From the recordings Afterthought to Afterglow and Phoenix From a Paper Town
"Phoenix from a Paper Town" was born from the lonely ache of growing up feeling fundamentally different from everyone around me. It's about being the girl in the library while the world partied, the one teachers looked at sideways, the one boys ran from. It's about the years I spent folding myself smaller, trying to fit into a world that had no space for someone like me. This song is my letter to that girl—the one who believed something was wrong with her because she didn't belong in the paper town everyone else called normal. It's the realization that the very thing that made me feel like the wrong material was actually the fire I'd need to rise.
Lyrics
I was a sketch on a paper plate
In a paper town, I learned my fate
The other girls were magazine cuts
I was a page of constant rebuts
My thoughts were scribbled in the margins, loud
A strange equation in a simple crowd
And every boy, a paper plane
Who saw the storm and flew away from the rain.
And I tried to build a cardboard version of me
Something acceptable for the world to see
But my own edges, sharp and true
Would always tear the construct through
So I learned to fold, and make myself small
The quietest, strangest girl of all.
I wore my silence like a winter coat
A single, solitary, drifting boat
On a sea of whispers, "weird" and "wrong"
A dissonant, forgotten song
The teachers' stares were spotlights, cold
A story that was never told.
And I tried to build a cardboard version of me
Something acceptable for the world to see
But my own edges, sharp and true
Would always tear the construct through
So I learned to fold, and make myself small
The quietest, strangest girl of all.
But a phoenix doesn't bloom in a polite, tame light
It needs the ash, the long and lonely night
To remember it was born of fire
To rise again, to climb still higher
I wish I'd known the spark I held
Was a power that the polished world repelled.
I'd tell her, "This is not your tomb,
This is the dark that grants you bloom."
Now some days, I wear my wings so high
I'm painting colors on the sky
And other days, I feel the old, cold ground
The echo of that hollow sound
I take a breath, and fan a single, gentle flame
And whisper my forgotten name.
I'm rising, learning, piece by piece...
Finding a rhythm, granting myself peace...
From the paper ashes, I begin to see...
The fierce and brilliant, authentic me.
A phoenix from a paper town...
Finally rising, never folding down.
Never again... folding down.