Becoming and Returning

the caterpillar and the butterfly

At some point in life, we all feel the pull in two directions.
One part of us aches to move forward, to grow and become who we’ve always wanted to be. The other part longs for what we used to be—the version of ourselves that felt freer, lighter... whole.

We tell ourselves we’re either moving toward something new or trying to reclaim something lost. But what if those aren’t opposites? What if becoming and returning are the same thing?

We speak about self-discovery as if we are searching for a missing piece. As if somewhere along the way, we lost ourselves, misplaced something, and must now retrace our steps to find it.

But that’s not how identity works.

You have never been lost. You have never ‘been not’ yourself. You’ve only been moving through different versions of who you are meant to be.

The problem is that we romanticise the past. When we think about who we used to be, we remember a simplified version—someone who wasn’t carrying the burdens we carry now, who hadn’t yet faced the pain we’ve endured. And so we convince ourselves that that was our real self—the one before the world changed us.

But memory is selective. The past self you long for is not real. It is a version softened by nostalgia, free from the weight of all the things you now know. You’re not meant to go back. Even if you could, you wouldn’t fit inside that version of yourself anymore.

A caterpillar does not mourn its transformation. It doesn’t enter the cocoon, afraid it will lose itself. It does not question whether the wings that emerge are truly its own.

It simply does what it was always meant to do.

And when it pushes out of the cocoon, when it stretches its wings and lifts into the air for the first time, it doesn’t look back at the ground and grieve the crawling thing it used to be.

It knows that it has not become something else. It has become itself. It was always meant to fly.

We are no different.

The child you once were, the teenager struggling to find their place, the version of you that fell apart and had to rebuild—all of them still live inside you. They’re not separate from who you are today. They’re the foundation of who you’re becoming.

So when you say, I want to go back to myself, what you really mean is:

I want to feel whole again.

But wholeness isn’t in the past. It’s found in stepping fully into the person you’ve been growing into all along.

You are not lost.
You are unfolding.
You are not becoming someone else.
You are returning to yourself—the fullest version, the one who’s been waiting all along.

Every caterpillar must become a butterfly.
And every butterfly was once a caterpillar.