In Fire Reborn

December 12, 2013 by Megan Lynae

Several years ago I decided I was tired of my life being over. I needed to figure out how to live with what I had. What I had, so far as I was concerned, was a body that I wasn’t happy with. How was I going to reconcile myself to the idea that I would never walk properly again? I had no idea. So I went to therapy.

My first therapist had an agenda. She would make sessions fairly difficult. What was wrong with me, how was I fixing it, everything I mentioned in passing we had to discuss at length, etc. When the practice she was with ceased to exist, I was referred to someone else in the Loop, who was fabulous. She was a student, but to me, all that meant was that we were a little closer in age and it was easier to talk. It was while I was seeing her that I decided to get a tattoo.

I have a theory that as you age naturally your life and your basic self slides through a series of incarnations, like a snake shedding its skin. It’s when your life as you know it is over in a second, and you continue to live anyway, that things are much more like the transformation of a phoenix. A phoenix ages, self-immolates, and comes back as itself again from the fire and ash of its own death. I lost a life in 2002. The life I have now is, like the resurrected phoenix, born out of that time of fire and ash.

The problem that I found was that once I was out of the time of true fire and ash, where I could not take care of myself, I looked essentially the same. So, why wasn’t I the same? Steps were taken in both the medical and spiritual quarters to fix things. The physical therapy and healing prayer I received at the time were all done with the intent of patching things back up and setting me out to be the same as before. What no one realized, and what it took me years to realize, is that the old life was dead. Gone. Lost in the fire and ash. I had to decide to live the rebirth and build my life on that.

And so I got a tattoo of a phoenix to remind myself of the change and the loss that together created what I am now.  I had it placed under the curve of one of my surgical scars, as a reminder that the old life is gone and the new one will bear me forth on wings of its own.