The Cocoon Stage
The Cocoon Stage
There was a quiet stage. My cocoon stage. I was shy and not confident. I didn’t like making eye contact. My voice shook when I had to speak, so most of the time I didn’t. People thought I was stuck up. I wasn’t. I was scared. I was trying to survive in my own head.
That stage was lonely, but it was necessary. Caterpillars don’t become butterflies in public. They go dark. They dissolve. That was me. Dissolving old versions of myself that were built on trauma, on being unhoused, on being criminalized, on being told I was too much and not enough in the same breath.
I found the talent stage to be a place that helped me in the metamorphosis stage. Writing. Speaking. Even when my voice shook, I wrote. I wrote about the 90s, about being biracial, about swing shift and City Hall and certificates I earned when I was still a kid. Talent gave me a mirror. It showed me I had something to say even when I didn’t trust myself to say it out loud. Every poem, every essay, every post was me stitching wings onto myself in private.
I am glad I never told my complete story to others because many people that I met during this time were superficial and on the internet. They wanted the highlight, not the healing. They wanted the aesthetic of “overcoming” without the ugly middle. They’d screenshot your pain for their platform, then leave you on read when you were actually bleeding. The internet will clap for your breakdown if it’s packaged right. But it won’t sit with you at 2am when the anxiety won’t let you breathe.
It was during this time that I was dealing with mental health issues and at my lowest. Lowest doesn’t even cover it. Lowest is when you’re working swing shift, sleeping in your car sometimes, trying to remember why you’re still applying to colleges, still paying for classes, still believing in a future you can’t see. Lowest is when religion feels like judgment and social media feels like everyone else got the manual for life but you. Lowest is when you realize if you told the whole truth, most people wouldn’t be able to hold it.
So I didn’t. I kept it in the cocoon. I let the quiet protect me. I let the talent stage rebuild me. I learned that metamorphosis isn’t pretty. It’s dark and wet and you’re alone. You don’t come out of it because someone saved you. You come out because you decided not to die in there.
I’m not fully butterfly yet. Some days I still feel the cocoon. But I’m not that shy, unconfident girl anymore either. She dissolved. And what’s left is someone who knows her story is hers to tell, on her time, to people who’ve earned the right to hear it.
The quiet stage saved me. The talent stage grew me. And keeping my story close until I was strong enough to carry it? That was the wisest thing I ever did.
