The Magnolia Woman October Series — No. 1 👁️🥀

There is someone lurking in the shadows…

She knows where you went for your birthday. She saw the new hair color. She knows you started a business. She noticed when you lost weight, gained weight, fell in love, fell out of love, moved, traveled, changed your style, leveled up.

She knows. 👀

And the funny thing is… you can’t remember the last time she congratulated you.

Welcome, darling, to the age of the monitoring spirit.

Now, before we start sprinkling salt around our houses and accusing everyone on your Instagram Story viewer list of witchcraft, let me explain.

I don’t believe every person quietly watching you is secretly plotting your demise. Sometimes people are simply curious. Sometimes they’re shy. Sometimes they genuinely admire you from afar. And sometimes, especially online, a stranger is simply consuming content that you willingly put on the internet.

But then there are those other people.

You know the ones.

They never seem to miss a thing.

They don’t celebrate, contribute, or encourage. They don’t purchase or share. Sometimes they won’t even give you the courtesy of a little double tap!

But somehow?

𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆.

Watching.

Lurking.

Keeping inventory.

And perhaps the creepiest thing about the modern monitoring spirit is that she doesn’t even have to hide behind the bushes anymore.

She has Wi-Fi 👻

Social Media Created the Perfect Haunted House

Social media is one of the greatest blessings and strangest curses of our generation.

Never before have we been able to connect with so many people so easily. A woman can sit in her bedroom with an idea and build a business, find her community, share her art, tell her story, teach something she knows, and reach people she may never meet in person. That is beautiful!

But access has a shadow side.

We have also created a world in which people can have extraordinary access to one another while contributing absolutely nothing to one another.

Someone can watch your life unfold for years.

Think about how strange that actually is.

They can know what you wore. Where you traveled. What your house looks like. What you’re building. What you’re celebrating. What disappointed you. What you’re proud of. What you’re cooking for dinner.

And you may know virtually nothing about them.

In another era, keeping that close of an eye on somebody required effort. You needed mutual friends or proximity. You needed a phone call or to hear something through the grapevine.

Now all it requires is a thumb.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

And suddenly somebody who hasn’t spoken to you in three years knows you’re in Jamaica.

𝑺𝒑𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒚.

Attention Is Not the Same Thing as Support

This is something I think every woman creating something needs to understand:

Your audience and your supporters are not necessarily the same people.

Some people are fascinated by you without rooting for you.

Some people consume you without pouring anything back into you.

Some people are inspired by you.

Some compare themselves to you.

Some genuinely love what you’re doing.

Some are waiting to see what you’ll do next.

And yes, some may be waiting to see whether you fall.

That’s why I don’t think we should automatically interpret attention as admiration or even silence as hatred.

We cannot climb inside another person’s mind and determine why they’re watching.

And quite frankly as women who live juicy lives, we have better things to do.

The more important question isn’t:

Why are they watching me?

It’s:

What am I going to do with the attention?

When the Watching Doesn’t Feel Good

I believe intention matters.

There is a difference between somebody looking at another woman and thinking, Wow. I love what she’s doing. She inspires me to go harder, and somebody looking at her accomplishments and immediately searching for something to criticize.

There is a difference between curiosity and obsession.

Admiration and comparison.

Observation and fixation.

And while none of us can know every private conversation being had about us, most women have experienced what it feels like to discover that somebody who never supports them publicly somehow has plenty to say about them privately!

Maybe they gossip about your business with other people who don’t support you either.

Maybe every accomplishment comes with a qualifier.

Maybe they suddenly appear whenever you’re struggling but become mysteriously silent when you’re flourishing.

Maybe they keep watching because they’re waiting for information they can carry somewhere else.

And that’s when it becomes tempting to start watching the watchers.

Checking who viewed or who liked. Checking who didn’t.

Wondering what they’re saying, whether they’re jealous or if they secretly dislike you.

But here’s where things get dangerous:

If you spend enough time monitoring your monitoring spirits, eventually you’re monitoring too.

And now they’ve taken something much more valuable than a peek into your life.

𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚’𝒗𝒆 𝒕𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒏 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏.

The Magnolia Woman Doesn’t Shrink. She Transmutes.

This is where I want to introduce one of my favorite concepts:

TRANSMUTATION.

To transmute something means to transform it from one state or form into another.

And that, darling, is where your power truly lies!

Because you cannot control every opinion formed about you, stop every tongue from speaking your name, or police every group chat formed about you. And you certainly cannot force somebody to celebrate you.

Once you choose to live visibly—whether you’re building a business, creating content, pursuing a dream, changing your life, or simply refusing to hide people are going to have opinions.

So what?

Use it.

Let attention become visibility. Let visibility become community and allow that community to become opportunity.

Let criticism sharpen your discernment, doubt strengthen your conviction or being underestimated give you room to surprise people.

Let every eye directed toward what you’re building remind you to build something worth looking at.

That is transmutation. A powerful woman knows that to win at life you must play chess not checkers. Transmutation is far more rewarding than retaliation or proving people wrong. Once you understand how to transmute energy you’ll level up in such a transformative way!

I sometimes think of the law of conservation of energy as a beautiful metaphor for this. In physics, energy changes form rather than simply disappearing. Spiritually and emotionally, I like asking myself a similar question:

If energy is already being directed toward me, what am I going to turn it into?

Because whatever somebody else chooses to do with their attention is their responsibility.

What I do with mine is mine.

Famous Women and Monitoring Spirits

Cardi B is who comes to mind for me. I love her real personality and how her being true to herself was a major catalyst in her rags to riches success story. So many people are in the blogs commenting about how much they can’t stand “The Brim”, yet they watch every interview, outfit, relationship, or business move she makes 😹

Look at virtually any highly visible woman.

There are people who claim they cannot stand her and somehow know everything she does

People will write paragraphs explaining why they don’t like a woman whose every move they voluntarily consume.

Baby…

One thing successful women eventually learn is that visibility attracts admiration, criticism, projection, inspiration, curiosity and sometimes envy—all at once. You cannot build a meaningful life around controlling which one arrives. You can only decide whether any of it is going to knock you off your path.

Protect Your Garden Without Hiding Your Flowers

Now, transmutation doesn’t mean having no boundaries. It’s actually quite the opposite. There are things everyone does not need access to. Every relationship doesn’t need to be posted in real time. Your business idea doesn’t need to be announced before it’s developed. A big blessing doesn’t need an audience while it’s still taking root.

Sometimes privacy is protection and blocking somebody is appropriate.

Sometimes removing access is discernment and the strongest thing you can say is absolutely nothing.

But I never want another person’s fixation, judgment or envy to convince a 𝑴𝒂𝒈𝒏𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒂 𝑾𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒏 that the solution is to stop blooming.

You do not have to dim your light so somebody else feels less tempted to stare at it. You simply have to become discerning about who gets close enough to touch the lamp.

Let Them Watch!

So maybe they’re watching. Maybe they’re gossiping. Maybe they’re comparing. Maybe they’re secretly rooting for you. Maybe they’re secretly rooting against you.

Maybe you’ve completely misunderstood them.

And here’s a hot take- maybe it just doesn’t matter 🤷‍♀️

Because while they’re watching, you should be living.

While they’re talking, create!

While they’re comparing, cultivate!!

While they’re wondering what you’re doing next, go do it!!!

Do not waste your blooming season digging through your Story views trying to determine which pair of eyes came with bad intentions. Your job is not to investigate every person standing outside the garden, it’s to tend to what God has placed inside of yours.

Protect your peace. Love the people who genuinely pour into you. Create for the people who value what you create.

Transmute what doesn’t serve you.

And keep blooming anyway.

Because a Magnolia Woman doesn’t spend all spring staring over the garden fence trying to figure out who’s watching her flowers grow. She tends her garden. 🌸

Your Sister in Bloom,
Sandy
Magnolia Woman