Alicen's Magickal Diary: The Timeline Destruction Ritual
Sometimes our most powerful magick... is the magick we forgot we did LOL
The Box
I moved to Asheville, NC 4 months ago. As I sorted through my belongings in preparation for the move, I came upon a box.
This wasn’t just any box. This was The Box, which held all the spiral-bound notebooks where I’d hand-written a fantasy saga in my early teen years. The main character of this series was a supergirl with magick powers — and of course, she was me.
I was a sad kid. No need to recount every detail of my childhood; just know that it was dark. So these stories were my escape — my chance to experience power, while living in a home where I otherwise felt powerless.
Back when I wrote these stories, it was my highest aspiration to be a published author — and this fantasy series, I thought, would be The Thing That I Published and Got Super Rich From, like JK Rowling with her Harry Potter series.
Even my family seemed genuinely impressed with these stories (well, the not-sexy parts that I allowed them to read 🙃), so they encouraged me. They could see it, too.
“I see this being a movie!” my mom said. Dad agreed.
“This series could be a bestseller,” my Grandma said. This was serious feedback, because Grandma is a book connoisseur.
My grade-school friends would demand to see the newest pages of whatever story I was working on — which, as you might imagine, gave me quite the ego boost.
So for a long time, I took for granted that the massive success of this book series was my one-and-only inevitable future. Hence, I lugged The Box of my stories with me everywhere I moved to, including 5 different NYC apartments and 3 different U.S. states.
Even long after I shifted focus to writing the essays you now know me for, and had this box idling in a deep corner of my closet, it seemed “wrong” to get rid of The Box — because “What if?”
What if, one day, I did decide to publish these stories and get Super Crazy Fucking Rich off them?
What if getting rid of them would have negative metaphysical consequences, like bringing my trajectory towards writing success, to a halt?
…But today, looking back, I am so fucking glad I never published those books.
In fact, before moving to Asheville, I ritually destroyed every single one of those books in a shredder.
Here’s why: