Giving Birth to Our Selves Again

I wrote this for us…

There’s something happening…or about to happen, and it feels really big. So many people are struggling in profound ways right now—more than they were struggling one year ago when the Big Stillness of the pandemic descended upon us…more than any time in this whole surreal past year. It feels like agitation and exhaustion and confrontation and numbness and contractions and rupture and maybe, just maybe…transformation.

It is physical and psychological and existential and spiritual. Even my eczema-inflicted hands that have been—strangely–not so bad this past year, are now full of tiny little cuts that sting when I sanitize them and swell up my fingers so that they don’t even work correctly. No matter what I do, my skin won’t heal. My skin is literally splitting open.  

What I’ll write next is not anything wholly original. Rather, it is an original synthesis of my personal bits of intuitive matter mixed with confirming bits of articles read, blended with stories shared with me in confidential moments of crisis and anecdotal evidence from check-in after check-in that reveals something big is happening…or about to happen.

Here’s what I know in my bones. Its an anniversary and a coming to terms and a self-reckoning and a tension between two realities and a redefining. This may be the most uncomfortable many of us have ever been, and it may also be the chance for us to be more authentic than we’ve ever been before. None of these are small matters.

I remember reading years ago in one of Harriet Lerner’s books, maybe The Dance of Intimacy, about how anniversaries of loss and trauma can have a significant impact on our emotions and functioning, often without us even being aware they are the culprit. In my own experience, I can anticipate the day and the difficult emotions that may arise, and I can make plans for self-care. There is no guarantee, though, when or how the experience will hit me. On my first wedding anniversary after my divorce was underway, I planned ahead to have a soul friend spend the afternoon with me, imagining it would be really hard. What happened instead was unexpected.

Earlier in that week, something rattled me, and I cried on the entire 35-minute drive to work. I wasn’t sure how I’d get through the day. And then, on the beautiful autumn Saturday that marked my once anniversary, I sat on the beach and bought glorious golden mums from a local nursery and picked up steamed crabs that my nearly life-long friend and I picked on my porch. We listened to our favorite music, had drinks, ate crabs, reminisced and laughed loudly. I felt this expansive sense of liberation and possibility. Honestly, it might have been the best anniversary celebration I’d ever had. 

Other times a loss may not have even registered in my conscience, but I’ll be having or have just had an inexplicably sad day or be agitated or angry. Only in the midst of it or later do I connect the dots. Anniversaries can be funky and confusing and painful and even renewing. We are in the midst of the marking of a year of holding our breath, through overt and covert attacks on our health and our sense of security and civility and personal bonds and freedom and sometimes even in our trust in humanity. The beginning of the exhale is likely to be ragged and urgent and panicked.

Many of us have just spent the year doing a life-review. All of the busyness and commitments and overextension that, up until a year ago, had kept us from really sitting with ourselves and being honest about what matters to us and how much of it we have in our lives may have significantly decreased. During the possibly more quiet and still months of this year gone by, avoidance of our Selves has very likely been impossible. Though at times our batteries have been drained by this experience, we’ve also likely had glimmers of what it feels like to have enough juice to function well. In this year of far too much and way less, many of us have had the time to at least question if not more clearly define where we are in life and what we want from life moving forward. It may look nothing like what we’re fed as being essential to success out there in the world. We may have realized we were running on fumes and no longer even have the will to live up to the standard we previously set for ourselves. So, life as we knew it may be over, but there’s still life to live, and we may now define life worth living in a very different way than we did just a year ago.

There is a series of dichotomies surfacing…a kind of tension between so many existing needs and realities and longings. There is this safe place where some of us have been able to retreat and reflect and take care of ourselves like we have never been able to before, and it exists with the tension of a psychic and physical need to rejoin the world. And the world is so much safer than it was a year ago, though not everywhere, and there are still things that are quite unsafe about it. There may be a determination to live and work in the world differently coupled with an almost certain pressure to join the current-driven flow of activity in “normal” society. There may be an acknowledgement—an empathy even—toward those who have suffered the worst of this global tragedy while also being strongly pulled to take advantage of the potential for new beginnings. That could lead to guilt. There is birdsong and the unfurling of leaves that almost but not really bring the joy of years past that leads to a longing for what we’ve known but which our souls understand there is no returning to. We are Anais Nin’s layers of petals tucked tightly in a bud that has become too painful and now must bloom. We are the womb contracting, ready or not, about to give birth to ourselves all over again. We are the skin on the caterpillar that is splitting and falling away, destined to become a chrysalis. Something big is about to happen and it’s causing a lot of reckoning and discomfort and maybe, just maybe…transformation.

I was watching one of my favorite movies, Wings of Life, with my students this week. It’s a Disney documentary about the interconnectedness of all life on the planet, the essential role of pollinators in this web, and the risk we humans are creating to the very survival of vital species. I can’t even say how many times I’ve watched it, but I always learn something new. This time, when Meryl Streep, the narrator speaking from a flower’s perspective, describes the monarch caterpillar spinning its silken cocoon, it hits me in a very different way.

“The caterpillar grips the silk with its back legs and hangs upside down. Through contractions, the skin is loosened. Eventually, it splits revealing a new casing beneath. Now, a dangerous maneuver. In a matter of seconds, as the old skin and legs fall away, she must thrust hooks from the new case into the silk. If this delicate handoff fails, she will fall to the ground, helpless, and be eaten. Within this protective shell, her caterpillar self is fading away.” Then, the butterfly emerges, crumpled and unsteady. Her body pumps fluid that inflates her wings. The scales on the wings are shaped to reflect light and produce bright colored patterns. Contrasting colors of orange and black send the message, “I’m not good to eat.” 

On top of all of the struggle and the loss and the doubt and the exhaustion, we now have the opportunity, some may even feel the obligation, to transform ourselves and the way we live our lives. It feels dangerous but essential, because either way peril exists, so we may as well take the chance. But transformation doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a process that requires patience and persistence and more than one uncomfortable change. It is essential that we know and communicate our boundaries. Today, we lose an hour, but we gain more light. In the long run I find this desirable, the extra light, but I know it is likely that my energy and my mood will be off this week because of the time change. The first day of spring is just one week away. All of this seems to be converging in a quickening and change, inevitably, is coming.

So many people are struggling right now. But what if, while acknowledging and honoring the pain of it, we also recognize that it could be the contractions of old skins being rather intensely shaken so that they fall away and allow the caterpillar self to enter the chrysalis that allows the transformation into something new and more evolved than we ever anticipated. What if we are all just about to give birth to ourselves again?