In my last post, I talked about a type of magic we all have access to that’s unbelievably powerful but isn’t what we typically associate with super-natural powers. Now I want to explore the more conventional magic we all hold that’s closer to the Harry Potter variety—it allows us to do the seemingly impossible and transform the world.
Interestingly, though this is a more well-known type of magic, most people think they don’t have it. Even when I describe it in less-fantastical terms like “superpowers,” “zone of genius,” or even “the gifts you have to give the world just by being who you are,” many people assume these are things others possess that somehow skipped over them.
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But everyone has these magical abilities. The trouble is, they can be hard to recognize. Either they come so naturally we assume everyone can do them, or we’re innate aficionados and our standards rise astronomically high, making our own abilities seem nonexistent. Often, it’s because these powers are inherently tied to our limitations, and that’s the only aspect of them we pay attention to.
A bit of all three caused me to miss my own magic for decades.
Mortified
When I was young, I knew exactly who I was. When other girls my age flocked to the nearest baby and cooed over them, I wandered away to see if there wasn’t a more interesting type of animal nearby.
I fed my dozens of stuffed animals Cheerios, cried for a soccer ball I had to leave in a creek for a night, and wrote stories about the magical animals I imagined on my wanders in the woods.
One story was about a boy who shot a deer with his father, then became a different animal one after another until he began to see the world from their point-of-view.
Another was about a bunner—a rabbit with stripes like a tiger—who was one of only five of his kind who remained because humans had killed the rest for their fur.
Still another was about Oscar, an opossum who lived in a great big forest with his mother, father, and sister, and who “was very happy until he found out that his forest was going to be turned into condominiums.”
Subtle? Not exactly. Single-minded? Extremely. Even as I got older, my writing remained sentimental, at times verging on melodramatic.
At the same time, I was accused more than once of being overly sensitive. When I was younger, I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. Then I got depressed in my teens, and while I still didn’t fully understand what it meant to be sensitive, I assumed it must be more than an unfortunate trait—it was starting to feel like a fatal flaw.
After enough time reading between the lines and inventing some of my own, I abandoned the things I’d taken pride in as a child. I stopped writing stories. I hid my love of animals. I retreated to my head and avoided my messiest feelings.
Ironically, it was depression that put me back on a path to my truest, deepest self. Eventually the pain got too big to deny, and with the help of therapy, Al Anon, and time, I reconnected with my emotions, which led me to my intuition, which ushered me straight back to my childhood magic.
This might be the first sign of magic—that it scares most of us enough to make us run away but won’t let go of us no matter how far we get.
Eventually, I realized my single-minded stories, inexplicable love of animals, and sometimes painful sensitivity were gifts. Not only do they bring me alive and fill me with joy, but they allow me to help others reconnect with their lost magic—their own abandoned dreams, their desire to be a part of something greater than themselves, and their beautiful, wounded hearts.
To paraphrase something I’ve said before, my misunderstanding was in thinking I needed to grow out of this magic, when in reality I just needed to grow into it.
How to Recognize Your Super-Natural Skills
If you’re not sure where your unique magic lies or if you want to help others find theirs, here are a few places you can look:
Our Strengths = Our Limits = Our Strengths
Have you ever noticed how your biggest limits are inextricably tied to your greatest strengths?
I have.
My anxiety?
Part and parcel of my strong imagination combined with how much I care about others and the world.
Social awkwardness?
The flip-side of my ability to go deep and sense what may not be obvious at first glance.
Inflexibility?
Nothing more or less than the shadow side of my responsibility and commitment to taking care of what matters most.
I’m not saying we can’t find ways to work more effectively with our limits, but I am a firm believer that growth and positive change come from embracing them more fully, not trying to get rid of them. We can’t get rid of our limits anyway—not without doing away with our incredible strengths as well.
This might be the second sign of magic—its ability to highlight the paradoxes inherent in being human. There’s a hidden power in paradoxes, if we can get big enough to hold them.
The paradox we’re being invited to hold here is that we are amazing and absolutely perfect exactly as we are, and we are also deeply flawed.
The power hidden in this paradox is unconditional love—for ourselves and others—and continuous connection, because if we didn’t have such stark and obvious limits, we might be fooled into believing we can do everything on our own.
What We Resist Persists
Many of my clients claim to have no idea what their calling is, but at some point they remember a path of passion and purpose they started down long ago before giving up for various reasons. Those reasons usually appear as unfavorable circumstances, a lack of opportunities, or an unexpected challenge.
Beneath appearances, however, you can almost always find unacknowledged fear, shame, or grief.
This might be the third sign of magic—that it almost always takes us down roads that lead straight back to our long-buried, little-acknowledged, nearly invisible wounds from the past.
My magic led me to the devastation I felt when I was twelve and my first novel didn’t do nearly as well as all my friends’ short stories in our school’s book contest; to all the times I shared something from my heart or soul and felt judged or rejected as a result; to the many moments when the intensity of my emotions seemed too much for somebody close to me.
I like to think the magic returns us to our wounds so we can heal them.
I imagine it feels bad for us, recognizing how hard it is for humans to be with discomfort, but also knowing that when we avoid the pain, we miss out on all the good stuff too. So it keeps taking us back to the fear, the shame, and the grief so no matter how much we resist or how long it takes, we always have another chance to let ourselves feel the pain, maybe share it with others, and finally discover the compassion at its core.
It’s another paradox—that at the heart of our pain lies our greatest magic and the path to our bliss.
What Sets Us Apart
Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? Like an outsider? Or even an alien?
I have, for much of my life.
What sets me apart used to make me feel inadequate and unworthy. The times when I didn’t see myself reflected in the world around me made me think I must be doing something wrong.
Then I learned not to believe everything I think.
If you just focus on the first half of that sentence—I didn’t see myself reflected in the world around me—you might begin to see what’s really going on.
Tara Mohr speaks to it beautifully in her poem “A You-Shaped Hole:”
Sometimes the world feels inhospitable.
—Tara Mohr
You feel all the ways that you and it don’t fit.
You see what’s missing, how it all could be different.
You feel as if you weren’t meant for the world, or the world wasn’t meant for you,
as if the world is “the way it is” and your discomfort with it a problem.
So you get timid. You get quiet about what you see.
But what if this?
What if you are meant
to feel the world is inhospitable, unfriendly, off-track
in just the particular ways that you do?
The world has a you-shaped hole in it.
It is missing what you see.
It lacks what you know
and so you were called into being.
To see the gap, to feel the pain of it, and to fill it.
Our differences fit like the edges of a puzzle piece into the empty spaces of the world around us.
This truth points to another paradox—that we are both separate from and part of a greater whole. Our magic won’t let us forget we are both singular and special and fundamentally no different from everyone else. The hidden power here is that we have something uniquely valuable to offer and yet at the same time—we belong.
I want to offer a special acknowledgement here to sensitive folks and those viscerally feeling the pain of what’s happening in the world right now. My sense is that though it is rarely appreciated, sensitivity is one of the things most needed in these times. Trauma—sometimes described as the freezing of feelings too overwhelming to feel in the moment—has been passed down for so many generations that it’s the invisible water we swim in. People who feel—who can’t help but feel—the intense energy and emotions swirling around them are often, without realizing it, processing long-frozen trauma on behalf of us all.
It’s another example of how we all use our magic even when we don’t realize it.
It also demonstrates the most magical part of our miraculous powers—that our weird, awkward, and messy magic not only helps us do the impossible, but it’s always exactly—without effort and without fail—the precise thing the world needs most.
What About You?
What do you criticize yourself for most? What magic might these limits be the flip-side of?
What have you avoided, given up on, or abandoned in your life? Might there be some form of pain underneath that’s longing to be healed?
How do you feel you are different from other people? What about the world feels wrong to you? What do people misunderstand about you? What magic might any of this be pointing you toward?
Please share in the comments—I’d truly love to know.
Can you think of anyone who could use some help identifying and claiming their magical powers? Please consider sharing this with them.