A Spell for Reviving Recklessness

I promised you spicy spells for spring, and this one doesn’t disappoint!

It’s a simple one, but it’s really fucking powerful.

It will help you shake off the fixed identities you’ve been stuck in,

and imagine all the other things you can try, you can do, you can BE.

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Make Magic:

Remember, my love, that you are a brilliant and multifaceted jewel.

No matter how long you’ve been zoomed in

on being just One Thing,

you can always pull back to witness and honor

your whole sparkly, shining self.

Transcript: A Spell for Reviving Recklessness

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I'm your host, Natalie Miller, and I'm so glad you're here. 

Hello there, my friend. Okay, I promised you spicy spells for Spring, and I am hoping this one will not disappoint. Today's spell is a spell for reviving recklessness. So, here's what I mean: Once upon a time, I was a young woman who was so intent on traveling and experimenting and trying things out. Like, once upon a time, I graduated from college, and the first thing I did was move to Costa Rica. I wanted to have better conversational Spanish. I wanted to live abroad. I—I don't know, I really didn't have a lot of strategy in the choice. I just—it was something I really wanted to do. I was 21. I was thinking I'll probably apply to graduate school, eventually. I gotta make some money, but that shouldn't be too hard, and I up and went. 

I remember I flew there on the 4th of July, and then I proceeded to do things like go to Cuba before it was okay for people from the United States to go to Cuba, and to later up and move to Berkeley, California because, I don't know, this internship kind of sounded cool, and I could probably teach aerobics at the Y, right? That's like—I was reckless. In the best way, right? I just was free wheeling. 

And listen, I had the great privilege to be able to do that. Yes, I had to support myself, but I didn't have to support anyone else, and I didn't have huge student loans at that point, so I was very fortunate in those ways. But even bigger than that, I just wasn't really bound by any particular identity. I was in a place where I was exploring who I could be, and so even when I did start to have more responsibilities in my later 20s, that's still what I was doing. I was like, “I guess I'll quit graduate school. I don't like it,” not really thinking about the repercussions. Or, “Yeah, this job in New York sounds fun. I guess I'll just take it,” not really worried about if I could actually do it or not, just like, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” 

So, some colleagues and I were talking the other day about this kind of brand of recklessness, about what it was like in our youth—I mean, we're all, like, in our middle age, I think—what it was like to be willing to experiment, to be willing to try things out, to be not so worried about whether or not it was going to work. And so, I want to be very careful to honor that I know that for some people, responsibilities are so heavy and fall upon our shoulders so early that we maybe don't get as much access to that sort of freedom to experiment, and so I don't want to pretend like it's a universal experience, because it certainly is not, and/but I do want to speak to it because I'm seeing it come up in all of these different places, and frankly, because I think a little recklessness, a little fuck around and find out, a little experimentation, is really vital to our reshaping of this society and culture that we live in, right? 

All of the bigger, oppressive power systems would prefer that we conform, would prefer that we conserve and maintain the status quo. But fuck the status quo. The status quo is oppressive for the vast majority of us on this planet, so if we are to reshape the status quo, if we are to evolve what's expected and what's desired of humans in our culture, then I think reviving recklessness is an important aspect of that. 

So, here's the spell. It's a simple one, but really fucking powerful:

Who else am I? 

Who else am I? Because I think that, in my experience, and in just kind of watching clients, watching friends, watching loved ones, is that the more fixed our identities become, the more kind of confined and even, like, the less faceted our identities become, the less adventure, experimentation, fucking-around recklessness is available. Yeah?

So, let's say I am a CEO and so much of my day, so much of my thinking, so much of myself is wrapped up in my CEO-ness. I am imagining here like this kind of multifaceted jewel, but in my view, I'm zeroing in on a single facet, and then I'm getting closer, closer—I'm zooming in on that facet to see, like, this is all there is, is CEO-ing. And so, when my identity and my time and my thinking is that concentrated, I very likely spend less time being a friend, being a neighbor, being a partner, being a sexual being, having a body, honestly—being a world citizen. I am so focused on this singular aspect of myself that I maybe become really overinvested in maintaining it. I have forgotten who else I am, and I'm certainly not working to expand my self-definition, right? 

It's like a classic all-the-eggs-in-one-basket kind of thing. And listen, there are many roles in our culture where we are encouraged to put all of our eggs in one basket, or to invest all of our identity into a particular role. For instance, motherhood—less so fatherhood. I think fathers are—there's actually more allowance to have a professional identity, for example, in concert with a paternal identity, but for a maternal identity, for a mother, so very often, that role becomes all consuming, and we become maintainers. We become the people who keep everything running, the people who keep everything going, the people who are stabilizing things. 

And two things happen when we are pressed into that place. One, it's very difficult to find opportunities for fucking around, for being free and reckless. Yeah? It goes against the grain of the cultural imperative to nurture and stabilize. You know, you might get your very occasional girls’ weekend or book-club night, but to really have a sense of freedom is not super accessible. And then, this is in part, of course, because often in our culture, not for everyone, but for lots of people, the identity of mother supersedes and subsumes all the other identities, right? 

So again, just like our CEO who is immersed in that role, so too does our mother zoom in on a single facet and forget that the glittering jewel of themselves has all of these different facets: the traveler, the adventurer, the pole dancer, the figure skater, right? Whatever it is. 

Now, there's two things I want to say here. One is that of course we have a lot of responsibility in those identities I was just giving as examples, right? Like, there's a lot of duty that comes with being a CEO or being a mother. I also want to freely and fully admit that when we are in those more experimental phases of life, when we are fucking around, we are finding out. So, we are definitely discovering that some choices lead to abundance and to more choices, and that other choices have consequences we didn't expect and/or consequences we didn't want. Yeah? 

So, I can totally see how both of those things, like more responsibility to other people, more fiscal responsibility, and more time on this planet, more awareness around choices having consequences—I'm sure that both of those do dampen, a little bit, our recklessness. And at the same time—and this doesn't feel good, this feels a little more nefarious to me, but probably, also, we have in these years sort of figured out how to play the game of late-stage capitalism. We've figured out how to navigate this system, and perhaps we've made some gains: We bought a house. We've got a car. We've got investments. Right? 

Winning in the system does also mean responding to the system’s pressure to maintain the status quo. Ugh, when I think about that, that doesn't feel good, but I offer kindness to you and to me to sort of say, “Yeah, I mean, of course we have tried to figure out how to make it work within this system, and probably that has required some compromises on our parts.” 

All of this said, I still think that recklessness, experimentation, fucking around, disrupting, having a bit of revolution, creating more space for ourselves to be whole human beings—I think that all of that is vital, not just to us as individuals, but also to our concentrically expanding communities. A little bit of recklessness is important, and so that spell for reviving recklessness, that spell for saying, “Wait, who else am I? Who else am I?” is so—I hope—freeing and revitalizing in a way that encourages a more expansive way of working, of relating, of parenting, of being. 

You can sit with yourself for a moment and just ask in the multifaceted jewel of yourself: What's the facet, the identity you're most often inhabiting and looking at? I know that for me, it's work. I love work, and I also live in a culture that exalts work above all else. I am a primary breadwinner in our family. I have responsibility, and at the same time, when I narrow, when I can find my identity to “worker,” I personally feel so much more pressure and so much more confinement. 

It's only when I expand my identity and I remember: Oh, I'm also mother. I'm also partner. I'm also friend. I'm also neighbor. I'm also an earthling in a body on this planet—a body that benefits from movement and sex and plenty of water and sunlight. Yeah? 

When I re-expand my identity, when I remember, when I ask myself, “Who else am I?” And even sometimes when I mean that, not as like, “Who else am I already,” but, “Who else can I be? Who else might I be?” Might I be a person who goes on a silent retreat? Might I be a person who takes a sabbatical? Those of you who follow me on the Instagram know that I just got my very-first-ever tattoo. It's on my arm. It's beautiful. It's a snake and some flowers, and that was very much a “Who else am I” moment. Am I a person who is tattooed? I am, right? 

There is life. There is exhilaration. There is energy in that—in recklessness, in freewheeling, in exploring and experimenting, in expanding our identities. 

Oh my gosh, I just said, “Exploring and experimenting and expanding,” and I have to tell you, because this was very funny: My younger daughter, who is quite the actor, was the other day doing a parody of Mind Witchery. She called it Lime Witchery, and [laughs] she actually had this moment where she was like, “I'm going to help you expand and explore and many other ‘E’ words your life.” [laughs] So funny. I should get her to record that for you, shouldn't I? It was really great.

And it's funny, actually, that she just came to mind, because there is a person—my amazing, on-the-verge-of-teenage daughter who is expanding her identity. Like, that is the name of her game right now, is “Who else am I?” There's so much life. There’s so much power. There's so much freedom. And yeah, there's angst. And yeah, mistakes will be made. And yeah, new ways of being will be forged. And isn't that the thing to revive recklessness in a place where we're just tired of feeling so confined, where we're tired of feeling scared or stuck? 

Like, the place that you've outgrown, it can expand with this spell, with this, “Who else am I?”—remembering that, exploring that. Well, there are the ‘E’ words again. But, right? Expanding and exploring it, and then making space—making space for that so that we get to integrate that sense of freedom. We get to remember our many sides, our many facets. We get to continue to discover who we are, and as we are creating our everyday lives, because that's what we are always doing. We're always creating them. We might do it in a way that is more freeing, that is more innovative, that figures out how to weigh duty with joy, how to balance responsibility with freedom. 

I want that. I want that for me. I want that for you. I want a world where that's easier to do for all of us, and I know that world is ours for the making. 

All right, my love. A spell to revive recklessness. Who else are you? Turn that jewel of yourself around in the light, and remember. Thanks as always for listening. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I'm offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday letter at MindWitchery.com. If today's episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammie D. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K. O. Myers, Executive Producer, and I am Natalie Miller. Til next time.

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