Metamorphosis

Lately I have been falling asleep with the kids around 8 pm on a regular basis. During the day, my head is foggy and I am low on energy. I heard that some of you are experiencing the same. To me it feels like I am currently pupating in a little cocoon of mine. The other day I was talking about this with my dear friend Eva and we were joking around: At the end of this crisis, are we going to turn into beautiful butterflies or just come out as really fat and hairy caterpillars? 🙂

In any case, the pandemic is making me crawl back inside myself. And what I found there is my seven-year-old self, snuggled into a blanket reading everything she could get her hands on and writing her first short story about a leprechaun in a vase (true story..). This year, I am finally making time to dive back into the world of words and encouraging myself to write again. But what has once been a very spontaneous act of expressing my creativity, is now taking tons of courage. Instead of simply jotting down word by word, this has now turned into a very messy process. I am not sitting at my desk, words flying through my fingers, assembling this novel I always meant to write. I tried that several times, it does not work like that – at least not for me. I am constantly overthinking it: Am I ever going to finish it? Will it be any good? Is there anybody out there who even wants to read this? Overthinking and not being in the moment are the complete opposite of what I call «butterfly moments», when we are experiencing lightness and the feeling of being joyfully connected. 

I could tell you more about the book I am writing (or NOT writing for the most part ;-), but I won’t for now. Because I am still discovering it myself. While the main characters have been with me for a while, even lived in a dumpster close to our house (according to my daughter’s imagination), I still don’t know anything about them. And yet I had this urge to start putting them on paper, to know how it all ends, right from the beginning. I have started writing the book several time, each time I had to surrender immediately. I was approaching it like a day job – with a schedule: It needs to happen while the kids are at daycare. I need to put down some pages right now or I won’t be able to see any progress. I need to have all the answers right now or there is no way I am ever going to finish this book. Can you relate to this feeling? Does it make you nervous, too, when you cannot see the top of the mountain you are trying to climb?

However, I am starting to realize that most of my writing is taking place at night, while I am asleep. Our brains are wonderful and weird. Mine seems to function like a compost heap. At day time I’m collecting and absorbing everything I can – even more now that I am paying much more attention to snippets of conversations, to gestures or smells. Then I need to let it rest, marinate, decompose – fertilized by all my messy emotions. This is the hardest part. Metamorphosis happens in moments of stillness. It is the magical moment in between. Muscles grow in between your work-outs. We need to rest. We need to trust the process. It’s time to re-think what it means to be working and to give ourselves credit for taking a break – because even when it seems like we aren’t doing anything or going anywhere, there is still so much happening inside of us. By the way: Did you know there are seven different types of rest?

Even though I intuitively know that rest is important, I almost always feel bad when I am not doing anything. In the end, there is always more to learn and do, right? And even when I eventually allow myself to take a break, I have a hard time grasping the concept of not being in the driver’s seat of what is happening inside my brain at all times. Of letting things evolve on their own, observing and sinking into silence. It’s the hardest thing for me. But I am slowly getting better at it. I am even starting to enjoy it occasionally. 

We all are constantly evolving, we just don’t take enough time to acknowledge where we have been and who we have become (and in the end it is about becoming who we are, right?). We rarely give ourselves permission to sit back and wait. We are constantly trying to rush our metamorphosis. Maybe that is why the world is standing still these days…

From the outside, it sometimes seems like there is no progress at all. Whether we are potty training our kids, looking for our true purpose or trying to write a book. We tend to get anxious and stressed or lose faith in ourselves. We start working even harder, obsessing about moving forward. We become more rigid and thus more likely to crack and crumble. 

Whatever mountain you are currently trying to climb, I invite all of us to take a moment to see where we can soften our grip and stop overthinking. What happens if we approach our daily lives with more trust and less fear? What if we trusted our kids to evolve without pulling on them? What if we focused on what feels right instead of pushing our careers? What if we cut ourselves a little slack once in a while? Wherever you are headed – snuggle up in your cocoon and trust the process!

I wish you many butterfly moments and hope you enjoy this month’s collection below – all somehow connected to our first theme: metamorphosis. 

Lots of love, 
Tanja

This text appeared in my thought-letter Tanja’s Butterflies (March Edition 2021). In case you are interested in future editions, feel free to sign up here.