A lot has changed in that year. At the time of my last posting, I was seventeen years old, in the middle of my last semester of high school, terrified of the road ahead. There weren't many days when I remembered who I was, what I wanted to do. Days when I could taste that spark that says yes, this is why you're alive, why you were put on this planet, this is what you were meant to do, go do it.
Since then, (in not much of a particular order) I've graduated high school, become legal, visited England, been to a writer's conference, worked the first job that paid enough for a W2, worked a job that required me to be fingerprinted, completed my first year of a four-year college, changed my name, changed it back, essentially moved four hours away, and acquired a girlfriend.
There's a couple of those points I'd like to elaborate on.
I never said anything on this site that would reveal how young I am, how young I started this blog, because I started it at age fourteen with the lofty goal of uniting the various pro-queer organizations worldwide, a blog where interested activists could come to learn all the news rather than follow dozens of different websites. (At fourteen I also wrote, directed, acted in, and filmed my own movie, because no one told me I couldn't. Just to put it in perspective.) I was going to be the ultimate activist, the hub of information, and I knew I couldn't do it if everyone was seeing me as a little kid.
Then I realized something.
I don't want to be an activist.
Sometime in the past year, maybe even more, I've figured out that I don't have the energy for activism. Political correctness wears me out. As an introvert, I have to think about what I want to say before I start talking, which means the conversation often moves on before I have it figured out. It's a lot worse when I have to be careful not only of certain terms (and the list of things that can offend people is nearly infinite) but navigate different interpretations of the same words, negotiate with various other groups that want equal representation, and balance supporting people who want to live outside or even abolish things like gender, marriage, and other social constructs with supporting people who want to live inside them.
I just don't have the energy. It stresses me out. It makes me freak out about what everyone is thinking about what I'm saying, because often the words I'm using only fractionally explain what I'm thinking. It makes me feel burdened with the concerns of almost everyone. And, as a cynic, I can see all too clearly the impossibility of many ideas, which gets me shut out as a pessimist not helpful to the cause.
Why am I even attempting to justify myself? It should be enough to say, I don't want to do it. Some people are cut out for some things, and other people for other things. This ought to be obvious. It takes a little more work in practice.
I want to study things, and I want to make things. I want to break open viruses and put new genes inside and see what I can do with them. I want to write code to model biological systems. I want to write performance art. I want to write poetry and novels and maybe screenplays and teleplays.
If this blog is going to continue being of any use to me, of any relevance to the name Phoenix Tawnyflower and not merely a dead website with useful links on it, its purpose needs to change.
I'm going back to the writer's conference this summer, and I'm apparently writing a novel examining being transgender through the lens of a gendered language, Spanish. Being not transgender and not a native speaker of Spanish, I clearly have a ton of work to do, a ton of books to read, a ton of notes to take. So I'm thinking of keeping those notes here. It'll work for the public as mainly a site for book reviews, at the moment mostly on transgender themes, but it'll be more personal, more like most blogs are, less impossible for those who know me in person to connect to me.
That's one reason I'm coming out as a mere kid. Keeping everything I write separate from my real life is depersonalizing this site, and keeps me from getting invested in what I share here, which makes it boring for all of us. Another reason is that it's not important anymore. It's crucial for someone wanting to be a cornerstone not to be seen as too young to do it, but not so much for a writer. Anyone who thinks a now nineteen-year-old can't write books ought to go away now, because the purpose isn't to be the best, the purpose is to create to the best of my ability.
Pardon me for a digression which will become somewhat more obviously useful in a little. For a long time, I've had three A names in my head: Audacia, Allegra, and Atalanta. Audacia became the code name of my first crush, for audacious, for a girl bold as brass and not afraid to defy any convention she pleases. Allegra became my first love, for alegre, happy, for a girl with always an upbeat outlook on life and the source of a great deal of my happiness as a teenager. And I've found my Atalanta, for the girl in the Greek myths who needed no man and could outrun them all, my first girlfriend, the girl who constantly tells me that I am capable of all I dream of, who makes me feel like I can outrun the competition, who is always careful to articulate that I do not complete her and she does not complete me--for we are not half people. Instead, I compare us to trees that have grown around each other, creating their shape based on what else is there, so that they can be separated without killing either, but apart their shape is oddly contorted, and only together does the beauty show. I compare us to puzzle pieces, that can easily be used alone in art, hung on a necklace or pasted into a painting, but which fit together perfectly when placed just so. I don't say, "I cannot live without you," I say "I remember what it was to live without you and I don't want to do it again." I have a line of writing describing me and Allegra, saying that I don't remember what it's like to feel like a whole person. Well, here I am on summer vacation, sans my Atalanta, and I don't feel like I'm missing a limb. I miss my sounding board and my cuddles, but I can phone up my sounding board and acquire cuddles elsewhere. During the year, when she wasn't there, it was as though my awareness was used to having her presence there, and when it wasn't, it was an odd sensation, but it felt more like being used to having a warm body pressed against mine, and feeling cold when it was taken away. With her, I am more comfortable, more relaxed, taken care of, indulged, and pushed to make changes, but not more complete, despite being kinda head over heels.
In short, I'm in a healthier relationship than I was when I wasn't in one. Sorry not sorry for digressing, though. I'm a heckuva romantic.
Anyway. I was trying to decide whether to take the safe road that required less preparation and work the conference for the story that was already written, that just needed polishing before publication, or leap off the cliff and work it for a story that not only haven't I written, but I haven't got the experience nor done the background research for. My mother said to leap off the cliff and take the experience I wouldn't get elsewhere for what it was worth. My girlfriend asked me if I was feeling like Phoenix Tawnyflower or my real name. I said I didn't know if there was a difference anymore. She said, Phoenix is an ideal, a personification, a goal, to remind you to jump off cliffs and build wings on the way down. Phoenix was a reminder of who you wanted to be. And if you can't tell the difference anymore, you're on your way to getting there, and you should jump off the cliff.
And I wondered when she got better at articulating my mind than I did. Because that is who Phoenix is to me. That is why I changed my name when I got to college, as a constant reminder from everyone who spoke to me to build bridges, try new things, explore, and leap off cliffs.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it
was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow
of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that
was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I became Phoenix Tawnyflower because I wished to live deliberately. To remember not to sit in the corner and wait for things to happen, but to happen to things. And I build my network, and I found places, and it served its purpose and started to sound less like my name. So I reclaimed my own name, at least in private. Phoenix Tawnyflower is no longer my secret identity as an activist, nor my public identity, the name that everyone knows who isn't very close. It is the personification of cliff jumping. So why on earth shouldn't it be that here, too? It will serve as a reminder of what I still need to do for this project, an accountability for me.
Amusing--I have always appreciated the irony in the name. A phoenix is a bird joining life and death, combining opposites. I have always been a combination of opposites in so many ways, and acquiring an alter ego only emphasized that. If my alter and I are merging, what does that say?
I can't wait to find out.
