Convention bores me. I've been identified as an anomaly when it comes to the practice of magic, and that's a fairly accurate assessment, because experimentation necessarily involves becoming an anomaly: going outside the traditional boundaries and norms that define the conventional approach to any subject.
I remember when I first really began experimenting with magic. It was when I learned that I'd been diagnosed with bipolar 2 or what is called manic depression. I was diagnosed as well as a potential MPD (Multiple Personality disorder) and schizotypal to boot. And given that I'd spent most of my childhood and teenage years depressed, I think the diagnosis (at least as it applied to bipolar 2) was fairly accurate. The rest of the diagnosis...well while I certainly have a very fluid identity, I'm not sure that qualifies me as MPD, so much as flexible when it comes to how I use identity to navigate life.
As for the schizotypal...they'll give anyone that who believes in magic and displays unconventional thinking, but as Rorschach, in Watchmen says, "Your hands...My perspective" and that's exactly right...My perspective. See it's rather easy to label something, but the perspective you cultivate to deal with that label will determine what that label really means to you. And in my case, when I got the official diagnosis, which confirmed all along a very prevalent problem in my life, I knew something had to be done about it.
I was eighteen when I found out. I looked at my family history and through my mom's side found out that there was a genetic predisposition toward depression. Adding in everything that happened to me as I grew up and my brain was a chemical cocktail for depression. I'd seen the side effects that drugs had on people and althought I was urged to take medicine, I'd lived with depression for so long that I knew I could function. And I didn't want to deal with side effects. I was determined to find an unconventional and permanent solution to my depression, even if it had to occur through will power alone.
I began to experiment with magic, but nothing seemed to work. All of the practices, all the concepts I knew were conventional. Useful? certainly for somethings, but not for curing what seemed to be a biological predestiny. But I never believed in fate, or predestination. I believed in only the magic, and myself, for those were the two constants in my life, but I realized that if I was going to heal myself, I had to go outside of conventional approaches. I had to look for information that you wouldn't find in your average manual on magic. I had to understand more about how the body worked, before I could really interact with it.
Two years later, twenty years old, and reading about meta-programming the human biocomputer by john Lilly and reading Barbara Ann Brennan's energy work model, which included Lilly's work, I realized I had found the start of my journey to heal myself. Adding in Wilson's interpretation of Leary's eight circuit helped me understand the behavior patterns I was stuck in, though it offered little help in actully moving past those patterns. I took all of those approaches and experimented with the concept of energetically travelling into my body and altering not only the electro-chemistry of my brain, but also the genetic structure so that I could change the genetic predisposition. And it worked...suddenly the depression was gone, and there was no bringing it back...I only had to deal with the sudden influx of emotions that I had rarely felt and never understood. The first half of my twenties were very crazy years and even after it took a while to really stabilize...afterall how do you stabilize anything if you don't know how to handle it in the first place? It takes time. And further experimentation.
Of course my experimentation was no longer just to meet a specific goal of healing myself. I also began experimenting further to channel the intensity of the emotions I felt, and also because I was and am driven by a relentless curiousity to see what I can do. I realized that I had a strong foundation in traditional magical practices, but that I wanted more...I wanted to see if I could evolve those practices, reinvent the wheel, continue pushing my limits.
And that's still the case, and it's why I'm so unconventional, why I prefer to look outside the magical toolbox to see what everyone else is playing with and then incorporate that into my magical practices. What makes magic so wonderful isn't just the efficacy of the tried and true techniques, it's the fact that those techniques can be adapted to a wide variety of alternative and unconventional approaches.
your hands...my perspective. My perspective to change my reality. My perspective to take the various disciplines and studies and adapt them to magic, and adapt magic to them. My perspective to push past the limits, to push past convention, to test myself as much as possible as possible for the sheer joy of it, to see what I really can do. Instead of accepting what others tell me as truth, manifesting my own truth through my choices, and through my perspective.
I will always be the unconventional magician, the anomaly, the experimenter, because that is my calling, my role, my self-chosen label, and my desire.