on transforming

I’m trying to find the right way to start this essay and it’s kind of meta because I just need to fucking start, just like so many things in my life.

This morning felt so strongly like the montage scene in a 2000s movie where the main character finally puts in the work, goes through the makeover or finally starts trying at work or in dance. Devil Wears Prada scene where Anne Hathaway finally starts dressing fashionably and cares about her work after complaining that everything sucks and Nigel tells her she’s not even trying. Dance practice sessions with Channing Tatum in Step Up where he gives ballet or serious dance his all after acting like he was too cool for it. Timbaland beats in the background. A plucky bass line from Suddenly I see by KT Tunstall. God movies used to have such good soundtracks back then.

There’s a reason why we used to say that listening to our iPods as kids made us feel like we were in a movie as a main character. Like you were suddenly having an out of body experience, not only perceiving the music but ourselves as an external entity as a voyeur as something entirely foreign. For some floating moments, we believed we could perceive ourselves the way not only others did but how we wanted to be perceived.

But back to the transformation montages of those movies. Why did this morning feel like that? I got distracted just now trying to listen to music and find the perfect one. Because that is how transportive music is. All of a sudden you’re in a different mindspace, in a different world and the thought you had is lost, whisped away like smoke.

I think the act of transforming is first going inwards. But most people stop there. They think okay I must go search my soul, do some sort of shamanic exercise, journal, meditate, etc. But to actually transform you have to move through. With intention from point A to point B. You need to know both what is point A and what is point B. What are you moving towards and what are you moving away from? What are you no longer going to be?

. A————-> .B

Of course the classic example of transformation is always metamorphosis of the butterfly. We think about cocooning as the key to transforming, that we must hibernate for some exorbitant amount of time and that suddenly when we re-emerge we’ll miraculously find ourselves a whole new species. I think it’s quite a different phenomenon.

First of all the caterpillar knows it must grow and move on from being a caterpillar. It instinctively senses when it’s time to go onto the next phase of life and very actively builds itself first the right container, which yes is a cocoon. But what is a cocoon really if not a way of eliminating all distractions, of restricting itself from doing and therefore being the things it’s moving away from? The caterpillar doesn’t want to continue eating leaves and crawling on the dirt. So it builds boundaries in the sky and wraps itself in an almost straightjacket.

Inside that cocoon I remember my elementary school teachers explaining that it looks like nothing is happening in that opaque shell but quite a lot is happening. Enter: montage scene. This is the part we love to see. Like when cookies go from blobs of melted dough in the oven to reaching a temperature that boom they rise up into little mounds of cookies, forever altered chemistry. Something is cooking in those cocoons. Maybe that’s also why Gen Z loves to say “let ‘em cook.” It implies that we see something starting to take shape, we see the genius building but that it might take a second, so please be patient and sit back.

Cocooning reminds me also of focusing of intentionality. Remember how I said you need to know what point B is? The caterpillar can’t go into their cocoon and think hmm idk maybe I want to become a fox because I just don’t feel like being a caterpillar anymore, but maybe actually I should become a snake. If it doesn’t know or keeps changing its mind, it will be a pointless cocoon and become truly a cage that leaves it hungry and tired and unfulfilled.

To know what you’re becoming can be something small. Like a goal to get 330+ on a GRE test. Or to get a specific job. To know what you’re becoming can be doing a recital (Step Up) or being the model (pun intended) assistant (Devil Wears Prada). There’s something so satisfying about those montages because something we hate to see is wasted potential. It’s almost like we all know Channing Tatum’s character could be great before he knows it, and seeing him squander his life away is both cringe and unsettling. By contrast, seeing him finally put in effort, not even succeed at the recital is the most satisfying. Why is that? It reminds me of how the part you remember is the peak of something and the end. It is true, the most energetic and exciting part of a butterfly’s life is when it is transforming.

This also reminds me of (shocking) myself. I’m allegedly mostly mutable signs astrologically, which regardless of elements means that I am prone to changing a lot myself. Indeed, I feel like when I’m not striving for something or stretching or bettering myself I feel quite dead and ashamed of myself. There’s such a woke / self-help girl rhetoric from the 2010s about just accepting. Accept your body. Accept your friends. Accept your fortune in life. Accept your little life and learn to appreciate it. I tried each of those things for a little while. But accepting to me looked a lot like ignoring, avoiding, pretending, and swallowing. It felt also like rejecting parts of myself. I am mutable. I am ambitious. I am ambivalent—but not in the absolute way, but just in the sense that I may care about one thing now but cannot know if I will in the future. Temporal ambivalence if you will. I am more comfortable being a blank canvas, a collection of cells that could transform at any moment than being a certain thing. To me, acceptance felt like admitting defeat or giving up on ever becoming a butterfly. Which sounds a whole lot like fixed versus growth mindset if you ask me.

Last thing I want to discuss is why I think it’s so hard to want to change, speaking specifically from my experience with wasted potential: the short answer is, fear. Last night I admitted to myself and Idam that the reason why this new challenge felt so scary is that once you call out the avoidance, call out the things you’re no longer going to do and what you are going to practice and do, you open yourself up to an uncomfortable amount of failure. You don’t even want to play the what if game, you’re just opening yourself up for some vague ominous feeling that what if all you’re meant to be is a caterpillar? I felt this when working towards the GRE and business school apps. When I did 75 hard and felt like I would never be strong and slim.

But last night I read something about how it’s the risk itself that is the healing. The antidote to that fear. When I was cutting my hair, I felt fear and adrenaline coursing through my body. I couldn’t breathe properly. It reminded me of the first time I snowboarded. But I couldn’t climb back up the mountain, just like I couldn’t go back and un cut my hair. The only way out was through. I wonder if the caterpillar feels that way sometimes, when it’s just started transforming inside the cocoon and can no longer go back to being a caterpillar…