6.16.25
As a kid, I was obsessed with butterflies. I’d catch caterpillars and try to keep them long enough to watch them transform. I didn’t know then how much they needed to eat—I was probably starving them to death without realizing it. They always died. Still, I kept trying.
It started with the bright, vivid ones. Those colors pulled me in. But over time, I started to notice even the plain ones had their own kind of magic. The whole process is wild when you think about it. They start as tiny eggs, turn into caterpillars, and once they’ve grown, they literally turn to mush inside a cocoon. And from that mess, they come out something completely different.
People always compare that process to personal transformation—emotional, spiritual, mental, physical. Or all of it. I’ve heard it so many times it almost lost meaning… until recently.
My first tattoo was a butterfly. It was awful. Some guy—friend of a friend—gave it to me in a sketchy motel room with a homemade tattoo gun while we drank strawberry Boone’s Farm and snorted lines. Great life choices. When I turned 18, my mom took me to get it fixed for my birthday present.
Every time something big happened in my life, I used to think, “This is it. This is finally it. Your big metamorphosis.”
What the fuck did I know?
I have a story. I’ve told pieces of it—mostly cliff notes and broad overviews. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell it all. But what I do know is that since taking the first three steps in AA, something real has started to shift. This feels like the actual beginning.
Everything before now? Just the Butterfly Effect.
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