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 realistic not to view an entire chapter through the cracked glass of a moment that left you bruised and wounded. It’s easy to self-inflict wounds and believe they’re yours.

All the beauty that exists in this city refuses to be tainted by an experience whose only job was to teach me something, to show me something about myself. It refuses to be painted red simply because it revealed what I had avoided.

I sometimes abandon myself to keep the peace.

I avoid shaking the table.

I avoid conflict and confrontation.

I betray myself by not speaking up, by dismissing my own voice, by assuming instead of knowing. I prioritize living in my head more than living in truth.

The devil’s playground is filled with half-truths. Truths that keep you closed-minded, that make you a victim, that excuse you from accounting for what it took to meet the devil in the first place. That playground exists for those seeking refuge, not from the world, but from their own capacity to choose differently.

No place should be painted a single colour of rage and bitterness just because it did its job,

the job it was sent to do: to show you who you are, who you are not, who you’ve become, and who you’ve ignored.

It is entirely up to you whether you remain oblivious to the lesson, or whether you pause, reflect, and actually receive the teaching.

So breathe in the lessons.

Breathe out the pain.

Take the paint and the brush and draw what you see in the mirror with strokes of compassion and ease.

Breathe in compassion.

Breathe out the hard shell that refuses to crack.

Because the thing about self-betrayal is this:

there is always forgiveness and there is always a promise to stay true.

And the thing about experience is that good and bad coexist.

It is neither moral nor malicious it simply is.