There is a part of me that feels that I need to go through a metamorphosis. When that part is strong I feel like a caterpillar searching for the way to become a butterfly.

Last night I dreamt one of my ‘hospital dreams’. I am in places which I know are psychiatric units although I have not been there before. Often I can see the way to get out but also feel strongly that going further in might be the equivalent to building a chrysalis in which I can melt down and rebuild myself into someone  new. In last night’s dream the way to do this seemed to be related to losing enough weight to be put on some magic medication. I was regretting having got better instead of pushing myself to where I needed to go.

Waking up it all seemed very familiar. I don’t think losing weight or near death experiences are a good idea but that idea of transformation is still powerful. It draws me to the myth of Inanna going through the seven gates to the underworld and returning transformed and to descriptions of rituals that others have done based on her journey (such as these.) Preparing for my son’s birth it drew me to birth stories of natural labour and it’s transformative affects even knowing that my medical conditions were going to make such a journey really hard for me to take.

What is it? A need to feel initiated somehow? It certainly used to be as I tried to find the elements that would make me properly adult. Tempered and changed maybe? There have been times when that transformation was going to let me overcome the limits from medical conditions and psychiatric labels. After all I kept hearing people say that type one diabetes needn’t stop me doing anything and yet so often it does and many people talked of being recoverED in a transformative way.

This path sometimes took me down rabbit holes where I thought maybe the resources going into me should be freed for the rest of the world to use. I thought was too broken to be worth them. However those journeys to the edge showed me that my life force was strong. I gained knowledge and strength from those journeys whether it was right to take them or not.

I can move between worlds in my mind and often have a strong intuition and the confidence to follow it, most of the time anyway!  I want to find more ways to use these for good in the world. Maybe that’s my next transformation?

I talked to the part of myself that is searching for that transformative battle as I learned to do in therapy. I asked what we were trying to become. She immediately responded with three people close to me in age when I was eight or nine. People I thought were talented, clever, confident, comfortable in their bodies. I am many of these things now so aren’t we there?

Those people were admired by many adults and liked by many people, even by me when I wasn’t too jealous of them. Advice from that time crowded into my head about accepting myself and not coveting other people’s talents. My young self believed that accepting myself meant accepting that I was stuck with being the awkward second best weird one that I felt like. I listened as she shared the advice she’d heard about being content with what she has and her frustrations when others said she was also good at things when she wanted to know and do so much more.

I realised my experiences at the opticians last week showed me I have certainly transformed in some ways since then. As a child I wanted to communicate that feeling of not being good enough.  During any kind of test include my sight tests and field of vision tests I would be fighting the urge to fail and thus somehow communicate these flaws. Somewhere in the journeys between and having my son in the sling against me and the good rapport with this new optician that struggle had melted away.

I think that butterflies beautiful as they are are not a good metaphor for the long series of transformations I feel constantly drawn to. I am not stuck as a caterpillar waiting for the big change that will start my new life.  I remember in a level biology studying insects that went through many different instar stages. Different initiations different stages and different journeys to the edge to come back rearranged. Often when I’m in flow now I feel my wings but that doesn’t mean that the journey is done. I think the next step will involve being out in the world more in some way…