A Fool for Magic
Brielle and Her Passion for Magic
“Magic just feels like something where I don't need to compromise any part of myself. It's just… beautiful. I was explaining that to someone the other day. They were like, ‘Are you on shrooms?’ And I was like, ‘No, it's just great. Okay? It's just really, really great.’” — Brielle
When a 10-year-old Brielle sat in her living room watching Penn & Teller TV specials, she was awed by the illusions that made magic seem real, yet she never imagined that one day she would perform on the show — that would take an act of magic itself. But on Friday, March 15th, 2024, that’s exactly what happened.
“It is truly no secret that I am a big fan of both of you,” she told the famously hard to impress hosts as she stepped onto the stage. “And being the super fan that I am, I have a huge collection of Penn & Teller memorabilia. I brought a few of those items with me today.”
“Oh my goodness!” Penn exclaimed as she opened the briefcase beside her to reveal a Colt Python 357 Magnum bullet (fired from a show in February 2002), signed Penn and Teller cards, and a set of Penn and Teller's clear cups in an aluminum ball.
Pointing to this last item, Brielle said, “I paid a ridiculous amount for [this] online — [though] I could have easily made [it] myself at home.” The audience erupted in laughter.
Brielle then turned her back, inviting each host to select an item from the case to display to the audience. As she accurately guessed each item, the crowd’s silence turned to applause, with some whoops of excitement mixed in.
“You said you were new to magic, but we would never know it by this performance,” Brooke Burke, the show’s co-host, said after Brielle completed her trick — and made her 10-year-old self proud.
I met Brielle, born Jessica Brielle Kawalek, through our mutual friend and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. He recently discovered his own passion for magic and couldn’t wait to introduce us. I quickly saw why.
“Magic is something that is the most ‘me thing’ that I have ever come across in my entire life,” Brielle tells me. “It just feels like I'm in love when I talk about magic. It's therapy, it's healing, it's science, it's math, it's art, it's performance. I just love it.”
Her words resonate. That feeling of being in love isn’t confined to relationships with other people — it extends to our passions and other interests, too. It’s a profound connection that fills us from within.
“I was talking to my therapist when I first got into magic,” she continues. “I told her, ‘You know, it combines all these things that I really love.’ And she's like, ‘It’s not that it combines those things. It's that you've found you in something.”
Brielle is all in on magic. But unlike the few among us who discover their passion early in life and understand how it will shape their future, Brielle’s surfaced later in life. It was only after decades of experimenting and exploring various interests that everything began to converge — and finally clicked into place.
Act I: ‘Tell Me How to Start’
Brielle grew up on the stage. “I was obsessed with theater and I was in choir,” she says. “I just wanted to be a part of the community, whether I was singing or performing.”
In high school, Brielle fell for psychology, driven by a desire to help people and a fascination with the underlying patterns that connect us all. Convinced that the arts were not a viable career path, she relegated her passion for performance to a hobby and concentrated on her academic pursuits. After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology and German, she moved to Germany to teach English with a Fulbright scholarship, where she decided to also pursue a master’s degree in clinical psychology.
After returning to the U.S., Brielle worked for AmeriCorps and as a substitute teacher, which is where she first discovered her interest in magic. She was impressed by how effortlessly another teacher, Michael T. Meyers, captivated students. “I do magic,” he told her. “I show them something at the beginning. I show them something at the end.” The secret, he said, was about gaining mutual respect.
Intrigued, Brielle asked Meyers to teach her a few tricks. He noticed the spark in her eyes and encouraged her to stick with it. But when the time came for her to move away to grad school, they lost touch. Caught between her curiosity for magic and the pressure to follow a conventional career path, Brielle reluctantly let her newfound passion become dormant.
This is such a common scenario. All too often, we view our past passions with nostalgia, wrongly assuming it’s too late to revive them. But it’s almost never actually too late. Sometimes, we need to allow our interests to simmer in the background, enriched by life experiences and skills, until we’re ready to embrace them with greater wisdom and capacity.
For Brielle, it was nearly four years — after completing her education and moving to Chicago where she began a new job at an educational publishing company — before she reencountered magic. She attended a show headlined by comedy magician Trent James with a Bumble date. While her date enjoyed the performance, Brielle alone left with renewed determination.
After the show, Brielle approached one of the magicians. “I’m going to be a magician,” she declared. “Take my money and tell me how to start.”
“After that moment it was all I thought about and talked about,” she says. “I was constantly watching magic shows, talking to magicians, practicing, reading books, and watching tutorials... consuming anything that I could that had to do with magic.”
Brielle also told her friends about her new direction.
“This is going to be my new life now,” she assured them. “I need you to prepare yourself for this.”
She has not wavered once since.
“I was all in after that,” she says.
Act II: Destined for Bigness
Half a year after diving into the deep end, Brielle decided to reach back out to Meyers, hoping to share her progress. It was then that she received the heart-wrenching news that he had passed away since their last encounter.
“That was a really hard moment,” she says. “I wanted nothing more than to be like, ‘You were right. You saw something that I didn’t know was there.’”
Still, she carried Meyers’s belief in her with her as a constant source of inspiration. She dedicated herself even more to mastering mentalism, a style of magic that harnesses psychological techniques, intuition, and suggestion to create an illusion of mind reading and other extraordinary abilities.
“I've been drawn to mentalism from the beginning,” Brielle tells me, “because it feels so accessible as someone with a psychology background. It allows me to bring in emotions and feelings and body language and inflection to the spotlight and create stories around those types of things. And what that means to me is just a more personalized and intimate experience.”
And then, her friend Chris Davidson booked her for her first official gig: his 34th birthday party.
“You’re going to be really big one day,” Davidson assured her with a confidence that moved her. “I wanted to be the first person to book you. I want to be able to say I was the first show you ever did.”
This support from Davidson and others, countering the conventional voices that urged her to stick to a ‘real job’ and abandon her ‘silly dream,’ further fueled her determination. Motivated by the encouragement, Brielle began booking gigs across Chicago, quickly becoming a familiar presence in the local scene for her intimate, close-up magic. She also submitted her audition to Penn & Teller: Fool Us, pursuing a dream she hadn’t fully acknowledged until then. Now, she performs magic at least four nights a week — and, less than two years after her initial commitment, is a full-time magician.
“I’m excited to see what happens next,” she says. “I’m ready for the ride.”
Act III: The Return of Wonder
I asked Brielle to give an example of another one of her tricks. She described a mentalism routine based on classic movie cards (you can view the routine on her Instagram here).
“Take a card,” Brielle tells a member of the audience, handing him a stack of cards featuring classic movies and tells him to choose one he feels strongly about. “Now read the cards out loud and I will guess which card you picked.”
She closes her eyes while the audience member shouts out names of movies, her hands on the hips of her sapphire blue, silk dress. She doesn’t say anything as he sounds out names of movies on at a one.
“Your voice swooped up on one of them,” she says as she raises her hands into the air. “I don’t know if you guys heard it. But I’m going to go with Bambi.” The crowd erupts in applause.
“I love those moments that they share with me,” Brielle says. “It feels bigger than the magic trick. Because you’re really listening to them. And often it’ll lead to conversations about when they were a kid and why that movie was so important.”
So what is it about magic that brings out the childlike wonder in so many of us — myself included?
Brielle believes that magic offers a rare, socially acceptable way to tap into the sense of unjaded curiosity so many of us are pressured to leave behind as we get older.
“I think that at some point, we’re all told to grow up,” she says. “And along with that comes not allowing ourselves to experience amazement. Magic allows us to be in that space. It allows us to experience that wonderment.”
Brielle is clear that not everyone experiences magic this way. “Some people get joy from figuring out how it worked,” she says. She doesn’t see this as a fault — she recognizes it as a reflection of their natural curiosity and analytical mindset. “Maybe that’s how they were when they were a kid,” she says. “Maybe they like to take things apart and figure things out. And that’s great, too.”
But for others, like me, magic can momentarily suspend reality. “It might not be real, but it feels real,” she says. “And some people are like, ‘That is real. That’s what I want to believe in.’”
Whatever the reaction is, she says, she feels like the response to magic is genuine — it heals people a little bit and connects them to their childhood self.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t heal me, too,” she says.
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Brielle’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One lesson: When Passions Click into Place
Brielle's journey underscores a common narrative in the discovery of our passions: early interests often lay the groundwork for future passions, but it typically takes a pivotal moment or experience for everything to fully "click." Whether it’s a childhood fascination with the arts or an academic pursuit like psychology, these early explorations set the stage. But it often requires a defining moment or a deep realization to clearly see and wholeheartedly pursue a passion, turning dormant interests into a distinct direction.
One Exercise: Passion Integration
Take a moment to write down what you've been passionate about at different times in your life — when you were a kid, a teenager, and as an adult. What common themes or elements do you see in these passions? Think about what these similarities tell you about what really lights you up. Then, try to think of ways to combine these long-standing interests. Could mixing these together spark a new passion or breathe new life into an old one? This exercise is all about seeing how your interests link together over time, helping you find a unique or creative path that really clicks for you.
One Curiosity: Types of Magicians
Until recently, I hadn't realized the vast variety of magicians that exist. My conversations with Brielle and Kaufman opened my eyes to the many specialties within the magic community. Just like the diverse range of tricks they perform, magicians too have their niches—from mentalists to illusionists, from bizarrists to dove magicians (yes, that's a real specialty). The 'micro-passions' within the art of magic :)