i wrote and illustrated my own kitchen witchcraft book! potioncraft is an original written + hand-illustrated collection of recipes and rituals for beverages of all kinds. it features recipes for spiced hot cocoa, mulled cider, harvest sangria, and basil lemonade; it also features information on the magick of smoothies, teas, coffee and more. throughout the booklet are beautiful stippled illustrations that create a rustic witch-of-the-woods aesthetic.
the book is $8 and makes an great gift for yourself or another. buy it here. support witches!
I’ve had this blog for over a year now and I feel like a lot of great books get lost in the shuffle so I’m going to be continuously updating this list, arranged by genre, of books I’ve reviewed or recommended (and personally have read)!
So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD
by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.
So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.
To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.
Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”
And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.
Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????
Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.
Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?
My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.
Hey, ADHDers, just a friendly reminder that it’s ok to not be able to read a whole book. It’s ok to skip around in a book, skim over some pages, or only read the dialogue or important parts. That’s ok. That doesn’t make you any less of a reader. I know lots of avid readers and bookworms would probably think, “no, that’s awful, you can’t read a book that way! You’ve got to read the whole thing in order to really appreciate it!” And believe me, I would if I could. But that’s just not how my brain works. So I give myself permission to skip over a part my brain is refusing to pay attention to, or jump around to different parts of the story. And you should, too. That doesn’t make you any less of a fan of the book, either. You should still get to enjoy that book you want to read, even if you have to read it differently because your brain works differently. And you should not think it makes you any less of a reader or a fan.
#PrettyBoy Must Die by Kimberly Reid – A CIA prodigy’s cover is blown when he accidentally becomes an internet sensation, inspired by the #Alexfromtarget story.
96 Words of Love by Rachel Roy & Ava Dash – James Patterson Presents a modern retelling of a classic Indian legend, 96 Words for Love is a touching coming-of-age story that reads like Eat, Pray, Love for teens.
500 Words or Less by Juleah del Rosario – To redefine her reputation senior year, Nic Chen begins writing their college admissions essays. But the more essays Nic writes for other people, the less sure she becomes of herself, and whether her moral compass even points north anymore.
After the Shot Drops by Randy Ribar – A powerful novel about friendship, basketball, and one teen’s mission to create a better life for his family in the tradition of Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers.
A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena – When half-Hindu, half-Parsi school troublemaker Zarin Wadia dies in a car crash with a boy named Porus, no one in her South Asian community in Jeddah is surprised—what else would you expect from a girl like that?
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes by Atia Abawi – After their home in Syria is bombed, Tareq and family seek refuge, first with extended family in Raqqa, a stronghold for the militant group, Daesh, and then abroad.
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