it's as if the universe listens
so let it be known
I’ve noticed a particularly mysterious phenomenon recently that may be grounded in anchoring/confirmation bias, the psychological concept of synchronicity, the internet-bound buzzword of manifestation, or that one quote from The Alchemist that has been pasted and rehashed from the moon and back.
“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” - The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
The phenomenon, simply put, is this:
Whenever I write down that I’m feeling negative about something, it goes away.
This happens unusually quickly, like a thief in the night, and I’m not just referring to the disappearance of the negative emotion which is a common occurrence and reason that people journal/write/go to therapy — but to the negative thing itself.
A notable example is as I was writing you can do everything you want but not at the same time on a mentally-taxing Wednesday where I felt like a walking pile of garbage, but by the time I was editing it on Saturday morning, I was so much more liberated and positive and clear-headed about things.
It’s even more apparent in the aptly named swamped, but he’ll be alright which literally revolves around how shit I had been feeling those last few weeks, but I realise now that the three overarching dismays I chatted about 1) a creative slump 2) corporate burnout 3) a quarter life crisis; all became focus points that I actively worked on in the following weeks. My following post was about keeping resilience/self-forgiveness as we go through phases of burnout, followed by the 25 by 25 series as a way of sorting through my still-in-progress quarter life crisis. This burst of pushing in June helped reignite a desire to be more creative again and is why you’re seeing more consistent posts today.
I don’t tend to write much about being positive about something, and while part of me believes I should for the sake of continuous and extended appreciation (something I’m generally good at… which is why I don’t), I’m a bit fearful of doing so because I know this parallel works the other way too.
As a small case, once I started sharing that I was very proud on the momentum of my morning writing routines in it's okay to be jealous but be jealous of the whole package, my rate of days-woken-on-time plummeted into the icy concrete.
As a big case, once I stand atop the balcony/window, gaze into the horizon and reflect how peaceful, productive and perfect the last couple of days have been, on how I’ve carried out my life, relationships and activity with intention and self-love; some kind of conflict kicks up and I find myself hating everything again.
(And before you say this positivity/negativity is surely a time cycle, where clarity and joy enters on Friday evening and dread settles back in on Sunday night — that’s true, and there’s far more internal battles to it, though I cannot deny that that’s a sizable proponent and it might work differently if I wasn’t a 9-to-5er.)
All of this unscientific evidence points to my incredibly unscientific conclusion: that somebody is listening, that somebody is lurking, whether it’s God or my girlfriend or Ethan fucking Hunt — the universe does seem to listen, at times.
Whenever I clasp my hands in prayer, whenever I talk to myself on the balcony/in bed, whenever I journal into my Midori MD or my note app or an A4 piece of paper that I had taken from the office printer — when I tell it that I’m having a genuinely hard time, that I’m really struggling with my emotions, that my headspace is filled with looming dark clouds and that I’m overwhelmed by all things happening; something moves, mysteriously and thoughtfully; clearing out the gloomy sky, switch on the lights in my head, tempering the expectations of people around me… I can see you, universe, doing whatever it takes to give me a moment’s reprieve.
substacks i’ve liked recently: