So I finished it! Only took me a year. Well, actually more like 20 years and a year. I received this book as a gift from a friend years ago. Probably for my birthday, actually our birthday, cause our birthdays were one day apart. She wrote me an encouraging inscription in the front, about inspiration and transformation and great endeavors of flight. You see even then, twenty years ago, I was trying to figure myself out, who I was, who I wanted to be, where I saw my place in this world. But my friend also drew me a picture of a Phoenix rising from the ashes. It looks a…