Magic with a k

I went to my first rave in February of 2009. I had a cursory interest in electronic music, but was never very close to the pulse of it to like anything beyond what I occasionally heard on the radio. Finding new music, especially something so underground (at the time) was hard back then.

A person I was in the dorms with in college, contacted me out of the blue one day and asked if I wanted to go with him to a rave in San Francisco. He also asked if I wanted to try MDMA. Up until that point I had only ever drank and smoked pot, but I was definitely open to trying more. Afterall, I styled myself, at the time, as a burgeoning gonzo journalist, and I felt it was time to jump down the rabbit hole.

To this day there is no single event in my life that I can point to that changed me so much. After that night, where I danced with abandon for the first time, heard music that I really connected with, and talked to strangers without a care in the world, I was forever changed. What followed was a decade and a half of learning about myself, about others, and truly becoming a better person.

What was, in the beginning, just a thing I loved to do on weekends, where I’d see people I only met in the dark and on drugs, eventually became a career. After getting my journalism degree in 2012, I decided to pivot into doing event lighting. My roommate at the time (who I met through raving) was tired of seeing me struggle to find work as a writer, and decided to show me the ropes as a stagehand. After that, it was nothing but concerts and festivals for a very long time.

Life, as it does, got in the way eventually. I stopped working shows after the pandemic. I was incredibly burned out, and having a few years to sit with myself, realized I couldn’t handle the stress anymore. I was drinking too much, was suicidal, and needed a change. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you know what that change was, but even that took a few years to come about after formally leaving the event industry.

Last weekend I went to a rave in the woods that was attended by mostly trans people. I haven’t been to a proper rave, and especially not a renegade, in a long time, and it was one of the things I was very excited to do since I started transition and was really feeling better about myself. In very me fashion, I showed up being rather curmudgeon-y. As the night wore on I started to get into it, and, mid-conversation with my friend, I stopped.

“Did you suddenly realize this is what it’s all about?” She asked.

I had. There is something magical, and not card magic, but magick, with a k, about being in a place like that. You’re all together, dancing, enjoying your life, surrounded by nature, and you truly feel like what you’re doing matters.

On the surface, you’re just a bunch of people in the woods, or in a warehouse, or an arena, listening to a bunch of computer music with bright lights, but there is an intention to something like that. It doesn’t always happen. I’ve certainly been to electronic shows that felt more like a concert, especially some of the larger ones, but the intimacy of a bunch of people sweating together in a warehouse, or doing a bunch of drugs in the woods, becomes a sort of synergistic feeling that vibrates outward like the gravity waves from a collapsing star.

So that’s why I do it. That’s why I make art, that’s why I love people, and make space, and why I get so mad at the world when it doesn’t see things the way I do. We as a species are at our best when we’re together. We are all parts of a greater whole, and all I hope is that one day we figure it out. Until then, as long as there are trans people dancing in the woods to bleeps and bloops, that hope will remain.