The savage beauty of transformation

On metamorphosis, in butterflies & in humans.

Years ago, I sat around a 7pm table with humans I love. After excess food and laughter, we decided to do an online quiz that supposedly summed you up in an animal, based on questions about your personality. I can’t quite remember where we found the quiz or why we decided to take a quiz that would summarise us in a creature. What I do remember, though, is that I hated my result. While everyone else received bear or wolf or hawk, the creature that apparently reflected my personality best – was a butterfly. I remember rolling my eyes thinking there was no grit, no violence, no power to a butterfly. That was 2017, and it is only over the past few months that I have come to truly understand the magnificence of butterflies.

One of my favourite passages I’ve ever read in a book is an excerpt from A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. The passage is about the metamorphosis of butterflies. When I read it, the beauty and violence that to me reflects so much of my recent life, strips the air out of my chest with all its familiar brutality.

“…the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay." – Pat Barker

But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.” – A field guide to getting lost, Rebecca Solnit

In November last year, in the midst of my own decay, I took the first step toward what I was hoping would be a life changing metamorphosis and began the process of publicly announcing my own psychological death, followed by varying online decisions that I felt supported me in my metamorphosis. I had a few people question exactly why I would pull my books off the shelves, why, if they were so successful – would I sabotage that. And I understand, looking from the outside, it seems like an unnecessary risk and maybe even to some, a stupid move. But to a woman in a black chrysalis, to a woman mid-rotting – it was the only thing to do. 

When you find yourself in the midst of a chrysalis, it can be hard to see. The pitch black replaces your ability to foresee, to envision, to know yourself. There, dangling in the dark, you find that all you can do, all you can manage – is to continue on with your transformation. Everything else is muffled, faded, and irrelevant. You are driven only to complete your metamorphosis.

In the butterfly's metamorphosis, the caterpillar must first digest itself. There are certain clumps of cells that remain. These cells turn into wings, antennae and eyes. Parts of the caterpillar remain to integrate into its new self. And that, to me, is exactly how it feels to experience a psychological metamorphosis. You keep integral parts of who you are to build into your reformed self. During the violent process of mush to magic, you keep what is to be kept; the rest is lost to the hungry appetite of change.

I find true transformation rarely makes sense. And it is almost never champagne bright. Never something we can down with a bubbly glass of something pink tinted; smacking our lips with willingness. Instead, we drag our feet. Sulking, complaining, throwing our hands in the air as we explain to others, or ourselves, or some denim sky, that none of this makes sense! Rarely does transformation have a clear path forward. It’s murky; hidden in slush and shadows. What pushes us forward is the pain of not going through with the transformation. What urges us deep below, is the understanding that this, us, who we are – is just not right. What forces us to press on is the promise of more pain, if we don’t. 

Last spring, eating slurpy peaches on my back lawn, my mind sugar fast and racking itself for an answer on what to do – I realised that thinking alone could not solve this. I could not cerebrally climb out of something that felt like a howling biological urge. What was needed was the unblinking courage and audacity to pursue metamorphosis wherever it takes me. If it took me further into the dark, into something like failure, if I lost everything I had built. Fine. The process of my decay had begun. Fighting it was only stretching out the suffering. 

I’m still in throes of this transformation; floating in liquid of the past and future. I see butterflies everywhere now. Symbols of savage beauty, the psyche, power, and, after 6 years – me.

One thing I cannot do is live a life without myself – the urge to know myself is my greatest desire. 

That is where this metamorphosis will take me. Towards myself. 

And I think that is what every metamorphosis does. Despite the suffering that often accompanies it. Despite the dead black. The endless unknowing. At the end of it, when we break through the drapery of our chrysalis, all legs and wings and rebirth – it takes us towards our big, blue, iridescent selves. In all its violence, metamorphosis creates such startling beauty. And in butterflies as in humans; it is always worth it.