Phoenix.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about growth lately - the necessity of the beast, mainly, and how precisely one acknowledges and nurtures the growth within themselves.

Growth, you see, is difficult. It's not meant to be easy or for those faint of heart and conviction. It's meant to be faced down, met eye to eye in a back alley. It's supposed to be terrifying. A good friend once said to me, "If you're not scared, you're not learning anything." I laughed him off at the time, gave him one of my signature eye rolls and changed the subject, afraid that he really did know what he was talking about.

Turns out, he did.

I have had a lot of hurt in the past few years. I've gone through break ups, heart ache, made myself vulnerable and had things (romantic, professional and otherwise) end poorly. I've cried, I've beat myself up thinking about what I could have done differently and I've stayed in bed all day.

Then I got up. I moved forward.

Some people would have me believe that simply moving on, moving forward, is a slap in the face and means I've locked all those emotions in some deep, dark trunk in my brain. That just because I'm not thinking about all my decisions on a regular basis means I'm pretending it didn't happen, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

I've chosen to take those mistakes, those choices (for better and for worse), and use them as the soil that I've rebuilt my life on. No one comes into this world with an easy path, and some of us have it harder than others, but we all share one thing in common... we choose who we are and what we become. We can wallow in misery and focus on the negative or we can be the phoenix and raise ourselves up from the ashes.

I'm not sure I'll ever be 100% comfortable with who I am and where I am in my life. I'm a writer, a creator, and my natural mindset is to strive towards the unattainable. But what I can tell you is that I have never been more content with that struggle towards knowledge, never been more sure of who I have in my corner and who would try to trip me and hold me down. I've never felt more safe to be me in my life and I've never felt less afraid to give the middle finger to those people who can't be there for me the same way I have always been there for them.

In the end, really, it's their loss.

And I'm a goddamn phoenix rising.