Earlier this summer, my parents sent my kids a package: caterpillars. It sounds like strange gift until you’ve been in quarantine with two young children for months. They came with everything needed to feed and house them as they made their glorious transformation.
It was June; we had been on coronavirus lockdown since March, and nature was astounding us more than ever. We watched, with more joy than we usually did, the trees sprout their leaves, the tulips open, the ants beckoning the peonies to bloom. Nature, already, had been saving us, and daily. But never before had we had the privilege of watching caterpillars transform. The kids were excited and curious; I was equally enthralled.
We all want to be the butterfly emerging, soft and beautiful, from its chrysalis. And yes, I know you’re thinking the caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor is overdone. But maybe it’s not.
Tales of transformation hook us, but it seems that so often we get the Hollywood version. Blink and the process is complete. Caterpillar to butterfly, overnight. Easy. Natural. Simple.
But is it? What actually happens in between?
One morning we woke to find that the caterpillars went from crawling around their little container to hanging from the top. “Soon!,” we said to each other, our voices tinted with bits of much-appreciated anticipation. Later that day when we came inside, nine of the ten caterpillars were in chrysalises. The last one was still transforming.
I didn’t want to leave the room for fear that I would miss something. It hung there, upside down, still. Then, occasionally, it began to gyrate its body in circular motions, and lift itself into little caterpillar crunches.
I watched. It was the most selfish I had been in months, sitting there watching that caterpillar, for once refusing my kids’ requests to play games or read books or go outside.
It was, I think, like any change that happens slowly. I watched it happen, yet I couldn’t tell you what, exactly, happened. I was present for the changing but couldn’t see it clearly until it was complete.
But what, I wondered, is actually going on in there? As well known as the transformation is, however overdone the symbolism, I had no idea what happened in the chrysalis, during in-between, the time when the creature was neither/nor.
Turns out, like all of life at this moment, it’s nothing that I expected.
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar liquefies. Everything is melted down to its essence. It is contained, but if it weren’t, it would be messy. It is total destruction, an evisceration. The caterpillar digests itself, essentially. If you didn’t know, you would call it ruin. The End. If you didn’t know, you would say there was no hope for anything beautiful to be born from it. You would say there was no coming back from this.
And yet.
A week later, we released ten fully formed, beautiful butterflies in our backyard.
The messy middle is so often skipped. No one wants to tell you that the transformation feels like dying. That when you are in between, you will look around and not recognize a thing about yourself, or your life, or maybe anything around you. That the landscape, all the way to the horizon, will appear black, the thick black of deepest, new-moon night. That, when you are neither/nor, it is messy. Your insides are outside.
There will be no one to tell you that all is well, that you are simply digesting your old self so that your new self may be born. Maybe you will sense it, but maybe not.
You do not fall asleep one day as the old version of you and wake up the next day, fresh and new. In between, it gets ugly. And then, uglier. It brings you to your knees. You’ll cry tears of despair and desperation, you’ll long for your old life, you’ll long for your new life, you’ll feel adrift in a sea of who-you-were soup.
Nothing becomes the butterfly, it seems, without the messy part that’s hidden from the world.
A few weeks after we released the butterflies I was trying to fall asleep one night and, in that strange way that thoughts seem to pop up when you can’t sleep, I wondered: What does my name mean?
I don’t know why this question felt so pressing, and I don’t know why I didn’t already know. Doesn’t it seem like something one ought to know by their thirties?
So I Google. Stacy means resurrection; one who will be born again.
I think of the caterpillar. I think of the butterfly.
Crawling. Liquefying. Flying.
Ordinary. Messy. Beautiful.
Growth. Destruction. Rebirth.
I wonder, at this moment, am I caterpillar, or butterfly?
I’d like to be the butterfly, of course, and not just because I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to fly. I’d like to be beautiful, and fully formed, and certain of exactly what I am and what I offer to the world. I’d like to be the fullest expression of myself, I’d like to float along, I’d like to be colorful and free.
If I could choose, of course I would choose butterfly over caterpillar. Of course.
But the truth is, I am neither.
I am the liquid in-between; suspended, inert. I am neither/nor. I am caterpillar soup. I am becoming. But exactly what I am becoming, I do not know.