If you came here wondering what else there is to find on this website, you are not alone, because as I sit down to write this I am also curious to see what I come up with in the next days, weeks, and months.

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The Blog

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​​Having a catalogue of my thoughts over time - whether they be related to my practice of medicine, witchcraft, or more personal thoughts on health, healing, and the world: that was the reason that I created this website originally in 2024. At that time, I already had the Witchcraftd store on Etsy (for running my still-very-small business) as well as the 'Witchcraftd Weekly' page on Instagram (for keeping an entertaining visual record of my projects), but the truth was that Witchcraftd as a concept arose because of a decision I made to re-connect with sources of joy that I had known during earlier times in my life, and perhaps even more importantly to explore for the first time new, potential sources of joy that I had never been able to before.

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First and foremost, this website is a blog, but the topics that I write about (mental health, tarot, veterinary medicine, novelty cakes, and neat bone collections to name a few...) may seem disparate. What I post is not cohesive content nor curated to drive traffic, generate sales, or go viral. From an SEO standpoint, this website is a nightmare. And that is entirely the point.

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If you're interested in learning why the articles on Witchcraftd are so carefully chaotic, as well as why I started journaling online specifically for mental health, you can head over to my "Second First" blog entry and read more of the story here: [futurelink]

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To that end, I knew I wanted to start writing again. And once again I was at the intersection of medicine and magic: scientifically, it is well-documented that the act of journaling daily can be beneficial to the physical and mental wellbeing of the journalist; spiritually, I knew a very real possibility of being re-traumatized loomed on my personal horizon if I put pen to paper again. I felt that the form in which I recorded my feelings and experiences - and with whom I shared them - was going to have at least as great an impact on whether or not I could be helped by journaling as the writing process itself.

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Many years ago, writing had been one of a few things that even as a very young person in a hyper-critical environment I felt confident in my ability to do well. I excelled in written language arts academically, which pleased the people around me (something paramount to my mental and sometimes physical safety), but I also found genuine joy in writing down my thoughts and imaginings. That joy I derived from personal story-telling dissolved almost in a matter of days when, after a violent incident in my household, I tried to defend myself using the only weapon I had  - my voice - and instead of being heard I was sneered at and intimidated in front of older family members who did nothing. I was called stupid and warned that I should "learn how to talk" when the aggressor had no other counter-argument for what I had confronted them with.

 

Hearing that threat, and feeling that shame, I withered.

 

I don't remember feeling motivated to write non-academically, and certainly not feeling the same pride in my own words as I had before that incident, until over sixteen years later. It was not until I was in veterinary school earning my doctorate that I wrote anything for my personal enjoyment again, and it took me another year to share any of my writing with one other person, my sister. After that, I continued to write briefly for myself and for my sister when the demand on my time from school and later work in the veterinary field allowed, but I stopped again following a mental health crisis which left me hospitalized, and a painful departure from a dangerous but previously-loved workplace two years before starting Witchcraftd.

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For me, the impediment to honest expression through words was a fear of the humiliating aftermath - of being misunderstood and then abandoned by people who controlled me and my safety - but only initially. Fear of judgement from others was the starting place of my reluctance to express myself, but against a backdrop of complex, often insidious childhood [and then teen-hood, and then young adulthood...] trauma, that particular incident from my early life that I wrote about above was only one out of a hundred like it. I recognize now it was not even close to the first or last time that I was made to feel shame, punished even for things that would sometimes garner praise in other situations, when my behaviors, interests, or traits suddenly became inconvenient or oppositional to others. Over time, following that incident, I remembered that of course I knew how to talk! I could speak, write, read, and even present to audiences all quite well, actually, and I always had the grades and the praise of teachers and people outside of my family to prove it. So, I came to believe that the issue with communicating was not that I could not express myself well, but that the thoughts and feelings which I had inside me to communicate were wrong. The belief began in childhood but continued for decades, to the point that I ignored blatant abuse in my professional life for eight months before even attempting to speak out about the moral injury and mental suffering that I was enduring in 2023, and why - when confronted only with the nonchalance and dismissal of both the perpetrators and administration that ought to have been in place to protect me and others in my program - that belief was only reinforced, and my instinct was to self-hate and self-harm before it ever was to try and take myself to safety, away from that environment.

 

Self-effacement and denying the validity of my thoughts, feelings, and instincts is something that I was taught to perform on myself, by others, for their benefit. It is something that began in childhood but which I still grapple with constantly. Because the reality is that on most days, no one else is looking over my shoulder to monitor and humiliate me for my every thought and feeling that does not serve others. I have become the one to do that, and now I am trying to put an end to it. 

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While it may seem counter-intuitive that my solution to overcoming criticism for "problematic" thoughts and feelings which upset the status quo is to begin expressing them on an online platform, that is OK. It is OK if my solution to unlearning abuse that I was trained to impose on myself through keeping silent does not look like your own solution might. I also don't believe that journaling (whether it be writing in a diary, blogging, making voice recordings, etc.) is a process which has to be made public to be beneficial, and in fact, I think it's often the opposite case. When journalists become over-concerned about other people's access to or interpretation of their thoughts instead of the therapeutic effects of expressing them in the first place, they tend to anticipate and then fear criticism for their thoughts and shy away from expressing them at all, which is quite sad to me when I consider that journaling is such an accessible and free tool for improving our mental health as individuals. So, while intentionally adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards sharing my journaling process on this blog may seem strange or horrifying, if journaling in any other way helps you to feel and to live better, I hope that you do it. Even if what journaling looks like to you is whispering your thoughts before bed every night just to forget them in the morning, leaving no trace and keeping your practice entirely secret, I hope that you journal in a way that is helpful to you, for you, always.

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That is why I believe it is OK if my words and feelings and experiences that I share on this blog seem disconnected, confuse you, scare you, or make you smile. That is why it is OK if the content that I write means very little to anyone else. That is, as I mentioned at the beginning, entirely my point.