Did you ever read the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar? It was a favourite in our house when I read to my children, and it was one of my favourites when I was little, too.
If you did, too, then you already know this story goes, so just skip over the next bit. If you didn’t, please read on.
One night, a small caterpillar hatched from his egg. He was small and very hungry, so he began to eat. First through one nice green leaf, and then two; each day he ate more and more. As he ate more, he grew bigger and bigger, until by the end of the week he had eaten many, many nice green leaves. On Saturday, he leaves his sensible schooldays lunches, and instead our caterpillar friend fills himself up with all sorts of other celebratory delights – sausages and donuts and lollipops, and more!
Unsurprisingly, after that, he feels a bit sick. He eats through another nice green leaf, and feels much better. Now, of course, he is no longer a small caterpillar. He is big and juicy. He wraps himself into a cocoon and before too long – hurray! He is a beautiful butterfly.
I resonate strongly with the very hungry caterpillar. I actually feel like I’m currently in my cocoon, but I’ll get to that in a second.
As a kid, I read and read. I would always read anything and everything. I was the kind of child who would read the back of the cereal packet, if we had happened to be the kind of family who had cereal. A glass jar of porridge oats just didn’t have quite the same appeal, but you get the picture. I read every book in the school library, and since my dad was a teacher, I would go to his classroom and read every book in there, as well. I read whilst eating breakfast, I read at lunchtime. I read in bed by torchlight under the covers, or by opening the door wide to the landing light, if my torch got taken away. And, in general, I was reading nice fresh green leaves.
As I grew, my leaves became bigger and more complex. In school and college and university, I read textbooks and wrote critical essays, read nonfiction articles and wrote poems of questionable quality. I read newspapers and journal articles as well as my beloved fiction. I’m not a particularly loyal fiction reader. I will read just about any genre, except horror.
One dark November evening, I let myself into the empty house after school. This was normal; my mum worked and I often let myself in to snack and get on with my homework, as lots of kids do. On this particular autumn evening, the dregs of Halloween still hanging in the air, I took it into my head to read The Exorcist.
Alone in the house, the daylight faded around me. The house creaked as empty houses do, even those which aren’t haunted (as mine was). Too afraid to get up from my seat to turn on the lamp, I knew there was no way I could stop reading partway through. I had to see this story right through to the end. It seemed to be a very, very long time before my mum came home to find me frozen in place. I don’t think I slept for a month. That was the end of my horror reading.
Anyway, I feel like I was lucky enough to have my formative years – by which I also mean much of my 20s – free from social media. Not only did I get to make my mistakes in relative privacy, I was also able to absorb long form writing, both fiction and non-fiction, without any problem at all. But then, of course, we come to the start of the sugary, bloating, carb-loading section of The Very Hungry Caterpillar story.
I want to stress here that I have nothing against cake. Cake and its many cousins are right up there as some of my favourite things. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a house where vegetables and pulses and eating happy hens was king, so on the whole it’s been relatively easy for me to keep my diet healthy, varied, and interesting, and this has been the same with my reading matter, for the most part. But over the last little while, I have definitely noticed that as my social media time increased, my concentration span decreased. I still love to read novels by my favourite authors and reading long-form articles has rarely been a problem, but it has become clear that the instant stimulation and instant gratification of social media is providing a dopamine hit that I really don’t think is healthy, and is certainly not sustainable. I’ve always been a person who has several books on the go at any time, but even for me this is currently getting ridiculous. Here is a list of some of the books1 lying around my house that I’m halfway through:
- The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett
- Eve – Cat Bonahan
- Rebel Rising – Rebel Wilson
- Impossible Creatures – Katherine Rundell
- Burning Questions – Margaret Atwood
- Modern-Day Miracles – Louise Hay
- Here And Now And Then – Mike Chen
- City Of Girls – Elizabeth Gilbert
It’s not a bad list, and they’re all books that I’m either actively enjoying (Eve! It’s blowing my mind!) or really looking forward to reading, so I am working my way through them steadily, time and interest depending. But there is a nagging feeling inside me, a nagging, insistent, nudging compulsion that keeps searching for gratification on my phone. I didn’t have this before. It’s a means of postponing, of deferring, of procrastinating. It’s a way of squishing imposter syndrome and self-doubt and truth. It’s a way of filling myself with metaphorical cake so that I don’t have to look at the real picture.
If you know someone who might resonate with metaphorical cake, please share this post with them 🧁
I’ll admit that it’s taking a certain amount of looking myself in the eye and acknowledging that this is where I am, and a certain amount of focus and dedication to find practical ways of changing this. It is necessary for my own health, but since I have three teenage girls and one 11-year-old boy in my house, watching everything I do, learning from me through all my unconscious actions, I feel like it is really time to get a grip.
This feels like a dirty little secret, something akin to having a liquor habit. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a liquor habit! Maybe part of it is because I generally model and live a healthy lifestyle. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I prioritise sleep and positive self-care and cake in moderation. I try to do all the ‘right’ things. I have my vices, but they are probably as socially acceptable as drinking. I feel like I’m doing my best to model a healthy relationship with my phone, but I’m actually letting myself down here. That’s the dirty little secret. That I feel the need to keep it secret from my kids indicates that there’s a case for internal embarrassment, discomfort, and shame, because quite clearly, escaping into privacy for the sake of looking at something on my phone that is ultimately unfulfilling is clearly not healthy.
It’s not a great feeling.
So how is this very hungry caterpillar combating it?
Remember, in the story, our caterpillar friend eats all his party food, feels sick, and then goes and has a nice green leaf, and after that he feels much better. That’s pretty much what I’ve done. My nice green leaves came in the form of nourishing food, meditation, and tapping practices that I recommend and produce for friends and clients. It’s grounding myself in the things I know to be real and true. And it’s that good old-fashioned favourite, moving my body in nature, which is I think is perhaps the medicine for everything, or many things at least. My other tonic has been learning which places online are nourishing, and really asking myself what I am visiting for.
I still have Instagram, partly because my girls sent me funny videos that we bond over, and partly because some of the people I follow on there post things that I really want to see. I still go on Facebook, although very infrequently these days. Funnily enough, Facebook keeps me in touch with my local community in a way that it isn’t really possible to do in real life. I know the people living in my village much better through Facebook than I do in person, simply because of the way our lives are set up. For that reason, Facebook is a positive part of my online life, even though I might only log on there once a fortnight. Substack is the third place I rest online, and it’s also where I found my people. This is somewhere I go for quality writing and for lighthearted notes, for the deep and meaningfuls as well as humour and midlife belly laughs. It’s where I go for spirituality, honesty, and perspectives. It’s no surprise that I’ve made my home there as a writer as well as a reader. I’m disconnecting from the fluff of my phone, the stuff that gives me bellyache, and reconnecting with purpose to the roasted vegetables and fresh, sweet blackberry crumble.
So that brings me again to the cocoon.
The cocoon is where I am now. The cocoon is where all the magic happens. The cocoon is where that little caterpillar turns into a bright beautiful butterfly. The cocoon is surely filled with rainbows and magical sparkles, and sweet nectar, and honey scented flowers, and all the wonderful things that are surrounding me now as I snuggle down into my cocoon, after all the feasts I’ve partaken of over the last little while. I’m ready to turn into the most beautiful butterfly, the one that I’ve always been destined to become.
Doesn’t this just sound like a dream?
Have you ever wondered exactly what happens inside a caterpillar’s cocoon? Wonder no longer, dear reader, because I’m about to tell you. If you happen to be eating, or slightly squeamish, I suggest you save this for a time when your stomach is feeling stronger. Here’s the science, in a nutshell.
Once our caterpillar is safely ensconced in his cocoon, he begins to digest himself from the inside out. He uses his own digestive enzymes to break down all the cells in his body, ending up as a sort of protein rich goo – caterpillar soup, if you will. From this savoury broth are formed such adult parts of the new being as wings and antenna. Then the new adult cells begin to divide and multiply, multiply and divide, as they build what will become the next stage in our caterpillar’s evolution.
Metamorphosis is an uncomfortable process. When we build a cocoon, it’s for safety. We tuck ourselves away so that we can digest the old parts that are no longer fit for purpose, and from them create something new. This process deserves privacy, and not just because other people might find it uncomfortable to look at. We all deserve a safe space to contain our inner soup. But here’s a thought.
It’s kind of nice to know that we have the ingredients for our beautiful butterfly already there within us.
When we become these beautiful butterflies it is easy at first, before we fully stretch our wings out into the sunlight, to feel imposter syndrome sitting heavy on our backs. Because we’ve never been able to fly before, we think who am I to be this beautiful? Who am I to fly so lightly and so free? But those wings that we are flying with were made from ourselves, from the cells and the joys and the genes of our own growing, of all the fresh green leaves we ate and all the party food, too. Everything that we are is built from everything that we are. I’m within me, creating a new butterfly, and this is a process that repeats and repeats and repeats.
I have many times been the caterpillar, eating different products in this world. I was a caterpillar who gobbled up energy healing, and then went into my cocoon and told nobody; my healing wings are still drying. I was the astrology caterpillar, studying hard, taking class after class, holding a diploma, reading peoples charts, staying in my cocoon because the world seemed full of bright astrology butterflies, and I was afraid for a long time to be one of them, afraid that my colours wouldn’t shine as brightly, until I took the first leap of faith, and fell, and flew.
I was the author caterpillar, who inhaled every written word and retreated into my cocoon to write and write and write, to build story after story, book after book, novel after novel, to break out of that cocoon as a butterfly who felt she had no right to land on any publishing flower. That author butterfly is now strong; with a few children’s books under her wings; she flies from flower to flower quite happily, having fully embodied her fluttering new self.
I’m not completely sure which cocoon I’m in now, but I suppose that will become clear throughout the digestion process. When I emerge, I will take on the wings I’ve grown and learn to use them. I think in this incarnation I will be some combination of all these three things – astrologer, healer, and writer. And perhaps I’ll be somebody who has learned to worry less about how the world sees me, and more about how I can pollinate the world around me. What can I bring from one modality to help somebody here? What can I carry from another modality that will heal somebody there?
I still love the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Eric Carle did us all a solid when he wrote that one, and our old beloved copy is packed away for the next generation in our family to enjoy. I’m pretty sure when he wrote it, he wasn’t thinking of a woman, 55 years later, using it to describe the stew of her internal processes, but there we are. It just goes to show that art will speak to people in unforeseen ways.
I wish you all the protein you need to build your butterfly, all the peace and safety of a well-built cocoon, and all the cake you desire to celebrate, no matter which stage of your journey you’re on.