Breathing in the Cacoon
Breathing in a new identity. Breathing out lessons. Breathing in a seemingly broken self isn’t accepting defeat; it’s accepting the reality of the cocoon. This cocoon isn’t loud. But the exterior, the environment the butterfly exists in, demands an identity that exists nowhere in me. It demands it subtly, suggestively, alluding to an illusion of self I am expected to perform. It’s easy to paint a city with the colour of your experiences and attach the lack of love within people to the lack of love a place has for you. It’s easy to believe a place isn’t meant for you because of a single experience. It’s easy to pack up your lessons and leave behind a place that “doesn’t want you.” It’s more difficult to pull one bad experience from the mixed hat of good and bad that exists. It takes work to pick up paint and repaint the people who handed you that lesson without rewriting them as villains. It’s mature not to abandon a place purely because of one human experience, one lesson. It’s realist...