What made 1998’s Practical Magic so good was the absence of bad Tinder jokes and big-budget special effects: no floating objects, glowing body parts, or Marvel-style fight scenes that force the viewer into alternate realities.

The old world of Sally and Gillian was animated by nature (roses that grew in the garden overnight), the invisible bond between women and sisters (belladonna, anyone?), and the innate inner knowing every woman possesses. “There’s a little witch in all of us,” Aunt Jet coos to the ragtag coven assembled in her kitchen toward the film’s end.

“Throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck…”

These were the spellbinding words Sally says right before the credits roll. Though ordinary at first blush, what made them feel charged with power was their existence in our world: their tangibility, their accessibility, and the way they made the possibility of magic in women’s own lives feel real.

In PM 2, the teaser shows books ablaze with Harry Potter–like special effects and the scars from our beloved sisters’ blood oath illuminated when activated — an insult to the viewer’s imagination, which needed no visual enhancement to understand the life force pulsing between Sally and Gillian.

It was the invisible moments of energy exchanged – between lovers, between sisters, between women in a circle with their Dustbusters and kitchen brooms – that made this movie magic.

We saw ourselves in these women through the things we cannot see but intuitively know.

Yes, Sally may breathe candles to life and Gillian’s body may be a vessel for dead former lovers in round one, but it was just the right amount of movie magic that felt more parlor trick than CGI spectacle, more wink than cinematic flex.

I won’t even get into the disappointment of the casting.

Well, maybe I will a little.

The decision not to cast the original daughters feels like a betrayal of the very sisterhood the story is propped up on — a sentiment subtly echoed by actor Evan Rachel Wood, who commented, “...I would have happily rejoined my sisters,” in response to the outcry from fans.

So what if they’ve grown up in the last 30 years? Are we supposed to believe Nicky and Sandy stayed as frozen as their faces? (No shade. I can’t wait for my first facelift!)

With Sandra Bullock’s hard launch on Instagram seemingly for the sole purpose of promoting this movie (her debut post teased midnight margaritas), it’s hard not to suspect Joey King was a metrics hire, with 17 million followers to Wood’s fewer than 900,000 on her private account.

In under four minutes between the two trailers combined, the world that felt familiar and possible collapsed into something foreign and pandering. Sure, there are midnight margaritas and sweeping shots of the Owens sisters’ house, but the real magic of Practical Magic was the faith in women to believe in the things we cannot see.

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That relationship died along with any neutral notions about having a child.

But I’ve never heard the tick of my biological clock, dreamt up baby names, or pictured a partner plus little one in my future.

At 37, though, I question whether this supposed reproductive wiring has been rationalized away by circumstance and the general state of life in America growing inhospitable to anything other than data centers.

That there’s no man in my life doesn’t even factor into the equation.

Over pints of ice cream, my sister and I regularly wonder aloud how anyone could have a kid with everything that’s happening: AI replacing people, climate change killing the planet, a pedophilic fascist who’s regularly described as 50 shades of orange.

Speaking of our Cheeto-coated president, I can’t help but notice that for me and a certain cohort of millennial women, the window of our reproductive years all but slams shut around the time he is forced out leaves office.

Will I want a baby if the world were to resume spinning at a manageable pace? Would it even be physically possible?

And then it hit me.

Maybe I didn’t rationalize away my now-muted maternal instincts.

Maybe I was robbed.

I guess I’ll never know for sure, but a part of me suspects I’d do the baby thing if pumpkins weren’t in power and the matriarchy resumed its rightful order.

For now, I’m happy to ponder over pints with my sister — and that I know I’ll always want.

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I tried not to tend to the wounds of January’s walloping. It was a month where Murphy’s Law took no days off and seemed to intensify with each passing week, so I too took no days off, powering through what I wanted to believe was an extra dose of winter blues.

February followed suit with equal sadistic fervor: I’ve heard the sentence “they’re eating babies” more times than should be countable, across social circles with otherwise no commonality.

The difference is, these last two weeks have forced me to confront what I’ve long been trying to deny: I am deeply, utterly, uncomfortably sad.

“You can look but don’t stare” – but what if there’s nowhere else to look?

One of my favorite quotes from RuPaul is, “You can look but don’t stare” — a brilliant axiom encouraging us to acknowledge life’s darkness without being subsumed by it.

But where are we to rest our eyes when there is nowhere else to look? Darkness is all around us: Criminals leading by bleeding my country. Mind-shattering pacifism in the face of pedophilia. Wars on every corner of the map.

And that’s not even the personal shit.

There is little reprieve, yet still I self-flagellate when I fail to be OK, as if it’s my fault I can’t summon a cheery disposition in this fresh fiery hell.

My sadness has morphed into depression, my depression into despondence, all flirting with a nihilism I’ve worked hard to keep at bay: eating clean, working out, daily journaling, vulnerably voicing my saddened state to friends and family willing to listen.

But what once worked is no longer working, because the world is no longer what it used to be.

The Parking Lot Incident

I reached my breaking point during what I now refer to as The Parking Lot Incident.

It was the last day of Ass-Kicking January when a woman in a TJ Maxx parking lot scooped the spot I was waiting for, and then calmly mocked me when I frantically honk-gestured that I’d been there first. I debated getting out of my car to confront her, but the pent-up emotions of the preceding days had gotten to me first.

I went home. And I could. Not. Stop. Crying.

Here’s part of what I wrote in my journal that day: “I sobbed. Sobbed and stuttered my way through all the grief and angst and fucking sadness that’s clearly been coursing through my body. I guess this was the universe’s way of forcing some relief.”

Everything is not ok.

I am exhausted from pretending nothing is wrong, and I flinch at the question “How are you?” knowing full well it’s a perfunctory, performative ask with no expectation of a sincere response. “I’d be lying if I said I was OK” is some version of the answer I give — a minor rebellion against the lie that everything is fine.

I am deeply, sometimes painfully sad, and have every right to be.

When I finally stopped resisting what is, in fact, a perfectly rational response to what’s happening, I not only felt relief, I started to feel like myself.

Because it all comes back to what I’m constantly exploring with Other Wise: honoring your truth — however uncomfortable or socially awkward at times — is an expression of authenticity.

In surrendering to the sadness that had seeped into my blood and bones, I was surrendering to self.

And the self, I’ve learned repeatedly, will never let you down.

I fantasized about cutting all my hair off for years. Mostly for practicality purposes over appearance. I was always at a loss on how to style it and developed what my mom called a hair tic: nonstop twisting, twirling and touching bunched up strands while trying to coax that one weird cowlick to lie flat.

No matter what I did, it never quite looked right, and usually ended up as a carefully placed “messy” bun atop my head.

The truth is that I never thought I looked right—at least not when I tried to style it the way women of my generation were told it should be: long, Victoria’s-Secret-voluminous, and effortlessly face-framing, as if my part knew exactly how to fall.

I wanted my long, frazzled locks gone, off my head, but I was also fearful of how I’d be perceived if I actually did it. Would I look less femme (whatever that means)? Older than my thirty-something years? Or God forbid, less attractive to men?

What I realized in taking to my blunted kitchen scissors the night I finally chopped it off—spurred by an episode of shedding that usually precedes a woman switching up her do—was that acting on the urge to hack it off wasn’t succumbing to a hair tic. It was a higher, more knowing self guiding me closer to who I really am.

With each chop the night of January 10, 2023 (a date I only remember because I journaled enthusiastically about the results), I watched my smile widen in the mirror as I saw a version of myself I hadn’t yet met, but who looked more familiar than any I’d seen before. It was a homecoming. A hair homecoming.

But also so much more.

I imagine this was the feeling Gwen Stefani described when she bleached her hair and painted on a bold red lip when she was first starting out in No Doubt:

“It was like I’d unlocked the key. I remember feeling like, ‘I have arrived. This is me. Finally.’” The red lip came when her grandmother gave her a crimson lipstick when she was in high school. “I remember sitting in my ghetto, beat-up Honda Prelude and putting on that lipstick in the rearview mirror and being like, ‘Uh-huh, I like that. That’s the shit right there.’ I never stopped after that.” – Gwen for Harper’s Bazaar, 2012

Or Dolly Parton, when she discovered the power of wigs:

“It was more important that I be comfortable inside of myself... I just felt better in me to look that way. It just gave me a little extra confidence.” – Dolly for Entertainment Tonight, 2023

Elvis, too — dying his naturally light hair jet-black using shoe polish, sideburns grown out like the truckers he admired in his youth.

On the surface, these markers of outward appearance may seem shallow or superficial. But these signature looks—often not of their time and frequently mocked—are how we came to know and love these icons. They are proof that embracing the things that make us different, especially the ones that aren’t widely accepted, is what makes us undeniably, unforgettably who we are.

In the three years since I finally listened to the fidgety, hair-pulling voice that told me to “cut it all off,” despite what every societal construct reinforced, I have changed my hair countless times.

I’m now in a phase where it’s settled into its natural brown curls, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it mirrors the style I wore as a little girl—not yet shaped or sheared by the worldview of what a woman should look like.

What I have found—and more importantly, felt—is that doing the thing that made me wince at the thought of being outed as Not Like All The Other Girls is exactly what made me feel more like myself than ever before in my adult life.

My confidence soared.

I grew bolder in my self-expression.

And I couldn’t help but appreciate the compliments from strangers who’d stop me in grocery store aisles just to say, “I love your hair!”

Hair is just a stand-in for the thread I’ve been tugging at with Other Wise. What people are responding to when they see me is whatever magnetism I emit because I’m finally caring less about perception, and pursuing curiosities that may fall outside the norm.

Lean into whatever it is that scares you for fear of being Othered. It’s usually the answer to who you are.