...your own future, a leaving of the identity that used to fit, you know this stage. Not the after. The middle. The part where you don't recognize yourself, where you can't yet do what the old you did and can't yet do what the new you will do. Where it feels less like growth and more like dissolving.
Here's what's easy to miss from the outside: the dissolve isn't failure. It's the mechanism. The in-between is not the caterpillar dying for nothing. It's the only way the wings get built.
And here's the part that makes me quietly emotional. A ten-year-old boy in Kobe, Japan, named Jo Nagai, noticed something odd about the butterflies he raised: they kept flying back to him after release. Curious, he trained his caterpillars to associate a lavender scent with a mild vibration, then waited for them to become butterflies. When he tested them, the butterflies still avoided the lavender. Despite the total-body dissolution in between, something remembered. And when he tested their offspring, butterflies who had never been trained at all, they avoided the lavender too.
The self that dissolves is not erased. It's encoded. And apparently, it can even be inherited.
I think about that a lot in this work. When my clients ask, sometimes on the verge of being tearful, mid-transition, whether the version of themselves they're dissolving even mattered, whether all that old pain and effort just gets wiped when the new identity emerges, I think of that chrysalis. Nothing in that soup is wasted. It becomes the wings.
Which leaves me with a bigger, more pensive question, one I don't have a tidy answer to: if a butterfly can pass its caterpillar's memory to its children, what does that mean for us? If we do the work, if we re-tailor an anxious, reactive nervous system into a steadier, more emotionally intelligent one, does any of that outlive us? Does our children's baseline shift because we did the heavy lifting so they wouldn't have to?
𝘞𝘦𝘭𝘭, 𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘔𝘪𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘦𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘺'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘮 𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴: children learn nervous-system regulation by watching and co-regulating with the adults around them, and that shapes their own stress biology through nurture, not genetics. So maybe the wings don't have to be inherited. Maybe they just have to be witnessed.
𝘈𝘴𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧:
✧ What part of you is currently in the soup, no longer who you were, not yet who you're becoming?
✧ What would it change if you trusted the dissolving instead of resisting it?
✧ If your own emotional growth could be witnessed and passed on, what would you want passed down?
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