The Soul of the Chrysalis | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, August 25, 2024

August 24, 2024

I like the story where the cowboy lives
because the bullet struck the whiskey flask
instead of his thin-walled heart…
I’ve come to appreciate the happy ending,
no matter how tacky or unearned.
~Kristen Tracy, Happy Endings

I periodically cycle through this thought process: You want to live peacefully alone and just enjoy life. But isn’t that a smidge beyond self-care and into selfish? All you want to do is plant flowers and Feng Shui the house, and not even hold Reiki or writing workshops in your spiffed-up, solitary home. How does isolationism benefit anyone?

The thoughts are familiar, but the experience broke from the usual pattern. It didn’t last for days. I wasn’t s****d into a quagmire of either trying to justify my preferences, or talking myself out of what I know I want in order to serve the imaginary good of others. 

One of the ways I defuse uncertainty is to imagine a contented and fulfilling future life. Yesterday, after starting along one such daydreaming path, the inevitable chiding of “You can’t just have fun and do nothing useful with your life” popped up, a sly target in the funhouse shooting gallery at the Nightmare Fair. Somehow, that train of thought did not gain its usual traction. I observed it, but did not hop on for a ride. 

*****

Somewhere along the line an emotional muscle has gained strength, a muscle that firmly pulled me away from self-defeating inner sniping. The next place that emotional muscle might haul me is, “Drop this whole dialogue and jump into ‘how does the life I want look?’” without a detour into “Really, it’s okay to want what I want.”

If the subconscious, persistent programming hasn’t dissolved with a nudge from rising planetary vibrations, or through years of emotional excavating, I can get conscious about it and ask it to happen. Ask to let go of the remnants of whatever is in me that insists that I can’t have what I want. Or, worse, I shouldn’t want it.

*****

My mental peregrinations on this topic have never reached that point. I usually get as far as it’s okay to want what I want before abandoning the attempt to change my own mind. It hasn’t occurred to me to just dump that entire line of thought and ask myself to be rid of such ancient inner and outer training. Jump straight into the way I want to be, never mind how I don’t want to be—to borrow a page from the Manifestation 101 handbook. 

Embedded in me is the knowing of my own value and my own human deservingness. I don’t need to earn the right to happiness; I already have it. It’s up to me to give the being within the chrysalis a little nudge, poke a couple of holes in that webby enclosure, and climb out of the old lifestage.

I bring the old with me into the new, but in a way that has been so transformed there are only a few fragments of what used to be in what is now. The soul of the chrysalis rejoices in its new carrier. And even though I’m not there yet, I can see myself as the free, winged creature basking in the light, loving the chrysalis-that-was even as I leave it.