Kimberly Steele

TikTok has been a thing for years and I paid it little to no attention. I'm not sure at all why I suddenly decided to put up a TikTok channel calling myself the White Witch of the Prairie (sounds like a Young Adult novel from 1987) with the mission of injecting a dose of sane occultism into the astral grime. I started the channel about two weeks ago, on a Wednesday of course, during the hour of Mercury. I have maintained a schedule of posting one new video a day, and there are many days when I don't feel like posting. I try to interact a little with some TikTok "friends" in order to not be so completely unidirectional as a content producer.

True confessions: I don't like TikTok and I never have liked it because my preferred length for videos is about 12-20 minutes long. The short video format is annoying and far too many vain and insecure people use it as a digital mirror to pout and preen. The pouters and preeners are mostly women, and of course any celebrity worth her weight in crap has a TikTok so she can out-pout and out-preen other celebrities and attempt to steal the thunder from good looking plebes who didn't have to trade sexual favors on a casting couch. The TikTok preening Olympics are not my cup of tea, and despite it having some good content, I have managed to scrupulously avoid it for most of its existence. What Facebook is to Gen X and Millennials, TikTok is to Zoomers. They love it and aside from video games, it is one of the only ways to reach them. So TikTok it was... ugh.

I thought I was doing pretty good getting about 200 views on each new video I posted. My discursive meditation video has over 200 views, the Druid Tree ritual one is nearing 500, and my various videos about the subtle planes have a few hundred views a piece. Imagine my surprise when a video I recently posted about what I believe happens when someone commits suicide hit 8000 views overnight. Though a seasoned TikTok veteran would likely not be impressed, I was taken aback.
Here is the text version of the video I posted:

Traditional occultists believe it is a terrible idea to take your own life because you end up in an astral holding pattern for as many years as it would have taken for you to die a natural death. From my experiences talking with dead people, I strongly believe the holding pattern hypothesis is correct. When people die, their etheric bodies stick around for anywhere from 3 days to several months, and that is why the loved ones of the recently dead so often see their ghosts. The Second Death is the term for when the etheric body dies and the rest of the person, including their soul, goes off to deal with the process of the afterlife. When you take your own life, your etheric body dies on schedule, but the astral body is forced to linger as it has literally left its evolution unfinished and dangling like a cliffhanger in a soap opera.

When I was in my teens, I wanted to end my own life despite having talked to the ghosts of dead kids who actually went through with what I only planned. Back then, I didn’t have enough experience talking with dead people to know about the specific nature of astral holding tanks, but nowadays I gather it is much like being trapped in mundane dreams of the sort where you’re anxious, melancholy, bored, and frustrated. I am REALLY glad I did not end my own life as I am fairly certain I would not have escaped a single one of my problems. From what ghosts tell me, all of your unsolved problems are waiting for you in your next incarnation if you are foolish enough to end it. It doesn’t matter if you spend a good 75 years in astral boredom… all you do is delay the inevitable.

If I could go back in time and talk to my severely depressed 15 year old self, I would tell her to do discursive meditation every day and get to the root of her problems instead of running away and projecting the shadow. I would also tell her to pray to multiple gods and to take regular cold showers or baths. Cold water cleanses the etheric body, which helps one to think clearly.

As I have said in past videos, this era is not an easy one in which to be alive. The collective astral plane is basically the bog of eternal stench right now. There are a lot of people in a certain industry that shall remain nameless who profit from mental illness, and often these people think they are helping because it is the blind leading the blind. Depression is to be expected... That said, if you are feeling as bad as I did at 15, I hope the gods bless you and give you the assistance you need.

There was lots of butthurt over the video. Suicide is a sensitive subject.  I knew I would trigger some people, but I did not expect it to get a great deal of attention.  The video got its share of troll comments, including the usual assortment of atheist-materialists demanding that I provide proof and more than one uncritical thinker trying to thought police me for daring to voice an opinion.  Nevertheless, I was willing to field all sorts of trolling because I remember how I felt when I was suicidal and I feel I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble had I taken the advice from future, middle-aged Kimberly.  I hope there is a TikToker out there (a fellow TikToker, ughhhh) who looks at the suicide option and decides not to employ it.  If that happens, every single video from now until whenever will have been worth the annoyance, irritation, and inconvenience.