Manifesting my life gave me everything I asked for. Here’s why I quit

I must have been a teenager when I found this strange, thin book gathering dust on my mum’s bookshelf. The Cosmic Ordering Service, the cover read, the text spread across an image of dandelion seeds being blown away into a blue sky. A Guide To Realising Your Dreams, by Bärbel Mohr. I liked the look of this odd, functional-sounding book. “It’s fantastic,” read a quote on the front attributed to Noel Edmonds. I was too young to know who Noel Edmonds was. But still: fantastic.

While we often hear about The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 self-help bible beloved by Gen Xers, it was The Cosmic Ordering Service, published a few years beforehand, that really got me hooked on the idea of manifesting my life. Essentially, the book promotes the notion that, in order to get what you want, you can simply “place an order” with the universe. You write it down, set a date and wait for it to be “delivered”. So long as you ask in a positive way, aren’t too attached to the outcome and, crucially, believe, then it will happen. What could be a more enticing prospect?

Over the next decade or so, I became a staunch proponent of manifestation. I didn’t bang on about it or anything; this was my own private formula, and for the most part, I felt as though it worked. I manifested my way into jobs, relationships, lump sums of money. I’d ask for a certain amount of cash, and then get an unexpected tax rebate. I’d ask for a compatible partner, and then meet her in a bar. Each time an “order” was “delivered”, I’d feel thankful (the book encourages you to feel thankful; it fuels your manifestation powers). I am a lucky, lucky girl, I remember thinking, without irony. If only people knew how lucky they could be.

And then, I guess, my frontal lobe developed, and the things that I hoped to have obtained by now became harder to wish into being. My peers with inherited wealth began buying houses or being able to afford kids. I noticed the ways in which those from certain backgrounds had been able to pursue creative interests freely, while those less well-off were still shackled to unrelated 9 to 5s. I don’t mean to sound like a first-year politics student who just smoked their first blunt and discovered class consciousness. I just mean to say that cracks began to appear on the surface of a system I had—until my late twenties—come to follow like a secret cult.