In the horror film Get Out, the villain has the ability to cast their victims into “the sunken place,” an eternal darkness that traps your real self, and it’s just a shell of you operating blankly in the world.
In the film, it operates as a powerful allegory for racism. But when I watched it, it felt personal, and familiar. It brought me back to a recurring sensation I felt during those years, of being in a smooth dark tunnel, and the world is above me, and I’m sliding, accelerating, down into the dark. And there’s nothing to hold onto, I can’t stop sliding, so I just let go. And I sink.
I have shame, still, for how many years I spent stuck in one place, literally unable to move forward, my psyche just as frozen as my psoas.
This is a world that demands you keep moving forward at all times, here are twenty-seven things you must be doing to save the planet, what are you doing to stay perfectly fit, to be healthy, are you working hard enough or do you not have enough friends, you must be doing something, something, something, something, please watch another training montage, hello, hi there, create hope, see the river not the rocks…
…but for years, I didn’t put my boat in the water at all. Just sat on the shore and watched life float by.
How long did I spend like this, watching the world but barely in it? Well. Long enough to be able to discuss in minute detail every single franchise of Real Housewives and a handful of spinoffs as well. (Text me! I have thoughts!)
I have carried a lot of shame for this part of my story. My anti-training montage, we should call it: me at home, watching Bravo, running nowhere at all. That is a story that even hurts to type.
But lately I have started to wonder if I’m telling it wrong.
Winter For A Reason
Nothing in the natural world is at peak performance all the time. This is a cliche, but I tend to forget it, and how it applies to humans also. Tides ebb and flow. Trees go bare in the winter. Bears hibernate. Our natural state is to wax and wane; to retreat and renew. When you plant a seed, it stays underground for weeks or months, beneath frozen dirt, and it seems that nothing is happening, but something is.
In human history also, people have periods of retreat, going low. Jesus had his lost years, a total missing period in his life, between his childhood and the start of his ministry, when he is totally absent from the story of his own life. This is a guy who accomplished quite a lot by the time he died at 33, but he was off the grid for a couple of decades!
Or take Carl Jung, who had a career crisis, including a break with Freud, that led him to feel like he was having some sort of collapse. He closed down his practice, retreated entirely from the world, and was gone for three years.
It’s a pattern. Retreat — and renewal. The bare trees of winter become the bright colors of spring. When Jesus reentered his story, he launched his ministry, started doing miracles and altered the course of human history. Jung came back with a new model for the subconscious that we still use today.
During the pandemic, Glennon Doyle reassured people who were not using this time to be their most creative selves: “Sometimes you’re writing. Sometimes you’re becoming the person who is going to write.”
And becoming quite often looks like nothing at all, especially to those of us in the middle of it.
Inside the Cocoon: Carnage
Every writer has at some point tapped into the metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly, but have you ever really thought about what goes on inside the cocoon?
The caterpillar doesn’t go into the cocoon, wrap their blanket snugly over their little head, drift off to dreamland, and awaken transformed into a butterfly.
They melt.
The caterpillar melts, people. They become a “liquid, soupy substance.” It’s not a beautiful thing, the act of becoming a butterfly. We can’t see it, because of the cocoon, but inside there, it is carnage.
It was for me. Carnage. I melted, and we’re getting into it. We’re not skipping the hard part.
But I’m going to promise you this up front, this newsletter is called Create Hope not Carnage Everywhere, because the carnage never gets the final word. The carnage is the thing that happens before the butterfly. Even more: the carnage is the thing that makes the butterfly possible.
For a long time, I was so ashamed at how truly liquid I became. But more recently, I started wondering what it really feels like for the caterpillar inside the cocoon.
Is the caterpillar chill and serene? Or is the caterpillar panicking in there? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THE WORLD, I AM WRAPPED UP SO TIGHT I CAN’T EVEN BREATHE, WHAT DID I DO, I AM SOUP!?!?! LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT.
I mean, if we heard the caterpillar carrying on like that, we’d be all confident and reassuring: “Hey caterpillar, chill out, sure, you’re kind of liquid right now, but dude, you won’t believe what’s going to happen next.”
We tell the story of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly with such confidence, as if it is the easiest and most natural story in the world. But sometimes, when we are the caterpillar, we panic.
We forget that the story of the caterpillar is the story of every hero, from Jung to Jesus. We forget that it is my story, and it is yours. It is the story of the world itself.
Sometimes we have to leave our old life, to transform into the next thing. We have to let go of what was, so we can transition into what we will be. And that period of waiting, wrapped up tight in a cocoon, it feels like being stuck. But maybe it’s something else entirely.
Sometimes The World Needs Nothing At All. (And So Do You.)
The writer Michael Pollan has spent years exploring the interaction between humans and the natural world, especially plants and psychedelics (spoiler alert!), and recently, reflecting on how this experience has changed him, he said “I have spent most of my life as a human doing. I’m trying to spend more time as a human being.”
Sometimes, if you want to move forward, you must be still.
When you have been doing everything that you can think of. When you have exhausted yourself with all the trying, with all the stories, the constant demand for more action, more plot, when you have running as far as you can, and nothing is working…
Then maybe try the opposite of everything. Maybe try nothing at all.
For years, nothing is all that I did, and for a long time I was ashamed of that, but now I wonder if maybe, sometimes, nothing is absolutely the best thing to do.
I wonder if maybe the world is trying to show us that it is okay sometimes to be still, to retreat. To go dormant.
Inhale. Exhale.
Sunset. Sunrise.
Something. Nothing.
Darkness. Light.
“Winter is coming” said George R.R. Martin and we all got scared, because winter will always be terrifying. Winter is inevitable. It comes to me, and to you as well. It always will.
I am deeply aware that in many ways, all of the world went into a cocoon in 2020, and it still feels pretty soupy. It feels like winter will never end. My own deepest winter, years ago, went on for so long, that I forgot spring was even possible. I forgot that there was even the possibility of life outside the cocoon, life after dissolving.
But this is the hopeful part. Today, years later and maybe just a tiny bit wiser, when I imagine the caterpillar inside the cocoon, I hope they’re not shrieking. I hope they know this is not how their story ends. I hope they know that even when they feel like they’re basically just a liquid, soupy substance, they have inside them every element they need to become a butterfly.
Maybe we do, too.
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This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To find out how it began, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.
I will never again look at a cocoon and think dormant. Your piece puts the focus on how everything is a process and our culture's lack of patience for the truly wondrous all around us.
I looooove the way you put this!!! So brilliantly accurate.