I don’t want to sugarcoat what it means, to me, to be a “chaos witch.” A chaos witch is versed in just that—chaos. Chaos is marked by confusion, messiness, and unpredictability. The proverbial “shit storm.” How I became so familiar with it is a long story, longer than this post alone. It’s a story that cycles between feeling like chaos happens to me and feeling like I’m an agent of it myself.

The truth is either both or somewhere in between. One thing is for sure—that truth isn’t so simple.

I graduated from college with a degree in journalism. Why I chose that path makes more sense to me now than it did back then. About 20 years ago, I thought that knowing the facts and reporting the facts created a sense of order. Maybe even predictability. If I could know what at least one variable in the equation was, then I had a better chance of determining the outcome. That felt like power.

And it definitely was some aspect of power that I needed at that time in my life.

When I was 18 years old, I moved as far away from home as I could while still staying in-state. I started my first year at the University of New Orleans in August 2004. During that year away from home, which felt like an entire lifetime, I met one of my very best friends who I still keep in contact with; I was arrested and taken to jail for possession of cannabis; I had my first ankle reconstruction surgery, and I met the man who I would call my partner, many years later, for over a decade. By the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed the city and forced me back to where I had started. At the time of the evacuation, I left with a boyfriend who had tried to choke me in a drunken rage just a few nights prior to leaving. On our way out of town, for reasons I honestly don’t remember, we abandoned his car at a gas station and hoped the storm wouldn’t take it.

I didn’t leave the couch for a week once the storm hit, glued to the news on TV. Those images and stories still haunt me. It was a sickening display of injustice, inequality, abandonment, betrayal, and absence of compassion. And I knew in my core that I was, without a doubt, a lucky one. A privileged one. I struggled deeply with that guilt.

I couldn’t go back. I was too overwhelmed by the fear, the pain, and even feeling like I was cursed myself. A dark and terrified part of me felt like somehow that storm was my fault, as crazy as I knew that was.

Sometimes though, when chaos is such a prevalent force in life, one begins to wonder…am I in this storm, or am I the actual storm?

After making the decision to stay in my hometown, and after another physical altercation, I promptly kicked out the boyfriend who I had evacuated with from New Orleans. I made a promise to myself that I would NEVER accept another man trying to hurt me ever again. I had to fight back, and I was filled with such sacred rage that I wasn’t even afraid to fight, if it came to that. Not anymore. Not after everything I had been through already. I may have had nothing to lose, but I wholeheartedly refused to be a victim of that man.

I was angry. And I knew that anger was justifiable.

So, I did what I still tend to do when I got angry. I rebelled.

I took the next few months off from school, spending most days in a haze of partying, fueled by a variety of illicit drugs and plenty of promiscuous sex. During a three-day blackout, I fell down some steps and reinjured my ankle, which resulted in another reconstruction surgery.

It was around the time of my second surgery that I began to realize something important: chaos within chaos begets more chaos. If you let chaos take the wheel, she will certainly take you on a ride. But at that time in my life, I needed chaos. I needed her more than she needed me.

She said, “Tell me ‘when’.”

Everybody’s limits are different. But at some point, hopefully, you say, “WHEN.”

“When” or die, she’s your ride-or-die. Chaos is true, raw, feral power.

Inside the feral power of chaos, there is a gift that she bestows. There’s this opportunistic, educational moment of stillness. The eye of the storm. When you accept that moment of stillness, you obtain a sense of clarity, be it fleeting or not.

I accepted my moment of clarity. I said, ‘when.” I got my proverbial “shit” together. I enrolled back in school and decided to pursue journalism. I needed a foundation to start. And I needed that foundation to be facts. To be truth.

In that moment, I also realized that I was hungry. I was motivated to make a difference. I was hungry for change in more than one way. That clarity was not fleeting. It would shape who I was, who I am, and who I still want to be.

Chaos would be with me through it all, still with a tendency to drive at times.

Eventually, I would learn another rule of chaos: become a student or be the victim.

Only within that choice would I find the strength to face the storm, and in doing so, become the storm myself.