I never know when to put a bit of magic in the Failures column. That stuff can reach far and work longer than we have the patience to track it for. If you put a whole lot of energy into something and release it into the wide world, how far does it go? How long does it take to feel effects rippling back to you and when do you stop feeling them? Did the spell have a chance of success in the short term conditions of your life? And if its chances were slim, do we really count it as a failure? How often do you hear people talk about how their magic failed? It's like your ~*~sUpeR MaGicKaL pOwERz~*~ are the only factor in the whole damn universe that determine if something works out or not. Like it's me, a taper candle, and a half hour of visualizing versus a multinational financial crisis, and if that doesn't work out in my favor, I can't talk about it or else the whole wide world will think I'm a fraud.
Let me tell you about my biggest failure.
When I had acknowledged that the things I'd been doing for ages were, in fact, witchcraft, I did my first "witch spell". Instead of doing the kinds of things I'd grown up doing, I did a fifteen day job spell off the internet. Yeah, that's a one and a five. Every damn day at the right time and moon phase, I carefully followed Cunningham's instructions for creating sacred space, dressed that day's candle, and knelt in front of it concentrating on sending out the energy for that day's task. What I didn't know is that you don't have to build and push energy the entire time the candle burns. That's an awful lot of energy to have pushed at one thing.
And it worked. Sort of. I got interviews for positions at companies that were dream jobs. I got multiple interviews. The problem was that I'd pushed well beyond my sphere of influence and had done it right about the time the recession was really settling in. Nobody's going to hire someone who just barely qualifies on the minimum years of experience and would be getting a raise in excess of 50% if she got the job when they could hire someone with plenty of experience. I was bummed out, but I understood what had gone wrong. It actually gave me a lot of confidence.
Fast forward to this morning, when we're lying in bed, talking about packing up to come home from vacationing at the coast. My phone dings with an email telling me that I haven't gotten a job I had interviewed for. I'm pretty sure it was within my sphere of influence, and things had gone well, but I just hadn't moved on to the final round. I've spent YEARS doing work on and off for a new job, and it always gets me interviews, but it has yet to result in me getting a new job with insurance or higher pay. That's a few major, disappointing failures a year, every year, for a few years. I try different stuff each time, repeat what felt really powerful, refine things. None of it works.
What do I make of that? I don't really know, honestly. I've grown in my current position so as to be ready when a better opportunity comes along. Do I need to do bigger, stronger, more ferocious magic? Is the universe over there thunking its head into its desk because I'm not getting it: this path is closed, the door is shut, so climb through the freaking window! Maybe my job is one more thing stuck in liminal limbo for the next couple of years. I don't know what to do with it. But as I lay in bed with the now pointless mojo bag I'd made in my hand, I felt like an utter failure. I still do. Career improvements was a big part of what I wanted to work on in the new year. Hard to work on it if you're not sure what the problem is - me? the magic? the economy? the approaches used? that this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing?
I don't know what to tell you what to do when your magic fails. Review it, make sure it's something you're capable of pulling off, and try again with some changes. Are you being impatient? A lot of failures are actually just impatience. Sometimes it's a harder slog to the goal and things may not happen on our ideal time table. The one thing I do know is that when things go wrong, we should take heart and have hope, knowing that it's ok for things to not work every single time. I don't think acknowledging that makes me a bad witch or one who doesn't have faith. It makes me approach what I'm doing from new angles, consider if I shouldn't be working on a different aspect of the problem. Like the career thing - I don't care much about having a high-flying career. I want the upgrade so that I can have insurance and pay off my debts as quickly as possible. A better job seems like the most obvious solution, but maybe patience, frugality, and working on the debt instead of the job will give me the results I want.
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