I got removed from the Rowan + Sage school because I made a post about Spiritual Vitalism a while back that included her name (among some others) as some people whose content I’d recently interacted with at the time who continued to help perpetuate the narrative in the modern day that Animism was integral to the practice of Greencraft and Paganism, etc, and that Animism was “the only true way” etc.
She messaged me in Instagram DMs about “unfairly calling her out” and how I should have messaged her privately if I had issues with her content. Then re-centered a post about my own trauma on her and her emotions. Condescendingly told me I should watch her and Althea’s class on Animism “instead of lumping them in with White Man bullshit”. And then told me that including her in my issue with that narrative was “projecting my trauma onto her”.
I told her that dismissing my problem with that narrative as mere projection of my trauma was disgustingly dismissive. And I ended the conversation on Instagram by blocking her; it’s pretty clear at that point, I think, that she wasn’t actually looking for a real conversation*.
* Especially not when she was jumping in with her responses before even letting me finish my full response to her initial message in the first place. Which, aside from most social media messaging apps straight up being impairment and disability unfriendly, is another major reason I hate DMs for stuff like “clearing the air” and view any attempts at holding space on them as disingenuous by default; you can’t hold any claim of legitimate or genuine space when the person you’re supposedly trying to “clear the air” with can’t actually get a full and proper response in because of character limits to begin with, and you’re constantly interrupting them. I don’t know what communication classes anyone else has taken, but that’s not how genuine communication and interpersonal problem solving works- and it never will be.
She then proceeded to remove me from Herbaria and Vitalist Herbcraft, and completely deactivated my school account.
So not only is Josh Williams a complete disappointment in his ability to handle any sort of hint at criticism at all ... Apparently Sarah Corbett is also in the habit of delegitimizing and dismissing any content concerns, and disgustingly dismissive of personal trauma. And likewise fond of derailing and re-centering posts clearly talking about your own trauma and lessons as being about her and her own emotional reactions and issues, and making mountains out of molehills that never existed to begin with, too.
Now we can talk about whether or not the language I used came across as attacking, or read as a callout post to people. We can talk about how the language I used could have been better. I’m all for that as perfectly valid criticism of that post, because social media sucks and I’m Autistic and words are not my strong suit (especially not on social media in character limited spaces) ... I’m even down to talk about Animism properly, and not in the dismissive and condescending “well then you need to read / watch” bullshit way that treats me as uneducated ... We actually could have had several great conversations.
But automatically accusing me of “calling people out” on a post that wasn’t even about them, being dismissive like that of personal trauma, re-centering a post predominantly about my personal trauma on you, etc? Too far. I’m not going to participate in that kind of drama-mongering bullshit. Because that’s all it is.
You can claim being genuine all you want, but you’re not actually looking for a conversation. I’ve been around this block a million times, and this is not how people looking for genuine conversation act. What you’re looking for is to attack back in some capacity, because you incorrectly think you’ve been attacked somehow. And I’m not going to be a punching bag, be dismissed like that, be condescended to, and be told I’m “just projecting” like that, etc, and watch people re-center my posts and my trauma on themselves; I’m not going to be retraumatized into silence by a community that can’t handle any criticism of Animism on even the smallest, most minuscule level- and who has literally proven this every single time I’ve so much as said the word.
You’re just going to get blocked.
I’m not going to deal with that nonsense on a good day. But I’m definitely in too much pain to deal with that kind of nonsense right now, especially. Doubly so from another disabled person I respected; your own trauma and problems, or whatever, do not give you the right to delegitimize others’ trauma or act like it’s “just projection” when it informs their interest, because you happened to be the target of some (incredibly minor) “negative critique” that interest centers on (which you never even bothered to find out what it actually entailed before hanging your lip out like a toddler).
But then to remove me from a program I actively paid money for and am supposed to have lifetime access to online? Is petty as hell; I would have taken being banned from Herbaria, as it’s the community aspect. Fine ... But Vitalist Herbcraft and complete account deactivation was a step too far. Especially without reimbursement. That is literally the most ridiculous and hypocritical level of petty.
ETA: Correction, I returned from my Chiropractor appointment to find that, after I blocked her on Instagram for dismissing me as merely “projecting”, she had emailed me the message that she’d been typing up at the moment that I blocked her anyways “for the sake of transparency” ... And also to inform me that she removed me from Herbaria and refunded the automatic payment I made yesterday (But not Vitalist Herbcraft. And no mention of her completely deactivating my account, which I need to access Vitalist Herbcraft still).
Her forcing the instagram DM on me was definitely not at all to continue forcing the conversation on me anyways despite a clear wish on my part to end to the conversation for her behavior ... Nope ... She totally couldn’t have just left the instagram post out of it and sent me a straight business email letting me know I’ve bee dropped from the community “because it’s her safe space and that’s the agreement I signed”. It’s not like not doing so and insisting on forcing her half typed message on me anyways “for transparency” is definitely not the kind of behavior that would be considered harassment in literally any other context.
Fun parts: Said message vaguely insinuated that I was being anti-indigenous by being Vitalist “without a proper understanding of Animism” (though “she’s sure that’s not my intention”); an absolutely hilarious statement to anyone who actually knows my history, and the history of my family, and the utter bombshell that I had dropped on me this year. But she doesn’t know that. It was a delicious bit of irony, regardless, though.
Where’s that whole “give people enough respect to talk to them before making big blanket criticisms” thing at right now, though? Because I see a whole lot of her demanding that I give her space to do x, y, z ... But I don’t see a whole lot of her doing the same for me.
She can yell that I don’t know about her beliefs and should educate myself on them ... But where’s literally any of her attempts to educate herself on my background (the anti-indigenous assumption is an incredibly personal one to make without knowing anything about someone, for instance. Those are some balls, right there)? Where are her attempts to find out what the narrative I’m talking about even is in its fullest capacity? Where are her questions asking me to outline my actual critiques about her content? My critiques of her content in relation to that narrative? How I think she’s actually upholding it? What I’m talking about when I say “the Animist / Dynamist Dichotomy”? They’re nowhere at all.
She’s never made a single attempt to understand anything about a 2,200 character post and its context (meanwhile I have, in fact, read everything I could find on her stance about Animism save that class, because I wrote the post before the class was out; I did my research) ... Instead I get an accusatory message with an assumption of intent after she’s already built up this victim narrative wherein I’ve wronged her. A message blatantly telling me that 1. She doesn’t appreciate being called guilty of upholding a narrative she’s never upheld, and 2. Telling me that if I had a problem with her content then I should have spoken to her privately instead of writing a callout post I never even made.
I have literally had my post co-opted and selfishly re-centered on a group of other people entirely, and been cast as a villain for something I didn’t even do to any of them in the first place- all while she is quite ironically sending me a complaint about me doing that to her ... And she doesn’t see the hypocrisy in any of this behavior at all.
The big one, however, was that she also declared that ... Because I’ve never sat down and spoken to her about her beliefs about Animism directly ... I cannot possibly have any kind of valid criticism of her beliefs at all; reading about portions of her beliefs she’s directly written into her own self-produced school materials, a school which I was an active enrolled member of, apparently doesn’t count as having any kind of information on her beliefs I guess- though I think we’re all perfectly capable of acknowledging that’s certainly a starting point and not the whole picture. I would have been more than happy to explore her beliefs further and acknowledge if I misunderstood her at any point. But she never gave me that opportunity before (again, ironically) accusing me of something I never did, and then being condescending and dismissive while I was trying to explain myself.
Also: The completely logical and perfectly rational icing on the cake? Was some nonsense that (in essence) boiled down to the idea that ... Because she’s not responsible for my trauma (which I never claimed she was, though I found it ironic she said “she can hold space to acknowledge that I’ve been traumatized” since she’s done the exact opposite so far) ... And because I’ve never spoken to her about her beliefs directly ... She cannot, therefore, be a participant in perpetuating the narrative I’m talking about. Especially since “Animism is opposed to dichotomic thinking” ... Because clearly if you don’t know what narrative you’re perpetuating, or the exact critique against you, and you’ve never actually talked to the person, the critique obviously doesn’t actually exist and is fake / false!
Nevermind that (again) she still has no actual idea what my actual criticism of her work in particular is and has still not sought, in any capacity at all, to actually understand my criticism of her work and exactly how I think she contributes to this narrative, and in what capacity ... She only knows that my criticism exists and that it is related to broad set of criticisms I have with a narrative Pagans often push about Animism- especially in relation to Greencraft, Activism, etc.
The whole time she has, in a twist of quite hilarious irony, participated in exactly the kind of repeated traumatizing actions I experienced surrounding Animism that I’m always talking about; exactly the exact kind of abusive and condescending actions I had to deal with as a budding practitioner over the decades, which spiritually traumatized me and eventually made me leave the green path as a non-Animist; exactly the kind of behavior I speak out against Animists continuously doing to others in regards to the narrative I talk about; exactly the kind of actions Animists most often perpetuate against people questioning or criticizing the Animist narrative and those who perpetuate it, in particular, and the lockhold that Animism has over Paganism and the Craft.
If you can’t handle people criticizing Animism and your potential role in its narrative in spiritual spaces- good or ill- without turning into a hypocritical, dismissive, condescending, asshole to them? Then you are, in fact, exactly a part of the problem that I routinely talk about. Hilariously enough, you actually just became a larger part of it than I thought you initially were, even.
And also just a bunch of other nonsense in general, really. This is all, still, somehow, not being dismissive, however. She’s never dismissive. Never condescending. Never dehumanizing. She’s done zero wrong at all ... In fact, I should be the one to fix my relationship with her should I wish to come back! She’ll be here with open arms, even.
ETA 2: It got even better, apparently; I went to grab screens for a friend who asked and I have a new email from Sarah despite blocking her email- and despite her being told not to contact me again in no uncertain terms. Especially not to discuss this any further. But oh, she discusses it anyways! Including another halfassed excuse about including the Instagram DM because she “didn’t want to leave anything unsaid because she didn’t want Drama”!
In this new email I never should have received ... I’ve been accused of “acting in bad faith within her community”, “exploiting her work”, and “being duplicitous” ... All because I disagreed with her materials speaking on Animism and mentioned her in the uber offensive Instagram post everyone insists on making about them- even though I was speaking from a place informed by my traumatic experiences and the 4 names I listed were ultimately a minuscule footnote in the overall positive and important message of not taking everything you learn at face value, branching out, and exploring things for yourself (even if you land back on the original in the end)!
... And somehow that means that all of my other interactions I’ve ever had with her (which were indeed genuine, I can assure you) were false, or done under false pretenses. Further perpetuating the incredibly dangerous idea that you cannot, apparently, simultaneously respect someone and disagree with portions of their ideology; that you must fully agree with those you learn from. Which is gross, and I hope I don’t have to explain why extreme echo chambers like that are actually very bad for your health and safety.
But don’t worry! You shouldn’t listen to me anyways, because I have now also been accused by her of “scapegoating her and Althea in away that perpetuates white supremacy” ... Because, you know, they publicly talk about Indigenous issues and are public indigenous activists and their animism is informed by indigenous animism and she’s Jewish, yada yada yada, or something, I guess. So clearly all of this- my disagreeing with her, mentioning her name on the original post, and my combativeness and refusal to have a genuine conversation with her- means I’m obviously just a racist and support White Supremacy!
So we’ve moved from the subtle insinuation that I’m “anti-indigenous for being Vitalist because vitalism was created by white medicalism in the 1800′s” to blatantly just straight up calling me essentially a White Supremacist enabler, or adjacent.
Like ... I cannot stress that I merely listed her as one of many I felt perpetuating a narrative that, while it can be spiritually damaging because it keeps people from learning about the full breadth of options and that can ultimately lead to people abusing others who don’t “fit the mold”, is really not that big of a deal save for its prevalence- and ultimately has a very simple solution ... Meanwhile ... She has decided to make a personal attack on my literal moral, ethical, and political character an values ... Based on absolutely nothing ... Because I disagreed with her and then wouldn’t cower about it when she came at me sideways.
That’s a hell of a fucking reach right there but ok. We’ve learned from purity culture hypermoralists over the last two years that no one actually needs any sort of legitimate reason to dislike someone and end a conversation with them, or remove them from your school. Why would you, really, when you can literally just hypermoralize their behavior to hell and back, and turn them into problematic enemy number one? Truly out here making incredibly important words absolutely fucking meaningless.
But again, anyways: She still has absolutely no idea what my critique of her work in relation to the narrative I’m talking about even is. She certainly has no idea what my critique of Althea’s work in relation to the narrative is (why she’s constantly bringing up Althea, I don’t even know). She also has no idea what the full extent of the narrative itself actually is, she’s just basing it off one instagram post where she’s mentioned briefly in a tiny line ... She even admits this herself- outright stating:
“Ironically, as an animist, I hate how much of this interaction has been geared towards relational breakdown since you published that post accusing guilt on me for apparently posting something so offensive to you on an Instagram caption, which I'm still not clear on even what it was that made you feel this way, and now being responsible for your trauma.”
Here she just continues to make assumptions about what my criticism is and where I got my information to make it. But the major assumption is that she offended me at all by talking about Animism or being an Animist- she didn’t; I even blatantly said in the caption she’s talking about that there’s nothing wrong with being and Animist. The problem is ultimately the narrative itself and the positioning of Animism in Paganism, Greencraft, and Activism, etc, as “the true and proper way” (which creates a dichotomy with Dynamism whether you acknowledge it or not), and the way that can be spiritually damaging to people- as I have directly experienced myself and have spoken about and centered the conversation on.
Which, again, is being ignored in favor of other people’s feelings around being mentioned in relation to the narrative- which they are using to reframe the post as a “call out post”, which it never was; and which is being actively dismissed as “projecting my trauma onto others” because my interest in the topic happens to be trauma informed and they don’t like being included on the list of people I found to be perpetuating the narrative in some way, which I never explicitly mentioned or expounded on because of character limits. Because it’s social media and a 2,200 character instagram post has zero nuance (not that they’re even capable of nuance, anyways, clearly).
But again, again there’s even more dismissive positioning of this, and any of my criticisms and opinions, as “me making her responsible for my trauma” especially, this time, despite her not being a member of my Pagan community- which again again, I’m still not doing. My personal experience of trauma in this area may inform how strongly I feel about the fact that people need to be taught that other worldviews exist** ... But my noticing trends and spots where this narrative is perpetuated in small ways in modern writing, by modern creators, doesn’t mean I’m unhealed and therefore “projecting that trauma”. And it is, in fact, incredibly dismissive to position it as such, and to claim it’s me “making people responsible for my trauma” by talking about it or pointing it out when I see it, however I see it.
** They also need to be taught that no, it’s not “just another form of Animism” just because “it’s close enough”; our ancestors had names for this wide variety of worldviews and lumping them together into a homogenous blob because they’re “close enough” is not only spiritually damaging, but also a form of erasure. People sitting here and calling me “pedantic” and telling me I’m “splitting hairs”- or even telling me I’m “perpetuating white supremacy”, of all things- for demanding something so incredibly simple as linguistic accountability and the acknowledgement of other historical indigenous and non-indigenous terms for Animist-adjacent and even non-Animist worldviews ... Is literally fucking insanity.
Oh, and I have dehumanized her throughout the course of this. Because all she did was point out “with genuine concern and sadness” how my post could be read as disparaging. That’s it.
- She definitely did not initialize the conversation outright with a statement about how she “didn’t appreciate being accused” of doing something she didn’t do- with a number of assumptions about the intent of my post which put words into my mouth that were never there (gee, I do wonder how that feels ...)
- She definitely did not give me a spiel that was eerily close to “praise in public, critique in private” (an often abusive method of silencing criticism used by creators with an image to sell) for daring to criticize anything about her content or ideologies without talking to her about them first ”because I’m a student in her program”
- She definitely did not reframe an entire post predominantly talking about my trauma and my lessons (whose main focus was encouraging others to branch out and explore for their own sake) as “a callout post” for barely mentioning a handful of modern names- including hers- in the tiniest portion of it
- She definitely did not condescend to me about animism an her beliefs when I attempted to explain the foundation of what the post was about and where I was coming from- again, before even letting me finish my response, after choosing a character limited platform to hold this conversation on in the first place
- She definitely did not then dismiss me as “projecting my trauma onto her” when I reiterated that the post was predominantly about my own traumatic experiences, and attempted to explain specific experiences behind it, and tell her that others repeatedly reframing it and re-centering it around themselves was derailing behavior
- And she definitely did not drop insinuations that disagreeing with her (and Althea) makes me racist, anti-indigenous, and / or Antisemitic, etc ... Because apparently when you can’t get them to agree with you, just cancel them for being problematic in ways that strip important words of literally all meaning! And when that doesn’t work, say it overtly!
Make no mistake: Saying someone’s “scapegoating you” and “perpetuating white supremacy” for what ultimately actually amounts to nothing more than not agreeing with you about Animism (which, again, you don’t actually know in what ways) ... And for blocking you for being actively dismissive of them and actively re-centering a post largely about their trauma on yourself and your own emotions in a way that actively misrepresents what they were saying and doing with that post and falsely self-victimizes ... Is a whole new level of utterly fucked up behavior.
I don’t know why I’m surprised, honestly ... Coming back from a break, after all of my traumatization, trying to reintegrate... It’s quite disappointing to see that people're literally just as petty, overdramatic, and ridiculous as they ever were before (if not more-so because of the rise of new cancel culture and purity culture and this new incapacity of actually being a normal human being- and not a raging, self-centered, deranged activist on a war path about everything) ... And I get it, because I was there before in my younger days; it’s nice to watch the world burn when you’re in pain ... But I would have hoped that things would have changed and improved a bit.
This is honestly just how people in the Pagan, Witchcraft, Occult, and all the other even remotely adjacent spiritual communities just are, though, and I’m so incredibly tired of it at this point. Y’all honestly need to sort out your bullshit.