We, the Phoenix.

We, the phoenix.

There is a certain mourning that accompanies the reality of knowing that when you don’t come from money, money has to come from you. You’ve gotta create, from nothing.

It’s the same mourning that accompanies the reality of knowing that when you don’t come from love, love has to come from you. You’ve gotta give what you haven’t received.

It’s the same mourning that accompanies the reality that knowing when you come into a life that feels like a dark night, your only option for the morning is yourself. No one’s coming to wake you up with a coffee and a kiss. No one but you, is here to save you.

Being the morning, comes with a mourning that it wasn’t promised to us in the reflective face of a nurturing sun, but required us to undig ourselves from a worm infested grave we found ourselves coming awake in at birth, just to feel an ounce of warmth above soil.

It’s a terrible reality to face feeling bad for feeling bad. Feeling sad for feeling sad. Feeling unworthy when looking at the worthy luxuries of someone else’s advantage.

It’s angering to feel angry when witness to someone’s belonging to a family that genuinely loves and accepts them, evokes in you, the mourning that no matter how hard you try, how much you tidy up or pursue your own perfection just to belong, you’ll never, ever have what they have.

Being an outsider, has a way of making one feel outside, of even, ourselves.

The trek will never be understood by “those” people. As much as I despise that I’m not one of them, I find myself despising myself because of them.

Surface example of a deep cavity that goes far beyond this is, this year, three of my girlfriends got their dream homes. Not one but three. Not like “bought a nice house in the suburbs home,” but, hand-picked glitter grout in their third bathroom, kinda homes. They made “better” choices than me with better advantages, and this fact, doesn’t make me feel better.

What did I do wrong? I scratch not my head in wonderment, but my arms, with force trying to push the shame of not being right, back where it belongs, under the surface. This isn’t want I wanted to see. To feel. Not about them, but about me.

I’m ten years deep into a mortgage on a townhouse that I miraculously got a loan on while working full time, going to school full time, and raising two kids on my own at the age of 25. This decision came with zero support, so I didn’t have anyone but me and my prayers to lean on. Nor did I tell anyone I was doing it which was tremendously isolating.

Mortgage. Student loans. Being the matriarch in a smaller than we need space, where holidays feel more like chores than like the calm of stockings hanging over a blazing fire next to a warmly lit Christmas tree with souvenir ornaments from every travel destination up until that point. Having to run a business when wanting to raise my kids, just to keep up with the mortgage, student loans, and chores while chipmunking for any possibility of mediocre travel for my now family of six, all adds up, while I, somehow feel subtracted.

I want to blame the grave I’ve had to dig myself out of, but mainly I want to blame my choices.

You know, like choosing people and circumstances that align more to the grave that I was born into, than they do the sun in which I longed to know the warmth of. These people too, are rooted in something they’re trying to grow away from. This grow, usually feels more like famine, than like feast to people unfamiliar with any sustainable harvest.

If only I tried harder, if only I was smarter, if only I made choices that were more like “those” people and less like “my” people, I wouldn’t find myself, head between my knees, mourning the loss of things I’ll never get to start with, on mornings I don’t know where to start.

Then the shame, of feeling the mourning after finally, finally knowing what it’s like to get above ground while knowing that some of “my” people are still underground.

Isn’t this what I wanted? Didn’t I design this?

I’m literally living in a life that’s a house of my very own design that I created with my bare hands, without the intrusive suggestion of overly caring family members who hold stipulations of their own agenda over the events in my life story because their acceptance of me, or their financial contributions are my golden ticket. In my life, I’m the golden ticket, and on some days, it feels more like a fake ticket to a cheap theater with shitty acting.

I have never in my life felt like I belonged to a place, unless I first created the place. Followed by maintaining my position of belonging through some sort of earning of position in said place.

Sometimes, knowing that security will never be free, and freedom has never been secure for people like me, eats away at my psyche.

I’m happy for “those” people, and hurting at the same time. This is wanting to be a unicorn when you were born, just, corn. This is wanting to be-long, and left, with longing, and little allowance for merely, be-ing.

I know, I know. People who don’t know my story, maybe even ones that do, look at me the same.

I mean, you’re still reading, which means, you’ve let me in.

Twenty five thousand people subscribe to hear what I have to say. I have four gorgeous, healthy, mostly centered children that have come from many off centered moments, a healthy relationship that still elicits passion from both of us, which comes with days so grey we’re not sure the clouds will ever move, but we love each other enough, and trust each other enough to face the clouds together. We have each other, which is more than some people have and this isn’t for a second, taken for granted.

My body is newly healthy, and holds up well for its age and circumstance.

In truth, I have it all, and still, for people of my ilk, the hollow of nothingness that’s the foundation of the all in which I support, feels dark and scary on days when I look into someone else’s foundation and see a substance I didn’t get to taste until I grew the ingredients and cooked it myself which takes some painfully solid effort.

A kind of effort, it appears, they’ll not have to spend a day pondering, let alone a lifetime. It’s a substance my kind of people have been chasing their entire lives, wishing someone we trusted would just pour down our dark hollow, unicorn rainbow style. Then, finally, we’d feel whole. Full, even.

But that person’s never coming, and we know this fact. Unless we’re that person, and we hate this fact.

Not because that person wouldn’t if they could, but because that person very literally doesn’t exist. There is no “those” people and “my” people. There’s only, people.

We’ve all got the same dark hollow surrounded by the image of having anything at all while the guy with the personal jet feels too much responsibility about keeping it and the guy wanting it, feels too much responsibility to acquire it.

It’s hard to see babies be born into families who want them, when you’re an unwanted child. It’s hard to see the hot, healthy girl eat a donut with a smile that lets you know she’s solid enough to stop at one, when you’re the girl who just...can’t. It’s hard to see people making thousands of dollars for doing the same thing you’re scrounging for pennies just to maintain, merely because, they’re so used to money, it’s all “extra” to them. It’s so damn hard to watch people have it so damn easy.

It feels somewhat like sitting in a pew at your own funeral while people who didn’t actually like you in the first place give artificial condolences to the people who shared your life with you, like your memory is a self righteous social event to those that still get to live. There you sit, staring with a screaming silence for someone to know you’re still there and that a part of you that’s forcibly mustering up the consciousness to be there, could still be alive if only given the same chances as the people who were given fuller chances at true living from the start.

I’m one of “these” people, but I’ve worked with enough of “those” people to know how hard it is to have it so easy. Mentally speaking. The shame the comes with the responsibility of maintaining something they didn’t ask to acquire, and the shape shifting of self that’s required to fit the mold of “having it all.” I even had a woman tell me once that she had it so good that when she was a teenager and realized people got attention through suffrage, she knew she didn’t have a story, so she gave herself one. It was titled, Anorexia.

It’s so easy on most days to think of how hard it is for us, and how far away we are from them. But on the inside of having it all, is the fear of being absolutely nothing without all the having, trailed by a larger fear of that dark hollow of nothingness, being found out underneath the “all” of the image they’re surrounded by.

There is no us and them.

Unicorn shit, grows fertilizer which grows corn, both fueled by the sun, and both are the Uni-ty we miss when we see them, so far out of reach of us. “They” have to keep up with belonging, with the same longing to just ‘be” who they actually are in the dark, only allowed to come out in the perfect light, that those of us who’re comfortable with our dark, won’t find it uncomfortable to face like “they” do.

We all have different chapters, that lead into new chapters, but we sometimes bleed our pain for not living into their stories, all over our own words. And we slice ourselves just to watch the blood fall, to make sense of how confusing it is to be in such radically different stories, while theirs appears far, far less painful. Blood at least, means we’re still here, leaving our mark somehow, if not for in the well placed words of the perfect story.

Those of us who understand the trek of searching our whole lives for utensils and some berries, will never understand the choke that sometimes accompanies being hand fed by a silver spoon.

Neither are better, and even if one is easier, it’s still hard, because, people are people, and none of us are exempt from the punches life inevitably throws at all of us.

It’s easy to forget this while you have to blow any amount of oxygen in your lungs constantly onto your own fire when it appears that easily self sustained bonfires are getting fanned by communities of “fans” standing around them, growing them in loving adoration. But, the fire is the same and in the smallest flame, a bird whose wings are caught by it will likely die; and each death, houses the opportunity for a phoenix to be born.

There is no us and them. There’s only we. And we’re all birds, forced to die, time and time again, despite who or what is fanning our flames, to know ourselves as a phoenix. None of us are the exception from this reality despite appearances.

Even if not tonight my love, you will rise from the ashes. You will rise, and no one need fall to make this so. If you’ve had to be the morning rather than been welcomed by it, you’ve been gifted an intimacy with the sun, that anybody who takes the light of day for granted, will long for, in all of their belonging.

You came, to rise. But first, it will burn, and this is how we know, we’re still alive. Time and time again, you will rise whether you’re the bird, or the phoenix in the current chapter; indeed, my love, your rise, is inevitable if only you trust the wind for both flame, and flight.

The wind, is one thing we all can agree, we’ve all been given. There is only “we.”

We, the Phoenix.