The Violence of Becoming
"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."
- Maya Angelou
What the Cocoon Knows
I was not born in beauty.
I built it.
In silence. In rot.
In skin I had to shed
While smiling.
Don’t praise my wings
If you cannot name the darkness
That made them.
Why do they clap for the wings, but never ask what died in me to make them?
I’ve let things die. Not gently. Not willingly. But necessarily.
My belief that people are inherently kind. My openness with strangers. My unguarded trust. There was a time I moved through the world assuming no one would harm me because I meant no harm. That part of me is gone now. In its place: a shield. A filtered warmth. A caution I didn’t ask for, but wear daily.
Why do people mistake my voice for something it’s not?
They hear my questions and call them confrontational. They feel my honesty and label it disruptive. But I never speak to perform. I speak to understand. To grow. To name what’s been buried. To lift the taboo into the light so it doesn’t fester.
What they call aggression is my aliveness. What they call too much is me refusing to live half a life.
Why did the world expect me to thrive while I was dissolving?
Not just function — thrive. Smile. Rise. Keep pace. Make it beautiful. And never ask why the rules apply to me but not to them. I resented it then. I refuse it now.
Transformation is not inherently beautiful. It’s violent. It’s broken bones and restitching your own skin. It’s being taught lessons you didn’t ask for, on days you could barely stand. It’s brutal and relentless and unspectacular. And still — you’re expected to thank it.
Why do they want the butterfly, but not the becoming?
Because the scars are too real. Because grief isn’t photogenic. Because if they look too closely at your unraveling, they might see their own.
And yet — that’s where the beauty actually lives. Not in the wings. In the will. In the fire you protected when everything around you tried to extinguish it. In the softness you fought to preserve inside all that hardening. In the wisdom you earned — not from books, but from weathering storms until you could name them.
And the fifth why?
Because becoming isn’t just surviving. It’s remembering who you were before the world told you to be quiet. It’s naming the ache instead of dressing it up. It’s refusing to conform just to be called beautiful.
It’s standing in your own centre — messy, luminous, alive — and saying:
This is what it took to become me.
Don’t look away.
