we are but butterflies in a diving suit in a brave new world
“I hate that no one tells you that getting better feels like you’re getting worse. Because hear me out, isn’t it so weird that when you’re learning something new, you feel dumb before you’re wise? When you start working out, you feel weak before you’re strong. When you’re facing your fears, you feel terrified before you’re brave. In order to heal, you need to suffer. In order to have peace, you need to experience chaos, which means that life disguises growth as failure and progress as pain, so the mantra I live by is that if it’s hard, it matters, because becoming is messy. It breaks who you were to make room for who you’re meant to be, so you don’t build strength by feeling powerful. You build strength by feeling powerless. So if you feel tired or uncertain or behind, you’re in the middle of becoming and just around the corner from success. When you get there, you’ll turn around and realize that you couldn’t have found yourself without getting lost first.”
This poem was posted as a video on Instagram by creator kissingparty. The idea of “becoming” is something that resonates deeply with me.
My ADHD brain instantly connected becoming with the concept of a butterfly in a diving suit. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes his life before and after a massive stroke left him with locked-in syndrome.
The TL;DR is Bauby suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings, but physically paralyzed with some movement in his head and eyes. Bauby wrote the memoir about his experience by blinking only his left eyelid, which took him two months working 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. Unfortunately, his right eye had to be sewn up because of irritation. Using partner assisted scanning, a transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. It took him about 200,000 blinks to write at an average of approximately two minutes per word.
The typical human can read at a max of 200 words per minute, which is about the speed of the animated text from the becoming poem, but we think at a much faster rate, in the 400-800 words per minute range. This inherent bandwidth constraint of thinking vs. speaking/writing is why it so often feels frustrating to communicate with other people, because we can’t clearly explain our thinking to someone else fast enough; a butterfly in a diving suit. My heart goes out to Bauby! I can’t imagine the experience he must have had with a bandwidth constraint of two words per minute. And he was able to write a novel, which most of us can’t do.
Both stories, together, bring about the idea of isolation and personal growth in the adversity of a brave, new, huge, and often terrifying world. Together, we grow… locked-in and becoming.