To Laurie Amber Chandler; saving the purest and most noble of love.

“Wúrà tó máa dán, á la iná kọjá” – Yoruba proverb
(Gold that wants to shine must pass through fire first)

Have you ever wondered why the most profound changes in our lives seem to require us to pull away from the very people who could support us through them? There’s something deeply counterintuitive about this pattern, yet it appears everywhere we look – in nature, in personal growth, in creative breakthroughs. The more I’ve explored this paradox, the more I’ve come to see it not as a problem to solve but as an essential architecture of transformation itself.

i. Pulling away
Imagine someone at the edge of a major life transition. Maybe they’re leaving a career that defined them for decades, or emerging from a relationship that shaped their entire adult identity. What happens next is almost predictable: they start canceling plans, spending weekends alone, avoiding the very friends who’ve known them longest. From the outside, it looks like depression or self-destruction. From the inside, it feels like survival. When you’re living it, the disconnects manifest in unexpected ways. When Asabe’s identity began reconstructing itself after leaving medicine, every social interaction became excruciating – not because she didn’t love her friends, but because she had to perform a person who no longer existed. Her friends would ask about work, and she’d feel her throat close. Not because she was sad about leaving surgery (though she was), but because answering required her to be someone – the surgeon – while she was desperately trying to become someone else. Asabe found herself developing what she called “social allergies.” Her best friend’s voice, once comforting, now made her skin crawl. Not because of anything her friend did, but because that voice was tuned to a frequency Asabe could no longer hear. It expected responses from a person who had dissolved.

There’s something else happening, something harder to articulate. During transformation, we develop a hypersensitivity to being influenced. Every conversation threatens to pull us back into old patterns. Asabe noticed she’d leave coffee dates feeling poisoned – not by anything specific that was said, but by the subtle gravitational pull back toward her old self. Her friend would mention a medical article, and Asabe would feel herself automatically engaging, the surgeon-self rising up like a zombie that didn’t know it was dead. The Suttons always invited Asabe to their Thanksgiving and holiday dinners, folding her into their extended family – a warm, genuine group that had always felt like home. But as the life she had once loved increasingly felt foreign to her, Asabe began avoiding these gatherings. They represented everything stable and settled, everything antithetical to the transformation tearing her apart from within. One Thanksgiving, she chose to fast all day rather than join them. By evening, famished and alone, she found herself at a nearly empty Waffle House – the fluorescent lights harsh, the scrambled eggs rubbery, the only other customers a truck driver and a woman crying into her phone. This was better somehow than the warmth she’d rejected. At least here, she had the comfort of anonymity, where her changing self went unnoticed.

The protection mechanism goes deeper. Koku discovered that during his transition from military to civilian life, he literally couldn’t hear certain things people said. Friends would give advice, and the words would hit his ears but not penetrate. Later, he’d realize he had no memory of entire conversations. His brain was protecting his transformation by creating selective deafness to anything that might pull him backward. But here’s the truly dark part: the withdrawal often begins with hatred. Not for the friends, but for what they represent. Asabe found herself despising her doctor friends – their routine existences, their stable identities, their ability to answer “what do you do?” without existential crisis. She’d sit at dinners, watching them discuss cases, and feel rage bubbling up. How could they be so content in their grooves? Why didn’t they want more? And why did they keep assuming she’d eventually come to her senses and return? The hatred was really fear. Fear that maybe she was wrong to leave, to want more. Fear that their stability meant her chaos was chosen, not necessary. Fear that she’d destroyed something precious for nothing. So she withdrew – not to protect them from her transformation, but to protect her transformation from the mirror they held up.

ii. Neither here nor there
Let me discuss further what actually happens in liminal space – not the theory, but the lived reality. After Asabe took her leave of absence from surgery, she entered what she later called “the nowhere.” Not a place between places, but an anti-place, a void where the normal rules of existence stopped applying. The first thing that went was time. Not in some mystical way, but practically. Asabe would sit down at 8am to drink coffee and look up to find it was 2pm, the coffee cold, her body stiff. Where did those six hours go? She wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t daydreaming. She was just… absent. Her neighbor once found her standing in her backyard at midnight, not doing anything, just standing. Asabe had no memory of going outside. The physical symptoms were bizarre. Her hands, so steady they’d once sutured arteries, developed not just tremors but what she called “purposelessness.” They’d reach for things that weren’t there – phantom scalpels, ghost patients. She’d catch herself making surgical movements while walking, her hands performing procedures on air. Her body was grieving the loss of its purpose through movement. Language dissolved next. Not dramatically, but insidiously. Asabe would be mid-sentence and simply stop, not because she’d forgotten what she was saying but because words themselves felt false. Every statement required an identity to speak from, and she had none. “I think” – but who is this “I”? “I want” – but wanting requires a self to want from. She’d open her mouth and nothing would come because there was no one there to speak.

The daily logistics became surreal. What email signature should she use? Her old one said “Dr. Asabe Bello, Chief of Neurosurgery.” But she wasn’t that anymore. Just “Asabe Bello” looked naked, wrong, like appearing in public without skin. She spent entire days composing single emails, each word a small decision about who she was becoming. Finally, she stopped responding altogether. Let them think she’d died. In a way, she had. Manny’s liminal experience had a different quality – a viscous shame that coated everything. After his company failed, he developed what he called “success nausea.” Seeing anyone accomplish anything – a jogger finishing a run, a barista making latte art – made him physically ill. The world was full of people completing things while he existed in a state of fundamental incompletion. He created elaborate geographical boundaries. Certain streets were off-limits because successful people worked there. Certain coffee shops were forbidden because he’d pitched investors there in his past life. The city became a minefield of memory, each corner a potential ambush of who he used to be. His world shrank to a three-block radius where nobody knew him, where he could be nobody without witnesses. But the worst part of liminality isn’t the dissolution – it’s the glimpses. Some mornings Asabe would wake with perfect clarity, knowing exactly who she was becoming. She’d leap up, energized, ready to move toward this crystal-clear future. By noon, the vision would fade. By evening, she’d wonder if she’d imagined it. These moments of clarity were crueler than the confusion because they proved she was capable of knowing, just incapable of sustaining that knowledge. These glimpses of possibility make the next phase even harder to bear. Because after liminality comes something worse: complete dissolution.

iii. Dissolution
The metamorphosis metaphor seems clean from the outside – caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. But have you really considered what happens inside that chrysalis? The caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings. Enzymes dissolve its body into soup. If you were to cut open a chrysalis midway through, you wouldn’t find a creature in transition; you’d find biological goo with no discernible structure. What does this actually feel like in human terms? When Koku entered his chrysalis period after his divorce coincided with career collapse, he didn’t just lose his identity – he lost the ability to recognize identity as a concept. Looking in the mirror became horrifying, not because he looked bad but because he couldn’t connect the face to any sense of self. That face belonged to someone, but not him. Nothing belonged to him, not even his own reflection. The dissolution went deeper than psychology. Koku’s body forgot how to do things it had always done. He’d been an excellent cook, but suddenly couldn’t remember how heat worked. Not recipes – the actual concept of heat transforming food became alien. He’d stand at the stove, watching pasta boil, genuinely confused about what was supposed to happen next. His muscle memory for decades of cooking had dissolved along with everything else. Friends would visit and find him living in disturbing ways. Sleeping on the floor despite having a bed. Eating the same meal – a can of chickpeas – for weeks. Not from depression but from fundamental confusion about what humans do. The scripts for normal life had dissolved. He had to relearn from scratch how to be a person, but first he had to remember that he was a person, which itself was uncertain.

Here’s something curious about the chrysalis: you’re conscious during the dissolution. The caterpillar might not be, but humans are. You watch yourself liquify and can do nothing about it. Koku described lying in bed, feeling his personality dissolve like sugar in water. He could observe it happening – “Oh, there goes my sense of humor. There goes my political opinions. There goes my taste in music” – but couldn’t stop it. The really horrifying part? Part of you wants it. Asabe discovered a terrible relief in dissolution. No more maintaining, no more performing, no more pretending to be consistent. The exhaustion of being someone finally ended. She could be soup, and soup doesn’t have to make decisions or answer questions or remember who it’s supposed to be. But something else happens in the goo. Those imaginal cells – the ones that carry the butterfly blueprint – they don’t appear immediately. First, there’s just soup. Koku spent months in this state, neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just organic material with potential. He’d feel things stirring – new interests, different ways of thinking – but couldn’t grasp them. Like trying to hold water, these new aspects of self would slip away the moment he noticed them. Then one day, without warning, architecture returns – but different. Amaka could suddenly see buildings again, but now she saw them as frozen music, as crystallized intentions, as dreams made solid. Her architectural knowledge hadn’t returned; it had transformed into something else entirely, something that included but transcended what she’d known before. She wasn’t an architect anymore, but she wasn’t not an architect either. She was something English doesn’t have a word for. Yet, dissolution is only one kind of transformation. Sometimes we’re not just dissolving what we were – we’re growing what we’re becoming, and that process has its own color of horrors.

iv. Gestation
There’s something about the metaphor of pregnancy that captures what other transformation metaphors miss. When you’re pregnant, you’re creating something that is both you and not-you. You can’t fully control what you’re creating, you can’t speed up the process, and you can’t know exactly what will emerge until it does. Elena discovered this during her seven-year journey writing her first novel. How did those seven years actually look? Not romantic artist-in-garret scenes, but something far stranger and more disturbing. For the first two years, she didn’t write at all. She’d sit at her computer for hours, hands on keys, and nothing would come. Not writer’s block – that implies something blocking. This was writer’s void, an absence where creativity should be. She developed what she called “creative morning sickness.” Certain words would make her physically ill. She couldn’t read fiction without vomiting. Her body was rejecting all literary input while it grew something new.

The “ideal selfishness” of pregnancy manifested in shocking ways. Elena’s mother had a health scare, needed support, and Elena didn’t go. Couldn’t go. The novel – still unwritten, still just a pressure in her chest – wouldn’t let her. She’d pack a bag to visit her mother, get to the door, and find herself physically unable to leave. Her body was protecting the gestation with ruthless biological priority. However, this is what people don’t understand about creative pregnancy: you’re not just growing the work, you’re growing the person capable of creating the work. Elena wasn’t just writing a novel; she was becoming someone who could write that particular novel. The seven years weren’t delay – they were necessary transformation. The novel couldn’t be born until Elena had become its mother. The violence of creative birth, when it finally came, was literal. Elena’s final year of writing involved what she described as “contractions” – periods where she’d write for thirty hours straight, not from inspiration but from biological imperative. She’d forget to eat, forget to drink, piss herself rather than stop typing. Her body had become a birth canal for something demanding to be born. When birth finally comes, it’s often anticlimactic. Elena finished her novel on a Monday afternoon, typed the last sentence, and felt… nothing. No euphoria, no relief, just a strange emptiness. The thing that had lived inside her for seven years was outside now, separate, no longer hers in the same way. Post-partum depression hit immediately. She’d call friends crying, “I don’t know who I am without the pregnancy.” This emptiness Elena voices after birth points to something larger about transformation – sometimes the creative force itself is destructive. Even at a cosmic scale, birth is violent.

v. Violent creation
If you want to understand why transformation often feels violent, look at how stars are born. In vast molecular clouds, gravity begins pulling matter inward with such force that temperatures reach millions of degrees. The violence is not incidental – it’s the mechanism of creation itself. Without that crushing pressure and extreme heat, nuclear fusion cannot begin. Without fusion, there is no star, no light, no warmth that makes life possible. Dave lived this cosmic violence during his transformation. The external pressure came first – bankruptcy, divorce, his father’s death, all within six months. But instead of breaking him, these forces compressed him into something denser. He described feeling his personality collapse inward like a dying star, everything he’d been crushed into a point of infinite density. The heat came next. Not metaphorical heat – actual, physical burning. Dave developed unexplained fevers that lasted weeks. Doctors found nothing wrong, but he knew: his old self was being incinerated to create fuel for something new. He’d lie in bed, sweating through sheets, feeling molecular changes he couldn’t name. His DNA felt like it was rewriting itself. Then came the explosion. Not gradual emergence but violent eruption. Dave woke one morning and couldn’t recognize his own thoughts. Ideas came in languages he didn’t speak. Solutions to problems he’d never considered appeared fully formed. He wasn’t thinking differently – he was thinking with an entirely different apparatus, as if his brain had been replaced overnight with alien hardware.

Seeds follow the same pattern. They must be buried in darkness, subjected to moisture and pressure, before they can crack open. The sad twist of fate that we don’t talk about: from the seed’s perspective, this isn’t growth – it’s death. The seed coat splits, the interior is exposed to elements that will destroy it as seed. Everything the seed has been must die for the plant to live. But here’s another violent truth: not all seeds germinate. Some rot in the ground. Manny knew this possibility intimately. He could feel himself decomposing rather than transforming, breaking down into components that wouldn’t reassemble. The difference between germination and rot? He couldn’t tell. How could he? They felt the same from inside. Where Dave’s thoughts had transformed into alien hardware, Manny’s were becoming compost. Ideas would start to form, then collapse into their component parts – half a memory here, fragment of ambition there, all of it breaking down into psychological mulch. He’d try to think about his future and find only decomposing pieces of his past. Not transformation but putrefaction, and he could taste it – that metallic flavor of rot that comes from inside. He would have to die first, hoping to find himself on the other side of his destructive germination, or not. This violence of creation takes specific forms in specific worlds. In the startup ecosystem, the transformation has its own particular brutality.

vi. Founder’s journey
The founder’s journey carries its own surreal loneliness. Jiya had what everyone thought was an ideal setup – a great job, supportive friends, a loving partner. Then she got the idea for her company. Not a casual “wouldn’t it be nice” idea, but the kind that colonizes your entire nervous system, that makes every other thought feel like betrayal. Within a year, Jiya had lost most of her friendships. Not through any dramatic confrontation, but through the slow incompatibility of different realities. Her friends were planning vacations; she was calculating burn rates – the monthly cost that determines how long her company could survive. They were discussing restaurants; she was eating peanut butter from the jar at 12am because she’d forgotten to eat for two days. They complained about their bosses; she was terrified of becoming the boss who’d destroy six people’s lives when her company inevitably failed. The loneliness of founders isn’t just about working long hours. It’s about undergoing a fundamental rewiring that makes you incompatible with normal human society. Jiya’s brain literally changed. She started thinking in metrics and runway – how many months until the money ran out. Human interactions became user experiences. Friends became potential customers, investors, or neither – and if neither, they became irrelevant.

She developed what she called “founder’s aphasia” – the inability to speak civilian language. At a friend’s birthday, someone asked what she did for fun, and Jiya literally couldn’t answer. Fun? The concept had been overwritten by metrics. She tried to explain that watching user engagement numbers spike was fun, that fixing a critical bug at 3am was fun, but saw their faces and stopped. They lived in different worlds now, and translation was impossible. The physical transformation was disturbing. Jiya’s body adapted to startup life in ways that made normal life impossible. She could only sleep in three-hour increments, even when she had time for more. Her stomach could only process specific foods – the ones she could eat while typing. Her eyes could only focus at screen distance. Her body had specialized for a particular kind of survival, like a cave fish losing its eyes. But the darkest part? Jiya started needing the stress. On rare quiet Sundays, she’d feel physically ill. Her cortisol-adapted system would malfunction without constant crisis. She’d create emergencies just to feel normal. Send aggressive emails to competitors, push dangerous code to production, anything to recreate the familiar sensation of everything being on fire. Peace felt like death. When investor meetings went badly, Jiya would lock herself in bathroom stalls and punch walls until her knuckles bled. When they went well, she’d feel nothing – just temporary reprieve from extinction. The emotional range narrowed to two states: dying and not-dying-yet. Everything else – joy, sadness, normal human feelings – became luxuries her system couldn’t afford. This extended beyond feelings into every relationship. Because transformation doesn’t just change you; it changes what you cost others.

vii. Calculating the burden
Here’s a special kind of relationship destruction: asking for money. But it’s not just the asking – it’s everything that comes before, during, and after. The complex calculations, the preemptive distancing, the permanent scarring even after debts are repaid. Jackson learned this the hard way when he raised his first round of funding from what investors cynically call “friends, family, and fools.” His uncle invested his retirement savings. His best friend from college put in his house downpayment fund. His sister liquidated her emergency savings. Every family dinner became a board meeting. Every casual conversation included subtle questions about the company’s progress. Jackson couldn’t just be a nephew or friend anymore – he was the steward of their financial futures. But there’s another layer to this story. Before the funding round, before the company even existed, there were the personal asks. The month his car broke down and he needed $800 for repairs. The emergency root canal without dental insurance – $2,000 borrowed from his college friend. His sister covering three months of rent when freelance work dried up. These personal loans created a different kind of poison. Investment in a company at least carries the fiction of business distance. But borrowing money to fix your transmission? That’s just need, raw and undignified. “When you borrow money for your startup, you’re selling a dream,” Jackson explained. “When you borrow money for groceries, you’re selling your dignity.”

The calculus of need becomes exhausting – and it extends beyond money into every form of support. Is this friendship worth $500? Can I ask for emotional support again, or have I depleted my annual reserve? There’s a horrible accounting that happens – tracking not just money but favors, tolerance, how much weight a relationship can bear. You become a careful auditor of other people’s patience. Manny discovered this during his transformation. He knew he was becoming toxic – needy, inconsistent, exhausting. He’d watch friends’ faces during conversations, tracking micro-expressions of fatigue. He was a burden, and everyone knew it. So he began what he called “preemptive containment.” Rather than let the situation deteriorate until his friends’ fatigue became resentment, he withdrew first. It was a strange form of kindness, born from experience. He’d watched too many cherished connections spiral into ugliness, seen himself repeat the same corrosive patterns for years. He knew how this ended – with bitter texts, blocked numbers, mutual friends forced to choose sides. Better to remove himself cleanly, like deleting an ex’s phone number before you drunk-dial them at 1am. Every severance made him heartsick for weeks, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of inflicting that familiar damage again. Get ahead of the trainwreck before it happens. At least that was the logic. The real tragedy? The relationships you lose before you ever ask. Jiya discovered this pattern – she began systematically distancing herself from her most generous friends. Her childhood best friend who’d just gotten a promotion. Her mentor who’d offered support. Her brother with savings. “Because I loved them too much to become their burden,” Jiya explained. “I could see the trajectory. I knew where I was heading. And I couldn’t bear the thought of being the friend who calls after six months of silence because she needs rent money.” This preemptive severing follows its own twisted logic. You’re protecting them, being noble. Preserving the friendship by removing yourself from it. It feels like generosity – choosing isolation rather than imposing on their benevolence.

Oliver watched himself pull away from a decade-long friendship because his friend had just bought a house and Oliver knew – knew with horrible certainty – that within three months he’d need help with medical bills. “I couldn’t let him become my ATM,” Oliver said. “So I let him become a stranger instead.” When Jackson’s company finally raised institutional funding and could pay everyone back – with interest – he thought the relationships would heal. They didn’t. His uncle never fully trusted him again. His college friend grew bitter about the years of stress. His sister remained supportive but distant, their easy intimacy replaced by careful politeness. And the friendships he’d preemptively ended? Those never recovered at all. When Jackson tried to reconnect after his success, his childhood friend listened politely to his explanation, then said: “I would have helped, you know. That’s what hurts. You didn’t even give me the chance to be your friend when it mattered.” That phrase haunted Jackson. He’d thought he was protecting people, but really he’d been making choices for them, deciding unilaterally what their friendship could bear. The arrogance of it only became clear in retrospect. The transformation demands its price, and sometimes that price is paid by others. The guilt of that – of dragging loved ones into your chrysalis, of making them subsidize your metamorphosis – creates its own special isolation. You’re alone with the knowledge of what it cost others, and with the memory of all the relationships you sacrificed on the altar of not wanting to be a burden, only to realize that burden and connection might be inseparable after all.

viii. Becoming someone else
The shift from employee to entrepreneur isn’t just a career change – it’s a violent reformation of self that happens at the molecular level. When Amaka left her architecture firm to start her own practice, she expected challenges. What she didn’t expect was to literally forget who she was. It started small. Her signature changed – the practiced architectural lettering became shaky, uncertain. Then her voice changed. The confident tone she’d used to present designs became tentative, questioning. She’d call clients and not recognize the voice coming from her mouth. But the real transformation was neurological. Amaka’s brain, wired for fifteen years to think within constraints – budgets, building codes, client preferences – had to learn to think without limits. The freedom was paralyzing. Given infinite possibilities, she couldn’t design anything. She’d sit at her drafting table, pencil in hand, and her mind would go blank. Not empty – overfull, every possible design existing simultaneously, canceling each other out.

The employee-to-entrepreneur shift required developing what Dave called “schizophrenic thinking.” As an employee, you have one persona. As an entrepreneur, Dave had to be simultaneously CEO (confident, visionary), CFO (cautious, analytical), janitor (humble, practical), and salesperson (optimistic, persuasive). These weren’t roles he played – they were distinct personalities he had to embody, often within the same hour. Amaka discovered her body was keeping score in disturbing ways. Every time she acted entrepreneurial – pitched aggressively, made bold decisions – she’d get physically ill afterward. Her employee-trained nervous system was punishing her for breaking protocol. She’d vomit after sending bold proposals, develop rashes after networking events, get migraines after making executive decisions. Her body was allergic to her new identity. The loss of institutional protection created vertigo. Amaka hadn’t realized how much of her confidence came from the firm’s reputation. Without it, she felt naked, fraudulent. She wasn’t “Amaka from Pensler Architecture.” She was just Amaka, and Amaka was nobody.

ix. Three-way marriage
When you marry someone who starts a company, you’re entering a polyamorous relationship whether you know it or not. The startup isn’t just a job or even a passion – it’s a living entity that shares your bed, eats at your table, colonizes every conversation. Lindsey discovered this when her husband Josh launched his startup. At first, she thought she was supporting his career change. What she got was a ménage à trois with an insatiable third partner that never slept, never stopped demanding, never gave back. The startup had its own needs, and they always came first. Date night? Canceled for an investor call. Anniversary dinner? Interrupted by a server crash. Lindsey’s birthday? Josh was there physically but mentally debugging code. The startup was the primary relationship; Lindsey was the side piece. The startup changed Josh physically in ways that made him incompatible with normal marriage. He could only talk about the company. His brain had been reformatted to process everything through startup logic. Lindsey would tell him about her day, and he’d respond with user acquisition strategies. She’d cry about her mother’s illness, and he’d see it as a problem to be solved with an app.

The gaslighting was subtle but constant. When Lindsey complained about neglect, Josh would say, “This is temporary, just until we raise funding.” But each milestone led to another. The temporary became permanent. When she threatened to leave, he’d accuse her of not believing in him, not supporting his dreams, being selfish. The startup had taught him to manipulate emotions like user experiences. Sex became transactional and rare. Josh’s body was so flooded with cortisol that arousal became impossible. When they did have sex, Lindsey could tell he was thinking about burn rates. He’d orgasm and immediately check his phone for metrics. The startup was there in bed with them, demanding attention even in supposedly intimate moments. Ada’s experience was different but equally destructive. Her wife Melina’s startup didn’t just take time and attention – it took their entire financial reality. Ada became the sole breadwinner while Melina built the company. But breadwinner implies choice. This was conscription. Ada couldn’t quit her soul-crushing job because they needed health insurance. She couldn’t pursue her own dreams because someone had to pay rent. The resentment built in tiny increments. Every time Melina excitedly described product features while Ada paid for groceries. Every time Melina talked about “changing the world” while Ada worked overtime to cover bills. But leaving felt impossible. After three years, Ada had invested so much that walking away would mean admitting massive waste. Besides, Melina always seemed just about to succeed. One more month, one more pivot, one more investor meeting. Hope became its own trap. Ada’s impossible situation illustrates the broader paradox of transformation. We need help most when we’re least capable of receiving it, when we’ve become toxic even to those trying to save us.

x. Support network
The cruelest aspect of transformation is this: we need support most when we’re least capable of receiving it. The dissolution of identity that makes transformation possible also makes us allergic to the very connections that could sustain us through it. What actually worked, when everything else failed? When Koku was disappearing – that’s the only word for it – his friend Marcus did something strange. Marcus had been through his own disappearance five years earlier. Lost his financial services firm, his marriage, his sense of self. So when Koku started dissolving, Marcus recognized the signs. But he didn’t swoop in with advice or comfort. Instead, he started showing up at Koku’s apartment every Thursday at 7pm with takeout. Chinese food, always the same order. He’d knock, leave the food, and sit in the hallway eating his portion. The first three weeks, Koku didn’t open the door. Marcus sat in that hallway eating lo mein, talking to the closed door. Not advice. Not encouragement. Just stories about his day, complaints about traffic, observations about the neighbor’s cat. Mundane proof that life continued existing. Week four, Koku opened the door but didn’t speak. They ate in silence, Koku on one side of the threshold, Marcus on the other. Week five, Koku let him in but turned his back, eating while facing the wall. Week six, they sat at the same table, still silent. By week ten, Koku spoke: “I don’t know who I am anymore.” Marcus replied: “I know, man. That’s why I’m here.” This is what worked: Marcus wasn’t trying to fix Koku. He was just proving that connection could exist without conditions. That someone could witness dissolution without running away or trying to stop it.

Asabe discovered something similar in a support group for former surgeons. The first meeting, she walked in expecting advice about career transitions. Instead, she found six people sitting in silence for the first ten minutes, just breathing together. “Before we can talk,” the facilitator explained, “we have to remember we’re bodies, not just minds wrestling with decisions.” Then they went around the circle describing physical sensations. “My chest feels hollow.” “My hands won’t stop moving like they’re looking for instruments.” “I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s skin.” The group had rules: No advice unless requested. No “it gets better” platitudes. No success stories unless someone asked for hope. Just witness. Just presence. Just the revolutionary act of not being alone in dissolution. But the most profound support came through what one member called “parallel process.” Lucca, two years out from leaving surgery, would sit next to Asabe during breaks. Not talking, just sitting nearby sketching. His presence said: “I’m further along but still in it. You can be where you are. I’ll be where I am.” This is what support during transformation actually looks like: Marcus in the hallway with Chinese food. The surgeon’s group starting with sensation. Lucca sketching beside Asabe. Not trying to help, just being present. The paradox never fully resolves, but sometimes – with the right people who understand that presence matters more than help – enough gets through. Not enough to make transformation easy, but enough to make it survivable. Yet the relationship between struggle and transformation isn’t always straightforward. Not all visible struggle indicates transformation, and not all transformation is visibly struggled.

xi. Flagellation
This deserves careful examination: the public display of transformation wounds. Not everyone bleeding in public is bleeding for the same reasons, and the visibility of pain follows its own complex logic. You’ve met them. The person who’s been “finding themselves” for a decade but never seems to find anything, whose journey is suspiciously circular, whose breakthroughs last exactly as long as the workshop. Their wounds never quite heal because they’re carefully maintained, exhibited like museum pieces behind glass. Cathlin was one of these people, until she wasn’t. For years, she performed transformation beautifully. She had the right books on her shelves, used the right vocabulary, posted the right quotes on social media. She went to retreats, did cleanses, collected certificates of completion without completing anything internal. Her public wounds were choreographed – careful cuts that looked deep but never hit anything vital. The performance served a purpose. It protected her from real transformation while giving her the identity of someone transforming. She got the social benefits – the impressive counts of likes and shares, the conversation at parties, the depth people attributed to her, the excuse for not having her life together – without the actual dissolution. Cathlin knew she was performing. She could feel the difference between real dissolution and the theatrical version she was staging. Real dissolution is terrifying, uncontrollable, often unglamorous. Her version was curated, photogenic, always stopping just short of actual danger. What changed? Cathlin couldn’t tell you exactly. Maybe the performance became more exhausting than real change. Maybe she ran out of stages to bleed on. But one day, the real thing started. And it was nothing like her performance. Real transformation doesn’t photograph well. Cathlin spent six months in her apartment in genuine dissolution. No posting about it, no turning it into content. She wasn’t “finding herself” – she was losing herself, and there was nothing romantic about it. The silence wasn’t strategic. It was simply what happened for her when real dissolution began.

Marcus had the opposite experience. During his firm’s collapse and marriage ending, he posted constantly – not for attention but because keeping it inside felt like drowning. Making it visible was the only way to disperse the internal shocks. His friends got exhausted. Some muted him, others stayed but watched in entertainment, occasionally offering advice that was more like judgment. They couldn’t tell the difference between performance and genuine hemorrhaging. That’s the cruel part: even genuine bleeding can look fake. Becky from Asabe’s support group found a middle way. She had a private account with eleven people – not influencer numbers, just witnesses. She posted the ugly parts: videos of herself unable to get out of bed, voice notes recorded while sobbing in her car, photos of meals she couldn’t eat. It was survival through documentation, endurance through the solidarity of shared witness. The difference between performative and genuine public bleeding isn’t always visible from outside. That person posting meaningful quotes might be desperately trying to make sense of their dissolution through others’ words. The one sharing emblematic music might be using each song as a breadcrumb trail through their own disappearance. Yet, some transformations require absolute silence – without witness, without documentation, without even the personal letters to the people we most desperately wish would understand what we’re becoming. Others need to feel seen by their friends, every wound visible, every breakdown documented. Most alternate between the two, bleeding publicly one week, deactivating their social media account for self-reflection the next. The authenticity isn’t in the method of display but in whether actual dissolution is happening beneath whatever sharing or silence someone chooses. Then comes the return.

xii. Return
Every transformation story includes a return, but it rarely looks like what we expect. After two years of intensive isolation, during which she rebuilt her entire sense of self, Maria emerged – but she didn’t return to her old life. She couldn’t. The person who could live that life no longer existed. The return is often more difficult than the isolation. During withdrawal, you’re excused from social expectations. But when you reemerge, people expect you to slot back into familiar patterns. The shock of discovering you no longer fit – that’s when the real grief begins, both for you and for those who loved who you used to be. Maria found that her transformation had made her literally speak a different language. Not vocabulary – frequency. She could only talk about certain things now, could only engage at certain depths. Small talk felt like speaking Latin – she remembered the rules but couldn’t make it feel natural.

Some relationships couldn’t survive the return. Friends who knew her before wanted the old Maria back. They’d look at her with barely concealed disappointment, wondering where their friend had gone. These relationships became museums – careful preservation of something already dead. But other relationships, unexpectedly, deepened. People who’d only known Maria peripherally discovered resonance with her new frequency. Strangers recognized something in her that old friends couldn’t see. She became a beacon for others in transformation, attracting those who were dissolving, who needed proof that reconstitution was possible. The return also brings responsibility. Having survived transformation, you become a guide whether you want to or not. Maria found herself fielding calls from acquaintances entering their own dark nights. They wanted the map, the shortcut, the reassurance that it would be okay. But all Maria could offer was presence, witness, the simple fact of having survived.

xiii. Unsettling
The research, the stories, the lived experience all point to the same uncomfortable conclusion: meaningful transformation requires entering what feels like death. The caterpillar doesn’t know it will become a butterfly. From inside the chrysalis, dissolution feels like ending, not beginning. But why these three metaphors? Why chrysalis, pregnancy, and stellar formation? The chrysalis insists on the goo. That’s what it gives us – the absolute necessity of liquefaction. You can’t add wings to an existing structure. The old form must completely dissolve. The chrysalis says: transformation requires becoming nothing. This is why it’s terrifying. In our culture of constant self-improvement, we want transformation to be additive. The chrysalis says no. First you must become less. First you must surrender everything you think you are. Pregnancy gives us something else: relationship with what we’re becoming. You’re creating something that is both you and not-you. It feeds on you, depletes you, but it’s also becoming separate. The chrysalis is solitary, but pregnancy is inherently relational. You’re never alone because you’re carrying what you’re becoming. And pregnancy gives us the violence of birth – that transformation isn’t just difficult but actively painful, that something tears when new life emerges.

Stellar formation gives us scale and inevitability. The biological metaphors are human-sized, lasting months. But stars take millions of years to form through crushing gravitational collapse. This metaphor says: sometimes transformation isn’t about you. Sometimes you’re just matter being acted on by forces beyond comprehension. And stellar formation gives us nuclear fusion – the moment when pressure becomes so intense that atoms themselves transform. This is transformation at the level of identity – not changing what you do but what you fundamentally are. Together, these three metaphors map the complete territory. The biological metaphors make transformation personal, embodied, survivable. The cosmic metaphor makes it impersonal, inevitable, larger than individual will. Each illuminates what the others hide. And they’re all cyclical. Butterflies lay eggs that become caterpillars. Children grow to have children. Stars die and scatter elements that form new stars. There’s no endpoint. We’re always becoming, always dissolving, always pregnant with what’s next. This is perhaps the deepest truth: transformation isn’t a journey from point A to point B. It’s the fundamental condition of being alive. The only choice is whether we do it consciously or unconsciously, whether we resist or surrender, whether we find others dissolving alongside us or dissolve alone.

However, here’s what’s unsettling: not all transformations lead somewhere better. Oliver scrolling through his former friend’s social media, trapped in maladaptive isolation, watching a life he walked away from while his mind loops through humiliation – that’s transformation too. Jiya, successful now but needing crisis like a drug, unable to exist without chaos – she transformed, just not into something healthier. Sometimes we transform into more broken versions of ourselves. The dissolution you’re in right now – whatever it is, however it found you – isn’t a detour from your life. It is your life. The chrysalis isn’t a waiting room. It’s where the most real thing happens: where you become. What feels like ending is beginning. What seems like destruction is construction. But also: what seems like growth might be decay. What feels like emergence might be just another kind of trap. The chrysalis isn’t comfortable. Neither is pregnancy. Stars form in violence that would destroy any living thing. Comfort isn’t the point. But neither is emergence into something better. Sometimes emergence is into something worse, something more fractured. And that’s still transformation. That’s still life. That’s still the inexorable process of becoming that defines existence itself. Jiya sits at her computer at 6am, creating another crisis because peace feels like death. Oliver deleting his friend’s number for the fourth time this month. Asabe paints above the bakery, choosing dissolution daily. They’re all transforming, always, into what they’re becoming – better, worse, or simply other. Into the next becoming. Which has already begun. Whether we’re ready or not.

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