A Story of Identity, Change, and Becoming
by Vivien Chao
There is a famous story called the Ship of Theseus. It asks: if you replace every single plank and nail of a boat one by one, until not a single original piece remains—is it still the same boat?
I found myself asking that same question a few summers ago. My children were grown and leaving home. For decades, “mother” had been my primary plank, my mast, my anchor. As that role quietly shifted, I felt like the ship itself. I no longer knew who I was. I was lost in an identity crisis, sitting alone under the big tree beside the Field House at Creasey Mahan, simply watching the world pass by.
Tavia was nearby, just a few yards away, gently observing tiny baby monarch caterpillars on the milkweed. She is a wise soul. She didn’t ask if I was okay, and she offered no advice. Instead, she looked up and mentioned how brutal the summer heat had been—and how these fragile creatures might not survive. Then she simply asked, “Would you like to help me raise some of them?”
She handed me a cage and, with it, a purpose. Every morning, I returned to the Nature Preserve to gather fresh milkweed. I watched the caterpillars devour it voraciously until, one day, they stopped. They ate no more. They moved no more. Slowly, they began their transformation into a chrysalis.
A chrysalis looks like a silent chamber—still, fragile, and full of mystery. It resembles a long, deep sleep in a place where the past dreams of a future it cannot yet see. In that moment, I realized I was living in my own chrysalis phase. I was suspended in darkness, uncomfortable and uncertain, yet somehow necessary. Like a seed buried in the soil, we must sometimes endure the dark in order to sprout and grow.
Then one day, the stillness broke. A butterfly emerged—delicate, trembling, and impossibly beautiful. Tavia helped me release it, and together we watched it take its first flight into the preserve.
As it soared away, I understood: I am still the same ship, even though every plank of my life has changed. When I was a caterpillar, I did what caterpillars do—I feasted, I nurtured, I grew. But we are all part of nature, and nature eventually calls us to transform.
The chrysalis was never a place of hiding. It was a place of becoming. I learned that we do not lose ourselves when our seasons change. We simply grow the wings we were always meant to have.
