The Day the Magic Shifted

In partnership with

There are moments in life that don’t announce themselves as turning points.

They arrive quietly, disguised as regular days, regular conversations, regular choices.

And yet when you look back, you realize something ended there… and something else began.

For me, one of those moments happened in a place I never expected to feel loss:

Disney World.

Disney has always been my North Star.

My happy place. My portal into a world where joy didn’t have to be earned, and imagination felt infinite.

But standing there recently, in a space that held so much meaning for me,
something broke.

The Ride That Raised Me

Spaceship Earth.

When I was a little girl, my Grammie would ride this with me over and over and over again.

We never questioned it. We just stayed seated and rode it again and again, letting time loop around us like a warm blanket.

Some of my earliest memories live inside that dark, slow-moving sphere.

My tiny legs swinging off the seat, my Grammie’s arm tucked around me,
her voice narrating the world.

As we approached the Egyptians, she would lean in and whisper:

Long before historians confirmed it, my Grammie knew.
And because she believed, I believed.

Then we’d glide forward into the Greeks, and she’d say:

And I would look at her with wide-eyed wonder and whisper back,
“Woooow”

Through every era of human history, she pointed out things she lived through:

She was Rosie the Riveter.
She was an engineer.

She saw pieces of herself everywhere in that ride.

It wasn’t just a timeline of humanity.
It was a timeline of her life and how she poured belief into mine.

And then…
Then came my favorite part.

As you circle the Earth and “descend” back toward the future, they used to show scenes of potential uses of future technology.

There was one scene I loved more than anything:

a little girl in bed, separated by physical distance from her grandma, but video chatting with her as she sings her to sleep.

I can still hear my Grammie’s voice in that moment:

And every time, every single time, I’d say:

“OK, Grammie. I will, Grammie”

Because she’d always been right about everything else, so why wouldn’t she be right about that?

And today we have all the things she (….and Walt Disney) predicted.

The Moment The Magic Shifted

So here I was, walking onto the ride with my husband, our first Disney trip together. I haven’t been to the parks in over a decade, so I was beyond excited…

Of course, I was crying, but the good kind.
The nostalgic kind.
The “I get to share this piece of my soul with someone I love” kind.

We started moving through history, and I told him all the stories:

Cleopatra.
The Greeks.
Rosie the Riveter.
The Grammie who shaped the engineer I became.

My heart felt full. This place was sacred.

And then we reached the part — the part —
where you’re supposed to come back to Earth and see the future.

My breath caught.
I waited for her.

I waited for the animatronic grandmother video chatting with her grandbaby far away.
I waited for the echo of Grammie’s voice.
I waited for that moment of magic that had followed me since childhood.

But instead…

There was nothing.

No future scenes.
No grandmother.
No vision of what could be.

Just blackness and twinkle lights.
A computer screen offering nothing but static possibility.

And in that instant, something inside me broke open.

It wasn’t just that the scene was gone.
It was that the symbol was gone.
The thread between my childhood and my adulthood had been cut.

The place where her voice always arrived…

was silent.

And suddenly, the grief hit me like a physical force.

My Grammie was gone.
Her scene was gone.

The magic she gave me…the prophecy, the possibility, the belief…
felt like it had vanished into darkness.

And on a theme park ride…..my whole worldview was shattered.

When Childhood Magic Breaks: The Neuroscience Beneath It

We don’t talk enough about this kind of grief.

The grief of losing a place, a ritual, a moment that shaped who you became.

Neuroscience tells us:

• The hippocampus stores emotional memories tied to place.

• The amygdala reacts when those memories don’t match reality.

• The prefrontal cortex tries to make sense of the mismatch.

When something central to your emotional blueprint disappears, the inner world destabilizes.

Your brain experiences it as loss, even if the world calls it “just a ride.”

This is nostalgic grief. A kind of identity grief.

The grief of realizing the version of you who once lived here is gone.
The grief of realizing magic isn’t external anymore.

It’s internal now…
And that shift hurts.

You Can’t Go Home Again… And Maybe That’s the Point

That old saying, “You can’t go home again,” landed differently that day.

Maybe you can’t return to childhood magic because you’re meant to build the adult version of it.

Maybe the place that once taught you to dream now asks you to carry the dreaming yourself.

Maybe the silence where your Grammie’s voice used to be isn’t emptiness, but an invitation.

The invitation to become the one who whispers belief into others.

The one who sees the future and says:
“I just know it’s possible.”

The one who builds what the next generation will one day remember.

Try This This Week

If you’ve had a moment recently that cracked open an old memory, or revealed a quiet grief (because I know the holiday season has a fun habit of bringing these emotions up…):

1. Name the emotion with precision.
Not just “sad.”
Maybe it’s longing, disruption, nostalgia, or identity grief.

2. Ask what part of you felt lost in that moment.
A childhood dream?
A connection?
A version of you who no longer exists?

3. Ask what part of you is emerging.
Grief often signals growth.

4. Remember this:
Magic doesn’t disappear…
It evolves.

Final Thought

That day on Spaceship Earth, I felt like the world I knew as a child had vanished.

But in the space where the animatronic grandmother once stood, I realized something:

The future is so much bigger than a static scene on a ride.

It’s something we’re building every day with our choices, our courage, our curiosity, and the people who raised us to believe.

My Grammie wasn’t gone.

She was right there, in the engineer I became.
In the dreams she planted.
In the work I do now, teaching others to build the worlds they want to live in.

So remember, even though we can’t always go home, that magic is still here.

It lives on in us and everything we are.

Behold the power of beehiiv

This newsletter? It’s powered by the platform built for growth, monetization, and jaw-droppingly good reader experiences.

From sponsorships that actually pay you fairly to referral programs that grow your list on autopilot, beehiiv gives publishers, creators, and writers the tools to grow their newsletter like never before. And yeah, it is just that easy.

Power your content with beehiiv