From the Editor

Molly Backes, Communications Coordinator

Anumber of years ago, I went through a series of big upheavals in quick succession, so that within a span of about six months, nearly every major element in my life changed. Marriage? Ended. Job? Position eliminated. House? Our landlords sold it from under us, and the new owners bulldozed it. So much change that quickly was disorienting. Sometimes it felt like I was living on a different timeline than all of my friends were—as if I had lived through six years in what everyone else experienced as six months. One day I was married, working a stagnant but stable job, tending to the garden in our quirky rental house; the next I was separated, unemployed, driving past a hole in the ground where my house used to be.

During this period of my life, people liked to tell me stories about butterflies, one of our culture’s favorite metaphors for change. “Don’t worry,” they’d say, “you’re going to come out of this stronger and more beautiful. Like a butterfly.” After the tenth person told me that I was going to become a butterfly, I started wondering about caterpillars and butterflies, and exactly how one turns into the other. I suppose I had always assumed it was something along the lines of tadpoles turning into frogs—the legs appear, the tail disappears, and voila—but caterpillars and butterflies seemed to have really different bodies. How, exactly, would that transformation work?

The answer, as it turns out, is much grosser than I expected. After a caterpillar encloses herself in a chrysalis, she essentially digests her entire body and turns into a soup, where all the cells of her former self rearrange themselves and grow an entirely new body. Somehow, none of the cute books about caterpillars and butterflies I read in childhood mentioned that part. The more I learned about it, though, the more I realized that this was actually the missing piece of the metaphor for me. Because when people told me that after all this upheaval I would turn into a butterfly, I always sensed a hint of impatience in them, as if they wanted me to hurry up and sprout some wings already. I was impatient, too. I would have loved to fast forward through the depressing stuff and transform all my unhappiness into something beautiful, but the annoying thing about this kind of change is that it takes time, often much more than you want it to. I wasn’t ready for wings yet; I was still in the soup.

During a caterpillar’s soup phase [not the scientific term], she is incredibly fragile. If something happens to her protective chrysalis—if it’s pierced or punctured at all—she will just ooze out, losing all the possibilities of her future self. It occurred to me that I might be just as fragile. I decided to give myself the only gift I could, the same one the caterpillar gives herself: time. I told myself that I could spend as much time as I needed to in my own soup phase, and I did my very best to trust that with enough time, my cells would rearrange themselves into someone new. And eventually—eventually—they did.

Change is hard, and messy, and it almost always takes much longer than we think it should. We like quick solutions and sped-up makeover montages, but real transformation rarely happens overnight. If you find yourself in your own period of upheaval, remember that the caterpillar builds her chrysalis for a reason. Maybe you need to give yourself the space and time to dissolve entirely. Before you grow your next pair of wings, you might have to spend some time in the soup.