This Isn’t Experience. It’s Dress-Up

 

 Let’s stop pretending.

There is a very loud, very performative strain of “witchcraft” right now where people in their early thirties are claiming nearly two decades of teaching the craft—and expecting that to land like authority instead of comedy.

It doesn’t.

Because time alone doesn’t make you seasoned.
It just makes you older.

What matters is what you did with that time.

And there’s a world of difference between:

• decades of grounded study with covens and experienced practitioners,
• and a long stretch of calling yourself a witch because it sounded good and got attention.

Those are not the same road.

Not even close.

Real experience is built in rooms where you are not the most knowledgeable person there, and you’re not allowed to pretend you are.
It’s built under people who will correct you, challenge you, and shut you down when you start believing your own hype.

It’s built in Friday and Saturday nights given to the work, not handed over to bar crawls around UW while wearing black like it’s a personality trait and calling it “the craft” for shock value.

Let’s be blunt.

Wearing black, lighting a candle, and quoting something you heard online does not make you a practitioner.

It makes you themed.

And stacking that behavior over years doesn’t transform it into depth.
It just turns it into a long-running habit.

You want to talk about what actually builds experience?

Try this:

• Fasting when nobody knows you’re doing it.
• Meditating until your mind stops performing and starts obeying.
• Walking a labyrinth slowly enough to feel every damn step instead of posting about it afterward.
• Taking silent walks through the woods until you stop narrating the moment and start being in it.
• Dancing around a fire not because it looks mystical, but because you’ve pushed yourself into a trance that strips you down to something real.

That’s work.

It’s repetitive. It’s unglamorous. It’s often lonely.

And it doesn’t care about your aesthetic.

Eighteen years of that leaves marks. It builds discipline. It builds restraint. It builds discernment.

It also builds the kind of humility that keeps you from standing up and declaring yourself a teacher before you’ve earned the weight of that word.

Because here’s the truth:

People who have actually done this for decades don’t need to inflate their timeline or posture for authority.

They don’t need to announce themselves.

You can hear it in how they speak.
You can see it in what they don’t say.
You can feel it in the fact that they’re not trying to convince you of anything.

So when someone rolls in claiming eighteen years of experience that somehow never translated into depth, discipline, or grounded practice, it shows.

Immediately.

Not because anyone is gatekeeping.

Because the difference is obvious.

This isn’t about being new. Everyone starts somewhere.

This is about people skipping the work, skipping the correction, skipping the discipline, and then planting a flag on ground they never actually walked.

The craft is not a costume.
It is not a personality.
And it is not a shortcut to identity.

You don’t earn it by declaring it.
You earn it by being shaped by it.....over and over again....until there’s no performance left. The wins, the losses, the gratitude and the grief that is sometimes so sharp you don't need an athame to cut. You're still bleeding. 

If that hasn’t happened?

Then you’re not seasoned. You’re not a teacher. You're not a 32 year old "Metaphysical Expert" who's spent 18 years teaching. 

You’re loud. You spend too much time on Tik Tok following a guy with a fake British accent, and people who do it for the aesthetic, and not for the reality. 

And the rest of us are done pretending that’s the same thing as someone with validated experience.