The Ascent

They say phoenixes rise from ashes.  I suppose this means at one point they were consumed in flames. Or perhaps they're burning all the time. Birds on fire. Birds of fire. Fiery birds. Are we humans so different? Being consumed by fire. Flight from ashes. Beauty from death. Glory from pain. If we're living according to Christ... Dying to ourselves... Carrying our crosses. Everyday.  Does that mean that every day a phoenix arises in my heart? Only to die, to be extinguished with the sunset.  Could it be that miraculous, that majestic? 

If I'm not ever dying to myself, though, what does that mean?  Am I unchanging in the worst way?  Not steady. No. Predictable. Boorish. Is my flame slowly going out?  Is it a mere sputter from time to time?  Am I a flightless phoenix? Destined for the ground since it is in my combustion that I take flight.  Am I not a phoenix, but a chicken? A flightless, pathetic, edible, realistic bird.

Am I destined for the chopping block where I'll run around, headless, for a good ten seconds or more for the entertainment of some bored farmer?  Am I already running around headless?  Is that my existence?  Dead.  Not really knowing. Not really registering.  Just scrambling around in a yard with a bunch of other headless chickens, bumping into one another, picked up one by one to be eaten.  To be seasoned, stuffed, cooked and devoured.

I think perhaps without Christ that is, indeed, my existence.  I'm being fattened, plumped for the chopping block and I'm none the wiser because my brain is the size of a pea and after all, what else can there be besides me and this coop?  The occasional other chicken?  Perhaps a turkey wanders by and looks up, drowning in the rain.  They're brains are rather tiny as well.


What is this? Existentialism?

Goodness.

I mean the fact of the matter is, I don't really care what you believe.  Yes, you're important. But today, you're not. Not to me.  I have to be honest, the furthest thing from my mind today is how to love you, how I can be more like Christ in your life.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

I'm not about to give you flying lessons when I've forgotten completely myself that I'm not a chicken.  I'm not about to make sure your flight lessons are going okay when I myself have yet to take off.  I've never been good at sympathy.  I get compassion.  My attempts at compassion are feeble, at best, but sympathy makes me nauseous.  Duty and obligation and propriety make me angry.  I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as I love myself, but truth be told, I really don't like myself.

I'm certainly not going to ask for forgiveness for telling you to take your stuff and your problems elsewhere.  Especially if you're not really looking to change anything about yourself.  If I'm listening to you, it means I want to be listening.  I'm not going to pretend to be interested. Not anymore.  Because when I look in the mirror, I'm completely bored with the pretty face that stares back at me.  She's nothing of substance.  She's vacant, unintelligent, and judgmental.

I'm all about being "real" with people and I think I've done a bang up job, but I don't know if it's been necessarily at being real as much as being blunt and callous.  I think there's maybe seven people on this planet with whom I'm actually real.  And when I say that I mean that know the dirty, ugly, gritty, evil side of me.  They're the people that know all my short comings and still look at me on a more or less daily basis and smile and say "I love you". And they mean it.  But I'm not real with anyone else.  Because being real in the sense of being open and honest and just letting myself be exposed... That's vulnerability.

I'm no good at being vulnerable.

It scares the living daylights out of me because I have perfected how not to be vulnerable.  I have perfected how to tell you my entire life story, all the pain, all the gore, all the joys without so much as removing a brick from the walls I've built around my heart.  And I'm so good at it that I don't even realize I'm not being vulnerable.  It's just as though I'm telling you someone else's story entirely.  It's moving. It's well-told.  It has ups and downs and climaxes and conflicts, but it's not really my story because I'm not sharing something with you that's close to my heart.

This.  All of these words on a screen. This is the most vulnerable I've ever been with people who don't know that I actually would love to take singing lessons and that I'm actually a huge foreign film fan.  Mostly of the martial arts persuasion.

And I don't really know that I owe anyone any vulnerability, but the truth is, I feel my walls cracking.  Someone has just taken a ginormous battering ram to them over and over and over again and I don't really know that I noticed until yesterday.  And it's left me feeling... hurt.  I'm used to anger.  I'm used to frustration and rage and fury.

But tears from pain... Tears from feeling like someone stomped on my teddy bear or scoffed at something I wrote... They're completely foreign to me.  I, Anna Molinari, do not cry because someone snaps at me.  I snap back with something witty, a solid defense either in my mind or from my lips.  But I can no longer muster anger.  There's no fight left in me.  I'm a wild mare that's finally been broken and I don't know that I can think of anything more heart wrenching than a horse, tamed.

I'm used to saying, "I'm ready for blood."  I'm used to swearing, "I'm ready to slit someone's throat."  I'm used to bristles and cussing and pretenses and just pure anger.  But this soft person that has over taken me I do not know.  This girl that allows people's words to get under her skin, to peel back her layers to her deepest fears, her heart's desires, her hopes and dreams... She's been hidden so well, so covertly disguised, but she's somehow been exposed.

I wish I could say I hate it, but I'm more confounded than anything.  I can't really point to a certain event or word or moment where all of a sudden she pushed aside the snarling me to take the jabs and wounds in an entirely different matter.  And now, I can't even muster rage.  It's frustrating in a debilitating way.  Not an angering way.  I want to be angry.  I want to be enraged.  I want to scrape and slash, but I've awoken to discover someone or something put me under and I no longer have claws.

This, I believe, for me is the ultimate and only mind screw I've ever encountered in my entire life.  And I think that is so because mostly, now that this little girl that used to look at the world with wide brown eyes and drink it all in, that used to defer to others and actually, truly love life is resurfacing, I'm even more frightened to put her away.

I hear myself saying snarky, caustic things and they sound... wrong coming out of my mouth. Like that's something I would never say, but I've spent the last ten years saying things like that rather profusely.

I don't know how to be at square one.  I don't know how to be this all of a sudden much younger, much more naive version of myself.  I know her.  I recognize her as myself from when I was tiny and it was fine to be this way. But now... Now I'm a grown woman who has no business letting people hurt her. But I think it's all such a mind screw because I'm going to.  I'm just going to let this side of me keep growing until there's nothing left of the version of myself I molded out of fear and pain.

Because I think it might kill me.  Figuratively.  Or kill monster me.  And I don't know that that would be such a terrible thing.