Voodoo Dolls

I make little voodoo dolls and sell them at my local witch shop. I had finally gotten my shit together and finished the five dolls I’d been working on, so I was going to get info/price cards on to them and take them down to the shop. Except I couldn’t find the cards after I moved everything around in the living room, and I couldn’t find the usb drive the guy at Fedex had put my template on, so I was really annoyed. I decided to take the dolls down to the store anyway, take back the voodoo doll Reed decided he wanted because he thought it was cute, and use that card to make more cards at Fedex. This seemed like a solid plan.

Yet when I got to Fedex, they said they might be able to send it to their group that does that sort of things and have it back to me in a couple days, but otherwise they didn’t have any way of making more cards for me with the card I already had, especially since there were four variations and a new one I wanted to do for my extra special super blue blood moon voodoo doll. I was extremely annoyed. This should have been a simple trip, and now all I was hearing was why they couldn’t help me unless I wanted it to be days. I decided to leave, with the hope of finding either the usb drive or the damn cards by taking another sweep through my apartment. It’s very tiny, there’s only so many places to hide.

I still didn’t find them, but I did see I have moved the voodoo doll card templates from the usb drive to my computer desktop at some point, so Hooray! I moved them on to a new usb drive and hurried back to Fedex. This is when I had a complete meltdown. The lady there was not interested in helping find solutions for making a new card for the super blue blood moon voodoo doll, and was being so difficult I just said, “Fine, print what I have.” So she printed it out, having seen an example of what I’m looking for when I showed her the one voodoo doll card I had with me, but she printed out a page with too big of a font, not in boxes, and instead just centered on the page. I had to hold my breath at this point because I was so upset. “This is clearly not what I’m looking for,” I said, comparing it to the little card in my hand.

“Well you asked me to print out what was on the drive and this is what printed out,” this awful woman replied.

I was not happy. “Tell me, why is it that last time I was trying to do this a very nice employee not only helped me get them printed out, but helped format them, got them all cut for me, and was supposed to have saved it all in this document so I wouldn’t have problems in the future and yet all I’ve gotten from you guys today is problems?”

“I don’t know, but we don’t normally do that, he must have been going outside of policy.”

“Well then, I will pay for what you’ve printed out and go somewhere else,” I said.

“Well, if this isn’t what you want we’re not going to make you pay for it,” she said.

If this isn’t what I want? This is so far removed from what I want I don’t even know what to say any more other than, “Ok, thank you.”

And I left. I was in a rage. I had been swooping into rages all week. All the depression warning signs were there: comfort eating, an unwillingness to do anything other than eat pistachios in bed while watching Merlin, extreme mood swings – but I’d been ignoring them. I needed to pull it together.

The next day, I found the price cards for my voodoo dolls, tucked away inside a recipe box. I headed off to the witch shop.

Deborah, the wonderful store owner, set me down with some twine and a pencil and I attached cards to voodoo dolls while she told me a story about trying to catch rats that had been rustling around in her basement. She had put out traps, and yesterday had gone up there and discovered she had caught a small squirrel  in the trap. It was still alive but she was worried it was paralyzed. She pried it out of the trap and took it outside, where she covered it with something. This morning she had found it still in the same spot but the cover had blown away and it was being rained on and somehow still alive. Realizing now that it would not survive in the wild, she brought it inside to her basement and put it into a plastic container and put something over it so it couldn’t get out should it decide it was able to and so that her giant dogs didn’t eat it. She said she’d been giving the squirrel coconut oil because she had heard that coconut oil is good for squirrels. Today it seems to be doing better, able to move its arms and legs and hop around but still not fully mobile. I am astonished the poor squirrel lived at all. It didn’t occur to me to ask why she didn’t just take it to a vet until Reed asked me about it later. She also could have called animal control. Who knows how long that poor squirrel suffered unnecessarily, and who knows if it’s going to continue to thrive eating coconut oil in Deborah’s basement, but at least it seems to be doing better and she finally told her husband about it despite concerns he’d react poorly to her new friend being in the house.

After my voodoo dolls were priced and put out on display, I bought some benzoin, bay, and vervain for this Circle Incense in Scott Cunningham’s book on Wicca. I had the other ingredients I needed. I planned to have a big-ass ritual to deal with my depression storm as soon as I got home and was able to prepare everything. I took a shower, put on some peace oil, symbolically swept away negative energy for the room, raised the circle, invoked the god and goddess to banish these negative emotions, wrote them down on parchment and burned them in my cauldron fire, shared a glass of wine with the universe, and called it day. I was exhausted by that point and laid down for a little while, but I felt infused with calm. Reed and I happily watched youtube videos while we did laundry, got some dinner, and watched the last part of the Dune miniseries while I crocheted. This morning I’ve woken up to a fresh start, feeling positive, determined to be my best self against all odds.