Your Word Is Your Wand

Spells You Cast So Often You Forgot You Were Casting Them

I’ve shared before that my mother has addressed me as “Joy-child” for as long as I can remember. I’ve also shared the embodiment that started to take place as I was growing into myself and how I felt a desire to live up to that name.

But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately. Not what the name itself meant to me… but something a little more nuanced.

What was actually happening when she said those words?

Because she wasn’t describing me. She was doing something far more consequential. She was installing something. And I was young enough, and trusting enough, that I received it without question. I just let it in.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time, of course. I only understood it later, when I started reading the new thought authors of the 1900’s.

Florence Scovel Shinn was writing in the 1920s. Self-published, which in that era meant she believed in what she was saying enough to back it herself. The neuroscience didn’t exist yet. The vocabulary we now have for things like neuroplasticity and cognitive self-talk hadn’t been invented. She was working entirely from observation and conviction.

And she was pretty spot on.

What she understood, what she articulated with clarity, is that your word is your wand. That language isn’t a passive record of what is. It’s an active force shaping what becomes. That every time you open your mouth, or let a thought complete itself in your mind, you are not describing your reality.

You are instructing it.

I said this in my first post and I’ll probably say it again. Words are not descriptions of reality, they are instructions to it. Be warned: this is one of my all-time favorite topics.

I have considered myself a writer since I was 11 years old and started writing poetry. I used to read the dictionary for fun. Not kidding. I have been gifted many a dictionary over the years—because I ADORE them. I love, love, love words. I am, indeed, fascinated by etymology, but on a more fundamental level, I love how words sound when you speak them out loud, how they feel when you roll them around in your mouth. The word yes is so fun. The chewiness of the y, the snake-hiss of the s. The energy of acceptance. It’s also three letters and I’m quite infatuated with the number 3. Yes is pretty much a perfect word. I have a long list of pet words. One I find genuinely delightful is the word spell. As in, the thing a witch casts. As in, the letters you arrange to form a word. The same word, doing double duty across two supposedly unrelated domains, because at some point in the history of language, whoever was naming things understood that these weren’t two separate activities at all. That to arrange symbols into words was already an act of power. That language was always magic. We’ve just been doing it so long we stopped noticing.

The true impact of these observations lies in their eternal nature. ‘In the beginning was the Word’—not the thought, not the intention. The word itself, treated as the generative force that called existence into being. And from Hindu tradition, Nada Brahma: the world is sound, a vibration that never actually stopped. Creation as an ongoing act, not a historical one. Every tradition that tried to explain where everything came from reached for language first. We are casting spells constantly. The question is whether we’re doing it consciously.

Think about the language you absorbed in childhood. Not just what was said to you, the nicknames, the assessments, the offhand comments that lodged themselves somewhere permanent, but what was said around you. The sentences that moved through your household like weather. The particular texture of how the adults in your life talked about money, about women, about what was possible for someone like you.

And then think about the internal monologue that started, likely without notice, somewhere in your early years. The voice that sounds so much like your own that you’ve never really questioned whether it is.

Ursula K. Le Guin built an entire magic system on this. In Earthsea, to know the true name of something is to hold power over it. And to be named wrong is to be diminished. It may be fiction, but it’s not fantasy. Toni Morrison was working with a subtler version of the same truth in her book Beloved, the way her characters had to reclaim language that had been used to unmake them. The question underneath both of those bodies of work is the one worth asking about your own reality: whose words did you inherit, and have they elevated your lived experience or undermined it?

Consider the sentences you say on repeat, things like I’m so bad at this, I’ve always been terrible with money, This always happens to me… Did you absorb them from someone else and then mistake them for facts? Have statements like these possibly even gotten tangled up in your identity, who you believe yourself to be at your core? I’m so bad at this isn’t a factual statement. It isn’t a neutral observation you’re making about the world. It’s a performative act. Every time you say it, you’re not describing a reality. You’re reinforcing one. You’re issuing an instruction.

Epictetus said it in the first century: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the opinions about things.’ Ancient Stoicism was, in a very real sense, an early language audit: notice the sentence running underneath your experience, and question whether it’s actually true.

Viktor Frankl arrived at the same conclusion two thousand years later, from inside a Nazi concentration camp. Not as a philosopher with the luxury of contemplation, but as a man trying to survive the unsurvivable. What he discovered in that extremity is that the story you tell yourself about your suffering determines whether it destroys you or defines you. The instruction you give yourself about what happened to you is as consequential as the thing itself. The part of you that has been listening, faithfully, for decades? It believes you. It takes notes. It organizes your experience to confirm what you’ve told it is true.

Cognitive bias is a sneaky beasty. Next time you find yourself entertaining a phrase like I’m so bad at this, just hold it lightly. Maybe contemplate a reframe. When did I decide I was bad at this? Am I inherently bad at it or have I never really given it a solid effort? A child might declare they are bad at something simply because their parents or siblings don’t like it and then carry that with them into the rest of their lives.

Florence Scovel Shinn knew this a hundred years ago, without a single brain scan to support her.

She was writing spells. She just called them affirmations.

I want to be careful here. I am not about to hand you a list of sentences to say in the mirror every morning. That’s not really how this works, and it’s not who we are here. (Real talk: I love intentional affirmations and am not discounting them.)

However, what I’m more interested in is the noticing. The moment before the practice, where you finally hear what you’ve been saying.

Most of us have an inner monologue we’ve never actually audited. Sentences we repeat so automatically, so fluently, that they’ve become invisible. That’s just how I am. I’ve never been the kind of person who (fill in the blank). I always do this. Said so many times they’ve stopped feeling like choices and started feeling like weather. Like facts about the atmosphere.

But they’re not facts. They’re instructions. They’re spells you cast so often you forgot you were casting them.

If words are instructions, then the question worth sitting with, with grace and without urgency, is: what am I currently instructing?

What are the sentences you say most often about yourself, your capacity, your life? Not the ones you say to other people, necessarily, but the ones that run underneath. The insidious, continuous scroll.

And then, more tenderly: whose voice do those sentences originally belong to?

There’s a detail in Genesis that tends to get overlooked. After creation, God brings every living creature to Adam to see what he would call them. Not to confirm what God had already decided. To inquire about Adam’s instinct. The divine doesn’t name the world. The human does. That’s a striking delegation of power. The authority to name things, to define what they are, handed over completely.

I truly don’t think my mother understood the gift she gave me. The prayer she prayed over me. She addressed her daughter as Joy-child for a decade before that daughter had any idea what to do with the name.

Eventually, I grew into it.

Not because the word made me joyful by force. But because being spoken to that way, from the very beginning, gave me a self to grow toward. A shape to move into. An instruction I didn’t have to fight my way out of first.

That’s what the right language does. It doesn’t manufacture a feeling. It creates a direction.

You’ve been receiving instructions your whole life. Some of them belong to you. Some of them were never yours to begin with.

The assignment here, if you’re game, is just starting to tell the difference.

P.S. I wasn’t exaggerating in my first post when I said I wasn’t an inherently joyful child. My mother’s photo collection is littered with shots just like this one. Though, to be fair, my son is convinced I was just unhappy about my outfit. 😉