Let Beauty Come Out of Ashes

These make up part of the lyrics in the one and only, Celine Dion’s song “Ashes” which is featured in the movie Deadpool. If you haven’t heard it, then I highly recommend giving it a listen, though here I want to talk a bit about why I love this song and what that particular line means.

First and foremost, as you’ve probably already noticed, I’m a fan of listening to, and finding, songs that describe my state of mind or emotion. I love it when I can sit down with a song on repeat and it just expresses what I’m feeling in every way. It’s just another way of relating and feeling as though I’m not the only one going through what I might be struggling with at the time. Fun fact about me, I’m a die-hard country music fan (bet you wouldn’t have guessed!) and I will know a country song for every possible state of mind you can throw at me. Feel free to test me!

Anyway, getting off track here! The headline of this article is perhaps one you find quite cliché, or even cringy. However, despite the sentiment being a well-known one, the experience of going through the process may not be. I want to talk a bit about why, despite the glorified idea of rising out of the ashes like a phoenix, it not only requires more strength and determination than you might think, but I bet it’s also far more dangerous than you’ve imagined.

Rising from Rock Bottom

To put it in perspective, imagine the following; you’ve told a lie, a small lie, something that was seemingly harmless at the time. However, as time has passed, the lie has started to spread, it’s starting to haunt you and you are doing everything you can in order to fight fires as a result, but the lie itself has outgrown any capability you have on your own to stop it and it’s spreading like wildfire. It’s spreading faster and faster, and at some point you lose complete control.

This is how I experienced my decent into what to me was my rock bottom. Part of Celine’s lyrics are “… I’ve been bending backwards ‘til I broke.” It all starts with seemingly insignificant bits (or pebbles, if you’ve read my article on the “Pebble Analogy of Anxiety”), which don’t seem to do much damage. However, as long as you let the little things slide, eventually it will spiral out of control until the point where you’re no longer in any way able to control your own decent, by yourself. You keep fighting, you keep struggling, you keep bending, until you break.

When thinking of someone trying to fight their way back from being completely broken is essentially like watching someone fight their way out of a cage full of hungry lions, but every 30 seconds another limb is devoured until there’s nothing left to fight with. This is what rock bottom feels like. You have no fight left. You see no way out. You’re losing all hope. The only way out is to try and stay alive long enough for the lions to get tired and you can escape the cage. You don’t know how long it will take or if they ever get tired at all.  You can only hope, and if you don’t have hope, then what’s there left to do other than give up?

This is what makes the downwards spiral so dangerous. You see no way out. You see no hope.

The Rise

Getting out of the dark pit you find yourself in is immensely painful. It’s excruciatingly difficult. Not to mention, you may resort to short-term remedies that help in the moment, but prolong the darkness. Imagine being alone in the woods in complete darkness and all you have is a box of matches. If you can use a match to eventually light a fire, that’ll be much better and you have more matches left for later. However, if you just light every match as a source of light and warmth you’ll quickly run out and by the end your short term gains have cost you the entire box.

I have such tremendous respect for all those who managed to light the fire or eventually fought their way out of the cage. I’m personally far from having escaped. I’ve also made plenty of poor choices and taken wrong turns. I wish I would have caught it earlier, but by the time I realised my downwards spiral it has already spun out of control and it ultimately felt as though it cost me everything.

It’s been about 18 months since I found myself alone in the woods, or limbless in the lion’s cage. I’ve come a long way since then. Physical exercise, mental wellness, focusing on the right relationships and cutting the damaging ones, trying to focus on Kent and eventually be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes.

You may never know who around you has spent their last match trying to find the light. No one gets out of the cage by themselves. You may be the person holding the door open for them to escape and you may not even know it. Always bear that in mind.

Lots of love!