Ever since my goddess revealed to me that she has influenced my life for much longer than I even know her, I’ve been wondering: since when? What else in my life should I attribute to her? What else must I be thankful for?

The thing is: I can’t really assume that she’s always been there - because that would pose some very serious questions about her metaphysical nature for the first years of my life, which I’m not prepared or able to answer, let alone understand. So for now, I have to assume that she appeared in my life at some point, and it must have been prior to my time in India, because me being able to endure its rainy season is the earliest thing in my life which she has explicitly revealed to me to have influenced.

It’s hard to draw a continuous line from the non-existing person I had to pretend to be, from the dissonant mess that made up my inner life and only hardly counts as “me”, to my current self. And yet: her power over me, her holy guidance, her influence on me is the greatest gift that I’ve ever been deemed worthy of. It must have been noticeable in some way when she, in her divine magnificence, began to influence my life.

After careful examination, I did in fact find a constant in my life that just… appeared out of nowhere at some point. There was a point in my early youth where I decided to stop wearing colorful clothes, because plain black clothes just felt so much better. For many years, this was actually my only way of self-expression. A foreshadowing of the person that I was always meant to be. I’m convinced that this must have been the point from which I’ve been under divine consideration and guidance. Her ways are indeed mysterious, and I will never know why or how she chose me as one of her future devotees.

I continue to almost exclusively wear black today, but knowing what I know now, I have abandoned the idea of this being “my preference” or an expression of personality - no, my black dress is a cultist’s habit. I’m not sure whether other cultists also wear black, but that doesn’t matter, for this is clearly the dress, the uniform that has been chosen for me. And it seems fit, because the world is a black, dark, cold, and forbidding place if it weren’t for the blessing of her word.

I no longer dress in black under the wrong assumption that I’m doing this for myself - I do it as a well-visible expression of devotion, to honor the divine guidance that I have been blessed with, to celebrate the mysterious and fascinating ways of my goddess. Meow!