The Magic in Me: How I Stopped Waiting to Be Saved

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I do not think trauma made me a Dream Weaver. I think I was born this way.

I have always found threads between things. Stories, movies, dreams, tarot cards, astrology charts, repeating numbers. I have always been a spiritual seeker—through Christianity, Buddhism, curiosity about Taoism and Hinduism, and more recently Norse mythology. I have always noticed what repeats and felt when something resonates.

That capacity was already mine. But childhood danger gave it a job.

As a child, I needed someone to see what was happening and get me out. I did not have the power to create safety for myself, so stories helped me imagine that rescue was possible and someone would one day come save me.

I watched movies like Cinderella and read books like Charlotte’s Web. Someone could see the one who was being mistreated. Someone could use their love, words, or power to change what happened next.

That was regulating. When I could not leave the reality I was living in, imagination gave me a future beyond it. Hope was one of the ways my system kept me psychologically alive.

The magic was never the problem. It was a gift that helped a child survive something she could not control. But survival gifts do not always know when their old job is over.

Scanning the Shoreline

In 2010, after a painful divorce, I was reading a book about manifestation during the time the self-help industry was roaring with visualization and law of attraction books. It instructed me to visualize the future I wanted and write it down as though it would happen. So I wrote in a journal that I would meet my soulmate on a beach in Florida in 2014.

In the visualization, I wore a white sun hat, my youngest son dug in the sand, and a little girl wandered over to play with him. Somehow, her father and I would “just know” and live happily ever after.

Years later, after one more devastating relationship, my boys and I took a road trip to Florida. I remembered what I had written, and I realized I still owned that white sun hat—so I packed it. I hadn’t gone to find this person, but it was 2014, and the coincidence carried weight in my mind.

When we reached the beach, my son was digging in the sand exactly as I had imagined. For a moment, I found myself scanning the shoreline. Looking. Waiting.

What I wanted was not only romance. I wanted to believe I would be seen, chosen, and not left to carry my life alone. It was the same magic that had helped me survive a horrendous childhood. Again, I was waiting for rescue silently.

I remembered that recently when I found my mind doing something similar again. I felt embarrassed for the younger version of me who needed that fantasy so badly, then grief—for the sweet child inside me who has, at times, been steering my life.

Many of us build private stories like this. When the present does not feel safe enough to inhabit, the imagined future becomes a place of refuge.

There is nothing shameful about that. Sometimes imagination keeps a small light burning when very little else can.

When Magic Began Working Against Me

The imagination that protected me as a child did not disappear in adulthood. It kept looking for the hidden goodness that would lead to rescue.

I could weave a story around a brief moment of care and make it evidence of something deeper. I could believe so strongly in the goodness underneath someone’s behavior that I stopped responding to the behavior itself. The magic that once made me feel safer could now make me less protected.

As a child, projecting goodness into the future gave me hope. As an adult, projecting goodness onto someone who hadn’t earned my trust kept me attached to them. I could stay patient and forgiving while waiting for the person I imagined them to be.

The shadow of the Dream Weaver in me is not that she believes in magic. It’s that she can weave a story beautiful enough to hide from reality.

Looking for the one right person was not the only way I searched for safety outside myself. I also looked for the one right set of instructions. Even the beach visualization had begun with a manifestation book telling me what to do: imagine the future clearly, write it down, and trust that it would arrive.

As a child, the instructions came through Charlotte’s Web and Cinderella. As an adult, I looked to tarot, astrology, the Bible, Google, and other people’s interpretations to tell me what my own dreams, intuitions, and the numbers I kept noticing meant.

I treated meaning as if it belonged to the object or the authority interpreting it. If I could find the right book, person, spiritual system, or explanation, maybe it would tell me what was happening, what would happen next, and what I should do to be safe.

Those external things can help me access meaning, but they do not own it. I get to decide what meaning I give them and how much weight that meaning carries.

I Am Worth Protecting

For the past ten months, I have been seeing the number 911. Instead of searching online for what someone else believed it meant, I finally asked myself: What does 911 mean to me?

The connection came from inside me.

9-1-1 is the number we dial when we need help. It is a signal that says: Something is wrong. I need protection. Here is where I am. We have to actively dial the number and ask for help. We call 9-1-1 when we believe something is worth protecting. When I had that realization, the song “Safe & Sound” was playing.

It felt like something inside me had been trying to tell me this for months. Maybe it was my unconscious. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was some collaboration between the two that I will never be able to explain.

But no book, religion, spiritual teacher, algorithm, or outside authority interpreted it for me. I was the one who created the meaning for myself.

I had spent much of my life waiting for someone to notice that I needed protection. But I’m a grown woman now. I do not have to find the one right person who will finally make me safe, and I do not have to find the one right set of instructions outside myself. I can trust my own ability to recognize what I need and find the resources that can help me.

I can pay attention to what someone’s behavior is showing me. I can speak when something hurts, set a boundary, leave, call a friend, hire an attorney, or ask someone to stand beside me. Heck, I can even reach out to a stranger, which I have when I was in active danger. I’ve shown myself I can protect myself. I keep showing myself that.

The Dream Weaver does not have to use magic to keep me safe anymore. I can use my discernment, boundaries, voice, and ability to reach for resources.

That frees the magic to do something else. It can make my life feel more alive and meaningful.

The Right Not to Know

I used to think I had to choose between believing every coincidence carried a message and dismissing the symbolic world altogether. I don’t think I have to do either.

Spiritual certainty can force an ambiguous experience into a fixed explanation because not knowing feels intolerable. Dismissing anything that cannot be verified or measured can close the question too quickly too.

There is another possibility: I do not know exactly what this sign or coincidence means, and I choose to see something meaningful in it anyway. That isn’t denying reality or insisting my interpretation is objectively true for everyone—it’s letting an experience remain alive without forcing it into certainty.

Reclaiming our inner authority doesn’t mean becoming certain about everything. It means trusting ourselves to live with uncertainty without abandoning what reality is showing us.

Holding the Mystery Beautifully

In an astrology book I own, the day I was born is called the Day of the Dream Weaver. I have always woven stories from symbols, longing, intuition, and hope—noticing what repeats, feeling when something resonates.

I have a black cat now. He did not mysteriously appear on my doorstep as a sign. I wanted a black cat, so I searched for one and adopted him. I happened to get a really cool little asshole who is lovable and feisty.

Choosing him was a way of remembering my own magic—the imaginative, intuitive, slightly witchy part of me that finds beauty in darkness and meaning in symbols. I don’t need the outside world to prove that part of me is real. The meaning I see in something may tell me more about who I am than about what is going to happen.

He is also a way of acknowledging the beauty of my own shadow. The Dream Weaver only becomes dangerous when I don’t know she is weaving. I can see her now. I can love her and decide when she gets to tell the story.

The magic was always mine. But it is no longer responsible for keeping me safe.