Witchcraft Is Self-Care

Something is stirring.

You can see it in the social media posts and hear it in the conversations over ladies’ lunches. You can feel the energy among the women who never thought of themselves as political, suddenly showing up at school board meetings, at rallies, at kitchen tables with clipboards.

Something ancient is waking up in ordinary women, and it has a name older than any of us: the witch.

Not the caricature with the pointy hat, but the real thing, the woman who sees beyond the facade, who speaks truth, who tends her community and refuses to be silent when the world demands it. Women who never called themselves witches, but stood accused by those in power.

Six hundred years ago, they came for the healers first. The midwives, the herbalists, the women who knew about bodies, about plants, about the turning of seasons. Women trusted by their neighbors, women who held their communities together in hard times.

In every era of upheaval, there is a moment when ordinary women stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start using whatever power they have. That moment is upon us again. And whether you call yourself an activist, an organizer, a concerned citizen, or just someone who can’t look away anymore, you are walking a path that women have walked for centuries.

You are, in the oldest sense of the tradition, walking the path of the witch. Because at its core, witchcraft is the practice of creating change, and effecting change is the heart and soul of activism.

The work of the witch is not an easy task. Maybe you’re feeling drained from pouring your energy into everyone else’s cup. Maybe the daily rituals that once sparked your spirit now feel like another item on a never-ending to-do list. Or maybe, suddenly it all seems trivial in light of what’s happening in our communities.

For most of human history, the witch was not a source of fear, she was a resource for survivial. Every village, every community, had their wise woman. She was the woman you went to when the baby wouldn’t come, when the fever wouldn’t break, when you needed something the priest or the landlord couldn’t give you.

Witches held the knowledge that had been passed down through generations of women, They did not operate outside the community, they offered the skills that held the community together.

So what changed?

The power, and who wields it.

As the Church consolidated its authority, as governments centralized, as the early machinery of what we now call capitalism began to grind into motion, independent women became a problem to be solved.

In systems that benefit from your exhaustion, self-care is not only empowering, it becomes necessary.

The witch trials of the 15th through 17th centuries were not really about supernatural magic. They were about control. About who gets to hold knowledge, who gets to heal, who gets to speak with authority. The women most likely to be accused were the ones hardest to control, widows who owned land, midwives who challened the emerging medical profession, cutting into their profit, and the outspoken women who didn’t look away when something was wrong.

Share Simple Witchery for Everyday Enchantment

If this sounds a little too familiar, it should.

Just look around at what’s happening in our communities right now. Schools are battlegrounds for what children are allowed to learn and allowed to be. Healthcare (especially women’s healthcare) is being legislated and controlled by people who will never worry about access or affordability. Libraries are being defunded. Social safety nets are fraying. The systems that are meant to care for us are failing.

And one by one, neighborhood by neighborhood, women are filling the gap—as they always have. Organizing food drives and mutual aid networks. Showing up for neighbors. Holding space for other people’s fear while quietly managing their own. This is the witch’s work; it always has been.

But here’s what the old ones understood: you cannot tend the needs of others and ignore your own—your rest, your rituals, your connection to something larger than the chaos around you. And yes, even your joy in the spaces between grieving.

Self-care, in its truest form, was never the bubble bath and scented candle version we’ve been sold. It was radical. It was the refusal to be consumed. It was the understanding that your own welfare is not separate from your community’s welfare.

The most countercultural thing a woman can do right now is insist on her own wellbeing. To say, I will show up fully, and I will also rest. I will fight, and I will also tend to myself as carefully as I tend to others. The witch knows that power doesn’t come from depletion, it comes from deeply, stubbornly, and unapologetically thriving in the face of everything that would bind her

We may not all claim the title of witch. Maybe most of us didn’t plan to become the woman who shows up and speaks out. The woman who stays up late reading things that make her heart pound with anger—and with something that might, underneath it all, be hope.

You didn’t apply for this. The world just got to a point where looking away became impossible.

What you’re carrying right now, the worry, the fury, the fierce protective love for your community and your children and the future you can still see even when it feels far away, women have carried before. They’ve carried it in harder times than these, with fewer resources, and with far greater personal risk.

They didn’t have group chats or online organizing tools or the accumulated knowledge of every women’s struggle that came before them. They had each other, and they had themselves, and it was enough. It has always been enough.

You are not starting from scratch. You are picking up a thread that has been laid down for you by women who refused to stay silent. Who healed and were punished for healing. Who gathered and were punished for gathering. Who bore the knowledge of generations and were punished for knowing.

Women who left you something, a thread woven through history, a way of moving through the world that is fierce and tender at the same time, that holds the community in one hand and the self in the other, that understands power not as something you seize but as something to be shared.

That isn’t nothing, it’s everything.

So my dears, tend yourself and tend each other. Show up when you can and rest when you must. Trust that both of those things are part of the same work. The circle is wider than you know. The thread is stronger than it looks.

Something ancient is waking up in the ordinary woman.

That woman is you.

Until next time ~

Blessed Be and Journey Well

If you’ve found yourself unexpectedly stepping into this role, showing up in ways you never imagined, carrying more than you thought you could, I’d love to hear your story in the comments. You are not alone in this, and your experience matters.

This is a free post—if it resonated with you, please consider restacking and sharing on social media. Thank you.

This post is the beginning of a series exploring what it really means to take care of yourself in times like these, We’ll be looking at Self-CARE^TM as a practice: Clarity, Action, Results, and Empowerment. The tools the modern witch actually needs. I hope you’ll stay with me.