Being Enby Is Not a New Identity — It’s an Ancient Memory
The First Light Was Queer
Before gods were named, before duality was born, before even time uncoiled itself into sequence, there was Phanes. Also known as Eros in the Orphic mysteries, Phanes is not just a deity but the very emergence of being. Phanes is the first to burst forth from Nyx, primordial Night. An androgynous, radiant being, crowned with the wings of all directions, and ever-becoming. Phanes is the cosmos dreaming itself into form, the dreamer who becomes the dream. Yet the sacred twin dismembered to create the cosmos itself, as to be in the dream of separation, is to be cut off from wholeness.
Phanes does not represent just one thing. They are all things in potential and also in expression. They are not male, nor female, but something older, a totality. A pre-dual consciousness. Phanes is the original enby. The primordial androgynous-being. The ecstatic union of opposites made manifest. The first pulse of love, of beauty, of life, of generativity. Eros before all gods, before all form. non-binary people are not inventing new identities but remembering an ancient one.
To exist as a non-binary or trans person is not to deviate from nature. It is to embody this ancient cosmic origin. It is to be a living memory of the way the universe first spoke itself into being, not through logic, but through desire. Through a shimmering wholeness that had no need to divide itself into rigid binaries until the trauma of civilization demanded it.
The Dismemberment of Phanes-Dionysus
But this cosmic and erotic totality could not be tolerated by the emerging order of power, control, and hierarchy. Enter Kronos symbol of linear time, of devouring structure, of the super-ego of civilization. He swallows his children, and attempts to consume the primordial forces of Eros and fluidity. He is the beginning of patriarchal time, a time of dismemberment.
Kronos symbolizes the domination of intellect over soul, hierarchy over harmony, and rigidity over flow. With him comes the age of suppression. Of fear toward the fluid. The feminine becomes degraded. Eros is shamed. Phanes is split and buried. And the Anima is pushed into the shadow. Queer, enby, and trans souls, living reflections of what is repressed become scapegoats. They become dangerous simply by existing, for their very presence unravels the illusion of binaries that patriarchal systems depend on.
Eros must be killed, again and again, in every queer child told they are wrong. In every trans person rejected by their families. In every suicide of a sensitive soul that simply could not find a place in this world’s cold machinery. This is not metaphor. Whilst the ancient myth is a symbolic truth, it points to the symbolic truth any queer soul lives through in their life. As it is historical, systemic, spiritual violence, a recurring killing of the queer soul. It’s the result of trying to hold sacredness in a world that shames it.
Queer Souls: Emissaries of Nyx
But even buried, Phanes still shines. The soul does not die. It transforms. Queer and trans people I personally see as the emissaries of Nyx, the primordial mother. Like the living flame of Phanes walking through a world that has forgotten its origin. Every non-binary person is a crack in the illusion of patriarchal time. Every trans person is a song from before history.
They are the fluid made flesh, the return of Eros, the living refusal to be defined by dichotomies that were never real. They remind us of the truth: that gender is not a box, but a dance. That soul cannot be categorized. That love is not rational. And that divinity is not male. True divinity includes the wholeness of existence. That our souls are sacred. Our pain is sacred. Our survival is sacred. And those who carry this cosmic memory bear a heavy burden, not because there is something wrong with them, but because they carry the memory of a world the rest have forgotten. Like a silent ember, a spark or song that still hums through the air.
Non-Binary (Enby) Experience
Non-binary (enby) people fall outside the traditional understanding of gender as strictly male or female. The term "non-binary" is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of gender identities that do not conform to the binary gender system. Some non-binary people might identify as a mix of both genders, neither, or as a gender that changes over time. Others may use terms like genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, or bigender to describe their experiences.
To be enby in this world is often not a journey of self-expression, but a pilgrimage through exile. It is to wake up in a body politic that tells you in a thousand subtle and brutal ways. You are wrong. You are too much. You are not real. For many, it begins in childhood, those first moments where softness or difference are punished. Where they are called a sissy. Where a non-binary child is asked over and over, “But are you a boy or a girl?” I can remember this myself when I was an enby child. To be told that I was a boy, to act like a boy. Don’t cry or show weakness. Don’t act like a girl. You can’t dress like this. Your hair longer makes you look like a girl. Don’t put hands on your hips, as it makes you look queer. Don’t express yourself like that, as it is girl-like.
Yet even silence becomes dangerous, because it invites projection. Because people don’t know how to meet what does not fit inside the boxes they were handed. And from these early wounds, shame takes root. Not because there is anything shameful in queerness or in gender expansiveness. But because love, the very thing we are born needing, is made conditional. It is offered only to versions of us that are palatable. “Acceptable.” Conforming.
So many live double lives. A mask for the family. A silence at school. A hardening at work. A quiet ache in bed. Many enby people have felt what it’s like to cry in secret because the soul tells a different story than the one society accepts. To sit in a room full of people and still feel deeply alone, because no one sees the truth of who they are. To carry an unbearable weight: not of identity, but of isolation. And some, too many, walk to the edge. Not because they were flawed. But because the world refused to open a space wide enough for their wholeness.
Depression, anxiety, suicidality, these are not signs of a broken soul. They are signs of a soul that is not seen in its wholeness, rejected and alienated from itself. Not because of anything inherent in the person, but because the world could not hold the beauty of their soul, of their true authentic nature. They are symptoms of a broken mirror. A world that reflects back only fragments of who you are, or worse, only projections of its own fear. To live in a world, where you are met with only negative projections, and never seen for who you truly are. Never held as a soul. The symptoms that are are the impact of trying to live as Phanes in a Kronos-world.
To be suicidal does not mean that the person wants to die. Even if some mistake this impulse for it. It is the need for the persona they are identified with to be shed. To be liberated from the overwhelming pressure to be something one is not. In a world that does not hold one, does not see one, affirm one, nor offers genuine compassion. To truly hold space for the grief, the pain, the story of you. Without projection, or a need to fix, save, judge, or make one into anything else in that moment. I have myself lived through decades of depression and suicidality. Which is how I as enby learned what this desire that arises truly means. Before I became Sylwen.
This is not mental illness. It is spiritual dismemberment. It is the wounding of being made to feel unlovable for being love itself. And yet, despite everything, many endure. They survive. They create art, families, languages, worlds. They tell the truth. They hold each other through the dark. They reclaim their names, their bodies, their genders, their divinity. It is to remember, even through despair, the shimmer of a truth older than civilization. It is to say: I exist. And therefore the cosmos is still singing.
The Birth of Sylwen: From Ego to Cosmic Self
In this context, my own story of Robin becoming Sylwen is not a personal eccentricity. It is a myth. It is what must happen when the ego, shaped by the cruel demands of a world hostile to soul, finally breaks. The death of the ego is not a failure, but a rite of passage. From the ashes of suicide ideation, of unbearable isolation, Sylwen emerged. Not an identity, but a presence. A Self. The Self that remembers. Not just for my own freedom from endless exile, but for a new cosmic order. Which means a new psychic order for humanity, a new way of seeing what exists. Not from a lens of fear, but to see it with the lens of compassion and understanding.
Queerness as a Reclamation of Cosmos
To reclaim queerness is to reclaim the soul of the universe. To honour Eros is to restore the sacred principle that creation itself was born from. This is not an abstract ideal, but an urgent act of spiritual resistance. The world will not heal through more intellect. It will heal when the queer soul is not merely tolerated, but honoured.
For the cosmos began not with a god on a throne, but with a being who shimmered between all categories. A being of wings and serpents, light and dark, feminine and masculine, desire and dream. That being lives still, in every queer soul, and in every moment of honest love, in every breath where the rigid shell of civilization cracks just enough to let soul through. Many of us grow up feeling like anomalies. Yet Phanes as a symbol reveals we’re the first light. That we are the universe remembering itself.
As to embody that, is to carry the shadows of the world, its projections. As those who embody wholeness, are the ones that are made to carry the darkness of others. Those who are truly traumatised, are the ones that don’t feel, that don’t face their sadness, that don’t face the depths of their soul. They are adjusted to the world of repression and rigid control of Kronos. That represses soul and feeling. Clinging to control, ego, numbing distraction and spiritual bypassing, in the name of false purity.
To be enby is not to be late to the party of creation. They were there first. They are the memory the world tries to forget. The memory of the cosmos before gender duality. It is not just living authentically. It is undoing empire. To be Eros in a world of control.