I don’t know how your therapist spent the pandemic, but mine raised monarch butterflies. So, yesterday while I was struggling to explain my frustration and impatience with myself, she told me a story about how a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis. How it emerges with a body that is full of fluid and bigger than we think about butterfly bodies, and how its wings are curled and crumpled.

And I began to cry. I could feel those crumpled wings.

Those crumpled wings that I was ashamed of. Crumpled wings I wanted to hide or ignore because I was so deeply disappointed, after years of hard work, to emerge crumpled, instead of whole.

She continued: a butterfly rests where it emerges and must flap its wings over and over to fill up its wings, to bring the fluid from its body into its wings and help its wings expand. She explained how this takes a lot of time, and lots and lots of flapping.

And I continued to cry.

I cried from that exhausted relief you can feel when you realize that you are not alone. I was suddenly in the company of millions of small delicate souls, who emerge from one of the biggest changes a being could make—and yet still need time to become whole. I felt an expansive permission to be where I was. I sensed the beginning of forgiveness for all the judgments I had placed on myself. I felt the love that the universe extends to butterflies and could feel, even for a moment, that I could extend that love to myself. I was surrendering to a fight I had been unaware of until that moment.

I could feel my shame lift. I could feel that my emergence with crumpled wings wasn’t because I had done it wrong or was hopelessly broken. I was reminded in a way I could not ignore that emergence is continuous.

Crumpled wings aren’t an error—they are a part of the very nature of emergence. I could finally feel my messy in-between place as a place in its own right—as a place that is necessary. I could see that the task of becoming requires you to rest and stay where you are: that growth requires both rest and stillness.

And growth requires awkward flapping. Flapping to feel yourself grow, to feel where your edges are, to feel the power and possibility of what you have created. Flapping that brings all the work of healing into the power of your wings—draws all that painful work you did to heal into your cells --so that you come to inhabit yourself differently—and inhabit your world differently. And I felt deeply, in my heart, which now hurt, that this tender space of stillness and awkward flapping was precious and sacred. This place I had covered in shame, was in fact a place of wonder.