The Cocoon Isn't Cozy
- Jul 10
- 4 min read
The Butterfly Doesn't Grow Wings. It Dissolves First.
Hi love.
We love the butterfly. We put it on everything — the transformation, the "new beginning," the glow-up. But we skip the part in the middle. The part nobody photographs.
Because inside that cocoon, the caterpillar doesn't sprout wings onto its old body and flutter off. It dissolves. Completely. It melts down into a formless goo — no shape, no map, no proof of what it's becoming. If that little caterpillar had a mind, I imagine it would panic. Everything it knew is coming undone in the dark.
I know that dissolving. I've lived it.
A few years ago, within days of each other, both of my sons got married. Two weddings. Two of the most amazing spouses I could have dreamed for them. And if you're a mother, you know — there is nothing, nothing, like watching your children stand there that happy. It was joy I could barely hold. It was everything.
The day after my second son's wedding was my birthday.
The man I was with hadn't come. Not to the wedding, not for any of it — after months of me trying to talk him into it, reassuring him, managing his feelings so I could go and simply be present for my own child. He stayed home. And the morning of my birthday, I got a massage, came home, and lay on the couch, trying to just… rest inside everything that had happened.
And he came home and started screaming at me.
Standing over me. All the things I should have done. All the ways I'd supposedly failed him. On my birthday. A day after the happiest moments of my life as a mother — and somehow I was the one being made to feel like I'd done something wrong.
I curled up on that couch in a ball. There's a scene in the Netflix show Maid where a woman sinks down and just… disappears into the cushions. That is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to melt into the crease of that couch and vanish. Dissolve into nothing.
And somewhere in that moment — curled up, crying, disappearing — something in me finally said: there is something wrong here.
Not wrong with me. Wrong here.
Because that's what this kind of relationship does to you. It makes you feel like you're the crazy one. You get so dazed, so confused, so slowly worn down that you start to wonder if maybe it is you — because you cannot fathom how someone who says they love you could treat you this way. That's the manipulation. That's the fog. I started searching things I never imagined I'd search. Is my partner a narcissist. And piece by piece, the fog began to lift.
I couldn't keep living with someone who made me feel bad for simply existing. I was supposed to be celebrating my life. Instead I was trying to disappear into a couch.
u are becoming.
So I made a plan. Quietly. Carefully. The way so many women have to — in secret.
And here's the part nobody warns you about: leaving wasn't the end of the hard part. It was the beginning of the cocoon.
The months after were the goo. Coming off the adrenaline, the cortisol, the constant bracing — my whole nervous system had to relearn how to feel safe. It didn't happen in a weekend. It took months and months. Some mornings I would sit in my car and scream at the top of my lungs, so frustrated, so furious that this had happened to me at all. How does someone treat a person like this?
But every single morning, I rolled out of bed and I did the work. My meditation. My breathwork. My mantras. Every day. Every day. Even when I felt like nothing. Especially when I felt like nothing.
I didn't always feel it working — and that's the truth about the cocoon. You don't get proof. You just get to keep showing up in the dark and trust that something is moving, even when you can't see it. So I trusted the breath. I trusted the sound. I trusted the practice to rebuild me quietly, from the inside out.
And it did.
Not overnight. Not because I forced it. Because I stayed. Month by month, I got stronger. Lighter. The energy that had felt so heavy began to move again. I came back to my yoga, stayed steady in my meditation and my mantras — and one day I realized I was no longer the woman who curled up on that couch. I hadn't been patched back together.
I'd been remade.
Lighter. Freer. Whole.
That's what the butterfly knows and we keep forgetting: you don't have to understand the process to trust it. You just have to stay with it. The dissolving isn't the end of you — it's the cocoon. It's the in-between. It's the part where, if you keep breathing, keep showing up, keep trusting the tools, you are quietly becoming something you can't even picture yet.
So if you're in the goo right now — the dark, formless, coming-undone part — hear me: you are not falling apart. You are not doing it wrong. You are becoming. And you are right on time.
The tools that carried me are the very same ones I hand to every woman who sits with me now. That's the whole reason I do this work. Not to fix you — you were never broken. Just to hold the space while you dissolve, and to remind you what's waiting on the other side of the dark.
In your divine time — not a moment too soon, not a moment too late. 🦋
