Apparently, I’ve entered the part of my life where I’m making herbal tea, reading books about witches, finding old brass bells tucked away with things I’d forgotten about and paying attention to the way the silver in my necklace tarnishes against my skin. I’ve been making moon water. I say hello and goodbye to my house. Sometimes I feel like my mother is nearby.
None of this feels particularly strange to me.
What does feel strange is realizing how much of what I’ve called intuition over the years probably wasn’t intuition at all.
Sometimes I’ll be sitting across the room from Nick while he’s buried in his phone, notice that his tone is slightly different and immediately wonder if I’ve done something wrong.
That isn’t intuition.
I’m finally learning the difference, although it’s taken me a while because the two can feel remarkably similar. My gut reacts to both, but I’ve started paying attention to where the feeling goes from there. Anxiety travels upward and sits on my chest like a cat without the comfort of purring. It wants my attention immediately and usually makes me busy. I clean something. Fix something. Manage something. I start mentally working through every possible explanation until I find one that makes me feel like I have some control over whatever hasn’t even happened yet.
Intuition is quieter. It makes me stop and notice. It’s more like something passing through or catching my eye from the peripheral instead of standing directly in my path demanding to be dealt with. I’ve spent enough time in therapy to realize that some of what I called intuition over the years was actually a trauma response dressed up in much prettier clothes.
I don’t think there’s one moment when I became someone who needed so badly to understand things in order to feel safe. I can remember being a little girl sitting in a car on the side of a highway in Germany while my dad held his shirt against my mother’s head. She’d been feeling nauseous and asked to get out of the car, then tripped and cracked her head on the curb. Eventually, that accident led to the discovery of an AVM.
Life was unpredictable after that. We were an Army family, so moving was already normal, but then there were doctors everywhere too. At one point my parents left Panama together for Walter Reed and only my dad came home. There were custody issues with my biological father, courts, therapy and adults with different versions of the same events. I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older that everyone can have their own version of the truth, and there are things I’ll probably never completely understand.
Maybe making sense of things became my way of making them feel less capable of surprising me. If I knew what was happening, maybe I could prepare for it. If I could prepare for it, maybe I could control it. And if I could control it, maybe it couldn’t hurt me.
The funny thing is, I was also raised by a woman who believed there were plenty of things we couldn’t explain. My mother was deeply religious, but she was also incredibly intuitive. She had vivid dreams and would write them down. The more vivid they were, the more likely she thought they were to come to pass, although she didn’t always know when or where. Déjà vu was normal enough in our house that neither one of us thought much of it. She believed the body was a vessel and that the spirit continued after it was finished with it.
Somewhere in my childhood was also her copy of Erica Jong’s Witches. I remember looking through it and being simultaneously fascinated and terrified. Some of the illustrations frightened me even in broad daylight, which obviously did nothing to stop me from continuing to look at them because apparently I’ve always been like this.
So this interest I have now in herbs and rituals and nature and whatever we want to call magic isn’t really new. I’m reading Magic Lessons right now, which is probably feeding it, but I think I’m mostly giving myself permission to be curious about something that’s always been there.
I’m certainly not abandoning logic. I literally turned down a substitute call this week because I needed to get bloodwork done to check my hormones and cortisol. I know why silver oxidizes. I believe in medicine and science. I’m just not convinced that knowing how something works automatically makes it less wondrous.
Along the way, “Momma’s magic” became part of Evelyn’s bedtime ritual. It started because an overtired toddler spiraling at bedtime needed help regulating herself while her mother was simultaneously learning how to regulate herself in real time. Emotional regulation is apparently something elder millennials raised by Boomers get to learn alongside their preschoolers. That’s convenient.
I put my hands against Evelyn’s cheeks and tell her, “Momma’s magic keeps you safe. Momma’s magic helps you sleep.” Now she asks for two handfuls.
I know there are perfectly reasonable explanations for why it works. Her mother’s hands are on her face. It’s familiar. She knows what’s coming. She feels safe and her body settles. But knowing that doesn’t make the ritual feel any less magical to me. When I put my hands on her face, I’m intentional about what I’m giving her. I’m giving her my love, safety and protection. I believe it. She believes it.
That’s Momma’s magic.
The more I’ve paid attention to rituals like that, the more I’ve realized we’re all creatures of ritual whether we believe in magic or not. We make our coffee the same way. We kiss people goodbye. We have bedtime routines with our children. We light candles for people we’ve lost. We put candles on a birthday cake, silently make a wish and blow out the flames, and somehow we’ve collectively decided that particular tradition isn’t witchy as hell.
We practice ritual constantly. I think what I’m becoming interested in is doing it intentionally.
When I make moon water, light a candle, cleanse a space or brew a cup of tea, I’m doing it with intention. I even say hello and goodbye to my house when I come and go. Maybe that sounds strange to someone else. I’m okay with that. For me, magic works because I believe in what I’m doing. If I’m cleansing a space, I’m setting out with the intention of clearing energy that doesn’t belong there and making room for what I want to welcome in. If I’m seeking healing, I’m deliberate about the energy I’m bringing into that practice.
I breathe in. I choose the energy I am accepting, and I let go of what is not mine.
The more I’ve sat with that sentence this week, the more I’ve realized this whole thing is really about energy. What I bring into a room. What I take from it. What belongs to me and what doesn’t. What I give to the people I love. What I allow myself to receive.
There have been times in my life when that quieter kind of knowing has stayed with me. Falling in love with Nick wasn’t a huge whirlwind thing. It happened easily, which might actually be why I spent so much time trying to stop it. There were complicated lives surrounding both of us, children involved and plenty of reasons to question whether loving someone automatically meant you were supposed to build a life with them.
I remember sitting at work on my lunch break one day and calling my dad. I don’t call my dad to talk about love. I certainly didn’t then. But I asked him why he’d chosen to marry my mother. She already had two children. Loving her meant helping raise them and choosing an entire little family that existed before him. I wanted to know why he loved her enough to choose all of that.
“How could I not?”
Months later, a friend of mine had a much less sentimental conversation with Nick. She was protective of me and my children and basically told him it was time to shit or get off the pot. She asked him why he loved me and why he was sticking around if he wasn’t going to move forward and build this life with us.
Nick didn’t know about the conversation I’d had with my dad.
“How could I not?”
Ten years ago, I probably would have spent an entire paragraph trying to explain what I think that means. Now I think I can just say that I noticed it, it stayed with me, and I don’t need to decide whether it was coincidence or something more for it to mean something to me.
I’ve had to learn that with my mother too. The day she died, Emily asked me to stop and see her and something in me said not to. I’ve revisited that decision plenty of times, especially because of my EMS background. The medical examiner eventually gave me the practical reality: unless I’d been sitting right there when her heart went into that fatal rhythm, there wasn’t anything I could have done.
Instead, my last memory of her alive is from that morning. My dad had brought breakfast home from work. She was happy. We were together.
I don’t know what kept me from stopping later. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was my mother. Maybe it was simply one decision that happened to leave me with a kinder final memory. For someone who likes an answer for everything, I’m becoming surprisingly comfortable saying I don’t know.
Maybe I don’t have to understand every energy I feel. Maybe I just need to become more intentional about what I do with it.
Tuesday night, I got to experience the beautiful side of that.
Nick and I went to see Of Monsters and Men, and music has always been a kind of ritual in my life. There are songs I return to over and over through completely different seasons of myself. Florence + the Machine and Of Monsters and Men have taken me through more journeys than I could probably count. Nick calls them the soundtrack that plays on repeat rent free in my mind, which is accurate. I can listen to the same song hundreds of times, know every word, and then hear it one night from a completely different place.
I went into that room ready to be there. Not to figure anything out. Not to heal anything. Not to manage anything. I wanted to hear music I love with the person I love, and I let myself be completely present for it.
Then they played Crystals.
I’ve heard that song more times than I could count, but that night I wasn’t just singing along. I felt it. I was in my body. I was in the room. I was beside Nick. I wasn’t anticipating what might happen next or paying attention to anyone else’s energy. I wasn’t trying to understand the feeling while I was having it.
I just let myself have it.
When we got back to the car, my heart was so fucking happy. I had that incredible concert high where everything in your body feels alive, but there was something underneath it too. I felt emotionally whole. Not because something needed to be repaired or because I’d figured something out. I think I was simply safe enough to feel all of it.
I could breathe deeply.
Wednesday, apparently, my body decided that was enough personal growth for one week.
I rolled out of bed in the same sweatpants I’d put on for the ride home from the show and stayed in them all day. I didn’t wash my face. I didn’t take my morning walk. I napped when Evelyn napped and went for acupuncture and scraping on my back that evening. Nick worked from home and took Evelyn to the park while I handled a parenting situation that needed my attention sooner rather than later.
And I let that be the day. No guilt about the walk. No convincing myself I should be productive because Nick was working. My body needed recovery, so I gave it recovery.
That’s energy too.
Then Thursday gave me the practical exam.
Without sharing details that aren’t mine to share, Nick and I had a difference of perspective about something he was doing. I had concerns. He felt like I was being critical instead of supportive. And we landed in one of those places we’ve found ourselves before, where I think support and honesty can coexist and he sometimes experiences my concern as evidence that I’m not supporting him.
It made me realize there’s another part of intentional energy I hadn’t really considered. It doesn’t mean only allowing pleasant things into the room. It doesn’t mean pretending I don’t have a concern because acknowledging it might change someone else’s mood. Sometimes something uncomfortable is true and I’d rather acknowledge it than spend my energy pretending I don’t see it.
Nick and I are different this way. There are times when I think he’s better able to put uncomfortable pieces aside so he can enjoy what’s directly in front of him. I tend to want to look at them, talk about them and understand them. Sometimes what feels like honesty to me can feel like negativity to him. What feels like protecting an experience to him can feel like avoidance to me.
I’m learning that I don’t have to resolve that difference by abandoning my own perspective. I can support someone and still have concerns. I can be excited for them and say something they don’t particularly want to hear. I can care that my honesty hurt someone’s feelings without deciding the existence of those feelings means I shouldn’t have been honest.
The harder part comes afterward, because that’s when I feel the energy change.
This morning there was a quiet walk with the dogs. Small talk. Short answers. A silent car ride. I could feel myself chasing interaction, trying to get some kind of reassurance or warmth before we went our separate ways.
I know this dance.
My old instinct is to fix the atmosphere. Ask another question. Explain what I meant. Make sure we’re okay. Create the loving interaction I want us both to have so neither of us walks away feeling disconnected.
But I was there. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t withholding affection to punish him. I wasn’t trying to ruin anything. I was present and available while also continuing with my own morning, and he was having feelings of his own.
I can care that his feelings were hurt without taking responsibility for everything he does with those feelings afterward.
That is fucking hard.
Because I love him. Of course I want him to leave knowing that. Of course I want the warm goodbye. Of course I don’t want him somewhere later feeling sad that we didn’t have more loving interaction before he left.
But I also can’t manufacture connection by myself.
I can reach toward someone without chasing them. I can be supportive without becoming silent. I can listen without surrendering my own perspective just to restore the energy in the room. Someone’s feelings can matter to me without automatically becoming mine to fix.
Maybe that’s part of why writing has become such an important ritual for me too. It gives me somewhere to put the emotional output long enough to actually look at it. I can ask myself what was mine and what wasn’t. Was I acting from anxiety? Was I being honest? Was I trying to control an outcome? Is there something I need to own, apologize for or do differently?
And sometimes, after all of that, I still arrive at the same place I started. I just arrive there without carrying everybody else’s feelings with me.
Tuesday night and Thursday morning couldn’t have looked more different, but I think I’ve been practicing the same thing.
Tuesday was allowing energy in.
Thursday was allowing energy to stay out.
That’s what I’m starting to understand about intention and ritual. The ritual itself doesn’t have to be extraordinary. I’ve listened to those songs before. I’ve made tea before. I’ve lit candles before. I’ve walked the same roads and put my hands on Evelyn’s cheeks hundreds of times. We’re creatures of ritual. We return to the same songs, the same practices and the same little comforts over and over again.
What changes is the energy we bring to them.
Practicing intentional magic isn’t giving me control over what happens next. It’s choosing how I enter the moment I’m already in. What I bring with me. What I’m willing to receive. What I give back. What I allow to move through me and what I refuse to carry.
I can believe in medicine and still make herbal tea. I can understand exactly why putting my hands on Evelyn’s cheeks comforts her and still believe there’s Momma’s magic in there too. I can feel someone else’s energy without making it mine. I can love someone without managing everything they feel. I can speak honestly without needing immediate agreement.
And apparently I can wear the same sweatpants for an unreasonable amount of time in the name of healing.
It’s a practice. I’m practicing.
I breathe in. I choose the energy I am accepting, and I let go of what is not mine.
Some days that means breathing all the way in.
And some days it means letting someone else’s breath belong to them.
Continue the conversation
If today’s essay felt like someone put words to something you’ve been carrying, I think you’ll find a little more of yourself in The Unguided Woman.
It’s not a roadmap. It’s an honest conversation about perimenopause, identity, grief, and finding your footing again when life feels unfamiliar.
Download The Unguided Woman here.
Leave a Reply