Imaginal
Nobody tells you that you become soup.
They tell you about the hot flashes. The sleeplessness. The moods that arrive without warning and leave without apology. They hand you pamphlets. They lower their voices. They say change of life the way people say I’m sorry for your loss — like something is ending and the kindest thing they can do is be gentle about it.
Nobody tells you what is actually happening.
Your body is doing something ancient. Something precise. Something it has been quietly preparing to do your entire life. It is liquefying everything you were — every performance, every role, every carefully maintained version of yourself — so that everything you were always meant to be can finally take shape.
This is not a loss.
This is a blueprint activating.
The caterpillar doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly.
It only knows the dark. It only knows that the body it has always lived in is coming apart, and there is nothing it can do to stop it. Scientists call what happens inside the chrysalis imaginal soup — the caterpillar dissolves almost completely. Muscles. Organs. Structure. Everything it was becomes unrecognizable. Nothing survives intact.
And then something extraordinary happens.
Tiny clusters of cells, present since the caterpillar’s very first moments of life, dormant, waiting, patient, wake up. They’re called imaginal discs. And they build, from the ruins, from the soup, from the wreckage of everything the caterpillar used to be, the creature it was always meant to become.
The butterfly was always inside the caterpillar.
It just needed everything else to dissolve first.
She doesn’t know she’s becoming a butterfly either.
She just knows the dark. She knows the body she trusted is unfamiliar now. She knows the rhythms she built her life around for thirty years are gone. She knows she cries without knowing why, rages without wanting to, disappears inside herself in the middle of a conversation and can’t find her way back.
She thinks something is wrong with her.
Nothing is wrong with her.
She is in the chrysalis.
The woman she has been — the one who held the temperature of every room, who existed in relation to everyone else’s needs, who performed and produced and poured herself out until there was nothing left that was purely hers — that woman is dissolving. Not because she failed. Not because she is broken.
Because she was always meant to become something more.
What comes after is not spoken of enough.
The stillness. Not the stillness of exhaustion — she knows that kind, has carried it for years. This is different. This is the stillness of a woman who has been through her own dissolution and is no longer afraid, because she has already survived the worst of the dark and discovered something waiting for her on the other side of it.
Herself.
The unperformed version. The one who existed before the world got hold of her and started telling her what she was for. The girl who walked into a room like she had every right to be in it. Who spoke without calculating the cost first. Who knew, in her bones, exactly who she was.
She didn’t go anywhere.
She was waiting in the soup.
The imaginal discs don’t build something new.
They build what was always encoded. What the creature was always meant to become, the form that required everything that came before, and required it all to end, to finally arrive.
So here is what no pamphlet will tell you:
You are not declining. You are not disappearing. You are not becoming less.
You are in the chrysalis.
And what is being built from your ruins, from your imaginal discs, from the cells that have been waiting since the beginning, is the most complete version of you that has ever existed. Sure in a way that cannot be shaken, because she has already survived her own undoing. Peaceful in a way that cannot be faked, because everything that wasn’t real fell away in the soup. Powerful in a way that needs no announcement, because she has already been through the fire and she knows exactly what she’s made of.
The butterfly doesn’t mourn the caterpillar.
It lifts.
You are not losing yourself.
You are finally meeting her.
And she has been waiting a long time.
Love,
Momma Jess