I've been making wings; both metaphorically and physically. Actual, enormous, ridiculous, beautiful stage wings made from EVA foam, with every single feather cut and shaped by hand. I've spent around seven hours building them so far, mostly in the early hours of the morning. Our household isn't exactly known for peaceful nights, and living in a sleepless neurodivergent household means that sometimes the only time I get to work on things is when everyone else is supposed to be asleep.
There are plenty of other costume pieces I could have worked on first. Sensible things. Practical things. Things that probably would have made more sense to tackle before deciding that what I really needed to do was spend hours individually cutting feathers for a giant pair of wings. But the wings came first, and the more I make them, the more I realise that they were always going to.
These wings are for a new routine that will become the grand finale of my shows and events. The theme of the routine is rebirth, and while I originally thought I was simply making a costume piece, I now realise I'm making something that represents a much bigger part of my life. For me, rebirth isn't about becoming somebody completely new. It's about finding the parts of yourself that got lost along the way and bringing them back.
I've spent a lot of my life putting other people first. I became a parent at eighteen, went into teaching, and have spent years advocating for my children. For the last three years in particular, I've been fighting for SEND support and school places, while also building a daytime business from the ground up to keep a roof over our heads. I've been a parent, a teacher, an advocate, a business owner, a supporter, a problem-solver and the person who keeps going when things get difficult. I don't regret any of those things. They are meaningful parts of who I am, and I am proud of many of them. But somewhere along the way, I became incredibly good at putting myself last.
I've also been through things that changed me. Domestic violence, abuse, struggles with my mental health and years of trying to understand myself and why certain things seemed harder for me than they appeared to be for other people. It wasn't until my children were diagnosed with Autism and ADHD, at a time when I was struggling myself, that I began to recognise some of those things in me too. For a long time, I thought I simply needed to try harder, be better, be more organised, be less emotional, be less chaotic and somehow become more like the version of myself that other people seemed to find easier to understand. Somewhere in all of that, the creative, chaotic, playful part of me got caged and chained up and hidden away.
Then I found burlesque. I'd known about burlesque since I was a teenager, but I never really believed it was something that was accessible to me. It seemed like something other people did — other bodies, other personalities, other lives. Then I watched a good friend's journey and started seeing people who looked more like me doing it, and something changed. Burlesque gave me a place to play again, to create, to be ridiculous, to be sensual, to experiment, to take up space and to discover parts of myself that had been buried for years. It felt like I had finally found somewhere I could soar.
Recently, though, I had a difficult experience in a dance space where I felt very restricted and, ironically, felt my wings being clipped in a space where creativity and freedom were supposed to be encouraged. I don't want to go into the details of that experience here because, ultimately, the details aren't what matter. What matters is what it made me realise. I don't want to spend my life waiting for somebody else to decide that I'm ready, being told what I am or am not suited to, or feeling that creativity comes with conditions attached. I don't want to make myself smaller to fit into somebody else's idea of where I belong. I've spent enough of my life doing that.
So perhaps it is fitting that, at exactly this point in my life, I'm making wings. Because these wings aren't perfect. Every feather is individually cut by hand. They aren't all identical. Some are slightly wonky, some edges aren't completely even, and there are little imperfections everywhere. And I'm leaving them there. I've realised that I don't want perfection; I want authenticity. I want to celebrate the fact that something has been made by a human being with their own hands. I want to create things because they excite me, not because they are guaranteed to be perfect. I want to try things before I know exactly how they'll turn out, to experiment, to get things wrong, to learn and to make something slightly ridiculous just because I can.
That's a huge part of why Phoenix and the Flames exists. I don't want to teach women to become versions of me, and I don't want to tell people what their bodies should look like, what their acts should be, what kind of performer they should become or what they should be interested in. I want to create space for people to develop their own acts, explore their own interests, experiment, make mistakes and discover what makes them feel alive.
I think that comes from having such a huge amount of empathy for people who are struggling. I know what it feels like to fight for things. I know what it feels like to feel like you aren't being understood, and I know what it feels like to be told, directly or indirectly, that you should be different. I've always wanted to support people and help them succeed, and I give a lot of my time and energy to others. Sometimes, probably, too much. But perhaps one of the things I'm learning now is that supporting other people doesn't have to mean disappearing myself.
I've spent so much of my life helping other people find their wings that perhaps it's time I learned how to use my own. That realisation has reached far beyond burlesque, too. I'm giving up a PhD that I've been working on for six years, which is a strange thing to say because I'm finally in a position where I actually have the space to finish it. But I don't want to. For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I'm allowing myself to ask a very simple question: what do I actually want? Not what should I want, not what would make the most sense, and not what would make somebody else happy. What do I want?
The answer is becoming clearer. I want to create. I want to perform. I want to make ridiculous things with my own hands. I want to build things that make people feel something. I want to help other people discover parts of themselves that they thought they had lost. I want to create spaces where people can be messy and experimental and imperfect and still feel like they belong. And, perhaps most importantly, I want to stop believing that I need somebody else's permission to become the person I want to be.
That's what these wings represent to me. They represent all the parts of myself that I put away because there were other things that needed doing. They represent the young woman who became a mother at eighteen, the teacher, the advocate, the person who fought for her children, the person who survived difficult experiences, the person who struggled with her mental health, the person who discovered that she was neurodivergent, the performer, the business owner and the creative who had been hiding for far too long. All of those people are me. Rebirth doesn't mean leaving them behind. It means bringing them with me.
And maybe that's why the wings came first. Before I could create the grand finale, I needed to create something for myself. Something that says that I'm still here, still creative, still allowed to take up space, still allowed to dream and still allowed to try.
Seven hours in, there is still a long way to go. There will be more feathers, more glue, more foam, more late nights and undoubtedly more moments when I look at them and wonder why on earth I decided this was a good idea. But I think that's part of the point. These wings don't need to be perfect to be beautiful. They don't need to be symmetrical to be powerful. They don't need to look like somebody else's wings. They just need to be mine.
I've spent so much of my life helping other people find their wings. Now I'm learning how to use my own. My wings were clipped, so I'm making new ones — one imperfect feather at a time. And this time, I'm going to fly.
