Impractical Magic

AKA growing up to be manifest destiny's child

I have never been a list person. This is mostly because I have never been a forgetful person for most of my life. That is, until adulthood foisted the responsibility of multi-tasking upon me, and small tech offered the ability to do it all more easily while distracting my brain from doing anything at all. There are countless planner notebooks and organization task management apps to fulfill your lifestyle management needs. Organizing your lifestyle is a lifestyle choice in and of itself. Look at all my little tasks. Look at what I did today.

I find it only slightly humbling, the amount of tech and stationery that promises to shepherd me along to being a responsibly productive person, or at least appearing like one. People love lists, though. The Internet will read anything — anything — if it’s in a list.

Here is the thing, though: Doing healthy little habits is perhaps the widest gateway to “feeling better,” something I categorically downplay to the detriment of my health, mental or otherwise. Imagine my surprise to learn that list-writing is a big advocate for mental health. It’s pretty much the entire physical practice of manifesting, a concept I don’t take all that seriously as I simultaneously wonder whether I’m missing out by not taking it seriously (like Succession or Phoebe Bridgers).

Manifesting, as I know it, relies on the sheer force of earnest belief that you’ll get what’s coming to you if and when it’s meant to. But passive desire is an oxymoron to me. Because desire is not passive. It’s arrogant, egocentric, demanding, obsessive, and it never ever knows when to quit.

So I guess the most chill way you can handle a desire is to give ye olde universe a list of demands and say it like you deserve it so that the universe knows you mean business. Cultivating your wants can be a kind of personal spirituality in that way. As the general rule goes, nobody gets what they don’t believe in. No fakers allowed.

Manifesting is not passive, though. Because there are lists involved. A friend told me, “you have to make a list and you have to be specific.” Of course, I immediately thought of Sally Owens’ Amas Veritas love spell in Practical Magic:

“He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards. He can flip pancakes in the air. He'll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he'll have one green eye and one blue.”

I know what you’re thinking because I am also thinking it as well…

She just described David Bowie! Right down to the heterochromia. And seeing as in the film, her man recipe was concocted with impossibility in mind, this is a great choice because what are the odds of two Bowies existing in this same universe? Clever girl.

But as cinematic law decrees, if a little witchy girl casts a self-preservation love spell, she will grow up to be Sandra Bullock, and she will get her Impossible Man™. This is a great example of manifesting because no one tells you that sometimes it really does take the lifespan from Camilla Belle to Sandra Bullock to happen, and also that when it finally arrives, you’ll probably have forgotten that you had in fact manifested it so long ago, and — wah-là (kind of like my probiotic supplements monthly subscription).

“This kiss, THISS KISS (unstoppable)” ヾ(´〇｀)ﾉ

That’s where it gets tricky. You can square-dance around any subject, lining out its finer points and qualities without ever naming it. But it must be named. For some, the biggest barrier to satisfaction is admitting to themselves that they want that thing. I don’t mean like a hot dog or whatever it is people line up outside of the Supreme store for — I am talking about your heart’s deepest yearnings. Wants indicate places of lack, and lacks have a tendency to trigger all those feelings of inadequacy and questionable self-worth. You can’t define yourself by what you are not, yet we do this all the time and it’s never not a bummer. To aspire to what you don’t feel worthy of is a very personal form of illogic that chooses to opt out when faced with uncertainty in order to avoid rejection. Sounds like self-sabotage to me!

Maybe consider it this way: your desires want to be wooed and made to feel wanted. They must feel that they have a place in you to land. Much like any love of yours, if they don’t feel that they are truly wanted and that you’re ready to receive the entirety of them, they get cold feet. I identify with desire in that way. I go where I’m enthusiastically welcomed and leave when I feel I’ve overstayed. Sometimes I wonder if our wants ever resent us for not believing in them, or for taking them for granted once we have them. I wonder if they take it personally — fulfilling our expectations only for us to realize that we needed something else instead, perhaps something we already had.

This is where lists come in handy, to get your shit down straight — no critical inner voices to shoo away, just ink on paper. I am writing my list like an invitation. I’m surprised with how easily it lengthens into a poem, and then a spell, and then a song. It’s a different kind of daunting because there isn’t really much at stake except for my belief in the universe’s system of cosmic bureaucracy and that I, too, can be a child of manifest destiny. It’s the intention that requires the courage and discipline — leaving a light on and keeping a cozy space vacant for those little wants to wander home, hoping that they also believe their home is me.