accidental spells

something weird happened !!! (how I manifest)

I’m exposing my algorithm here, and this might be enhanced by the fact it’s January, but every time I open Instagram at the moment I get a new piece of advice along the lines of: ‘Here’s how you ACTUALLY manifest in 2026 with this oNE new visualisation technique girlbosssss !!!! INSTANT RESULTS xoxoxoxo’ Each post I see seems to contradict the one before it, and, predictably, I’m eating it up.

The current iteration of ‘manifestation’ (which I privately believe in but publicly think is bullshit) resembles a prayer a bit too closely for my liking. But, that being said, I’m nothing if not part-spooky-woo-woo-girl and part-optimisation-bro, so this kind of delusional yet aspiration content is heavily appealing to me. There seems to be a dramatic increase in its popularity recently, and that probably has a lot to do with the hopelessness of the world right now. It’s unsurprising that our collective anxiety has resulted in an obsession with controlling the few things in our power, e.g. our individual habits and goals. Manifestation is has been the extremely marketable answer to our pursuit of control / ownership for a while now, and at least it’s kind of a fun one. If we’re honest, it mainly revolves around aggressive daydreaming, writing down your goals, making collages of things you want etc etc.

I guess, in its essence, ‘manifestation’ means: getting something that you wanted. Whether that’s achieved by some universal power or through an active strategy and pursuit seems vaguely important, but not really. In my experience, once I’ve attained the thing I wanted, I don’t really care too much about what caused it. It simply becomes another thing that I have.

To me, there are two categories. I can think of so many things that I wanted and actively worked towards achieving, which I guess could be attributed to manifestation in the sense that I brought it into existence. But, the category that is more interesting (and what my algorithm is talking about) contains the more ephemeral, spooky, weird, and wtfffff??? instances where you get something you wanted in a way that it unexpected or unexplainable.

An example from my life:

A few years ago I was really angry with a guy I knew. I was listening to a lot of Doja Cat at the time, specifically her album Scarlet. I really loved (and still love) the song Wet Vagina, and wrote down one particular lyric from that song in my notes app. I wasn’t writing it down with anything in mind. I just thought it was funny. The lyric was: ‘all that stressin’ ‘bout me has been giving you acne.’ Then I forgot all about it.

A few weeks later, when I saw this guy again, he told me that he had the worst acne breakout of his life; something that had never happened to him before. He’d always had clear skin, and never had any problems, and now he didn’t know what was happening. Listen: I obviously knoooow there was no way this could have been my fault, and writing down that lyric could not have caused his acne, but I did feel really guilty for a while. And, either way, it was just weird.

Me listening to Doja Cat

This is my most recent example of an ‘accidental spell’ that I did, or just something weird happening that I can’t really explain. It’s less delusional than the Doja Cat/acne incident because it was something that I was actively pursuing, but I still can’t really articulate what changed. I’ve included it as a voicenote because it’s slightly niche…

Lol this is literally me right now… (this won’t make any sense unless you’ve listened to the voicenote…)

Thank you sooooo much for reading!!!!

Sephy x