This essay is also published over on my Substack.

Do you know what happens when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly?

If you’re like me, you read Eric Carle’s delightful The Very Hungry Caterpillar as a kid. You flipped through the colorful pages about the cute little caterpillar eating through one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, and five oranges.

And then you read about how the caterpillar build “a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out, and he was a beautiful butterfly!”

As kids, we assume it’s a two-week cozy vacation where the caterpillar knits itself a cute little pair of colorful wings, and BAM! It emerges as a beautiful butterfly.

That’s not actually how it happens.

I’m borrowing this extended metaphor from my (bestselling!) book How to Try Again, so let me share what actually happens:

A caterpillar’s metamorphosis is less lovely, more Lovecraftian.

When a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis* to begin its transformation, it literally eats itself, releasing enzymes that dissolve the remainder of its body. A few specific cells are preserved while the rest becomes caterpillar soup.

(*Carle knew it was a chrysalis, not a cocoon, but art won out over science here.)

Open a chrysalis at the wrong time, and caterpillar goo will pour out.

Yes, nightmare fuel.

Here’s the thing: the caterpillar goo stage is critical.

While in the chrysalis, the caterpillar’s remaining cells use this protein-rich soup to create a new body, wings, antennae, and legs.

Only after it’s gone through this disgusting transformation does it become the beautiful butterfly we all know and most of us love. (Personally, butterflies creep me out, but that’s besides the point).

A butterfly’s metamorphosis is a stunning accomplishment, like a can of alphabet soup organizing itself into War and Peace.

It’s also the perfect metaphor for why making changes in life can feel difficult, gross, and uncomfortable.

In other words, we feel like caterpillar goo.

Change is hard and sometimes gross

In order to change, we must break down the old version of us to make enough room for the new version to grow.

This requires courage:

• We ask uncomfortable questions about how we want to show up in the world.
• We shed behaviors that used to protect us but are now holding us back.
• We stop chasing external validation instead of our internal compass.
• We stop living the same story about our situation or our place in life.
• We stop people-pleasing at the expense of our own needs.
• We finally stand up for ourselves.

All of these decisions carry consequences, can create an ego-shattering void, and lead to plenty of “I FEEL LIKE CATERPILLAR GOO” moments. Which makes sense. Human nature and mother nature would prefer that we don’t change:

Internally, our brains don’t want to change. We’re trying to make long-term changes to our deeply-held beliefs or internal narrative… without the joy of instant gratification, and without the certainty of what the future might hold. We’re not equipped for this! Change requires a lot of brainpower and energy and doing things differently, repeatedly. Gross.

Externally, we still live in the environment that shaped us into who we were. As creatures of habit and products of our environment, trying to change amidst this requires a lot of hard work to change our routines or patterns or physical environment.

To further complicate things, there are people in our lives who would prefer us to stay who we were, simply because that’s what makes sense to them. The people who shaped us, who we spend a lot of our work day with, our readers or fans. My friend Joshua Heath Scott talked about this in a recent, fantastic essay, “Are you still the person they decided you were?”:

“The world meets you in one context, decides that is who you are, and then resists pretty hard when you try to move. People hate change, and especially when someone else’s change exposes their complacency.”

This doesn’t make them bad people, nor does it make the box they want us to stay in a bad thing either. We all change in our own way on our own timeline. People just want us to stay how we were to keep things easy. Unfortunately, that’s not the path life has in store for us right now. As Josh puts it, “None of those boxes are evil. The person in them is just bigger than the box wants to admit.”

Here’s the other reason why change is so hard: big change can bring unexpected consequences and unknown challenges. Change might lead to the end of friendships or relationships or occupations.

And yet, we cannot stay who we were.

There is more out there for us, and we cannot go backwards. We cannot go back to just being a caterpillar. We can only go forward and break ourselves down in order to eventually become a butterfly.

Which means we must move through the awkward middle. Where we’re no longer who we were, but not yet who we hope to become.

The caterpillar goo stage.

And no matter how difficult and weird it might feel, the caterpillar goo stage is a crucial part of the process.

I am currently caterpillar goo

I find myself in the caterpillar goo stage at the moment in three phases of my life.

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“Steve the Small Business Owner.” For fifteen years, I was fortunate to be able to build a business (Nerd Fitness) around writing deeply researched essays that people found via Google. I’m proud to have created dozens of jobs, started a fun worldwide movement, and helped hundreds of thousands of people level up their lives.

This path worked for a long time, and let millions of people to find out about my writing. Starting around 4 years ago, that window started closing. These days? It’s pretty damn shut.

ChatGPT, LLMs, Google Gemini, etc. have taken all of research and essays my fellow writers and I have created, and can now provide folks with a succinct answer without needing to visit our websites. The result is losing around 90% of our traffic. It happens. It still sucks though!

Nerd Fitness is still going strong with a great tight-knit team, but we’ve had to go through an uncomfortable metamorphosis and reinvent ourselves.

Here’s where we settled: while the rest of the internet races towards AI-slop and AI-generated workouts, advice, etc. , we’re doubling down on humans helping humans with empathetic accountability.

(If you are interested in working with a real human who actually cares about your progress, check out Nerd Fitness Coaching! I’m really proud of how our coaches help people.)

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“Steve the Writer:” I spent the last 3 years of a roller coaster life writing a book that I’m so unbelievably proud of. I then spent the last six months building up to launch and then promoting it everywhere: going on podcasts and writing guest posts and then signing books and going on Irish radio.

And now that I’m on the other side of the launch, I feel like I can finally take a breath and figure out what I want life to look like now. It has also led me to asking some interesting questions.

For example, how and where do I want to show up on the internet?

I have such a frustrating relationship with social media, especially as it becomes more “media” and less “social” by the day. Each platform is racing towards algorithmic short form video content that must be fed at all costs by human-creators or AI-slop. These videos are making us less intelligent, shattering our attention spans, and stoking insecurities and outrage. To create on social media these days is to buy a pile of scratch tickets and hope to win the algorithm over, and over, and over.

The “just write great content and people will find it” path is mostly closed.

At the same time, I love writing so much (using my own brain, I’m out on AI). I’ve been writing this free weekly newsletter for 17 years, and I’m currently exploring fun options and experiments to keep writing for another 17 years and beyond.

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“Steve the Human:” I spent the first 40 years of my life as an insecure overachiever who developed really strong people-pleasing tendencies. As I wrote about on Nir Eyal’s newsletter, “The Hidden Beliefs Holding You Back,” I’ve spent the last three years re-writing that narrative. This has required me to break down those stories and question my people-pleasing tendencies.

I’m reevaluating quite a bit of the need to reach some arbitrary level of success in order to feel accomplished and “enough.” Instead, I’m trying to give myself the space and energy to craft new narratives and behaviors that are more aligned with who I want to become.

As somebody who loves to work and planned my life only to have it all stop working all at the same time, this feels uncomfortable and liberating. But requires constant pep-talks and telling myself “Hey buddy, just because we used to think that way, doesn’t mean we need to keep think that way.”

The problem is that clearing the way introduces a lot of uncertainty. “We know we don’t want to do things the old way, but what is the new way?” And honestly, I don’t know…yet.

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I was speaking with my therapist (shout out mental health) about these areas of uncertainty in my life, and he shared a T.S. Eliot poem, “Wait without Hope”:

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith,

But the faith and the love are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

I don’t know what the future holds for the “Steve the small business owner”. I don’t know what the future holds for “Steve the writer.” I also don’t know what the future holds for “Steve the human.”

Instead of throwing myself full speed into things to hide from this uncomfortableness, I’m embracing the first step of “the P.A.C.T.” from How to Try Again:

I am giving myself permission to “PAUSE.”

To slow down. To breathe. To ask questions. To stop doing things that don’t fit.

To wait without hope.

So here I reside, inside the chrysalis, a pile of caterpillar goo. That can also somehow still type this essay to you (just go with it).

And though I’m a pile of goo, that doesn’t mean I’m doing nothing. Even the pile of caterpillar goo is always in the process of breaking down or building, it’s just not visible outside of the chrysalis.

Here’s what life looks like inside the chrysalis for me:

• Going for walks, exercising and finding time for things that fill me up.
• Connecting more deeply with my community and volunteer opportunities.
• Sharing my thoughts weekly in this newsletter. I can’t NOT write.
• Reading widely and chasing my curiosity without an agenda.
• Sharing the philosophy/lessons of How to Try Again.
• Prioritizing time with friends and family.

I’ll continue questioning and shedding and dissolving the old version of me, and trust that the new version will reveal itself over time. And eventually, when I lean into the uncomfortable growth part of figuring out what’s next, it’ll be weird and new and unusual and challenging. Wabi-sabi asks me to accept the fact that I’ll never have certainty about how the next version of me will turn out, which is so hard for me. Which is why I’ll do so with curiosity, not judgment.

I’ll cite Josh’s words again, slightly amended to wedge my anaology in:

The way out of the box is almost always the same. You take a gig that scares you. You get on the plane. You stand on a stage in a city you have never been to and find out that the version of you that lived inside the box was a smaller version than the one you actually are. You have to kill the smaller one so the bigger one can find something new to smile about. To live in. To grow in.

It is uncomfortable. It is supposed to be uncomfortable. The discomfort is the price of admission and also the proof you bought a ticket.

So, if you also feel like caterpillar goo, welcome to the club.

Congrats on breaking down the old version of you that no longer fits.

Let’s wait without hope, and see what emerges.

Until then…

-Steve (former caterpillar, current pile of caterpillar goo)

PS: Speaking of doing things that challenge me, I’ll be speaking (and signing books!) at my friend Chris Guillebeau‘s NeuroDiversion Conference in Austin March 25-28th, 2027. Early bird tickets go on sale today.

I attended this conference two years ago and felt like I found my people. If you’re still looking for your people, give this one a look!

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