It’s funny how you can spend decades searching for the safety of a cave in which to molt and in one day everything you thought you understood about what it means to be safe, and molting in general, gets stripped away. There is a deafening silence in this echo chamber but for the loud cracking; a heart fracturing so violent it feels fatal.
To live as a lobster is to be defined by a suit of armor—rigid, protective, and unyielding. It shields you from the currents and the predators, keeping you safe in a predictable shape. But growth demands a terrifying trade. As your body expands, the very thing that once protected you becomes a suffocating prison. The pressure builds until it is unbearable. You cannot stay as you are, but to change, you must deliberately break your own armor.
Sucks to be the one who has lived to pierce the armor of others, to let the light shine in them while buried under the weight of your own agony.
But birth and death are inescapably hard. I now see that birth and death are not two opposites but co-creators; space maker and form giver. How is there room for new things to come into form if the space it needs to inhabit is full of what is stagnant and festering?
