminded me once more of the lesson life has been bringing to my door in relentless succession: we are NOT surviving on just that. As my body has broken more and more, the generosity of others has buoyed us and kept us from sinking. We seem to be enmeshed in a dark web of compassion, a wide-flung community that keeps surprising us again and again with the help we so desperately need. We have yet to pay rent late since I started the Satanic Temple - Seattle Chapter a year ago, and that’s only because we’ve had a lot of help.
I’d love to pretend that the work I do for the Satanic Temple (TST) doesn’t interfere with my capacity to work my job. I always make the energy to run a TST meeting or draft a press release, because I love it. I will find the strength to lead an action or talk to the press through the greatest pain and exhaustion. But what happens all too often is I use my energy and pain coping units on the TST work and don’t have enough left for my actual paying job.
I don’t understand how this is happening, but so far the work income that has been displaced by my TST activism has been made up for by the generosity of my friends, the Satanic community, and even complete strangers who happen to have read my book. I’ve reconnected with old friends and made new ones in this process, and I am constantly astonished by this rich web of support. It’s allowed me to put everything I have into building a great team─and a close-knit family─of Satanists here in Seattle. I can reach out and touch others’ lives now in a potentially powerful way, for the better─and I feel like there are a lot of people rooting for me.
So THANK YOU, everyone who has offered a kind word, or help, or gifts, or any other act of compassion. Your magic has kept me going through the hardest of times. Ave Satanas!
Lilith Starr is Chapter Head of the Satanic Temple's Seattle Chapter, and the author of "The Happy Satanist: Finding Self-Empowerment."
Views expressed here do not constitute an official statement by the Satanic Temple.