Phoenix Rising, I say…you can keep your damn butterflies! | Lynne Bond | Blog Post | Red Room
The butterfly. This has long been a metaphor for change.
I’ve always accepted that metaphor as being appropriate. I just saw
myself as still gestating within the cocoon, not quite ready to emerge
and fully spread my wings in all their glorious splendor. More
accurately the butterfly has been a literary and psychological metaphor
for transformation, which in my mind is something much larger than
change. Not being a scientist, I can’t truly speak to the process that a
caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly, but I wonder if it is
just change and not really transformation. It seems to me that
everything the caterpillar needs to make the change to butterfly it has
before it makes the change. To the human eye, it is external…perhaps
even superficial. I don’t know if the caterpillar feels different once
it has become a butterfly…do caterpillars feel? But I would argue that
true transformation would require feeling different, not just looking
different. So the question I have been mulling over is this: are we
actually able to transform? I’m not sure I have the answer to this, but
I do know that the butterfly metaphor no longer works for me. It seems
too trivial, cliché, no longer relevant…at least for my life. It’s
time for a new metaphor.
I can say with almost complete certainty that 2011 has been the worst year of my 42 years of life. Keep in mind though that the lead up to this awful year has been coming along for about the past 4 years. In 2008 I left a man I had been with for 5 years and had thought I would be with much longer (I’m loathe to say forever…but you know what I mean). I had applied to graduate school and been rejected but was in the process of reapplying. In 2009 I started a PhD program at Southern Illinois University, leaving behind my beloved New York City. Intellectually I have been stimulated over the past two and a half years, but everything else in my life, all other sustenance personal and spiritual, has been put on hold. I don’t think we truly realize how connected all the aspects of our life actually are until some of them begin to atrophy. While this imbalance in my life was occurring I came face to face with my own mortality…and my own vanity…early in 2011.
I had my first mammogram this spring. A little later than I should have had it done, but I’ve always been healthy and there is no breast cancer in my family. So when the mammogram came back with an abnormality, some small calcification clusters, I was, well, terrified. Here it was, the possibility of something so life changing, and not for the better, and I was in no position to handle it. I was already depressed and lonely from personal and psychological isolation from the life I had created and loved in NYC. And now I had the possibility of my own mortality with which to contend. Perhaps even more terrifying than the possibility of death was the possibility of physical deformation. I had to address my own vanity and what that meant. As a 42 year old single woman, who looks much younger than her age and has always had a well-proportioned and sexy body, my greatest fear came bubbling to the surface: what if I lose my looks while I’m still single? I’ve never considered myself a superficial person, but part of who I am is how I look. It’s not everything, but I finally realized how much a part of me my appearance truly means. Vanity, vanity...
I had a surgical biopsy in the spring, and it turned out I didn’t have cancer just some atypical cells. Relief! For a brief moment. When I came back for the 6 month follow-up the surgeon wanted to go in again and remove the rest of the calcifications. According to her it was just precautionary…but precautionary or not there was no way for her to tell me that these other calcifications wouldn’t come back as cancer. So the additional surgery was scheduled for just before Christmas. And in the meantime I had my exams to take. So there I was…alone, already depressed, still facing the possibility of breast cancer, all the while trying to study for my comprehensive exams this fall. Needless to say I was struggling like I’d never struggled before and losing. I was heading for the bottom. I was heading for the ash pile. And I landed with a resounding thud coughing from the ashes flying around me…
That’s when it hit me. I needed something stronger than a butterfly for my own personal understanding of who I am now and who I can be. Transformation, true change, is a process that is never complete. I have been transforming slowly since the moment I was born. We all do. The butterfly metaphor just doesn’t work because we will never come out of the cocoon. Others may see us as butterflies, and that’s okay. We are never done. What we do actually is continually recreate ourselves. Out of fear, tragedy, loss, depression and also joy and happiness. What we have to be is the Phoenix – mythical, magical, and fierce, a true fighter struggling out of the ashes to regain our fire. And we have to keep going through this process over and over again...each time something new causes us to stumble and fall into the ash pile. The butterfly is linear; caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, death. The Phoenix is cyclical and eternal, out of death (or fear and depression) rebirth (or life anew). I’m the struggling hatchling again sitting in the ashes, but I feel the fire beginning to return. I don’t know what 2012 will bring, but I can feel the Phoenix in me rising…so you can keep your damn butterflies!
I can say with almost complete certainty that 2011 has been the worst year of my 42 years of life. Keep in mind though that the lead up to this awful year has been coming along for about the past 4 years. In 2008 I left a man I had been with for 5 years and had thought I would be with much longer (I’m loathe to say forever…but you know what I mean). I had applied to graduate school and been rejected but was in the process of reapplying. In 2009 I started a PhD program at Southern Illinois University, leaving behind my beloved New York City. Intellectually I have been stimulated over the past two and a half years, but everything else in my life, all other sustenance personal and spiritual, has been put on hold. I don’t think we truly realize how connected all the aspects of our life actually are until some of them begin to atrophy. While this imbalance in my life was occurring I came face to face with my own mortality…and my own vanity…early in 2011.
I had my first mammogram this spring. A little later than I should have had it done, but I’ve always been healthy and there is no breast cancer in my family. So when the mammogram came back with an abnormality, some small calcification clusters, I was, well, terrified. Here it was, the possibility of something so life changing, and not for the better, and I was in no position to handle it. I was already depressed and lonely from personal and psychological isolation from the life I had created and loved in NYC. And now I had the possibility of my own mortality with which to contend. Perhaps even more terrifying than the possibility of death was the possibility of physical deformation. I had to address my own vanity and what that meant. As a 42 year old single woman, who looks much younger than her age and has always had a well-proportioned and sexy body, my greatest fear came bubbling to the surface: what if I lose my looks while I’m still single? I’ve never considered myself a superficial person, but part of who I am is how I look. It’s not everything, but I finally realized how much a part of me my appearance truly means. Vanity, vanity...
I had a surgical biopsy in the spring, and it turned out I didn’t have cancer just some atypical cells. Relief! For a brief moment. When I came back for the 6 month follow-up the surgeon wanted to go in again and remove the rest of the calcifications. According to her it was just precautionary…but precautionary or not there was no way for her to tell me that these other calcifications wouldn’t come back as cancer. So the additional surgery was scheduled for just before Christmas. And in the meantime I had my exams to take. So there I was…alone, already depressed, still facing the possibility of breast cancer, all the while trying to study for my comprehensive exams this fall. Needless to say I was struggling like I’d never struggled before and losing. I was heading for the bottom. I was heading for the ash pile. And I landed with a resounding thud coughing from the ashes flying around me…
That’s when it hit me. I needed something stronger than a butterfly for my own personal understanding of who I am now and who I can be. Transformation, true change, is a process that is never complete. I have been transforming slowly since the moment I was born. We all do. The butterfly metaphor just doesn’t work because we will never come out of the cocoon. Others may see us as butterflies, and that’s okay. We are never done. What we do actually is continually recreate ourselves. Out of fear, tragedy, loss, depression and also joy and happiness. What we have to be is the Phoenix – mythical, magical, and fierce, a true fighter struggling out of the ashes to regain our fire. And we have to keep going through this process over and over again...each time something new causes us to stumble and fall into the ash pile. The butterfly is linear; caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, death. The Phoenix is cyclical and eternal, out of death (or fear and depression) rebirth (or life anew). I’m the struggling hatchling again sitting in the ashes, but I feel the fire beginning to return. I don’t know what 2012 will bring, but I can feel the Phoenix in me rising…so you can keep your damn butterflies!
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