The women in my family have a longtime fear of the evil eye - a superstition that there is evil watching and waiting to take fortunes away from us. To ward it off, my mother would pair gratitude with the redaction of it. The idea was to confuse the evil eye so it wouldn’t know what to take from us. When I asked her if the evil eye was real, she told me that evil is real. The form doesn’t matter. What matters is staying vigilant around the things you care about. When you love something, remind yourself to protect it.