June 16, 2021

Words Are Powerful and So Are Our Thoughts

Tia Williams on the power of manifestation and doing things for ourselves

Words Are Powerful and So Are Our Thoughts

Tia Williams on the power of manifestation and doing things for ourselves

I am, in general, a people-pleaser. I respect boundaries, and I’m always worried about – well – bothering people with my presence.

No, maybe I won’t invite my friend to brunch because she probably has something better to do and she’ll just feel trapped into going, at which point I’ll die.

Forget it, I won’t have a dinner party because I can’t cook and I don’t want subject people to take-out Thai and my dismal hostessing.

A beach trip? With a new boyfriend? But when he realizes that I need to pop fourteen migraine painkillers a day to maintain flirtatiousness, he’ll see that I belong in a neurology ward, not in his Montauk cabana.

I always fear that my personality—big, messy, overwhelming thing that it is—will spill out over my edges and drown innocent bystanders. The only place I don’t have this worry, is in fiction. When I write, I don’t think about the reader taking in my words (not during the first draft, anyway). I write stories for myself, as a wish-fulfillment fantasy—a personalized fairy tale to cheer me up.

Like Eva, I’ve had chronic migraines since I was small. Chronic pain made me a weird kid. I looked normal, but in my head, I heard sounds other people didn’t hear, smelled odors that weren’t there, and battled agony so acute that I rarely even breathed deeply, for fear of ratcheting it up a thousand notches.

In fourth grade, I remember talking to my friend (named Eva, funny enough) about some Teen Beat heartthrob like Ralph Macchio during lunch. I looked like I was paying attention, but I was training my focus on a single potato chip on her tray, thinking that if I just zero in on its bumpy surface, the roundness, the salt sprinkles, I wouldn’t pass out from the pain. This was all before recess.

An invisible disability is a lot for a kid deal with. Fast-forward thirty years and I was a grown woman—divorced, too sick to deal with dating, and the mother of my own fourth-grader, Lina. Like Eva, I felt like I was raising her on autopilot. Either woozy from pain, painkillers, or both, I’d order food, check homework, detangle her hair, have TV snuggle-time, do everything—all from the couch. And the mommy-guilt was massive.

I’d watch Gilmore Girls in wild envy—Lorelei and Rory’s mother/daughter dynamic was so like ours, except that Lorelei was “normal.” What would the show have looked like if a nagging illness threatened every relationship she had? Where is the portrayal of a Black single mom with this incurable disease? And wait—what if she fell in soul-stirring love, in the middle of all it? Where was that story?

It didn’t exist, so I wrote it. For myself.

I imagined a world for Eva—an emotionally scarred, closed-off woman who became open to love and, along the way, accepted her flaws, fears, and complicated past. In , Eva got the soulmate love I wished I’d had—plus the little family unit that I secretly dreamed of, for me and Lina. Eva’s story as a gift to myself, and it made me feel better at a time when nothing was quite right.

Then a weird thing happened. About halfway through crafting this personalized fairy tale, I swiped right on a dashing Dane (on the Bumble app; I highly recommend). He was too good-looking for it to go anywhere real, so I had no expectations. Five minutes after meeting him, I knew he was my person—the same way Eva felt about Shane. Three months after meeting him, I was in the delicate early stages of introducing him to Lina—almost exactly the way Eva did, with Shane and Audre.

My real life and my fiction life had synced up! Wild. Now, I’m not a religious person, nor am I particularly spiritual, but something inexplicable happened, there. Whether it was the power of manifestation, an incredible coincidence, or dumb luck, the universe threw me an incredible bone (stop it!) in the kind, brilliant, funny, cultured man who’s now my husband—and it happened exactly as I crafted the same journey for Eva.

Words are powerful, and so are our thoughts. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves seep under our skin and stay there. I’m grateful that my big, messy personality dared me to dream of a golden ending for my unlikely heroine—and kept me open to receiving the same gift.