The Phoenix Diaries: The Chapter Where My Writing Hit Puberty and Got Moody About It

A mid-forties writer’s dip into craft, courage, and the strange joy of starting over.

Phoenix Diaries
Personal stories of transformation, heartbreak, and rebuilding from ground zero.

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There’s a peculiar kind of humility that comes with realizing you’re a beginner again.

Not in life.

In the thing that actually matters.

The thing your bones have been whispering about for decades.

It’s a strange feeling in your mid-forties.
To know how capable you are in so many other corners of your world.
To know you’ve survived heartbreak, reinvention, adult decisions, taxes, marriage, betrayal, and the absolute circus that is modern life.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Yet here I am.
Starting from scratch with something that terrifies and thrills me in equal measure.

I’ve been studying.

Deep diving into craft essays and writerly YouTube spirals. Half the terms sound like minor Greek gods. The other half makes me wonder how I managed to get through high school without absorbing a single thing except acne and Catholic guilt.

Still, some of the things I’ve been doing instinctively have names.

Take chiasmus.
A clever little sentence flip.
Like JFK’s famous line: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
A mirror of meaning.
A dancer checking her posture.

Then there’s diacope, which sounds like a creature that lives under a bridge.
It’s repetition with a breath in the middle.
Like the most iconic diacope of all time:
Bond. James Bond.

Or my own version, whispered into the quiet of my day.
I’m trying. Truly trying. To get better at this.
(See what I did there? Look at me, practising my little rhetorical yokes in the wild.)

It’s oddly comforting.
Finding out that the strange rhythms in my sentences actually belong to something.
Like discovering your quirks had a family tree all along.

Most days, I feel like a beginner.
A woman ankle-deep in craft books, trying to decode secret runes left by writers who act like you need a cauldron, a quill, and a spiritual advisor to write a decent sentence.

I swing between awe and the absolute fear that I am acting the maggot on the page, playing writer instead of being one.

And yet something is shifting.
Small.
Barely-there.

Like that first sliver of light that slips into a room before morning makes up its mind.

There are moments now when I read a line I wrote and think, “Ah. There she is.”

The writer I would’ve been if life hadn’t banjaxed me sideways a few times.

I still have a long way to go.
A ridiculous, joyful, maddening way to go.

And here’s where I give you my one anaphora.
A tiny triplet.
A gentle drumbeat.

To keep learning.
To keep showing up.
To keep believing there’s a point to all these strange little sentences.

Enough anaphora for one night, or I’ll start sounding like a guidance counsellor who meditates on her lunch break.

I’m not polished yet.
Far from it.

Some days, my writing feels like a confused tourist with the wrong map. Other days, it feels like coming home in my own skin.

Still, I’m here.
Feet on the ground.
Breath steady.
Heart cracked open in ways that let the light through.

I’m trying. Truly trying.

And it’s enough.
For tonight, it’s enough.
For the woman I’m becoming, it’s enough.

(A tidy little epistrophe for the road.)

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Tell me…

What part of your life are you letting yourself be a beginner in right now?

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