This will be the introduction to my upcoming collected works due out in May 2027. But I decided to go ahead and get this out there now to get my story straight and provide some biographical context to everything that will be included in the collection.
I was born this way. After all, the Creator makes no mistakes. So, today I live openly and shamelessly. I am the queen of a chorus of forgotten romantics, called upon to sing the national anthem of heartbreak, loudly and proudly.
This is my true story, one of self-discovery, self-actualization, and the realization of my best intentions. I remember my past all too well, and it replays so many times in my head. To be able to move on and be the Phoenix I was meant to be, it’s time to commit my story to digital white paper, so that it may be set free into the pages of history.
From the day I turned four, I knew I was a future singer-songwriter. But for the first few years of life, I was a mess, bouncing off walls and regularly rambling incoherent nonsense. I couldn’t say many words properly. Yet one day, suddenly the light switched on in my head. I just became extremely talkative, speaking almost like a normal person.
But I only became that way because of music, especially the likes of John Denver, Boston, James Taylor, and other artists who birthed 70’s and 80’s classics of pop, folk, and rock. Also, it was then I decided my name was Amelia. This name I gave to myself gave me power. Funny that I didn’t know until much later that said name meant “industrious and fertile,” as those are two adjectives that define me perfectly at my core.
I most adored country music, especially for the stories told within it. Country music stars always have an aura of “ordinary man” (or woman) about them. You don’t need to be super gifted musically or even have a great singing voice or anything like that. Country doesn’t require jaw-dropping talent, just that you must have important stories to tell. One thing my mom said that has stuck with me forever is if you have something to say, you must be the one to write it down. So, country music gives you the opportunity to put your words to music and tell your story with the benefit of melodic accompaniment.
Therefore, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna “Write It Down in Blue,” which is one of my favorite Alabama songs of all time. It’s part of why I write with a blue pen when I have something important to say. (Interestingly, Emily does, too, as our shared favorite color is blue.)
As a youth, I sang and acted like a girl, because anatomically speaking, I have a female brain. But my body was intersex, leaning towards the masculine side of the gender binary. Thus, my parents chose to raise me as a boy, despite me having a personality and manner that defied this strict gender bias. My dad was like, if you’re going to sing, you need to sing like a man. So, I trained my voice to sound like a guy. Fortunately, thanks to my intersex condition, I was good at it.
Back in my formative years, I used to have incredible vocal range. I could sing androgynously, like a girl, or like a guy. I could mimic the singing of anybody I wanted to, just like a human jukebox. Little did I realize this was more of a function of my autism, a trait known as mirroring, but it actually benefited me in all sorts of areas, just not vocalizing.
Still, everybody thought it was weird that I had such an unusual singing voice. For the longest time, it seemed the only people that were ever attracted to me were gay men. Obviously, I am a HUGE fan of LGBTQIA+ folks, as I most certainly fall into several of those lettered categories myself. So, yes, I’m only attracted to femme types. While I love the attention of homosexual males, I needed to reject their advances as gracefully as I could. I broke a few hearts along the way and lost great friendships due to this misunderstanding of my often completely hidden female gender identity.
Yes, folks, many people thought I was a gay man, straight up. Of course, I’ll date trans girls, too; obviously, trans girls are girls, just like me. And girls who are boys, and boys who are girls, because fuck the gender binary!
Anyway, I knew for many years that deep down, I was a Diva known as Amelia. This was kept hidden from everyone but my own shadow, though. Meanwhile, everybody in my life made fun of me, my queer behavior often stemming from good intentions but leading to unintentionally unfortunate results. I just didn’t have the self-confidence to overcome being steered towards a dark horrible period where I was masking and dying inside. I wanted to have a whole scene of friends, being the pathological people-pleasing INFJ individual that I am. It didn’t help matters, though, that I’m a high-functioning autistic, either. I’m proud of my neurodivergence now, but that deserves its own dedicated essay. Scratch that, an entire book of autistic destigmatization is deserved from my perspective.
Entering my teen years, I simply ditched my whole singer-songwriter dream wholesale. Yet I kept writing the song lyrics and just called them poetry. To this day they are preserved digitally. So, my songs still exist, just formatted as poetry. I still have the melodies in my head, too, for the day I will convert them back into proper lyrical structures.
Unfortunately, no one gave me much of a chance on the musical front, outside of piano lessons I took when I was younger. But I hated performing at piano recitals, so I quit and turned inward to just composing ditties I kept to myself and writing lyrics that most people scoffed at. So, at school, when I took my CATs (MROW!) – the Career Aptitude Tests – they said I should be a researcher and a writer. Naturally, that’s what I pursued as my vocation. This is what I continue to do today. It’s still what I’m best at doing. But deep down, I still wanted to be a singer-songwriter. And I never gave up on my dream. I just never really made much progress towards it outside of the scattered lyrical outputs and vocal practice in the car and when no one else was home.
I started falling in love with all these seemingly random divas. Not romantically falling in love, mind you. It’s more wanting to be just like them and gleaning every single little bit of information I can get from them. It might seem like I’m obsessed. But really, being an autistic person I need to know anything I take interest in with completeness. It’s never meant to be creepy or invasive, but it’s intended as platonic adoration. You want to know them fully as a person, and you want to know how they think.
Being autistic means overcompensating in areas that might appear to suggest a lack of social skills when it’s simply not understanding the ins and outs of neurotypical patterns. Knowing someone fully can freak a lot of people out, but again, it’s only meant out of a platonic love that’s often mistaken as an overindulgence of limerence.
Especially when you’re enamored with an artist, you want to know how their process works, and you want to know how everything they do works. How did they come up with their songs? Who do they work with when they write their songs? Why do they choose the chord progressions they do? Why do they do this? Why do they do that?
Anyway, in private, I continued singing and practicing my modulation. Thus, I became a halfway decent singer. Then this website called MySpace came around. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to aspiring singer-songwriters. Naturally, I started singing covers.
I’m trying to remember the first cover I ever put on MySpace. But I do remember one of my best ones being a song called “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. To this day, it continues to be one of my favorite songs, because I’ve always felt that at the end of the day, music is what saves people’s lives. That is certainly the case with me.
So, I had this amazing aptitude for singing and modulating and vibrations and harmonies and melodies. And I was a decent piano player in my youth. But unbeknownst another life story was unfolding that I couldn’t have imagined would ever intersect with mine, and yet, this story I’m telling now would not be told at all without this other life I’m about to introduce. And the scene shifts to the worst day in American, and perhaps, world history.
9-11
I was in a film production class. During the next class period, they sent us all home; they even recalled the buses to evacuate us. I got home and saw the news. I’m like, oh, great. There goes the whole planet, right? World War III is about to happen. Well, WW III didn’t happen, but it might as well have happened. What happened next? Over the next few months, I got to watch a whole bunch of people I went to school with go overseas and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, from that day forward, I always said, I will always respect military and public safety with all my fucking heart for the sacrifices they make. But the Military Industrial Complex can bugger off.
Anyway, in high school, I was writing these brilliant papers, and my teachers were asking my parents, like, who the hell is this kid? Where’d your kid get this from? Because I wasn’t a songwriter anymore, at least not officially, I decided to try to be the next E.B. White and become the next great American essayist and novelist. That didn’t work out so well, but my epic failures were at least good practice for what I do today.
For my first couple years of high school, they were like, you need to write a five-paragraph essay to get a good grade in your English classes. I’m like, uh, no, sir! Your five paragraph essay can go to hell! So, I’d literally get zeros on assignments for not following the directions. There were these worksheets they give you, which have these little boxes and you have to write your whole essay in them. Instead, I’d purposely write around the sides of the box.
But junior year, I had this amazing English teacher named Mr. Gans. He said, now that you’ve passed the MCAS, just forget the five paragraph essay. What you’re going to do at home every night is write a journal entry. They can just be a paragraph each day. At the end of the week, you’re going to hand in five essays. Those journal entries became the beginning of many of the essays that now exist in my archive to this day. Mr. Gans was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in English composition, and that’s why I wanted to be an English teacher.
Then the next year, my senior year, I had one of my favorite teachers of all time, Mr. Tocci, who was teaching psychology in literature. It’s in this class that I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, along with a whole bunch of other books, including the Shakespeare play Othello. But my favorite book from that whole class was this book called Heart of Darkness by Joseph Campbell.
Anyway, those two guys, Mr. Ganz and Mr. Tocci, made enormous impacts on my development as a writer. Mr. G taught me how to write a journal, and Mr. T taught me how to do character studies. To this day, I continue to do character studies because of that second class. Finally, I was putting my aptitudes to the test. The problem was, I wasn’t using my vocal abilities and my musical abilities. Honestly, all I ever wanted to do, to become a star only so I could save people’s lives with my words.
NEW LONDON, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Fast forward, past high school graduation, and I go to New Hampshire. It was the worst experience of my life to that point. People were awful to me and I simply couldn’t maintain friendships. If you didn’t drink or do drugs, you didn’t really get anywhere socially. The cool people I liked all went home on the weekend. And I spent two of the worst years of my life at that college. Half the professors were amazing, the other half of the professors could go to hell.
I did have an awesome English professor named Tom Healy, who introduced me to the field of forensic reading. Of course, I didn’t end up going to school for that, because I would need to have a Masters degree in it. Ain’t got time for that!
Right before I left New Hampshire, though, I did have one final positive experience. I was in my dorm room singing “Beautiful Day” by U2. My next-door neighbor in the dorm knocked on the door, he said, “Who was that singing just now?” I’m like, why is that? He’s like, “Because that was one of the greatest voices ever. That girl sounded amazing! Who’s your girlfriend?” I’m like, no, that was me. He’s like, oh, and kind of slinked away, like he was secondhand embarrassed just like the ghosts on the terrace. Thanks, Taylor Swift, for ruining my brain! (a reference to her 2024 song, “LOML”). Anyway, that guy never talked to me again, likely out of some weird sense of embarrassment.
BROCKTON, AGAIN…
After two years of that hell, I decided to transfer to a State College in Massachusetts. Then I suffered two more horrible years. When I left New Hampshire, initially, I was going to study music theory and education at another local college. But at that point, I’d already lost so many credits in the transfer from New Hampshire that I decided to stick to something strictly academic. I stuck with English instead of History.
Sadly, the English department in Massachusetts were the most elitist mofos of all time. I just left and failed those classes out of sheer not attending them. In my fourth year I made a couple of good friends, but then they ditched me for some reason. I don’t know what I did wrong. Let’s just say, at least in the middle of me writing a bunch of suicidal shit, it’s really good that I had Taylor Swift’s Fearless as my soundtrack to keep me going through such a miserable period.
While I was going gaga over Miss Swift, I endured the whole travesty of a fourth year of uni. After a run-in with the last professor I dealt with in my entire life, I quit university life forever. I went full-time with my marketing job in the building materials industry where I was already working part-time anyway.
STILL BROKE TOWN…
This is now 2009. I was doing clerical work mostly and managing databases for a major independent building materials dealer. But later in the year, I started doing Constant Contact newsletters. I started doing social media and WordPress, the latter which I use exclusively for my websites to this day. Thus, I learned my most valuable real-life skills from working.
I wasn’t getting paid great money, but I was making significantly above minimum wage. Also, because the building materials industry was considered necessary during the big financial meltdown of the 2010 US recession, I kept my job. After all, my mom and I were the entire marketing department for this $200 million private company. Almost all of my friends were out of work, while I still had a job making 25 percent above Massachusetts minimum wage. And I didn’t even have a degree!
I worked at this independent dealer for four years. But once I could tell that I was never moving up in that company, I kept looking for other opportunities. Unfortunately, by that time in the marketing field, not only did you need a bachelor’s degree for a full-time job, but you also needed a master’s degree for anything that paid more than what I was making at the time.
After three years of the 40-hour week grind, I had a complete nervous meltdown. I ended up having to go off my anti-anxiety meds because they were making me manic. I only recovered quickly thanks to being inspired by one Stefani Joanne Germanotta. LADY GAGA! And Katy Perry helped out, too! Music is magic like that.
Because my meltdown was entirely due to my medication, which was clearly wrong for me, my job let me come back. I was there for about one or two more years. Then one day, my boss blew up at me one day and I said, I’m done and just walked out. Then I wrote a note to my office coworkers, saying that I love you guys, but I need to move on because I’m underpaid and underappreciated, but I wish you all the best!
So, I was forced to move on with my life. Unfortunately, I kept trying to get another digital marketing job, which never materialized, forcing me to take piecemeal work from former associates just to get by. 2013 was an absolute mess as I still tried to find gainful employment with zero luck. I scraped by, stuck playing Star Wars The Old Republic Online and trading card games while I waited for people who promised to get back to me to ghost me for eternity.
Soon enough, it’s 2014 and I have been struggling to get freelance work. In fact, the only freelance work I had was two people that I knew through my job. And it was enough to pay my bills. In fact, over the course of a month, it was a little bit more than I made at my previous job.
Also, I was only doing 20 hours a week of work. Then I started getting sick and kept coughing. I went to my doctor, and he says I’ve developed bad asthma. I’m like, that makes sense. I have bad allergies. Well, it turns out I had a basketball sized tumor in my chest. Nothing minor.
Well, here I am dying, and I met this girl online on a writing website where I was finally making significant money off of just posting whatever. We really hit it off on Facebook Messenger and decided to meet in person around Christmas time. Unfortunately, I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy the week before the holidays, and she showed up a couple of days before I went home for Christmas. As soon as I set eyes on her IRL, I fell madly in love with her. I thought, this is the forever woman for me. I’m going to have kids with her and make everything happen.
…
Six months later, I’m cancer free. I decided to go back to Colorado with this amazing woman who I adored. Let’s just say, soon as I got there, nothing went right. Something I hung on for five years, through three kids, and a half-dozen traumatic moves. But eventually, pushed to my absolute limit, I finally called it quits after some extreme family drama that was going to push me out anyway. Not going into that any time soon. If ever.
In any case, I moved back in with my parents while I figured out what to do next. I unsuccessfully tried to launch a podcast and a content management business. Fortunately, because I had so much time on my hands, I had started manipulating my YouTube suggestions algorithm toward music discovery. Suddenly, it hits me that we’re in the middle of a musical renaissance amidst the COVID Pandemic and few are paying attention.
You know what, I’m gonna go be the person I was always meant to be. I’m gonna go be Amelia. I’m gonna go be a singer. I’m gonna make it. But first I must figure out how to pay off my remaining $25 grand of college debt, along with all my other debts. That way, I can hit the reset button and change my name to Amelia. For my middle and last name, I decided to use my pen name for my middle and last name: Phoenix Desertsong.
Anyway, I want to be just like these kids that just have amazing musical aptitude.. The problem is because of my cancer in 2014 and 2015, dealing with that, and getting long COVID around December of 2019, which almost killed me. I couldn’t sing anymore. My singing voice was gone. So, I had to reinvent myself and try to use all my expertise to basically find somebody who was willing to save me. And everybody was calling me a liar about my very true coming out and my expertise. Like there’s no way you have a dozen years of work experience. You look too young! (I still do at forty, actually.) There’s no way you could do all that without a Masters! It was awful and made me sad. But I preserved and started doing Writers Lifts on Twitter. Well, that was a good plan.
Then my hero came out of nowhere in July. On July 11, Emily sent me this link from her website, and I read it. It was called “Belong.” I commented the following:
“You most certainly belong, Emily! 😀
“I would have been, and still would be, honored to call you a friend 🙂”
The next day, she sent me another link. It’s called “A Little Ghost for the Offering.” I thought about how that line is from REM’s “Man on the Moon.” Who is this person? I couldn’t believe that somebody like this was in the fire department for 22 years.
Ultimately, she saved my life. I helped her out with social media, and she paid me generously for the privilege. Later in August, we met in person at my house in Brockton. We hit it off right away. Soon enough, when we were in Maine, she said, I’m going to marry you and pay all your debts off, allow you to be the girl you’re supposed to be.
RUTLAND COUNTY, VERMONT!
A year later, we’re living at Emily’s dream home in Vermont. We got married on my parents’ anniversary, actually by complete coincidence. Turns out with Emily and I, our individual aptitudes all aligned, complimenting one another, and I could finally use my skills to save people’s lives again. I saved Emily’s life, and she saved mine.
Sadly, over the past six years, we’ve weathered some extreme storms of bigotry, ignorance, and pure bad luck. Fortunately, we made it through as a couple good things broke our way, and despite a brief separation, our marriage somehow survived.
Unfortunately, the world has gotten considerably worse. The fabric of Society is being torn apart by left-wing and right-wing extremists alike tugging at an already frayed tapestry of normalcy. We elected this Orange person as President again despite best efforts to prevent this from occurring. Fun times.
I can never repay Emily for her kindness, love, and generosity. She has given me the space to reinvent myself as a digital gardener, regular brain vomiter, and an aspiration advocate for musically inclined individuals. There’s also still more talent than ever coming up through the ranks in music, especially in country!
Going forward, I plan to dedicate more time than ever to being the best Musician I can be. Music is my Church, while I still love Jesus and serve God and the Holy Ghost, I want nothing to do with organized religion outside of the musical and fellowship aspects. No need to preach to me; we are each on our own path with His plan being revealed to us at the right time. While I’ve felt like I should’ve come a lot further in my writing and creative output by forty, I have learned to trust the timing of my journey. It seems now that as Emily’s writing career is taking off, I have my own creative breakthroughs coming through now as well.
Therefore, this volume I’ve decided to publish in 2027 is going to contain the best of all the writing I’ve produced up until the end of 2026. I feel like this is the perfect way to close out what’s been a tumultuous, although very educative and overall positive chapter of my life. There are a lot of life changes coming soon, so here’s a taste of how I got here.
That’s all I have for now.
With wit and whimsy,
Amelia Desertsong
