Did you know that if you open a cocoon at the right moment (albeit devastating for the caterpillar who you’ve just killed) you will be met with only liquid?
The caterpillar puts itself in the position to transform into a butterfly through pure instinct and I’ll take a gander that it absolutely is not reading any manuals on “how to think and grow rich.”
The caterpillar is born with specific enzymes that only preserve the eyes and antennas when it’s going through a metamorphosis, but everything else is liquified in order to create the butterfly it will become.
We can see all this from the outside when we observe a caterpillar go through its life stages. Larva, adult caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. We know what stages each phase of transformation as it happens, we know the timeline, and we know the end result because we can study it from the outside.
But perhaps for the caterpillar, the one experiencing this sort of death of what was while it’s still alive, it’s one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences it will ever go through.
It’s trippy as fuck.
I’m going through a bit of a transformation right now and I call it caterpillar soup. I can’t remember where or when it started, I can’t see the end result, and it feels completely foreign to be myself right now, whatever “my self” is anyways. See what I mean? My life feels like liquid, only some bits of my identity constant among a sea of changes, both internal and external.
However, from the outside, others see me as growing and transforming. They see a butterfly well before I am feeling or presenting as a butterfly.
Maybe it’s weird to say, but I want to believe that the caterpillar is experiencing trauma through its metamorphosis.
But…it sticks with the process, and holds out until the end, following its instincts to only reveal itself at the right time, on its own time. With a full transformation behind it, she/he goes back into the world as a butterfly.
Never gone, but not as it was.
I believe humans, myself included, experience all these phases, perhaps even multiple times in a lifetime, and we are always becoming the butterflies we were born to be.
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