Magickian, know thyself. Not the most creative of puns perhaps, but a trickster dictum that I have long chosen to live by. Wants, needs, desires. Even for the most hollow of Gutter Mages such as myself the act of taking the time to understand the mental drives that are serving as unspoken cogs in the machinery of desire is of paramount importance. That which is unacknowledged still bubbles beneath the surface, and adds almost invisible shades of pain to the palette that is reached for when ritual is required. It is better to befriend your demons than allow their cloven hooves to tramp mud through your crypt, after all.

As a book Chaos Streams II is well worth a read. Hailing from Kuriozum Press and showcasing the thoughts, insights and personal journeys of some of the individual members of The Magickal Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros, or IOT, it definitely got me thinking about a few things as the pages turned long into the evening. Soror Brigantia’s insightful Dyslexia is my Superpower, a short and highly descriptive essay on what it means to live with the very same mental quirk that has long guided, or perhaps misguided my own life left me in a very reflective mood. A catalyst for a journey within, and tales unwritten until now.

It may be difficult to believe, but before I was a published author, occult researcher or even in my early teens, cracks had already began to show in my education. Ones that would go on to become bleeding sores as I grew older. The 1980’s and 1990’s were not exactly kind to those with any form of neurodiversity. Even something as recognisable as dyslexia was woefully under diagnosed. Add to this the issues arising from both growing up in one of the poorest boroughs in all of good old London town as well as incessant bullying which itself led to me missing weeks of school at a time, and my hand was cruelly dealt from the start.

Never a confident or particularly fast reader, due to the same short term memory issues which even now make me an extremely nervous public speaker, I would instead feed my mind with the sorts of educational programming that used to be shown by television segments such as Open University or BBC Schools. In many cases those aimed far above my actual age group or current exam stage. Yet I understood them, albeit in a fragmented manner, and this sparked the hope in those around me that my intellect ran far deeper than the continued complaints of my teachers and disdain of my peers would assume.

A visual learner with many diverse, but usually weird interests, perhaps the fact that I lacked an academic grounding in what many would consider to be core subjects lead to my outright dismissal of truth as anything other than a social construct. Spending so long outside of the formal education system, reading Vertigo comics by day and watching a strange mix of Fortean programming, classic documentaries and monster movies by night left me as an outsider. Add to that the ever present dead, recurring nightmares as well as eventual lack of dreams, and it is easy to guess why I see the world so differently.

Yet there are no delusions of grandeur here. Nor do I believe myself to have avoided some poorly defined indoctrination that those who engage with academia are accused of going through either. Both my sanity and ego are relatively normal, and being largely self taught in those areas which hold my attention provides no secret skill in seeing through the spectacle. I was just never forced to differentiate between supposed truths and admitted fictions is all, instead treating both as individually weighted narratives along a curve of probability. Thus the chaos magickian is born. Nothing is real, not even me. And yet you are reading this.

Numbers may still elude me, but I chose to make the written word my home. Technology is ultimately to thank for this safe haven among the serif and sans-serif jigsaw that even now dances across the screen, because without both spellcheck and the delete key I would be lost to a sea of rewrites and correction tape. Drowning in office supplies, like quicksand for the psyche. Self taught and perhaps offering more than a passing nod to Lovecraft’s literary style at first, I found my voice through trial, error and much deserved critique. This is how my work reads now. But it was not always so structured or easy to follow.

Self diagnosis is dangerous, but sometimes accurate. While the medical community conceded that I was both Dyslexic and Dyspraxic in my early 30’s, I already found coping strategies to try and mitigate a condition that I had long surmised was a part of me long before then. Self help books and time management courses were raided for useful tricks, apps such as Obsidian leveraged to create a second brain. When reading targets were missed my focus pivoted towards audiobooks. Anything to staple the broken pieces of my working memory together into a somewhat useful shape. Whatever it took not to drown.

I prefer to treat my dyslexia as neutral, neither good nor bad, but I often lament not making it to university in my teens. The couple of years of undergrad Psychology that I completed as a mature student before leaving London has served me well, though. As did a background in both advertising and graphic design, though those college level forays into the creative arts actually occurred many years before and ended with a whimper as my body was carved up like ham on an operating table to save my life. Where education is concerned even subjects that I excel at are taken from me at knifepoint. Either that or I get bored and move on.

This exercise in self reflection, caused as it was by an article in Chaos Streams II that in so many ways made me see my own journey in a different light, is not designed to illicit sympathy. Nor do I want to end on as sour a note as the previous paragraphs may make it seem. I am happy enough with my vulpine mind, and long ago made peace with the fact that I will never be able to claim a normal life. Everything I seem to do is done in a strange or unusual way now, bricolage enforced by an intellect that refuses to be chained to a brain that so many in positions of authority wrote off as defective right from the start.

And so show and tell became central to my otherwise hollow shell. The ideas I share, thoughts, wants, desires. Techniques and critiques. Magick and madness. These words are not just my legacy, nor do they simply stand as stone etched epitaphs to prove that I was here. No. What they really represent is my continued conflict with a culture that wrote me off long ago. Proof that I have worth to my tribe, no matter who they may be. Dyslexia and a disastrous education history will not stop me from making occulture a better place, not now, not ever. And it is good to have you all along for the ride.