Sometimes, Growth is Gross

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before."
- Alice Walker

This reminds me of chrysalis time and the fact that we think of cocooning as some cozy time of warmth, self-protection, and growth, but really it's messy, painful, and kinda gross.

I want to say that this is an encouragement to use those feelings (the anger, weepyness, agitation--let's use a different word than hysteria) as a signal and start looking at your life to see if this is an instance of growth and where you might be going, but honestly? I'm feeling way more laissez-faire about this kind of thing these days.
 
If you want to analyze your feelings and your growth, by all means. But if you are feeling chaotic and confused and don't feel like digging into it, chances are the growth will still happen. I don't know that we need to be aware of the process for it to work. After all, it got you to the point of feeling like crap, didn't it? Maybe you can just experience it and see what happens on the other side.


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