mia gonzalez

The Return of renewable: The Phoenix: Mia Gonzalez 🔥🌿

They called me the girl who danced with the shadows. A whisper to the wind, a wisp of a girl at the neon edges of the city, the chaos of a city never sleeping. But behind the enigmatic smile and the late-night musings was a story; a story of fire, of fall, of flight - a phoenix rising. This is my truth.

In the eye, of that stormy, coastal town, I learned early there was no gift in surviving, only the grind. My father a fisherman, became one with the sea and left my mother and I with nothing but debts and a dilapidated shack on the edge of the world. My mother worked three jobs and cleaned the homes of a class of people who provide little more thought to her than people put into their day-old garbage. At age 16, I sold my books to pay the electric bill and studied by candlelight, while the world swirled with color outside my window.

I don’t recall the final evening I opened my eyes to blackness; a blackout—the third of the month, and for my mother, she was choking in the dark, her asthma medicine packed safely away in a fridge that no longer hummed; I yearn for the hum. The stillness. The impotence. The anger. That evening, I swore I would never let the dark win again.

I fought my way into engineering school. I worked days as a bartender (it's true, I make a solid Old Fashioned 🥃) and was a tutor in the evenings. In those days, sleep was a luxury and ambition was my only drug. When one of the top renewable energy firms rejected me—"You have no experience." I laughed. Experience? I had survived a lifetime in a society already rigged against girls like me.

So, I chose to build my own way. Solar panels made from scrap, wind turbines drawn on cocktail napkins, a consultancy created in a dimly lit studio apartment that now informs the future of green energy for Fortune 500 firms. The girl who begged for light can now command it. 💡

But the shadows are never far away. They remain in the every receipt I still save, in the frigid haunting that surrounds my memories of those powerless nights. This is part of why I fight—not just for milliwatts, but for the millions of people that won't leave the dark.

Are you wondering who the woman is behind the myth? Stick around; the best ones in my story have yet to be written. ✨