Resolutions and “New Year New You” vibes are wearing off now. For a long time, we’ve been sold this image of relatively easy and pretty transformation. Here is the “before” picture, here is the “after” picture, here is a few pics of them eating an apple, lifting a heavy weight, etc. We get the idea that they had to do things to change, but it seems fairly simple.
If habit change and real growth were this easy, we’d all be exactly where we wanted to be right now. We’d set a goal, and then just do it. And then once we reached the goal, we would naturally just be the kind of person who kept doing the work to maintain that place (or set new goals and move on, etc).
Of course, real change doesn’t happen that way.
Real change is kind of ugly. It’s kind of brutal. It takes changing mindsets, beliefs, actions and relationships.
The real deal is lots of ugly failures along the way. Martha Beck talks about the change cycle, and this necessary part where the caterpillar dissolves in the cocoon into a puddle of goo. The caterpillar parts literally melt into a “soup” of building blocks (muscles, breathing tubes, etc), and then rearrange themselves into butterfly parts. Wet ones that need to dry out.
No wonder humans, with their magical human brains, don’t like change.
If you had to convince the caterpillar to shut itself into a dark cave, dissolve its parts and rearrange them (alone and in the dark), push itself out of the cave, dry out, etc so that it could have these beautiful wings, what would it say? At least some of them would be all, “nah, no thanks.” Lucky for us, they are programmed for it.
People who have gone through radical changes will often tell their ugly, difficult story of dissolving AFTER their transformation. And yet, we often still minimize their suffering in our mind, or think they are superhuman or they are exaggerating.
And we often turn away, in many ways, from people who are suffering in front of us. And we hide our own.
I’m hard pressed to imagine that this changes any time soon across humanity, but I think when we acknowledge our struggling and striving, even to one person, we grow. Allowing others to witness and support the dissolving, to accept their help, is part of the change to the person we become on the other side.
No one who loses 50# or goes through a divorce or depression wants to be exactly the same person on the other side. Your thoughts change. Your interactions with other humans change. Your beliefs about who you are and what you are capable of accomplishing change.
Living into that new you, the person who has gone through the work, and normalizing it for others? That’s transformation. That’s magic. That is you in the beauty of a metamorphosis of your choosing.
