“I’m going to count you down from ten, and when I snap my fingers, you’ll open your eyes and be filled with an overwhelming sense of joy as soon as you see the color red.” You hear the words from a distance, but your body is limp and leaden. You struggle to conceive of a time when you were able to move.
“Ten.”
But the state you’re in doesn’t concern you; you simply observe it. Nothing concerns you right now. Some might say at 11, you’re too young to have experienced real concern anyway, but while it may not have taken the form of concrete words like “bills” or or “jury duty” or “we broke up” yet, you seem to have inherited something that runs through your body, a weighted shadow that curls into your chest. Sometimes it stops you cold; sometimes it makes you feel like you’re going to jump out of your own skin.
“Nine…eight…”
It’s all gone now, and you feel like pure light. You have the sneaking suspicion that your body remembers this feeling from somewhere. You feel your mouth stretch into a smile. You feel closer to where you started, and also somewhere entirely new.
“Seven…six…five…four…”
The leaden feeling is slowly leaving your body. Your consciousness is tickling at you, reminding you about this thing called “reality.” Something in you wonders if this red=happy thing is really going to happen. How could it?
“Three…two…”
Safe. You feel safe. Safer than you’ve ever felt—even with him, your father, who is half of your entire world. Years later, you’ll be able to step right back into this feeling. Years later, knowing this feeling will be what helps you find it again and again.
“One.” You hear the crisp, musical snap of his fingers. “Eyes open, wide awake.”
You’ve let go of that hope you felt earlier; not because you’ve stopped hoping, but because you’ve let go of everything. Your body is weightless and free. And then you see a red car rolling by outside the window, and you’re in ecstasy—the word isn’t too strong.
Years later, the details are hazy. You don’t know how much time passed between opening your eyes and seeing the car; you don’t recall which words were spoken between the two of you. But you’ve never forgotten the feeling that welled up in your chest—both instantaneous and all-consuming—or the tears of joy that ran down your cheeks. It stuck with you for days, months; it might even still be with you today. Maybe your whole life has been reshaped by the joy you feel when you see the color red; maybe it’s become such a part of who you are, you don’t even notice it. But what would your life be if you’d never received this suggestion?
It’s undeniable: with his words, the color red became synonymous with happiness. You still remember the beam of pride and joy on his face as the tears clung to your skin. This session not only a job well done, but a lesson he’d been aching to pass along.
Finding the red again
Eleven years later, you’re in New York City. You came here to live out your dreams, but your contract at Harper’s Bazaar ended two months ago and in your scramble to find another source of income, you find yourself seated at the front desk of Massage Envy. You’ve been applying to fashion and writing jobs, but nothing has stuck. You’re barely making rent and you don’t have a sense of community. You feel lost and dejected, but determined to figure things out.
Help comes in the form of him again—your father, who is still committed to passing along those lessons you don’t even know you need to learn. “Say these affirmations every day,” he instructs in his email, which includes an attachment to a Word doc with a list of positive statements.
They’re written in the present tense, and they’re full of claims that read outrageous to you. I am a successful writer. I am a powerful force in the journalism world. You feel blasphemous saying the words aloud, but it also brings you a sense of joy. It reminds you of how the color red felt that summer day in La Habra; you cling to the feeling, and do your homework.
Black, white, and red all over
Less than a year passes, and you’ve left Massage Envy. You’re working for an internationally-renowned company that licenses user-generated videos to global news sources. You’re also freelancing for a variety of publications on the side, finding your voice and slowly making your name in the noise of the media. You feel like you’ve been let in on some sort of secret—but what is it, really? All you know is that you speak things and they happen—whether good or bad. It’s like you’re writing your own story. The thought remains overwhelming.
“You should study hypnotherapy.” He says he’ll teach you everything he knows, that you’d be a natural.
You’ve been watching him work for years. You’ve held sign cues for him at stage hypnosis shows; you’ve reviewed videos and scripts of him hypnotizing clients for a myriad of issues. But still, you bristle at the idea of following suit; like many children of parents who came before you, you want to make your own way.
Despite your resistance, you can’t unsee. His insights live in you, waiting to be utilized.
Saying goodbye in his mother tongue
He’s in a hospital bed, and you aren’t allowed to see him. COVID restrictions. You FaceTime almost 24 hours a day, doing whatever you can to brighten his spirits. He’s sick, and he’s all alone. He’s miserable and scared. Seeing him in such a state is terrifying.
But it’s like you’ve been holding a piece of him inside of you for this moment. His voice tumbles out of you, and you find yourself regurgitating the hypnotic language you’ve been raised on. It doesn’t change what’s about to happen, but you’ll do anything to ease his pain by even one percent. You don’t even know if it does that, but you watch the words bring him back to himself a tiny bit. You just want to speak his language.
How to create
So maybe he lives on in you—at least the bits and pieces of him you don’t want to let go.
Ironically, his lessons make sense to you now. At first, this made you want to scream. It tore your heart apart with the agony of loss: what a bitter reality to understand his words when he’s no longer here to discuss them with. But you’ve found ways to feel him, and you think you understand your mission: keep sharing what he discovered about life. That we can and do write our own scripts, and when we choose our words sacredly, we create beautiful realities that no one can take from us.
It might start with the color red, and it might require you to let go and look beyond how you’ve defined reality thus far. But the best lessons I’ve learned are:
Don’t be afraid.
Speak your dreams.
Nurture them, act on them, watch your words, and watch them all come true.
Want to make your list of positive affirmations but don’t know where to start? I’d love to help—feel free to reach out to me at taylorfengle@gmail.com so I can pay forward the gift my dad gave to me.
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