UNDENIABLE
The following is an essay I wrote as part of a current art exhibition, “The Cosmic Egg”, on view now at the Philosophical Research Society. If you’re in the area, feel free to view the show in person and pick up the free zine version of this essay. This exhibition will be on view until Saturday, August 16th.
If you believe in manifestation,
should you believe in the Evil Eye?
If you believe forces or guides are protecting us,
what are they protecting us from?
If you believe in blessings,
do you have to believe in curses?
I grew up in a Jewish household of Middle Eastern and North African descent. My mother and her entire side of the family raised me to believe in the power of the Evil Eye. At a young age, I remember phrases and mentions of protection from it. If someone said something nice about me, my mom would wait for them to walk away, then put her hand over my face and spit three times. I was instructed to wear particular accessories; tied around my left wrist was a thin, red string. A silver or gold charm of a hand with an eye in the middle (Hamsa) was worn around my neck. The idea being that these items are able to stop harm from the Evil Eye.
The Evil Eye is born out of envy. When others want what you have, that's when they can curse you with it. Throughout my childhood, if anything bad ever happened in my family, my mom's immediate reaction would be to blame someone for giving us the Evil Eye. Often, she knew exactly who it was and why. People were on her list, and that list never ran out of names.
As a child, I didn't think much of it. When I got older and into my teenage years, things changed. I believed I could feel its presence. I suddenly saw the world the way my mom did. I was hyper-observant of the way people interacted with me. I was more careful about the personal information I chose to share. I started making my own list of names.
The irony is, I still loved and craved attention. I wanted to be noticed. I was an only child with low self-esteem and abandonment issues. Of course I needed external validation. I needed it bad. When it happened, I would at first relish the praise, but then quickly turn to fearing the consequences of being in the spotlight.
This is how my day-to-day life continued for the many years that followed. A constant back and forth from joy to panic. Confidence to unease. Optimism to distrust. I found it hard to tell even my closest friends about my accomplishments, or any good news at all, out of fear they might envy me. I was taught that the Evil Eye can be insidious like that. Even those you trust most, who you believe may want the best for you, can strike you with the Eye's curse. Consciously or unconsciously. Real fun stuff to tell someone whose brain is still in the process of developing.
Is it possible to live a life without ever being envied? There's always going to be someone, somewhere, who’ll want something you have that they don't. That's what's so fucked up about it. The Evil Eye gives immense supernatural power to a common human emotion. Granted, it's not an encouraged human emotion to experience, but it is common nonetheless.
Funnily enough, belief in the Evil Eye never stopped me from being envious of others. It wasn't until I started therapy that I even gave deep consideration to that. My therapist asked if I felt I had ever given the Evil Eye to someone. This inquiry genuinely blew my mind. Could it be? If others might not know they're giving it to me, could I be doing the same? I thought back to moments of envy I've had. There were friends I envied getting into romantic partnerships with men I believed to be just my type. There were peers I envied landing roles in TV shows and movies, or getting writing jobs I believed I wanted. There were strangers I observed on the Internet looking effortlessly beautiful while living in nice homes with big yards, showing off their high-end skincare products. I envied anyone who could afford to do their grocery shopping at the Farmer’s Market. Hell, even animals. How could you not envy the sight of a spoiled pet Chihuahua? To be adored and cared for, without having to do much in return, is my ultimate definition of "goals".
Could I have cursed all of them? Hundreds, if not thousands of others, in my lifetime? And the little dog too?
In early adulthood, I completely stopped being religious. I no longer believed in the God my mother believed in, but why did I still believe in her superstitions? Something I came to learn about myself in my mid-20s is that I have Purely Obsessional OCD. A type of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized by intrusive, catastrophic thoughts. Any positive mood could turn in an instant if something triggered an intrusive thought.
Occasionally, it was a memory of a moment in my life that I was ashamed of. Usually though, it was an imagined scenario where I was responsible for something terrible.
For instance, one that often came to mind was me babysitting a toddler at a park. I’d picture myself getting distracted talking to someone or looking at my phone. In that moment of distraction, the toddler runs off and gets struck by a car or kidnapped by a murderous pedophile.
Why was this a recurring scene that played out in my head time and time again? That, I don’t know. I was not a babysitter. I was rarely around toddlers. I don’t even really like kids or want to interact with them. Maybe that’s why? Again, I don’t know.
It didn’t stop there, though. If I heard a news story about someone committing a horrendous crime, I would panic about the possibility of me doing that or it happening to me. If I thought about something like cancer and then saw the word ‘cancer’ while scrolling the Internet, I believed that meant I had it. If I felt like I was getting a funny look while driving, I was convinced I might have hit someone and killed them (and somehow didn't notice that happening, but the other car did). If a guy I hooked up with was ghosting me, I was convinced he had an STI and didn't want to tell me.
When these panics happened, I knew it was ridiculous. I knew I was being paranoid. Yet, my body still reacted as though my fears had come to fruition. My mind still wouldn't stop replaying the thoughts. They mostly happened at night. I'd wake up from my sleep and be overcome with a sense of doom. My mind would choose something to fixate on so I couldn't get back to sleep for hours later (if at all). This led to things like:
1. Making impulsive online purchases…like the time I bought a syphilis test at 4 AM because I was convinced I had rashes on my palms (which I read could be a symptom).
2. Texting people I haven't spoken to in months or even years just to ask them stupid questions about the last time we interacted, or to make sure they weren't mad at me.
3. Going down hours-long Internet rabbit holes until I found anything reassuring to dispel my fixations.
4. Talking to the God I told myself I stopped believing in and pleading with them to protect me.
5. Repeating phrases out loud, over and over again, to assure myself I was okay and that it wasn’t real.
6. Saging myself and my room.
7. Clinging to my protective charms, which now also included crystals like tourmaline and onyx.
I'd eventually wake the next morning a completely different person from the one who spent those hours panicking. Who was that girl? Certainly not me. Day-me was a level-headed and rational intellect. Day-me felt silly and embarrassed for making such a fuss over nothing. Then, night would fall once more, and the cycle would repeat itself. I was her again. Night-me. The crazy bitch.
You might be able to see now how the Evil Eye complements such an extreme form of anxiety quite beautifully. The Evil Eye may not have generated my anxious thoughts, but it gave me someone to blame. It gave me a reason to see why this worst-case scenario thing I was panicking over might be real. Because someone doesn't want me to be happy. Because I performed too well at a comedy show or wrote an article that went viral, outshone someone in a social setting, or did anything to anyone that triggered some type of jealous reaction. Any form of positive attention I received was how I justified the possibility of something tragic happening to me.
Once I got into therapy to address my anxiety, it was advised that I unlearn all the superstitions, which inevitably meant I was to unlearn spiritual belief.
See, I outlined to my therapist what I just outlined to you. I told him how I clutched my crystals in times of extreme anxiety, saged my room when I had negative thoughts, repeated phrases to myself to prevent bad things from happening to me, and felt a sense of impending doom if I went a day not wearing the red bracelet. Believe it or not, these habits weren't viewed by my therapist as me simply being the typical woman in Los Angeles.
These were my compulsive rituals. They were the physical manifestations of OCD, and they needed to stop if I was ever going to get better.
At first, I was resistant. It's not like I was doing the stereotypical OCD things I saw on TV. You know, like washing my hands repeatedly or flipping light switches on and off a particular number of times. I wasn't giving supernatural power to everyday objects or routines like that. My rituals were rooted in ancient beliefs and practices used by varying cultures for centuries. At the time, I feared that if I let these rituals go, it meant I was admitting that there was no truth to any of it. That there is no higher power. There is no mystery to existence and no mysticism in the world. I didn't want that.
Despite losing my religion (being a Jew more in theory than in practice), I could never ascribe to full-on atheism. There was always the desire to have faith that human consciousness and the existence of the universe meant something greater than pure happenstance. Even if it wasn't God, it was something significant and more meaningful than a random series of unobservable atoms crashing into each other until stars formed and that's that. To dispel these beliefs felt like a fate worse than neverending anxiety. It meant I was to go on living without awe. I would lose the part of myself that is uninhibited and curious and able to let her imagination flourish.
As much as that worried me, I kept going to therapy and kept forcing myself to prioritize my mental health over superstitious and supernatural beliefs. Simply committing to having weekly talks with my therapist changed me in so many ways.
Even when I felt like our talks weren't productive or like I wasn't being understood, I see now how that still did something to improve me. Yes, I am yet another millennial woman recommending therapy.
Most of the process feels like a blur. Over time, things just got better, and I'm still not entirely sure how exactly that happened. I can't pinpoint any one exercise or practice that helped me, and yet, I gradually felt more inclined to do the things I once feared. I shared my good news with others. I took off the amulets of protection. I got better at controlling the bad thoughts when they surfaced.
Over time, the catastrophic thoughts became less and less. Now, they rarely appear. When they do, they are far less intense, and I can better stop them from amplifying into panic-inducing outbursts. I think getting older played a part too. Most of what I feared in my twenties never came to fruition, so I guess my thirties have been a time of clarity about that.
So now, the Evil Eye has been defeated (mostly).
But what of my spirituality?
As much as I felt I was spiritual then, I realize now I was not fully grasping the concept. I think I was still viewing spirituality through the lens of organized religion. I thought there were set rules on spiritual belief and that beliefs have to be all-encompassing. If you believe in souls, you must believe in an afterlife. If you practice the Tarot, you must also practice astrology. If you don't believe in curses, you can't believe in blessings.
Truthfully, something transformative has happened since my anxiety lessened. I have become more spiritual, and that spirituality has been rooted almost entirely in my intuition and instincts. It's as though removing the surface-level fears and worries that occupied my thoughts has allowed the deeper and more true version of myself to flourish. By being in touch with my genuine feelings, I now understand things more intuitively without needing to overanalyze. There is a greater sense of simply "getting it".
That's all to say, I believe there is something to concepts like manifestation, psychic ability, synchronicity, spirit guides, and souls. However, I choose to comprehend these things my way…as well as aliens, parallel universes, different planes of existence, telepathy, and cryptids (but that's a discussion for another time).
I may still wear the red string around my wrist, but now it’s purely decorative. I can take it off whenever I like. I still occasionally sage and buy crystals and repeat mantras, but not like my life depends on it. Now I'll engage in it as a way to better connect with this side of myself, but with the knowledge that it's not necessary.
Overall, I've learned to let go and give in to whatever the universe has in store for me. It's a relief to lose control in this way. To do what feels good and what feels right without overcomplicating the details. In doing so, I've learned to be grateful. As I continue to foster this version of me, I acknowledge that it may have never happened if I hadn't believed the superstitions first. Maybe, just maybe, the curse was the blessing.