Black People, This is Our Chrysalis Period
written by Soteria Thomas
Recently, my significant other has taken to calling me his butterfly.
It was unprompted and spoken with great warmth, as most pet names tend to be. When he first called me that, my resulting smile was dampened with a bit of confusion; though a part of me understood he was probably just equating my physical beauty to that of a butterfly’s, the part of me that seeks meaning in all things spoken to and by me couldn’t help but reflect on the nature of butterflies— creatures who’ve morphed into elegant, winged beings through their trials as caterpillars. They symbolize the very essence of what we hope change will look like for us, on us. We see them fluttering on gentle breezes and we anticipate that we too will be afforded that beauty, that ease, those wings when we emerge from our own chrysalises. So I guess that’s why I was stumped when he called me ‘my butterfly’. In my mind, I was more of a round pupa, squirming meekly against the force of the immense world around me. I think that’s a feeling many of us have experienced, especially in a year like this.
A lot of people may not know this, but the change it requires for a caterpillar to become a butterfly is a gruesome one. Some may think that all it takes is a bit of uncomfortable wiggling for it to shrink and shake out its wings when it’s really closer to death than anything else. A caterpillar will hang upside down and begin shedding its skin to reveal a hardened chrysalis beneath, wherein they undergo near-complete cell destruction. Organs, body— everything that once was that caterpillar is broken down and liquefied, and it’s only after this point can it begin to start being a butterfly. I believe what we’re enduring now, with the breaking down of our current systems whilst it breaks down our spirits, is not unlike the butterfly’s chrysalis.
At the time I’m writing this, Chadwick Boseman has passed away after a four-year-long battle with Stage 3 colon cancer and it seems now that the world couldn’t be in a grimmer state. It was the first thing I saw when I opened Instagram to post the birthday pictures I’d accumulated throughout the day, stopping me in my tracks. Seeing Boseman’s bright, smiling face only to look further down and read the horrible news sunk my heart to a depth I hadn’t thought possible. We’re all being forced now to face a world without the Black Panther, without a living legend, without a real-life superhero. In the past sixteen hours, I’ve seen and shared my mourning with millions of others who were touched by his magnanimous nature, his unmistakable charm, and unrelenting determination to be a role model to Black children, people, and creatives across the globe. I’ve also seen a new wave of virulence directed at 2020 itself, which is to be expected.
Injustice and violence have been prevalent themes in our media cycles, but there’s just a general feeling of unfairness that permeates life as we know it now. I’ve asked myself, my friends, my significant other several times why is now the time the world decides to fall apart just as we’re becoming adults; why is it now that so many young people, especially young Black people, have to stand on the precipice of mortal danger and loudly protest for our humanity all whilst society seems to crumble around us; why is it now that did he had to die? For months, I couldn’t understand how this came to be, but two hours till midnight on August 28th, the answer came to me.
There’s something about the way the numerous tragedies of 2020 seem to revolve around or directly affect Black folks. Since January when we endured the shock of losing another legend in Kobe Bryant, our community has suffered a great many hardships. From facing state-sanctioned brutality to fighting against a virus that disproportionately infects us to deal with an ever-growing wealth gap between us and the 1% to losing cultural icons, the culture has taken some serious blows within the last eight months. These things aren’t random, but they also aren’t conspiratorial in nature— they are elements gearing us towards our collective change.
In the final days of 2019, I prayed for a shift, a year of development, a year of clarity. I wasn’t alone either: all across my feeds were posts claiming that the new year would be the year in some way or another. People were hoping to expand or start businesses, find fulfilling relationships, money, opportunities, growth, change as beautiful and easy as butterfly wings. It didn’t seem to be mere coincidence that we were heading into 20/20, so surely that meant we were in for something monumental. What we’ve got now probably isn’t how we envisioned this year to go when the clock struck midnight, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve been denied all we hoped for.
2020 was slated to be the year of vision, and I truly do believe that it’s still the case as we are only a few months away from 2021. We’re living through the culmination of 400 years of oppression, hindsight, and are all doing what we can to ensure a world free of that oppression for ourselves and future generations. Some of our most important cultural icons, people with renowned visibility, are departing this world. The dirty secrets of this country are being laid bare at our feet thanks to the advent of smartphones, bringing light onto our trauma all while it’s rewinded in HD clarity every time we look at our feeds. There’s been virtually no rest, no time to process or grieve before the next calamity comes to knock us off our feet. We’re being worn down, like rocks being pelted by rough waves… or like a caterpillar in its chrysalis.
We have reached a point where we can no longer be sustained by our present state and we must experience this to grow into what we’ve always wanted to be. But in that we must come face-to-face with great pain, we must see the dissolution of our old mindsets, old bodies, and the old way of doing things. The world, the Universe, the Ancestors, whatever you may call it, has a peculiar mechanism for making sure that nothing goes stagnant, and that’s done by introducing conflict. Whether that conflict is a group of people telling you that your life doesn’t matter or if you’ve turned to soup in your chrysalis, it’s there to push you to a new level.
You see, floating in that “soup” are things known as imaginal cells that hold the blueprint of how to become a butterfly while still keeping track of the knowledge attained in its former life. It is with these cells, which can be as few as fifty at the start, that you begin to see the butterfly being built. It can take days, a month, sometimes even three years before that chrysalis splits open, but the result is beautiful all the same. Like butterflies, we have the same ability to build ourselves back from the ground up following destruction— we’ve been doing just that for four hundred years.
What we’re seeing today is the midpoint of a life cycle, the climax before the resolution to a story. This is a crucial point in the history of not just our people, but of the world itself; this, I think, was bound to happen, and it’s no more the effect of some shady overlord-esque society than a collection of adventitious unfortunate happenstances. It’s not even that 2020 is a cursed year. It’s natural, everything must come to these types of drastic and reformative changes. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel hurt by it, that you shouldn’t be angry, that you shouldn’t be moved to action in some capacity because that’s natural too. It’s vital to the change; where would we be if the first caterpillar got discouraged when its body fell apart and chose instead to wither away, damning its cocoon to become a tomb? We wouldn’t know the beauty of its final form, and I wouldn’t have an allegory to last me an entire article. All that to say, we have to keep fighting in any and every way we can until we make those long-lasting positive changes. We won’t be pupas struggling in an unjust world, but people proud to be compared to butterflies.
These last few months, I’ve wondered and worried what 2021 will look like, what the world will look like once we’ve pushed as hard and as far as we can against those who’d seek to maintain stagnancy and oppression. I have no idea what that place will be or how much more we’ll have to endure to finally get to it, but I have faith that it’ll be more than anything we could’ve hoped for. I pray that then we’ll take the time to recoup together, to heal, to rest because by that time the chrysalis will have split.
We’ll need a moment to dry our wings.