The Spell Isn’t Misfiring

You cast the spell.

Then something goes wrong.

Something hurts.

Your first instinct is to check the spell.

What did I do wrong?

Maybe the incantation was incorrect.

Maybe the ingredients were wrong.

Maybe the circle was imperfect.

Maybe you aren’t good enough at magic yet.

So you try to fix it.

You push the feeling down.

You distract yourself.

You analyze it.

You argue with it.

You try to become the sort of mage who wouldn’t feel this way.

But the spell keeps producing the same result.

Hurt.

Eventually you have to consider an uncomfortable possibility:

What if the spell isn’t misfiring?

What if it’s working?

The Feedback

A mage who doesn’t understand a spell’s feedback can mistake information for failure.

The fire burns your hand.

You don’t conclude that fire is malfunctioning.

You learn something.

The body says:

That hurts.

And somehow we expect ourselves to respond:

Incorrect. Please stop producing that data.

But pain is information.

Not necessarily a command.

Not necessarily a prophecy.

Not necessarily proof that something is wrong with you.

Sometimes it is simply the part of you that still knows something matters.

And this is where the strange little spell appeared in my own head:

Hurt is the you that loves you more than the you who gave up.

At first, even that sounded wrong.

Too poetic.

Too convenient.

Maybe the spell had misfired.

So I looked closer.

The Mage Reads the Feedback

Suppose a person has been hurt so many times that they learn to abandon themselves before anyone else can.

They stop asking for what they need.

They stop expecting kindness.

They stop noticing what they feel.

They become very good at enduring.

Then something happens.

A boundary gets crossed.

Someone says something cruel.

Something old is touched.

A dream is lost.

A relationship changes.

And suddenly there is pain.

The natural response can be:

Make it stop.

But what if the pain is not the enemy?

What if something inside you is saying:

No. This matters.

Not because it wants to torture you.

Because it still cares.

There may be a part of you that has continued loving you through every terrible decision, every compromise, every abandonment of your own needs.

You may have learned to ignore that part.

But it didn’t disappear.

It learned how to hurt loudly enough to be heard.

That isn’t necessarily the spell breaking.

That may be the spell reporting accurately.

Acceptance Isn’t Agreement

This is where the mage has to learn a harder spell.

Acceptance.

Acceptance does not mean:

“This pain is good.”

It doesn’t mean:

“What happened to me was okay.”

It doesn’t mean:

“I should keep hurting.”

And it certainly doesn’t mean:

“I am powerless to change anything.”

Acceptance can be much simpler:

This is what is happening right now.

The mage stops fighting the feedback long enough to read it.

Something hurts.

Okay.

Where?

Why?

What does it seem to care about?

What boundary was crossed?

What was lost?

What was needed?

What am I pretending doesn’t matter?

The pain becomes information.

And once the information has been received, you are free to act.

The Trick

There is a subtle trap here.

You can become angry at yourself for being hurt.

Then you are hurt and fighting the fact that you are hurt.

Now there are two wounds.

The first is the original pain.

The second is:

I shouldn’t feel this.

The mage can drop the second wound.

Not because the first one isn’t real.

Because fighting reality doesn’t make reality less real.

You can say:

“Yes. This hurts.”

And breathe.

“Yes. I wish it didn’t.”

And breathe.

“Yes. Some part of me is hurting because some part of me still cares.”

And breathe.

You don’t have to solve it immediately.

You don’t have to make the pain beautiful.

You don’t have to turn suffering into wisdom before you’re allowed to feel it.

You can simply receive the message.

The Spell Was Working

Perhaps that is the strange thing about being human.

The parts of us we most desperately want to silence are not always trying to destroy us.

Sometimes they are trying to protect something we stopped protecting ourselves.

The hurt says:

This mattered.

The anger says:

Something crossed a line.

The grief says:

Something was loved.

The fear says:

Something matters enough to lose.

These signals can become distorted.

They can become too loud.

They can point toward old dangers that aren’t present anymore.

But that doesn’t make the existence of the signal a failure.

A smoke alarm can be malfunctioning and still be telling you something important about the fact that there is smoke.

The mage’s task isn’t to worship the alarm.

It is to listen.

Then investigate.

Then act.

And sometimes, after all the fighting, you discover that the thing you thought was sabotaging your spell was actually the part of the spell that was working.

You weren’t broken.

You were receiving feedback.

And somewhere underneath the hurt was a stubborn little piece of you saying:

No.

I still care about you.

I’m not going to let you disappear without making a sound.

So perhaps the spell was never:

“Make the hurt go away.”

Perhaps the spell was:

“Listen when something inside you says you matter.”

And perhaps acceptance is simply the moment the mage finally stops arguing with the spell long enough to hear it.