You are a Butterfly

Yes. 

Whether you are a male or female, whether you are 8 years old or 80 years old, as long as you are living, growing and unfolding, you are a butterfly. The difference is only that the cycle a butterfly goes through is called metamorphosis and that you go through is Struggle. We get upset and hopeless while facing struggles in life, little knowing how obvious and important that struggle is, which you shall know by the end of this post.

The story of a butterfly starts when it hatches in the form of a larvae or caterpillar, so slimy and ugly that you would never want to even touch it. It is very tiny and very hungry hence it starts eating the leaf it was born on.. It keeps eating and eating all the leaves and branches it can reach on that tree and keeps growing bigger, so big that it cannot fit in its skin and has to shed its skin 4 or even more times.

This is your period at home, in your comfort zone. The schooling and may be college too, if you are a day scholar. You are prince/Princess of your Mom and Dad and they try to give you all the love, comfort, care, knowledge, manners, talents and protection they can. And you keep absorbing them and keep growing.. a fat caterpillar full of creativity, confidence, abilities and ambitions.

Then the larvae goes to the pupa stage, where it has a pupa or cocoon around it, sticking tight to its body, of the same colour as its surroundings- brown or green. This is the resting and growing stage. It protects it and allows it to change its body, its shape.

For you the late teens, the early hostel life or college life is similar. You are changing biologically, physically and emotionally. You start getting conscious of how you look, you get attracted to the opposite sex, you idolise the top sportsmen or super stars and imagine yourself on that place. You dream, you imagine, you aspire, but are a little less confident than the careless school boy/girl.

Once the butterfly is grown completely, the arduous time arrives. It has to struggle its way out of the tight, suffocating, strong pupa which is very challenging task. Trying its best it manages to make a small opening and squeezes itself out of the opening to enjoy the world outside.

You face the same challenges when you step into the real world, as an individual (and not as someones prince/princess) for the first time.

You struggle with everything, be it

• Loneliness 
• Anonymity 
• Failure 
• Failure instead of trying hard again 
• Poor health 
• Bad relationship 
• Long and painful job search 
• Ruthlessly political environment at workplace 
• Messy and filthy hostel where you have to stay 
• An unpalatable food in the mess 
• Once dearest friend who suddenly got selfish and hurt you  
• The society against you if you want to take brave decisions, or 
• Teething troubles in marriage

So much more can be added to this list, it is the stage you are every time you feel that the world is unfair and you are being victimised. And all the confidence, dreams, ambitions you built up as a caterpillar seem to be over exaggerated. The only key is to keep trying and pushing you harder against the walls. Because this is not the end or the destiny that is pulling you back. It is not the time to commit suicide or go into depression, It is not God who is to be blamed and hated. It is simply a stage of your life- the Cocoon.

And finally the butterfly comes our of the cocoon, after hours of rigorous struggle, struggle which got it extremely tired, but made it stronger. Struggle which squeezed the excess fluids out of its body and the fluids grew into its wings. The struggle which made its body lighter to fly and stronger to beat the air. Struggle that made it even more and more determined to fly. If anyone cuts down the cocoon for the butterfly to make it easier, it will be never be a butterfly that can fly. It will be just a swollen body with small and withered wings. 

So now If you drop a year to prepare an exam but still don't crack it, you prepare for a sport well but get a fracture day before the event, you love someone madly but get dumped, you do good for everyone and everyone leaves you alone, you try your best to marry your true love but his/her parents take her/him away by enacting suicide, you do your best in the job but did not get deserved appraisal....

Don't think it was not worth it. Don't feel like a loser. Don't ask what I gained from it, Ask yourself how much you learnt from it. You now know how to give up everything and study, how to love truly and selflessly, how to work as a professional, how to play like a champion. What if this time it didn't click, at least you are stronger, wiser and experienced. 

So the next time you find helpless and caught in a cocoon, squeeze out. What happened was not an accident, It was Struggle, if you don't have struggle in your life, you will never fly.