Through most of my young life, religion didn't play a very big part. The closest my family got to being religious was when I would try to drag my increasingly reluctant mother to the church across the street for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I didn't even want to go for any real religious purpose. I just went to sing. I'd always found church music to be beautiful, and the music itself meant more to me than the message behind it.

It isn't surprising that I, like a great many others, experienced something of a spiritual crisis. Faith was something that had never been properly addressed while I grew up. I once asked my parents if they believed in God, or had any ties to religion at all. My father said that he wanted to believe, but needed proof first that God was real. Not too uncommon an answer, but it didn't exactly help me with my own spiritual development. I didn't need proof. I needed belief. I wanted faith. I didn't demand that God appear before me and reveal the secrets of the universe before I worshipped Him. I just wanted to feel a little faith in my life.

So I did what a lot of people do. I went through the motions. Christianity being the most prominant religion in my area, I figured it would be easiest to start there. I tried to be a good Christian. I tried to learn and reflect on passages from the Bible. I tried to remember to say prayers every night before bed. I tried to make that religion a part of my daily life.

It didn't work. It didn't take too long before I realised I was doing nothing but paying lip service to a deity I really didn't believe in. If your religious practices become nothing more than an unpleasant chore, then maybe the religion you've picked isn't the right one for you.

So what else was there? I knew scattered bits of knowledge from a handful of other religions, and knew enough by then to know that they wouldn't be right for me either. I felt lost, adrift, and disappointed. Not just disappointed that I hadn't manage to find religion, but disappointed with myself that I hadn't been able to make that religion my own, so to speak. I felt as though I'd failed somehow, that if I'd just pushed harder I could have managed to find a space within Christianity for myself.

But then something happened which I can honestly say changed the course of my life. A friend told me about Wicca.

This was the first time I'd ever heard about Wicca, and I didn't exactly get a great deal of information about it. But the day I first heard about it, that cold grey winter's day, was the day I decided that I'd give it a try.

But I made that decision for the wrong reasons. It didn't strike a particular chord of "rightness" within me. It didn't give me a comforting feeling or a spiritual revelation or anything like that. No, my decision, weirdly enough, was based on pity for a misconception. My friend, whom I will call J for the rest of this Hub, told me about a man back during the Salem witch trials who was punished for accusations of witchcraft, pressed to death under more and more rocks because they couldn't get a confession out of him.

"How awful!" I thought, and made up my mind right there and then to honour that man's sacrifice by becoming Wiccan.

Never mind that the Salem witch trials had nothing to do with modern Wicca. Ignore the fact that while some factual basis for this story exists, the man in question was not refusing a confession out of loyalty to a faith. I was convinced. Those innocent people had been wrongfully punished, and I was going to honour them.

And so began my spiral down into complete and utter stupidity.

I threw myself into Wicca with reckless abandon, doing all the wrong things and none of the right ones. I learned that Wiccans worship a goddess instead of a god, and that made so much more sense, because hey, males had had their time in the limelight, and it was time for goddess-worship to come back. I learned that Wiccans take a magickal name, and so to my closest friends (all two of them) I went by my new name of Ebony WolfSong, the most meaningful name I could think of at the time. I learned that Wiccans cast spells and invoke spirits, so I did that at every chance I could, getting inspiration from movies like The Craft and casting glamour spells upon myself.

Feel free to laugh. I know I do, now. After the cringing stops.

Mysticism became my way of life. I interpreted my dreams and found more meaning behind them than a dreamer's dictionary could possibly do. I messed around with past-life regression, and discovered that holy crap, my "coven" of friends and I had been friends for countless lifetimes, and we fought evil together in the past. (Oh, you think that's terrible? J discovered through a self-induced past-life regression that she was soul-bound to James Marsters, the man who played Spike on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Whom she conveniently had such a crush on at the time.) We used Ouija boards and induced trance states to get spirits to talk to us, and jumped at any chance to cast new and nifty spells, making up new ones if the ones we found on websites didn't suit our needs.

And yes, I did try to prove to my parents that magick was all real and true by performing a spell in front of them. A glamour, to change my eyes colour. It didn't work. Gee, I wonder why...

If you made a checklist of everything a newbie could possibly do wrong, the list would probably be completed by me. I was young, stupid, and desperate for some meaning in my life. It didn't help that I was going through clinical depression in addition to the usual teenage crap, and so felt that anything that made me special was a good thing. I needed something to be, something that was strong and competant and important, because little old regular me was boring and stupid and unliked by a lot of people.

To take a quote from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "If you could be regular Willow or super-Willow, who would you be?" Ignore the fact that my name's not Willow. It's the sentiment behind the quote that counts. Why be somebody boring and forgetable when you can have superpowers and talk to spirits and do cool dangerous stuff all the time?

It was dangerous. Not because I stood a chance of invoking the wrong spirit and calling down fiery destruction, but because that kind of thinking was so seductive, so addictive, and it fed me everything I shouldn't have but craved so badly. Attention. A personality that was noteworthy. Friends who shared the same interest, and that interest was power. None of us were interested in the actual religious aspects of the religion. We all wanted the power that was supposed to come with it.

I did it all wrong. I was the kind of person who gives the whole belief system a bad name. I was, in a nutshell, young and stupid, and I'm not going to lie about that. I'm not going to try to excuse myself or defend myself in any way. I got into a religion for the wrong reasons, focused on the wrong parts of the religion, and ignored anything religious about it. I was what they call a fluffybunny, a derogatory term that pretty much says I'm all fluff and no susbtance. And they weren't wrong.

If you want to put it into Christian terms, it was like me becoming a Christian after hearing the story of Daniel in the lion's den because I felt sorry for Daniel, and then acting like I had all the power of the second coming of Christ with none of the responsibilities.

Thankfully, I grew up and sobered after a while. I learned more about Wicca as a religion, and tried to follow it. I called myself Wiccan for a good long time, and did my best to be a decent Wiccan and a decent person. (Which is more than I can say for some of my friends from the time. Some of them still haven't outgrown that power trip over a decade later.) While Wicca did come close to being the religion for me, it stopped feeling right after a while, and I no longer feel comfortable calling myself Wiccan, giving myself a term that doesn't apply to me.

It's as bad as paying lip service to the Christian God the way I tried to do before this whole incident.

Nowadays, I'm comfortable under the umbrella term of 'pagan', until I can explore my spirituality a bit more and make a more informed decision. Especially after what I went through when I first called myself Wiccan, I want to be careful that if I decide to include myself in a particular religion that I am actually doing that religion some justice, doing it right, or at least as right as I can.

Nobody does everything right where religion is concerned. We do our best, make mistakes, and learn along the way. At least I can say that something positive came out of the craziness of my power-trip young. I learned from it. I made my mistakes and got them out of the way, and now I know better and hopefully won't make the same mistake twice.

And I also got a ton of good stories to fill teen novels about people discovering magic powers so they can save the world. Bonus!