The Phoenix Complex

The Phoenix, this flamboyant bird dying in a fire to be reborn through it. What a powerful symbol for the circle of life, the circle of change, the circle of destruction and creation. Because there is no movement, no creation, without destruction. Something has to end, to die, to be transformed, for the newness to emerge from it. It is one of the oldest lesson of life. Life seems to not be made to stay still, to experience stagnation.

It is how, young teenager, I came up with this metaphor : life is like a river, flowing fluidly, always in movement, never the same. But we are totally freaked out by transformation, because transformation is the death of something, and we are scared by any kind of death, by the unknown. Our mind wants to know, wants to control, to be sure. There is no control in the wild current of a river. So we try to catch a rock, and to never let go. But life isn't made this way, so the current is hitting us, with violence, and we suffer. It is hard to let go of the rock, we don't know where the river is going. Following it means death to our old self, and embracing the darkness of the unknown. However, we can ask ourselves : when are we feeling more alive? Is it in the stagnation of our habits, the comfort of the well known, or in the void of the unknown, in the joy of feeling we are becoming new, being reborn through the fire?

The answer to this question was obvious to me : I want to live intensely. I want to feel all the diversity of human emotions, I want to live many lives, to be many people, to look back at the end of the movie and think : “What a hell of a life I lived! Death, you can take me, my job here is done!”

I found recently this well known citation :

“In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away” – Shing Xiong

In my teenage years, I also wrote : “I want to live my life like running naked in the forest”.

Is my mind trying nevertheless to catch the rocks? Hell yeah. A mind is doing mind things - like trying to make stable a world that is not stable with words, boxes, habits, narrow definitions of our identities. So I'm shivering in front of the void, like any human being. But I always remember : if you are scared, but you can have a glimpse of intensity, growth, passionate experiences, looking in this direction, it means it is the path. And I just have to kick my own ass, take a deep breath and jump into the unknown.

And I have discovered that I love to evolve, and to do it consciously. I love to die and come back to life on a regular basis, with the refreshing freedom to reinvent myself. So I had some therapy, and I'm continuing mostly on my own now. I'm trying to expand the limits of my consciousness, with philosophical quests and spiritual experiences. I'm addicted to change. To this feeling that I can become something else, someone else, that I'm earning more inner freedom, this space inside to breathe and be amazed by my own possibilities. The more recent change was about my gender, and this amazing discovery : I can choose for myself the box of my gender. It doesn't have to be related to the sex I was assigned at birth. What a great gift of freedom! I can be genderfluid, moving freely between an expression of masculinity, feminity and neutrality. I don't have to be a woman or a man, but I can play with these ideas, these boxes, without any restrictions. It is the last thing that blew my mind, and my mind is blown regularly. Boxes such as what is “normal sex”, “an orgasm”, “a romantic relationship”, “jealousy”, “my identity”, “my gender”, “a career”, exploded.

So we could say that the most stable thing about myself is to be unstable. Is it tiring? I'm not gonna lie to you, sometimes it is. When I'm in a “break” from my own evolution, being a little more stable for a while, enjoying what I have learned without new things blowing my old conception of myself and the world, I really enjoy to rest, like taking a good nap. It is also the time to internally process all these new things I have learned. But every time that I think : “Wow, I've been so far, I evolved so much, I have now a lot of freedom and joy into my life, it couldn't be better”, the river takes me farther still, and I'm flowing with it, discovering a new horizon, new lands never reached before, even more beautiful than the previous ones.

I'm feeling in this life like an explorer : going always further, always higher, always... different. And so many people are giving me the right direction for the next step, and so many are supporting my journey. I still have times feeling down, and lost, and weird. But I have so much times feeling like the luckiest person in the all world.

When I turned 25, I didn't really thought : “Oh shit, I'm an adult now, the fun is over”. I thought : “I already had a life more full than a lot of people. I did so many experiences, I took so many risks, all worth it, my mind has been blown so much. And I have been loved, so deeply, for who I truly am. And I loved, with all my heart, all my fire, and all my tenderness. All the mistakes and the dark moments are just making this story even more beautiful. I did good, for this life. If I'm dying tomorrow, it will be fine for me. Every new day is just a bonus”.

It has been one year and a half, since that thought. I now have the feeling that everything I did and was before my 25 are just allowing me to go way further. Everyday is a bonus, even if sometimes I forget. It is an other day I can learn, change, create, love. I'm seeing so much luck here. I want to share it, with as many other human I can.

Let the Phoenix live, let the Phenix die. Let the Phoenix be, because being is all about change.

A lot of love and appreciation for anyone reading this text,

Ready to live another day,

Emy Phoenix

In my articles, I make a lot of statements. It is hard for my philosopher side which would love me to explain in greater detail and give stronger arguments, but it is not fitting the short form I'm using here. I just want to specify that I'm not telling a general truth, just my truth at this precise moment of my life, which will change and evolve.

Also, I would like to apologize of my current level of english, I'm working at improving it.

Thanks to B for the english corrections.