I think about it often but in phases.
Like I think about the fact, as I’m on the train crossing water, seeing waves of people below the elevated train or walking in the street—-oh, one day I will be dead and this too shall continue to occur.
I used to be obsessed the other way—-I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die—-through my teens/twenties, it’s literally how I would rock myself to sleep at night.
I think it was a bouncing far end repercussion to being a teen and feeling like the world ended/suicidal over a broken love affair in high school. And then just when I thought I was amped to it, dying, I reneged on myself and sort of pushed myself to live fully, live life.
Life
I went off to college, threw myself into writing and sending out submissions—-I really got activated in life. What happened after college in my 20s is I still hadn’t completely fixed my boundaries with family and friends—-so I had some pretty dysfunctional people in my life then. I do believe that the 5 people you surround yourself with on a regular basis (one sort of has to half exclude coworkers) does affect your perspective and outlook on yourself and life.
Without a malignant narcissitic best friend who/is trans gender but not a transsexual for 20+ years as a roommate—-my life changed.
Getting Elizabeth, a therapist for a year, to help me establish boundaries and see myself clearly, helped tremendously.
Maintaining strict boundaries with my mother and family, there being a hiccup or two over the years but understanding that their addictions and greed towards me and money, all broiled into being dysfunctional and that I was not responsible for that nor could I fix it with money nor education.
I had to establish and create other family systems, join groups, make friends but over the years, I’ve omitted quite a few family members. I had to look at their resume (pedophiles, convicts, burglars, robbers, thieves, Welfare lifers, uneducated, drug-alcohol addicts)—-looking at all of these categories I saw that I had established myself beyond all of those things and that freedom, being free, being different can also cause it’s own kind of depression. I had to leave familiar faces for simply the big, wide world and fend for myself.
(Sometimes I do sit or lay in bed, look at the ceiling, eating food, looking at a book and recognize that I, me, Kyle created all of this, paid for it and has done so for decades—-especially when I say see an old TV episode that I know I saw 10 or 20 years ago and I trace back to that year and recognize—-yup, I was independent and self sufficient that year too.)
I’ve written 100+ books, gotten praise from all around the world, letters and salutations and invitations and done readings and even won awards. No one I am or have been blood related to has ever read one of my books. In the beginning I was offended and depressed by that, hurt. But now I see them clearly with my own maturity.
So for my teens to early 30s I was wrestling with depression, anger, thoughts of non-existence to suicidal ideation because of lack of autonomy, lack of support for my identity/work and my being entangled into dysfunctional relationships/family relationships.
Writing for the past 30+ years shifted this to a balancing perspective—-by that I mean I think we can think about say death, as death, dying, no longer existing and then farther on the spectrum we can think of it as not wanting to exist-suicide, anomie. The weight or push from external forces/people adopted internally pushes to one end or the other. When I shifted how I allowed the external forces to push at me, it re-balanced how I was able to think about death——in yes, a personal way but also in a detached way, an inevitable way, a compassionate way (towards others) and not as a surcease from the external.
Which meant I had to really consider my life, my interests, my goals, my responsibilities, what freedom really means in a broad context. One of the things I did in college was Tony Robbins Personal Power 1 & 2 systems of 30 days of essentially self evaluation and goal setting. I also added in Marianne Williamson taped lectures as I was studying A Course in Miracles.
Then I did college groups, where we talked about issues ranging from school to family to incest to racism, and I TAed and taught sexuality workshops. I externalized some of the detritus from the world/my family so that my Life didn’t feel as burdened by them/it.
What this has summed to is looking at my Existence—-what am I here for? What is my Purpose?
When my mother lay dying, the last relative I knew I would be close to of those left in my family, and I considered her life and death and such, I really also got time—-just to wander between her house and the hospital for a year and a half then bringing her to NYC—-to really think about myself, what mattered, what didn’t, what things would be like the day after she died. To some degree, luckily, she asked to be moved here to NYC so that gave me a 6 month project to focus on and then a few weeks after we got here, she died.
And it was a relief.
I was relieved because I could finally see that what was intended of a life was not to simply serve another's. (Which is to some degree what she wanted of mine.) I had rightfully rebelled, walked away almost 20 years before that to go off to college, to become Kyle. I’d always thought that when her existence, my last parents existence, ended, in some ways I would end. How would I go on? Alone? Then I realized…I’d been alone for years, decades prior to her death.
I was okay.
Purpose
Then I started looking at myself for what my Purpose was—-and there was my writing, my books published, stories, articles, even my local TV show that I maintained going back and forth to Charlotte. That the work was to create stuff that was good, useful, educating. That I had worked as a teacher and the process was evolving into a physical-digital way.
I often think about if what I do, missives, digital missives out into the cyber-ether, do for others, help, as intended. And then I further wonder, okay, if this is part of my destiny then is it to make up for the lack of support that I’ve gotten from those supposedly closest to me? Is the feedback, the adulation, the praise to make up for the lack of praise I got from my own kin?
And is that enough? Good enough? Fulfilling?
I therefore tinker with my engine, my internal engine—-attacking any moments of doubt or fear or laziness because I know I am my engine, my best engine. And yes, it’s made up of lots of widgets in therapists (3), mentors (8), teachers/writers, etc. (innumerable).
I often listen to people and the gaps, the chips, the fractures I hear in them of doubt and fear and apathy are so prominent that it changes their lives—-or most appropriately, it is so prominent that it prevents them from changing their lives.
Sometimes I think about the woes of folks, coworkers, students, and I try to embody that woe—-put on their woe sweater—-comparison but not superiority. I try to see their stuff through my eyes, to understand it. And I realize how many people don’t have a Purpose, they have tasks, they have responsibilities but they don’t have a joyous, a joy fulfilling, a joy, internally, giving Purpose. I have that. That’s the cracks and fissures and sadness and anger I often sense from them.
At 30, ill and hopped up on drugs for the first time seriously in my life and isolated , I distinctly remember sealing a “crack” within myself—-left from an abusive childhood, a dysfunctional family, held pain—-I was able to consciously heal and shift. I think being super conscious of the pain, slowly working at healing it, chiseling at it with new ideas from smart folk, helped dramatically. Also I think not simply the drugs, to lower my ego barriers but the isolation, being ill, facing a sense of mortality, gave me the impetus to dig into my own psyche and repair, discard a pebble-irritant-wound I’d always felt at the back of my “self”.
To contemplate life, death, existence—-I’m lucky that teaching/writing gives me areas to live out other lives, discourse about them, write about them, in new and challenging ways (sometimes a character’s question or fear is my own) and come to steps of answers—-is not an easy task, perhaps in the end it is the sole life task.
Death
I see in many people how partners, family, children, money isn’t enough. I also see how scared people are at asking the questions, getting answers or worse, the truth, you get progressive answers—-deeper-higher answers as life goes on—they shift as you experience more and more. My mother’s death, feared by me for decades, was a relief, a release, a freedom, a closure that now brings both smile and tear, sometimes in the same moment.
I just read a thing about parental death and how it is still a continuation of the relationship, simply no longer physical. How they are simply internalized to one's mind/dreams/inner voice/memories. I have a huge storage room that contains stuff from my mothers' house and recently I was organizing and sorting and came upon a satchel, monogrammed from a school I’d worked at, envelopes stuffed into the satchel in the flurry of moving across states—-but inside, somehow, were several photo albums from my mother and her PR work, events, her modeling agency, her non-profit—-all these pictures of her over about 30 years and scads of people I didn’t know.
I sat there looking at her life, knowing her death, thinking on her existence and thinking what would I do with all of these pictures?—-a bigger album?—-and then what would happen to them one day, in a few decades when I die?—-kids to pass them onto?—-and I was looking at all that stuff and thinking—-where do I pass this on to in 10, 20, 30, 40 years?
My writing, my Purpose because it’s bigger than just pen to paper, it has saved me. It has kept me alive. It has been my Life and halted Death and stood as the reason for my existence.
But the question, the mission, one’s Purpose, in a consciously lived life is to keep asking this question in deeper and higher ways, because that's what happens, You, Me, as people, should get Deeper and Higher in the manifestation of ourselves.
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Smile, Kyle
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
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