Be Inspired..!!

Nobody’s casting spells. We’re just lighting a candle so we don’t scream into Slack.

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Okay, confession. Last Tuesday I lit a candle at 8:58 a.m. before logging on, said “let’s do this” to nobody, and felt like a lunatic and a genius at the same time.

It was a vanilla candle. Eleven dollars. It sat there looking cozy while my laptop loaded forty-seven unread messages. And something in my brain went, oh. There you are.

That’s the whole trend. Everybody’s calling it “workplace witchcraft,” and I get it, the word is fun, but nobody I know owns a cloak. We’re just tired. We’ve lived through the layoff email that starts with “We’re excited to share.” We’ve lived through the “quick sync” that ate an hour of our one precious life. And now there’s an AI that writes our emails better than we do, which feels rude.

So we got weird. Quietly. At our desks.

I didn’t plan to join in. I’m a spreadsheet person. But one Wednesday my boss said “per my last email” to me in a meeting, out loud, with her actual mouth, and I went home and did something unhinged. I grabbed a pad of Post-its, wrote UNBOTHERED on one, and stuck it to my monitor. Like a threat. Like a tiny yellow bouncer.

Here’s the funny part. It worked. Not because it’s magic, but because every time I looked up mid-email-spiral, there it was, calling me out. Unbothered. Okay, fine. I’ll try.

Now it’s a whole system. Different words for different days. Steady. Soft. Once, during a truly terrible week, just “snack.” My friend Dana does one-word Post-its too, except hers are all insults aimed at her inbox. I respect that.

Then there’s the candle. I know, everyone has a candle. But I started lighting mine at the same time every day, and my body figured out the plan before I did. Candle on means work. Candle out means I’m done, go be a person. When you work from your kitchen table, that little flame is basically a door. A very flammable door. Keep it away from your paper stack, I’m begging you.

Last one, and this is where my sister-in-law judged me hard at Thanksgiving. The diffuser. Lavender oil, plug it in, little mist cloud floating off the desk like I’m summoning something. I bought it during a deadline week because Amazon said “frequently bought together” and I was too fried to argue. Three days later I caught myself breathing slower on a call. Was it the lavender? Probably not. Was it that I finally had something to do with my nose and hands besides doomscroll? Yeah. Fine.

And no, I’m not saying a Post-it fixes a broken job. It doesn’t. If your workplace is on fire, a candle isn’t the answer, an exit plan is.

But here’s what I noticed. The second I mentioned the diffuser to a coworker, she went quiet and said, “I put a rock in my bra before big meetings.” We stared at each other. Then we laughed so hard a guy from accounting walked by and just kept walking.

That was the closest I’d felt to anyone in that building in two years. More than the team-building thing where we each shared our “spirit animal” on a name tag. (Mine was a raccoon. It was accurate.)

I think that’s what’s really going on. We’re all running around pretending we’re totally fine, totally resilient, totally thrilled to hop on another call, and underneath it, everybody has a little weird thing they do to get through the day. A lucky pen. A playlist they start at 9:01. A word they mutter before hitting send. Nobody talks about it because it feels embarrassing.

It isn’t. It’s the most human thing in the office.

And think about Sunday night for a second. That tight little feeling around 7 p.m., when the weekend starts packing its bags and your inbox starts breathing on your neck. Everybody gets it. Nobody says it. A ritual is how you quietly turn that feeling down, and you don’t need a therapist’s couch to do it, just a Post-it and a minute.

In 2026, with the robots coming for our email, the weird little ritual might be the one part of your day they can’t do for you. They can’t light your candle. They can’t feel the stupid relief of peeling a Post-it off your monitor at 5 p.m. and crumpling it up like you won something.

So here’s what I want from you, and I mean it. Tell me yours. Right now. Hit reply or drop it in the comments. What’s the strange little thing you do before work, during work, or the second you close the laptop? I read every single one, I won’t judge, and I will absolutely steal the good ones.

And if you like this kind of thing, the honest, slightly chaotic, “wait, other people do that too?” stuff about how we actually work and date and survive being adults right now, subscribe to my Substack, Love, Unlearned. It’s free. It shows up in your inbox. It’s basically a candle for your brain.

Come sit next to me. Bring your weird. I’ll bring the Post-its.

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