THE WORD THAT FINDS YOU: INTENTION, MAGIC AND THE POWER OF NAMING YOUR YEAR
ESSAY SUMMARY
What if choosing a word for the year was less about setting goals and more about remembering how we wish to live?In The Word That Finds You: Intention, Magic and the Power of Naming Your Year, I explore the quiet power of intention through personal upheaval, spiritual awakening, grief and an unexpected confrontation with mortality. Moving between lived experience, psychology, philosophy and the language of magic, she considers how a single word can become a companion through uncertainty, a mirror to our deepest needs, and an invitation to participate more consciously in our own becoming.
The essay also questions the cultural and economic forces that teach us to measure our worth through productivity, achievement and prescribed timelines. Drawing on ideas of chrononormativity, embodied time and temporal sovereignty, it asks what might become possible when we reclaim the right to move at a pace that honours our humanity.
At its heart is an exploration of the relationship between language, intuition and transformation, and the possibility that some words carry meanings we can only fully understand once life has begun to unfold around them.
This essay is accompanied by a three-part reflective workbook designed to help you choose your own intention word for the year. The guide takes you through looking back, noticing where you are now, and considering what you want more of in the year ahead, before helping you identify a word that feels meaningful, grounded and genuinely yours. It also includes a library of 250 intention words to explore if you need inspiration, language or a place to begin.
“A word will not rescue you, but it will reveal you. And revelation is its own kind of salvation.”
EXCERPT 1
I spent two months writing my autobiography for six, sometimes twelve hours a day. It was not a book. It was an unearthing. Every page a shovel. Every paragraph a bone. I wrote my way through my memories, my motherlessness, my migration, my wounds. I saw patterns I had never seen. I met the earliest versions of myself. I realised how much of my life I had lived on autopilot, surviving instead of belonging to myself. Something in me cracked open. Something in me settled. It was not peace, but it was a clearing. An inner soil freshly turned.
“A word is not a target you chase; it is a frequency you become.”
EXCERPT 2
Chrononormativity — a term coined by cultural theorist Elizabeth Freeman — describes the invisible timelines that discipline us into urgency. It is the social pressure to reach milestones at the “right” time, to produce at a pace that has nothing to do with our bodies or our becoming. Under chrononormativity, time becomes a weapon of conformity. Faster. Straighter. Busier. It trains us to fear slowness, to distrust pause, to experience rest as failure. It is one of the quiet violences we inherit without question.
It rewards exhaustion, glorifies urgency, punishes rest. It bends time into something consumable: faster, tighter, busier. The pressure to move at unnatural speeds is a form of slow violence; the kind that accumulates quietly over years, eroding the nervous system, thinning the spirit, numbing joy. It is harm that disguises itself as productivity. Under its spell, we mistake movement for progress. We fill our calendars until our bodies forget how to breathe. We set goals because we’re afraid to sit still long enough to ask what the ache beneath our ambition is trying to say.
And yet the body keeps its own time. Somatic temporality — the pace of breath, healing, trauma recovery, intuition — refuses the demands of chrononormativity. The body does not rush. It does not care about milestones or societal clocks. It speaks in pulses, in waves, in seasons. And when life fractures, as mine did, the body reclaims its sovereignty instantly.
To decolonise time is to return to being, not as laziness, but as liberation. To move with seasons instead of schedules. To honour the pace of your nervous system. To reclaim the right to exist without performing your existence. This is where intention enters: not as a self-improvement trick, but as a reorientation toward your own life.
This reclamation is what scholars call temporal sovereignty: the right to choose your own pace. To belong to your own rhythm. To refuse timelines that were never built for your flourishing. For many Black women in particular, temporal sovereignty is not indulgence, it’s liberation.
“To choose a single word is to reclaim what your attention is allowed to orbit.”
EXCERPT 3
After the appointment, before leaving the hospital, I slipped into a toilet stall and wept silently. There was no elegance in that moment; just horror, shock, the sudden falling away of time. My body downshifted into stillness without asking me. ‘Unhurried’ found me by force. Presence descended like a cold cloth on the forehead of a feverish child.
After surgery, I wept again, but loudly this time. Not horror. Relief. Relief broke over me like weather. As if my body had been holding its breath for a season and finally remembered the exhale. Release. A full-bodied surrender.
I wept ten thousand puddles, called it a river, and told my sorrow to go and swim in it.
