diary
The serene, candlelit, gratitude-journal iteration of manifesting never once adhered to me. I would inscribe ‘I am open to abundance’ in agreeable handwriting and feel precisely nothing, as though leaving a voicemail for a deity who screens their calls and has, frankly, weightier matters to attend to.
The difficulty, I have concluded, was one of volume. I was raised, as most of us are, to want quietly: to render my desires small and apologetic and easily retracted the moment they encountered resistance, so that no one might ever accuse me of having wanted too loudly and lost.
So now I bellow what I want at red lights instead. Windows up, naturally; I am unhinged, not a menace. ‘I WILL finish the thing.’ ‘I am DONE waiting to be selected.’ The gentleman in the adjacent lane has witnessed things he will decline to raise at dinner.
And the results are, disconcertingly, comparable. Superior, perhaps. There is something in articulating a want at full volume that strips the shame clean from it. A whispered desire is one you have already half-forsaken, the escape hatch propped open. A shouted one has nowhere to conceal itself, and neither, suddenly, do you.
The decorous version was a supplication the universe could never discern over the din of my own doubt. This one is no supplication at all. It is a declaration, and the distinction is that a declaration presumes to be answered. I am finished bargaining with a silence I constructed myself.
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