Obligatory newbie post

Hello everybody,

My name is Mina, and I'm looking for friends/ conversation/ more experienced vampires.

I first became aware of psychic vampirism several years ago when I was doing archetype work with some friends (Caroline Myss' Sacred Contracts, if anyone is familiar). I put the Vampire in my Chart without question - the Vampire has always been an important archetype in my life - and was very surprised at how my friends reacted. Whereas I have always seen the Vampire as an empowering archetype, they reacted as though it was something I needed to "address". I noticed - they didn't question me about it - it was instead like they finally had the open invitation to stage an intervention.

One of my friends gave me Belanger's Codex. Reading it, I felt pretty good. I was able to understand myself as a vampiric entity for the first time. I didn't have any other literature so I just sort of carried on drifting. I found people to feed on, but struggled with how to handle their obsessions with me. I noticed I did not like to spend time with "sickly" people, and I did not like ambient feeding because of how sickly a lot of humans are. I noticed I liked going dancing, and the energy in clubs. So I have just been navigating my own way. I didn't talk to my friends much about it. Seriously, every time I mentioned the Vampire they'd say, "You mean your disempowered shadow side?" They really can't understand the Vampire as an empowered archetype.

Then I went back to university, and I found myself separated from my two primary energy donors. This is the main reason I've started looking for others who may have more experience than me. First I noticed that I felt "starved" even though I was eating plenty. I would go out to bars, literally hunting, and almost anyone was good enough. I don't seem to produce a lot of energy by myself, so when I tried to rein in my hunting, I think I started acting out in ways that would cause high-energy chaos (well, I guess I can call it drama) to try and feed off that. I was really struggling to ground myself. I made a big mess. Someone very important to me has been really badly hurt. And I just feel like I have been completely irresponsible about my own nature. Everyone talks about psychic vampirism as some floofy dark-Wiccan thing, but I've come to believe that if you really are a vampire, you have to take it seriously. So I decided I couldn't let grounding exercises be optional anymore. I've started doing them every single day. And I decided to go in search of others. I think I need to educate myself on how to be a responsible vampire.

I read a lot on your site before I joined, and I know you all take it very seriously, so if I've made any dumb mistakes in this post, please chalk it up to inexperience talking about this stuff, and nothing disrespectful.

Thank you for reading,
Mina

Hello Mina and welcome to the community. You made no dumb mistakes in your post and don't worry about such things, just feel free to express your opinions, doubts and questions. Something we always say here is that we're all learning. We're not that kind of pretentious know it all forums, even though we do have very experienced users among us that have a vast knowledge to share and teach.
You mentioned reading Michelle Belanger's Psychic Vampire Codex so I think you should try reading Luis Marques's Asetian Bible and understand the tradition where Belanger drew many of her first ideas about energy vampirism. The Aset Ka is the original source in terms of tradition and history that brought us metaphysical vampirism beyond that nasty idea of vampires being broken and just harassing people around them by stealing their energy and emotions. It was the first positive outlook on vampires, pretty much as you explained identifying with it as an archetype of empowerment as opposed the classical ideas of vampires having a spiritual or magickal problem.
Either way and independently of what you identify with please go ahead and join our discussions, looking forward to read about your take on things.

Thanks for the welcome Jonathan; as per your suggestion I found the Asetian Bible on ebay. I can definitely believe that this is the source material for the Psychic Vampire Codex. I have been reading some of the links to Marques' articles that show up in some threads, and I feel as though there are gaps in Codex, almost like some things got deemed unimportant. But those pieces of information have been wonderful for me. They just make the picture a bit more complete. So I'm really looking forward to the book!

Welcome, Minaethiel.

Hello, welcome (belatedly) to the forum.

Hello Kalb and Rhea; thank you for the welcome!