Welcome to Phoenix
spaceships and naked ladies
My perfect storm began with a phone call. It was the last day of February 2020, one week before the lockdowns began. I was vacuuming my living room, enjoying the way the sunshine lit up the small space, enjoying the small but happy life my family and I had built there.
I was cleaning up some sawdust because I’d just assembled a new set of shelves from IKEA. I was pretty pleased about that—you can never have too much storage space.
When the phone rang, I looked at the name on the screen and I grimaced. Then I turned off the vacuum and took the call.
Prior to that moment—that exact moment in space and time—I was one of the lucky ones. Where the set of Really Bad Things was concerned, I thought I knew the boundaries of the possible.
I was of course mistaken.
“Phoenix” is not about that phone call, nor the cascade of calamities that followed. Rather, it is an odd sort of guidebook—a series of letters written to someone who no longer exists.
Me.
That is, the “me” who was vacuuming unawares on that bright and sunny February afternoon.
Phoenix is my imperfect attempt to share some of what I learned when things fell apart. It is also my attempt to share some of the things I find interesting in the ongoing process of coming back to life.
In time, you may find essays on a diverse range of subjects here. Anything at all, really, that strikes me as meaningful. But first we’ll start at the beginning—the existential event-horizon that was my summer 2020.
In the midst of the storm, through a fairly bizarre and unpleasant set of coincidences, I was accidentally exposed to something called ACT—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
I found its message difficult to understand but also strangely compelling. At a time when absolutely everything else I’d tried had utterly failed, it seemed to offer two things I was desperate for:
some sort of explanation as to what the hell had happened
some sort of way out
As it turns out I got both, though not as I was expecting. ACT makes no claims of cures. It promises only a path to a better life. That’s not the same thing—but it is something worth having.
So. Welcome to my strange little corner of the Internet. Welcome to Phoenix. It’s possible most or all of what follows may not be of much interest to you. But you never know. You might just find something useful.
I would be very much pleased if that were the case.
