After that last major creative spurt back in May - when I found myself in February's pages and transcribed and recorded several iterations of a special little project called, Learning Healing - I went dormant again. At least, I went silent on all the platforms in ways that one might presume would reflect a period of inactivity. That, it appears, was when I entered my chrysalis stage, though it has been far from inactive.
Pardon the completely unoriginal caterpillar/cocoon/butterfly metaphors. It just so happens that ever since I took two months of leave back in May 2021, I've been feeling quite like a creature on some inevitable, internally compelled path to become radically different while somehow still becoming more of who I am.
Taking leave from professional work and digging into my own work clarified my responsibility to choose resignation and explore a different way of living my life. As I've indicated in numerous other places of writing, the process since August 2021 has been nothing short of rich, healing, arduous at times, uncertain, and unrelenting.
At this particular moment - with the benefit of hindsight to see seasons of change across the seasons in between, as well as threads that bind them to and through each other - I'm grateful for all of it. One is surely among the most fortunate if, when they gaze around at the details of daily life that surround them, they sincerely feel they are right where they need and ought to be.
The last four months felt like a portal. I know where I am and I have a sense for where I am going, but for the first time in a long time, I got here without much of a plan. Though always intentional and deliberate, since choosing to change my path I've been quite unable to look much further than one or two months ahead. I've been forced to approach my journey with a commitment to not be calculating, controlling, desperate, or overly domineering, even when waves of anxiety would set in.
(By the way, it's also fitting to be publishing this post in October because back in 2008, October took on the role of The Month When Big Things Happen. It has been my annual reminder to look back over the past year and realize there was no way I could have predicted I would end up here. The great insight, then, is that it would be foolish to assume I could anticipate what conditions I'll be pondering come this time next October so I might as well be open to the unexpected.)
More so than ever before, I am continuously stripping myself of layers of presumption that I am ever in a position to fully conduct or manipulate the orchestra of my life. Below such presumption, there is a glow of wisdom and a resource for hope in knowing, with certainty, that contained within us is also a deep capacity for change.
I'm also learning there is a peculiar benefit that grows out of the willingness to acknowledge some internal force which compels such dramatic change. This recognition allows for a certain kind of comfort or assurance, a sense that there is a will and that what wills, can be.
Maybe this is what some religious folks attribute to God. For me, I've probably held closest to it through my own notions about effortless action and what it means to let.
These days, though, perhaps because it is still 2022, my year to explicitly embrace any opportunity that could help me embody new dimensions of what it means to trust, I'm finding deeper connection with what it takes to trust the process of the process in process.
The force that compels the process has my attention far more than the stunning quality of the transformation itself. Regarding butterflies, this translates into a more poignant appreciation for the inertia of the butterfly's arc, that which moves it through such remarkable change.
It has me realizing how the experience of becoming more of who one fundamentally is is hardly a power worth fighting against; letting into it might also result in the most beautiful of all possible outcomes.
In the midst of such shapeshifting, at times it may be tempting to reject or abandon notions of the self. It's a classic take on a philosophical question really: When a crawly creature with a soft, pillowy body and no appendages wraps itself in a casing of its own making and emerges with a whole new winged body, capable of flying - elegant, powerful, and delicate - is it still the same creature?
Even though resemblance across forms is nearly impossible to trace, of course it is. Isn't it?
We know developmental processes entail renewal, replacement, and a good sloughing along the way. This happens with the regeneration of all the cells that make up our bones, tissues, and fingernails, and that doesn't seem to fundamentally threaten our concept of who we are.
It's how we, like all things, grow and change.
In fact, it's how we remain healthy.
A certain degree of progression with continuity helps us grasp that it's all just different stages and iterations of the same being.
In case these musings have meandered too far for too long, let me be more direct: I realize it's been several months since I shared what I've been up to, but I'm writing this post to dispel any worries that things were not happening during my writing hiatus. Trust it's still me, desiring to share parts of this journey with you, and trust that I've changed and am still changing.
Now, back to the philosophical blending of metaphors and amateur entomology.
One might argue that the chrysalis stage is actually the part that makes the caterpillar's journey of becoming a butterfly such an iconic, quintessential manifestation of radical change. It is the most transformative part of the entire process when the caterpillar somehow becomes the butterfly.
It's also the part that most challenges our notions of continuity because it involves a complete breakdown and dissolution of the recognizable body. Whatever went into that gooey pod of enzymatic juices emerges in an entirely new form.
Perhaps for this reason, we don't tend to identify the chrysalis with the caterpillar itself but rather as the opaque container for the caterpillar. The chrysalis, then, is a powerfully unique physicality. It conceals and protects the mystery of how one thing can become something else so utterly different and yet, somehow, still be what it has always been as it goes on just as it was meant to be.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, things started to really shift for me this past June. Still in the vein of this post from earlier in 2022, most of my time, energy, and reflections were largely focused on themes of work and life and death and dating and family and relationships. (Some things, it turns out, don't really change.)
But concrete differences surfaced in the form of a new, promising long-distance relationship (complete with first-time, in-person meetings), an offer to write a position description for a new, part-time job, as well as separate visits from my dad and my mom, the latter of which coincided with the uncanny death of my neighbor. June to July to August were a lot, and very true to form, I processed the weeks and months through big thoughts with deep feelings. Despite how frequently I thought about others, very few people actually heard or saw much from me. I was wrapped up, all consumed.
I didn't mean to slip into a chrysalis (and I couldn't have known at the time that this was what was happening!). I meant to share some of the shifts I was experiencing. I even started writing this post in September, but then paths crossed, moons became new, and suddenly I could officially update my professional experience on LinkedIn after traveling to California where I met my partner's parents and family AND cried my eyes out while reuniting with the Pacific for the first time in nine years.
All that is to say, after a very full four months or so, I finally feel like I've entered my butterfly stage. And now for the plot twist...
I don't really want to be a butterfly.
I mean, I'm good with it for now - no, deeply grateful for it - but I was never striving to be a butterfly, so I don't want to be a butterfly like this forever. I'm not exactly sure what happens after the butterfly stage, but I am pretty sure a butterfly dies, so let's hope that's where the metaphor breaks down.
In the meantime, I'm committed to trusting the process of the process as it evolves in process, and I'm thrilled to see what life provides through butterfly eyes.
At a minimum, I trust that things are going to look and feel different through this phase. At least, I really, really hope so, particularly when it comes to my writing. I'm eager to write like a butterfly to reveal and define new dimensions of me.
Despite the sage advice about writing that was echoed to me by Dr. Gerry Callahan in 2014 when he said, "Show, don't tell," somewhere deep down, probably in the part of me that still grapples with insecurity and vulnerability, I still felt the need to acknowledge my disappearance and explain myself before I really get a chance to pump my wings in the months ahead (and for however long it takes).
Buried in elaborate philosophical musings about a cliche metaphor, I guess I wanted to make sure you would still recognize me, even through and after the process of such a bold rearrangement.
P.S. During this time, I created several playlists at an unusually rapid clip, obviously reflecting the dynamic energy of the summer months into fall. Once I recognized I was becoming a butterfly, I curated the playlist, "Glide, Love" which features this gem of a song, an apt anthem for life and love in transformational times.