Wicked

Jake 2

Jake

Upon moving into the orphanage as a newly teenager, I was quickly pulled into the street world of drugs and petty crime. I frequently got in trouble with police and was labelled a troublemaker. Youth workers and child councilors were assigned to me and I was forced into appointments. Most support workers are actually crazier than the people they're helping. They were only attracted to the job as a way of dealing with their own neurosis and because they weren't smart enough to go to university or work as something that pays better. I always felt that I was smarter than the adults, whose half-hearted attempts to fix us were more about clocking in hours to get their paycheck.

Plenty of the support workers were knowledgeable in self-help books and practices, having first learnt them to help themselves. Psychology is a science that often blurs into less scientific territory, due to the fact so much about the human brain is still unknown. One afternoon I was in some lowly-paid child councilor's office and in the waiting room she had a book and CD set called 'The Secret'. I asked her about it and that was the first time someone explained manifestation to me. Gifted me a few books by Deepak Chopra as well.

Collective Consciousness is a belief system without rules or deities or mythology. It is a line of thinking that suggests the world we live in is not as concrete as it seems nor are we separate to it. What you put your attention on grows, that would be the obvious perception and even scientific psychology would agree. But the main idea, manifestation suggests you can visualize a thing, believe in it, let it go and then it comes true. After it was explained to me I tested it out with amusing results: imagining myself finding a twenty dollar note, stopped thinking about it, later found a twenty dollar note at the subway. Seeing black Nike sneakers and wanting a pair, imagining myself wearing them, stopped thinking about it, and saw how things naturally fell into place until I was in a position where I could ask and get what I wanted when one of the workers was getting everybody presents.

Trying to manifest nicer things was harder. I tried seeing myself behind the wheel of a red Lamborghini but was so excited about the prospect of it working that I couldn't stop thinking about it, a crucial step in getting manifestation to work. Imagining myself in a grand mansion, making a 'vision board' like one of the workers suggested, didn't mean someone was going to pop into my life and give me a free house. Even something like that would need to be worked for.

I wouldn't have even attempted manifestation were it not for something that happened when I was ten-years-old. It had been a normal morning when I'd gone to the bathroom, went to wash my hands and saw with my own eyes the tap turning on before I touched it. I froze, then ran fearfully to Mummy, leaving the water to run. She'd said the exact same thing happened to her and at the same age.

"We come from a long family line of witches." She said soothingly, stroking my back to calm me.

Sitting at the living room table by my apartment, I adjusted my shirt in the sewing machine. An old bulky thing lent to me by one of the support workers I'd known for several years. I was trying to fix up the stupid hole in the sleeve, but the needle kept bunching the fabric. I was breathing out my nose in anger. Undoing the thread, counting to five, trying again and it jammed. Starting over, counting to five, watching the needle fuck up for the tenth time. After each failed attempt I hit the side of the inanimate object, as if to punish it for disobeying. Then in a rage, I hopped up and went into the kitchen, came back and started stabbing it repeatedly with a pair of scissors. Swearing with each stab until it was in pieces, then I dropped the scissors on the floor and left to do something else.

I went to my desktop computer and started it up, it was cloggy to load and the screen flashed sickly blue light onto my face. I opened my chat client and scanned my three regular chat-buddies from an occult forum. One of them was online and the flashing icon meant he'd replied to my message, his username was LuciferChild33.