An Inspired Poem: From Crisis to Chrysalis

I mistook the doubts for failure—

the cracking skin, the restless ache,

the slow unraveling of plans once held

like gospel in my clenched fists.

This wasn’t the script I was promised.

Midlife, they said, would be

a summit with a view—

not a room with no doors,

not the sound of my own voice

echoing questions I feared to ask.

But here, in the hush between identities,

I feel it.

The hush is not absence.

It’s a womb.

The world calls it a crisis.

But what if it’s a chrysalis?

Butterflies know.

To fly, you must first dissolve.

Inside the shell, there is no map,

just memory, marrow, and mystery

rewriting the self.

Here, time is compost.

Ambition softens.

Roles disintegrate.

What remains is essence—

raw, radiant, un-nameable.

I am not broken.

I am becoming.

Let others rush to reinvent.

I will sit in this sacred dark

until the wings form