Unicorn Your Life

by Mary Flannery

Genres: Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

Find your “unicorn magic” with this fun self-help guide—and make your world more wonderful!
 
It’s the little things we do for ourselves that make our day brighter . . . just like a unicorn’s horns make it enchanting and different from anything else. Unicorn Your Life helps you discover your own brand of magic—whether it’s a tasty treat, fresh flowers, or your favorite sparkly shoes—and assure you get more of it. This playful, mindful guide has quizzes, suggestions for creating perfect “unicorn spaces” at home and work, ideas for nurturing the positive relationships in your life, and strategies for unleashing the self-assured, confident creature that lives inside you!

Release date: July 3, 2018

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 240

Sample

RIGHT NOW, SOMEWHERE IN THE world, there is a quiet cave full of gorgeous, glittering crystals. Somewhere else, in a desert, there is a tall cactus with a single flower at the top, blossoming in the hot sun. Still elsewhere there is a bakery making delicate, delicious pastel macarons; a girl braiding her vibrant rainbow hair; a school of iridescent fish darting below a bridge of pink coral; a fairy cozying up on the couch in one of those backward robes that everyone thought was a cool new blanket invention. OK, that last one may or may not be real, but the world is full of magic. In fact, it is magic! And to be a unicorn within it, all you need to do is see that magic all around you.

There is wonder and laughter to be found in every part of your life if you just turn your horn to it. If you keep an eye peeled for all that sparkles and is kind, instead of all that molders and is mean, you’ll see so much more cool stuff everywhere. With a glittery outlook, you’ll fill up your brain and hear with awesome instead of awful. So muck that negative junk—you’re a dazzling creation of magical amazingness!

Unicorns are symbols of this philosophy. They are horses, gorgeous creatures in themselves, with a little extra twist of enchantment: a horn that turns an ordinary animal into a wondrous beast. They are that magic you can find in yourself and the world around you if you look for gold and refuse to revel in refuse. They represent the act of turning mundane moments into cotton-candy extravaganzas.

Unicorn Your Life is your guide not only to spotting all that sparkles but also to making magic of your own. It’s not about pretending that bad things don’t exist but about focusing on the good and being generous toward yourself and others. It’s also about rainbows and glitter! Sooooo much glitter!!!

Unicorning your life is like this: Think about something that is simple and common but also so wonderful it makes you smile and shimmy with delight. Maybe it’s an achingly adorable puppy, a sunset streaked with pinks and purples, your favorite candy, or squishy toy caticorn (cat + unicorn) that smells like strawberries. That little fluttering warmth you feel when you revel in a simple pleasure, when you’re tickled by kitten whiskers, when you inhale the amazing artificial sweetness of an off-gassing toy so hard that your head spins a little, that’s a unicorn moment! And you don’t have to chance upon those moments like a maiden finding a fairy in the forest. A real unicorn like you doesn’t just sit on their pretty, pretty haunches waiting for happiness. You can actively look for these moments, take them into your heart and hug them, and even make them yourself. If you do that, well, you’re pretty much a magical unicorn—at least on the inside.

This book will take you through tons of ways you can unicorn your life. It starts with you and how awesome and wonderful and amazing you are. You’ll uncover who your inner you(nicorn) truly is and how you can hold your horn high. Once you embrace your truly majestic self, you’ll learn how to meditate like magic, see with unicorn vision, break bad old habits and form some dandy new ones, frolic with abandon, and, perhaps most importantly, give zero fudges about what all the ogres and trolls think.

Next, you’ll unicorn your relationships by finding new ways to appreciate friends and family as well as special friends (wink wink, nudge nudge). By meeting others on their own terms and truly seeing them for who they are, your expectations of them can fall away so that you can love them with a pure, golden unicorn heart. Also, dance parties!

Then, it’s time for unicorning your home—making your abode into a magical place where you are happy and at ease in its cushy adorableness. Creating special spots where you can recharge your sense of sparkly wonder, probably while eating candy, is essential to the unicorn philosophy.

Finally, once you’re fortified with all sorts of wonderful unicorniness, you can unicorn your job. This is, for many unicorns, a decidedly unmagical part of their otherwise pearly existence. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find rainbows and charm at work. Find out how to deal with credit vampires, office ogres, and beastly bosses with the grace and poise of a unicorn, as well as make some magic that will get you through your days with higher spirits.

In Unicorn Your Life you’ll discover all sorts of ways to make squee-worthy cuteness, heart-warming enchantment, and glittery goodness the biggest and best parts of your life. Some are as easy as identifying what makes you feel good and creating more time for that. Others require a bit more brain work. It’s easy to get sucked down into the muck of negativity when things go wrong or the world seems chaotic. But with practice, glitter, persistence, glitter, true love, glitter, and a happy heart and horn, you really can make your life—or at least a lot of it—into a fairy tale.

 

A number of creatures who wish they were as cool as unicorns are mentioned throughout these pages. Here is a quick guide to each of them.

Demons Friggen jerks.

Elves These cool creatures are smart, sexy (Arwen and Legolas, I’m looking at you!), and make great unicorn companions.

Fairies These super-fun creatures are great at parties and have an absolutely adorbs sense of style. Their souls are made of squee.

Giants These big cheeses are powerful beasts that aren’t necessarily good or evil, but they are all business.

Gnomes They may look like elves but they act like goblins. Every last one of them has the middle name Negative Nancy.

Goblins Nasty pieces of work who are always judging you and your work. Blech!

Imps Easily irritated, imps are always creating mischief to vent some of their frustration at always being irritated. It’s a vicious magic circle.

Leprechauns OMG! So cute and fun and rich!

Manticores The dude equivalent of the sphinx who thinks he deserves more legroom than you do.

Minotaurs Really bull-headed creatures who are easily lost and usually enraged as a result.

Mummies Shambling ne’er-do-wells who are always groaning about other creatures.

Ogres and Trolls Cut from the same reeking cloth, these creatures are bullies who love throwing their weight around and despise all that’s good and glittery.

Pegasi A close relative of the unicorn, pegasi are just like you but with wings instead of a horn, which sounds pretty rad.

Phoenixes Never count a phoenix out! They are resilient and fiery and badass.

Sphinxes Meow! These creatures are sexy as can be, but they’re also kind of confusing, what with that lion head and lady body.

Vampires Your energy, your time, your ideas—anything that’s yours, they want it! They’ll suck you dry if you let them.

Witches and Warlocks Malevolent pains in the horn that take pleasure in messing with majestic creatures such as unicorns.

Yetis Big lunks that are sweet but also stinky.

THE FIRST STEP IN UNICORNING your life is to find, appreciate, love, squeeze, cherish, and glitterify that amazing unicorn inside you. How could you unicorn anything else if you haven’t unicorned yourself? But what does that even mean? you may wonder. Unicorning may sound mystical, but really it’s quite simple magic: you just need to close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and think about what makes you happy. What delights and enchants you and makes you want to frolic and sing and cavort and make all sorts of merry like some kind of mad, majestic merry-making machine?

Once you know what you love, you’ll know what you want, and you’ll know yourself—and then all you have to do is embrace that self. Squeeze yourself in a big happy hug and just frickin’ love it! If it means wearing a sparkly tutu, wear it. If it means singing “I Will Survive” at the top of your lungs, sing it. Give yourself the tenderness and affection and respect and forgiveness and glittery gifts and freedom to be oneself that you would give your best friend and beloved. Loving your own horn (which is the core of you) is the best way to be happy, and by doing that, you’ll find that love will work itself into all the nooks and crannies around you like so much spilled glitter. You just can’t get rid of that stuff!

There are lots of ways you can get in touch with your inner you(nicorn), and this chapter goes over the most magical ones. Journaling, meditating, visualization techniques, not giving a flying fudge about what others think, frolicking in a meadow, positive affirmations—these are all effective means of getting all up inside your own head and making merry. But like all forms of magic, these means of self-exploration can serve you well only if you believe they will.

You can make so much magic by believing you can make magic. You might not always succeed in accomplishing a thing you believe you can do, but you will almost never succeed in accomplishing a thing you don’t think you can do. Believing that a thing will happen takes you an extraordinarily long way down the yellow brick road to it actually happening. There is only awesomeness to be gained by believing in yourself and your own amazing powers. There is only good to be had by thinking well of yourself. While going around bragging about yourself is just bravado—which is decidedly un-unicorn behavior—going around believing in yourself is just good sense.

You are a sparkling, majestic creature, and I’m not just saying that! It’s true. Everyone is a truly magical creation (granted, some tend toward the dark-magic variety), and the more you embrace who you are, the better you get. Sure, we all have flaws and foibles, bad habits we could break and evil warlocks we should really get around to vanquishing, but that essence of you—that spark in your core, that bit of magic that makes you a unique individual—is wondrous. It’s also kind of a mysterious thing. What is that core bit? Ho. . .