Illusion, Magic, Creative Power
My name means illusion. It also means magic. I spent years learning the difference, and longer realizing there isn't one.
माया
My name holds three meanings, and I have spent most of my life learning which one I was looking at.
I have माया tattooed on my right wrist. I put it there as a reminder that the voice telling me I wasn’t enough was माया. Not truth. An illusion I had mistaken for a fact about myself. For years that was the whole meaning. A small private argument I was winning by inches.
I didn’t know the other half of the word yet.
माया comes from the root mā.
To measure.
To give shape.
In Sanskrit, the oldest texts named magic itself, the creative force that makes something visible where there had been nothing.
So my name was never only a warning. It was also the word for making wonder real. The thing I am here to do is written into the thing I am called.
There is a joke buried in that, and it took me years to hear it.
I spent nearly a decade making magic for one of the most recognizable creative companies in the world.
Not magic as a metaphor.
Magic as the literal product.
The thing people paid for and traveled to and remembered.
I gave shape to other people’s wonder on stages and at sea, in rooms where the work was extraordinary and the cost of it stayed invisible until it wasn’t. I carried the exact word for what I made, tattooed on my wrist, and never once connected it to the job.
Here is what no one tells you about making magic for a living. It runs on something inside you that does not refill on a schedule. I kept conjuring it. I stopped noticing how little was left to make it from. The exhaustion was not dramatic. It was quiet and total, the kind you can carry for a long time because you have convinced yourself it is just the price of doing something you love.
I didn’t leave because I stopped loving it. I left because I finally understood that loving something that is hurting you is its own kind of trap. And I had been in it for nine years.
What I found on the other side of leaving was not relief. It was ruins. The version of myself that had been built entirely around making magic for someone else’s vision, gone, and not much yet standing in its place.
But there was so much beauty in those ruins. And as I kept crumbling inward, I started to find the beauty in my own.
That is when the rest of the word came back to me.
माया is the illusion and the magic and the power that creates the visible world, all at once. The same force that can make you believe a lie about yourself is the force that lets you make something true. I had spent so long fighting the first meaning, and so many years spending the second one on other people, that it never occurred to me the magic was mine to keep.
Maya B. Creative is me doing that. Out loud, in real time, with the pieces still on the floor.
This is not a place where I tell you how I fixed it. I haven’t. It is where I write from inside the rebuilding, the questions I can’t answer yet, the slow work of measuring out a life and giving it a shape that is finally mine. Some of it is about creativity and burnout and the cost of making wonder for other people. Some of it is just about being a person who is still becoming one.
If you are somewhere in the middle too, still measuring, still trying to give form to something you can only half see, I want you here. The doubt is माया. The voice that says you’ve left it too late, or that what you make doesn’t matter, that is माया too. An illusion. Convincing, and not real.
The magic is also माया. That one is real. After all those years of making it for everyone else, I’m learning to make it for myself.
and I’m doing it scared too.
- Maya B.