Don’t go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep!
When I gave birth to my son Mateo last August, I also gave birth to someone else.
She was the woman living dormant in my bones and the one I’ve been waiting to become. She was strong and wild and unafraid of her edges. For a few swirly, hazy cocooned weeks after his birth, I felt both entirely new and simultaneously more of myself. I loved her/me.
As I began to integrate back into life, I didn’t know what to do with her. I was still going to the same zoom calls and answering to the same name. I wore the same droopy leggings I kept telling myself I needed to replace. I had cracked open, but felt like I was trying to fit myself back into something I had grown out of.
So I changed diapers and responded to emails and tried to find my old rhythms. People would kindly ask how I was doing and I would say something very socially appropriate like GOOD! or FINE or OH JUST HANGING IN…
…while the wild woman swirled upstairs in the attic of myself.
Some days, she would try to come downstairs and I would suddenly experience an overwhelming desire to burn everything down or radically change my life in a way that was, um…UNNERVING…so I quickly shooed her back upstairs into obscurity.
When I told people about this experience of a new/old/wild self that had emerged during the past year, I didn’t expect them to understand — is there even a word for the space between who we were and who we’re becoming? Language feels insufficient.
But there was resounding recognition. I want to burn it all down, too a friend said softly.
A year of new motherhood has a lot of similarities with a year in quarantine.
Yesterday, a client said this about reentry: There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel ready yet — I was just starting to discover something, but it doesn’t feel fully integrated yet. I already feel behind.
It would be so much easier to exit out of this past year a butterfly. Ta-da! We transformed! We are new!
But when you have the courage to fully experience them, transitions—like life, and creative process—are nonlinear. Some days we will feel confused and longing for the safety of the cocoon. Some days we won’t know who we are. Others we will feel the electrical pull of possibility.
What I know for sure is: we can’t diminish our evolution.
Instructions for transitions:
1. Give yourself permission to change
2. Trust the whispers
3. Try stuff
4. Do what feels good
5. Make space. Be kind
6. Immerse yourself in poetry and art
7. Be very curious about who you’re becoming
The thing about my Wild Self is that she is—surprise!—my true self. If you, too, discovered a more alive and authentic part of yourself over the past year, I urge you: don’t disregard her.
If you have big angst or big questions or big desire for radical change you are not wrong and you are not behind—you are AWAKE.
And you are brimming with creative power and potential.
The space between deconstruction and reconstruction is an alchemical space. Our Before/After obsessed culture doesn’t see transitions so we are mostly invisible here. But invisibility is also a superpower.
What I know about you is that you are one of the remarkable people refusing to go back to the old, quick solutions sold to us by a culture that doesn’t make time to see our wholeness and humanity. Thank you. I really really love you for this. What I also know is that you are on your way to something freer and brighter and more alive than before.
If any of this resonates, I encourage you to give yourself a little extra space this week—maybe that’s as simple as taking 3 breaths right now, or letting yourself wonder about an aspect of your life without pressuring yourself for an immediate answer. And I want to leave you with this question—
What if the best is yet to come?
Maybe to be human is to be awake in the space between who we are and who we’re becoming.
Maybe butterflies are overrated.
