🦋 The Mythical Creature of Belonging

🐛 Because growth always looks weird before it gets wings.

🪶 Writing encouragement

…Often the early stages of change… mimic deterioration. Cut a chrisalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly…”

~Pat Barker

There’s something so satisfyingly brutal about that image, isn’t there? A chrysalis as rot. Progress looking suspiciously like decay.

Pat Barker (now Dame Pat Barker) earned her title for services to literature, which, as an American, I can’t even aspire to. (I can, however, overanalyze her metaphors for free.)

She writes about war and transformation. About what it means to live through things that change you so completely you almost don’t recognize yourself afterward. Which, honestly, sounds a lot like writing.

Because every time we sit down to write, we’re crawling into a new chrysalis. The first draft always feels like decomposition. The middle? Pure mush. And then, maybe, after enough time and work, something winged shows up. Fragile, but alive.

That’s why this space exists: to remind us that what looks like “not working” often is the work.

So let’s take that spirit into this week’s Tiny Memoir.

🧭 Instructions

Here’s how Tiny Memoir works:

1. Set a timer. Pick five or ten minutes. That’s it. You can do ANYTHING for ten minutes — even remembering your own life.

2. Write until it dings. No editing. No backspacing. No rereading that sentence for the seventh time to look up a few of those adjectives in the thesaurus.

3. Use your weapon of choice. Laptop, pen, phone, voice memo, carrier pigeon — whatever keeps the words coming.

4. Keep going even when it gets weird. The middle of every timed write is where your brain panics and says things like, “Actually, maybe I don’t have any memories.” Push through that part. That’s where the good stuff hides.

5. When the time dings, stop. Even if you’re mid-sentence. Especially if you’re mid-sentence. Hemingway did it (and he was fine, aside from the alcoholism and war trauma.)

6. Optional: revisit later. You can come back to edit, expand, or wonder why you spent three minutes describing your 4th-grade trapper keeper in vivid emotional detail.

7. Post your words in the comments. I know it’s really scary. Sometimes it doesn’t get easier, either. But that’s part of your growth.

8. Most important: just write! Don’t worry if it’s profound, funny, tragic, or reads like you’ve never met punctuation before. You’re not here to impress anyone. You’re here to remember.

Okay, time ready? Scroll down for your first prompt, and let’s make some questionable literary decisions together.

✍️ Your Writing Prompt