Square One Rips Off Your Antennae and Eats Your Feet

I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m going to try.

Change is not like in the movies. Like: in Good Will Hunting, Will changes enough so he can fall in love, quit his job, and drive off into the sunset. In Rocky, Rocky goes from someone who loses to someone who wins. After seeing what I saw today, I realize that change isn’t even like we see in real life—going off to college and coming home in four years as someone employable, for example.

Change is your worst nightmare, is what I learned today. Change is the movie Alien only worse because it’s real. I’ve written about Square One before here—I learned about it as part of the Change Cycle Martha Beck taught us in her course. The idea is that you have a triggering event that causes the cycle to begin: you lose your job, your pet dies, you move to another town—anything that signifies that life you were living and the person you were is now gone. Square One, Martha taught, is like when the caterpillar becomes a chrysalis. Martha told us this is no small thing. She told us the caterpillar becomes bug soup and that we, as people in this stage, live in the state of not knowing. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what’s going on. You know. That place that makes a lot of people cry, get drunk, go to therapy, freak out, and/or go to bed for long stretches of time.

So I’ve had compassion for myself this last year after my dad died and I went from being a daughter to being someone who no longer has parents. I also went from someone who lived in Massachusetts to someone who lives in California. I also went from someone who was a writing coach who focused on thoughts to someone who learned to be a life coach who focused on body sensations. Triple soup. I’ve never spent weeks and weeks and months and months and hours and hours on the couch watching TV when I wasn’t sick. I never didn’t get excited about going out to eat or swimming in the ocean. I never disliked almost everything and everyone I saw. I didn’t like much who I seemed to be becoming, but I also had the sense it was a stage, and that this deadened person was going to fall away one day and reveal something hopefully something a little softer and nicer underneath.

And that deadness falling away has been happening, and I am much relieved. However, it’s still a slow process, and so I do sometimes wonder what the hell is exactly happening.

But then I watched this video today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVhw7hQos44 and I have more compassion than ever for myself and for all creatures that go through this fucking chrysalis process. Go watch the video. I’ll wait.

So now you understand.

When we change, the change we are becoming eats us alive.

Did you see those antennae flailing? Did you see the interior of the chrysalis pressing and digesting and doing who knows what? Did you see that caterpillar’s head finally pop off and fall away?

That’s what happens in Square One!!! That’s why I felt so weird! I was popping off my own head as my new self was completely devouring who I was.

No wonder people like to live in ruts. They can keep their heads. Their little feet. Their green bodies.

But, oh, to be that brave. To really, really go for it. To throw your antennae in the ring and say, Take me. I’m ready to become my next self.

Wow.

How are we so complicated? How did we get built to be weak/strong, to dissolve, and then to be weak/strong again? How does that even work?

Wow.