Your Name Needs a Ward
An ancient practice for women whose success has begun to travel farther than they do.
This year I’ve been growing fast, and I don’t only mean with money. My work found its people, my name started reaching places I never expected, and the life I spent years building in the dark finally started showing. And right on schedule, some of my close friends changed on me. It wasn’t just that I was growing; I was moving past them, and sometimes that’s where friendships reach their limit.
The change was subtle, which somehow made it worse. That’s when I realized that not everyone watching you succeed is happy for you. There was the friend whose congratulations started to feel a little insincere, who made jabs dressed as jokes, or gave compliments that somehow hurt – suddenly, distance coming from someone who used to be so warm when I had less. Although, it was never obvious enough to confront or clear enough to prove, I still felt it, like noticing a draft in a warm house without knowing which window it’s coming through.
I’ve had to cut several people off this year. Before, it was easy for anyone to access me, but that changed when I finally understood something about elevation that nobody prepares you for: the higher you climb, the more eyes on you, and not all of them have good intentions. I could have let it get to me. I could have shrunk back down to a size that drew less attention, downplayed my achievements, or tried to be less noticeable. Women do that every day, and it costs them more than they realize. So instead, I chose a different path. I decided to alchemize it, to turn that attention into motivation and protect what I’ve built, starting with the thing that travels furthest without me – my name.
Because right now your name is in the mouths of people you don’t even fuck with. In conversations you’re not part of, group chats you’ll never see, held by people who smile in your face and people who have never even met you. This has always been the case for any successful woman whose achievements are visible, and there has always been protection for it. The women who came before us understood envy in ways we were taught to forget, and today I’m giving you their oldest defense.
The Oldest Belief on Earth: Evil Eye
My grandmother’s generation, hell even my mother’s, would’ve known immediately what I was feeling, because they had a name for it, one that almost every culture on this planet discovered on its own.
The evil eye is the single most widespread belief human beings have ever shared. It shows up in Mesopotamian incantations from 5,000 years ago, in Greece as mati, in Rome where people carved protections into doorways, in Turkey as nazar, in the Middle East as ayin hara, in Italy as malocchio, in Latin America as mal de ojo, and in India as drishti. Cultures that never met, separated by oceans and millennia, all came to the same conclusion: envy is not just a harmless feeling that remains within the person who feels it. It moves. It travels through a look, a word, or even attention itself, and it strikes whatever it lands on. This was never just a fringe belief held by the uneducated. Plutarch sat at dinner parties debating with philosophers how the evil eye worked, just as we might talk about any force of nature, because for the ancient mind, the only question was how it worked, not whether it did.
All of these cultures agreed that the evil eye targets anything clearly thriving, such as a healthy baby, a beautiful bride, an abundant harvest, or a prosperous home. People never thought the evil eye touched those struggling, because struggle draws pity, and pity doesn’t harm. The evil eye finds what is rising. Which means our ancestors, all of them, everywhere, understood something that modern positivity culture has spent a century unlearning: being seen doing well is a condition that requires protection.
They built entire etiquettes around it. In much of the world, you still don’t praise a baby without adding a blessing, because a compliment without one is an open channel, and admiration is understood to carry envy with it. Some languages even have a word you must say after giving praise, like mashallah or kinehora, so the compliment arrives protected. The old people knew where the evil eye usually came from, and it wasn’t strangers. The oldest warnings say it comes from inside the house – from family, close friends, or those near enough to watch your success closely, because envy needs proximity to feed, and nobody has a better view of your blessings than the people at your table.
These defenses were everywhere, often created by women. The blue glass mati hanging in doorways from Istanbul to Athens, the hamsa, the horn, the red thread around a wrist, mirrors facing the door, salt across a threshold – none of it was just decoration. It was all part of the foundation, generations of women protecting what they loved, because they knew that anything that shines draws attention.
Most of you are of the first generation of women taught not to believe in any of this. You were told to be visible, post your successes, to share your launches, to celebrate openly, and to build your lives in public, but you were given no protection. You were told that everyone watching you means well, and that any doubts are just paranoia. Meanwhile, you’ve felt it. The subtle jab after you share good news. The friend who pulls away when things go well for you. The compliment that feels more like sarcasm. Your body remembers things your worldview won’t let you read.
The Tax on Rising
Any woman who is growing or succeeding publicly eventually faces the evil eye, and that attention often leads to a choice typically made without much thought. Most women choose to shrink, which looks like softening her announcements, keeping launches quiet, no longer sharing her wins, saying “it’s going okay” instead of admitting things are going better than okay, avoiding raising her prices to keep from drawing attention, and editing good news before sharing it. Some friends and relatives will never hear the real numbers, because she already knows what their faces will do. This isn’t humility. It’s warding, done badly, because nobody taught her real protection, so she reached for the only defense that comes without teaching: disappearing.
And the training started long before money was involved. Somewhere in the past, you learned to downplay your achievements – you probably can’t place it anymore, but there was a moment when you shared good news and saw someone you cared about react with something other than happiness. Kids notice these things, and girls quickly learn whose faces change when she shines, so she starts editing before she understands what she’s editing for. By the time she’s grown, this editing becomes automatic, and she thinks of it as her personality, just being private or modest. But really, it’s the oldest defense she has, installed decades ago, still controlling what the world gets to know about her.
Trying to stay invisible is actually the most costly way to protect yourself, because visibility is where revenue comes from. A launch you barely mention makes less than one you talk about everywhere; hidden wins convert nobody into buying from you. Prices raised apologetically get tested harder than prices raised confidently, because people take their cues about your value from how you carry it. Your business only grows when people can see it. So every time you shrink to keep somebody comfortable, you’re paying for their comfort through your revenue, and losing money every month.
The ancients would have recognized this immediately and said it’s backward. You don’t protect yourself by hiding what makes you stand out. Hiding is letting fear win before it even finds you. The real goal is to protect yourself so you can shine as brightly as possible. That’s what the blue glass and red thread were for – not to hide, but to be visible and protected. The bride wore her protection and still had her wedding. The house hung the mati and stayed successful, out in the open for the entire village to see.
The trade on the table is to stop paying the envy tax out of your income, and pay it with a ritual instead. One option drains you slowly over the years. The other simply costs you an evening.
The rest is for paid subscribers. Behind this paywall is a ritual for warding your name. I explain why your name can be a path for envy to reach you, share the history of name-magic from ancient Egypt, and give you clear steps on what to write, what to say, and how to keep the ward strong as you move forward. A new ritual every Friday.