Ashes to Ember

I was in primary school when I started watching pokemon. Didn't take me too long to fall in love with the Japanese anime series, so much so that I will still look up some of the old episodes and watch the battles. While all my friends were hardcore Pikachu fans, I was a Charmander person. Since a very young age, I had a very strong bonding with the fire elements. My parents think it is because fire is symbolic to the extremes of my anger rages. My friends think it's equivalent to the spark I ignite in my close ones with my amateur motivational speeches. I denied neither claims and when Harry Potter came along I used to think of my spirit animal to be a phoenix. This is what I had to say about the Phoenix in a comment a few days back.

_{I have been very fascinated by the legend of the phoenix...that it rises from it's own ashes after its death. If we extend that analogy to our world, I would definitely interpret this rising up from the ashes as rising up after being knocked down by the struggles of life. The last couple years has been extremely difficult, and I have often questioned myself how am I even pulling myself up everyday. Now more than ever, I need to master the art of rising up from the ashes. :)}

_Source
But the actual reason why I have such weakness towards the fire element is much more mundane, nowhere near the glorified analogies my parents or friends came up with. See, I was an eczema patient since childhood, an extremely itchy skin condition that arises when I eat allergic food, like my favorite beef. The easy solution was to not eat beef, but my rage is equivalent to fire muhahaha! Not my words, my parents' words. A lady who used to work in our house came with a solution of basil leaf juice and convinced my mom this is the daddy of all existing eczema cure! (this is where my hate towards pseudoscience began, as early as at an age of 5/6 years)!

What basil leaf juice does to an eczema patient is, takes the level of itching and multiplies it by a factor of 14 million six hundred and five times (yes, I'm quoting Dr. Steven Strange, but not exaggerating). I have seen people scream in pain. I screamed out of intolerable itchiness and I have a very high threshold of tolerance. I once got into a cycle accident which resulted in a portion of flesh almost tear off from just below my right elbow and was hanging by the skin tag. I didn't cry, I went home and dangled it in front of my parents. I once ironed my wrist accidentally and was pointing out hills and valleys created by the raised blisters! So yeah, I screamed for the itching it caused.

Almost 17-18 years later as a medical student I officially learned what I had already figured out as a 5 year old kid, basil leaves are NOT the grand daddy cure of eczema. Eczema doesn't have any cure, it's just about managing the condition.

So back to the basil leaf juice. My mom used to hold me tight while the lady rubbed in the basil juice and I screamed. One evening, with no electricity for the whole day we were surviving on candles only. But my torture cell didn't take a break and after the usual ritual, I swished a match to light the candle in my room. I was half frenzied with the itching and I accidentally got the candle flame too close to my hands. And behold the magic of fire! The way the heat soothed my itching was beyond all ecstasy you could possible imagine (and as a 5 year old who was still quite a long way from puberty, my experience of ecstacy was kinda limited)! I had found my Aladin's Lamp, and everyday after the basil leaf fiasco I called upon my Genie!

My fondness for fire kept growing and Charmander evolved through charmeleon into a Charizard. Over the years I too transitioned from basil leaves to clobetasol propionate to Halobetasol. But as the flame of charmander's tail burned bright on Charizard's, the fire that found its place somewhere deep inside my amygdala, kept its blaze. I keep the spark alive, for one rainy day when everything seems gloom, the phoenix will rise from the ashes.