The Cost of Transformation (And Daring To Sing, Anyway)
The cost of transformation: having to live the change while the world responds in ways you cannot always predict
Last year, I was about an inch away from stepping on a cicada on the pavement beneath me before I realized it was there. And in the way I normally react to bugs (especially ones that I was not planning to see), I jumped, and tripped over myself as I stumbled to get away from it. As I looked back to see if the cicada had moved, I was never able to tell if it was actually dead or alive. This happened around last July, when the annual cicadas in my area had already started to quiet down, but there were definitely still some around.
But in the days, weeks, and months that followed, the image of that cicada was louder in my mind than ever before. I even felt like I started hearing more references to them, and I felt like I could hear them buzzing from the trees, even after summer had passed.
As I thought more about them, I realized it was not the sound of the cicada that had caused me to jump. It was the sight of it. It was the nearness of it, in an everyday space, right at my feet. It wasn’t the sound humming in the tree limbs above that made me react. Instead, it was the shell-covered, pulpy body, the exposed eyes, the sudden closeness. These aren’t the features of creatures we are taught to love and admire aesthetically like butterflies or hummingbirds. Cicadas don’t tend to immediately evoke softness, beauty, or comfort. And yet, they are real, fully alive. They will be heard and when you do hear them, they are difficult to ignore.
As I started hearing cicadas again this year, I began learning about different kinds. Some that stood out to me were the annual, which of course, appear every year. The 13-year periodical cicadas. And the one that really stood out to me was the 17-year cicada, which spends much of its life underground as a nymph. After 17 years, these cicadas emerge in large numbers, molts, mate, and live their lives aboveground for only a few short weeks.
One of the reasons why this stood out to me in this particular year is because right now, I am 35 years old, meaning that 17 years ago, I was 18, in 2008, which was the year I became, what they say is “officially” an adult. And when I think about the mountains and valleys I've traveled through since then, the widening, trembling grief, the unexplainable joy, and everything in between, I started to find a connection to something quiet but exacting about the underground life of the 17-year cicada: so much can be happening while nothing looks like it’s moving. The things that have happened in that time 17 year time period at every scale from personal, to interpersonal, to communal, to national, to global has been nothing small at all, as we all know, 17 years is more than enough time for decisions, consequences, the predictable, and the unpredictable to impact us again and again. And then, somehow, through it all, the years go by. There are these moments where movement stirs and rises. You break the surface and you stretch into the air. You shed the old exoskeleton you didn’t realize you’d outgrown.
But…then what?
Perhaps, at times, transformation feels linear, but perhaps, at other times, it can feel like this: Like a cicada, you become this creature with a form shaped by a process the rest of the world didn’t seem to track in real time. You become a physical record of long cycles that defy quick understanding. You transform, yes. You become something. Your whole being remembers the duration: the intervals, the conditions, the timing that the rest of the world did not see. The memory of it all is recorded in your wings, your movement, your presence: But even after you rise and you learn to fly, you may start to wonder: will the world even know what to do who I've become?
This experience, that the cicada illustrates, is what I’ve been calling the cost of transformation: having to live the change while the world responds in ways you cannot always predict. It is the experience of being out here, in the world, knowing you’ve been on a multi-year journey in the underground, and then, you rise…and like a cicada, not everyone will see you or the sound of you as something beautiful...especially not up close. The cost is living with the tension that when it comes to how you transform, the world may welcome, resist, ignore, or celebrate it, and perhaps, all at once.
We are in a moment in time where many of us have become well acquainted with words like courage, resilience, transformation. We see the need for it at every scale from the personal to the collective. These can be useful, steady words that can serve as containers for depth of process, struggle, and change over time. And at the same time, we have these reminders in nature, often overlooked, such as the cicada, that reveal how unconventional the process of coming forth with what you’ve carried can be. It is not always neat or easy or something that others can understand … or that you can even fully understand yourself. And yet, it is still a process worth acknowledging.
One area where I’ve seen this clearly in my own life is when it comes to trying to tell any kind of health-related story, whether from a research and advocacy perspective or simply when giving an update. Whether it’s my experience of being diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and sensory processing disorder at age 31, or how long it took to recover mentally and physically, including postpartum and after my myomectomy, or the childhood illness I once lived with, or even when I try to share updates about the health challenges my family members face, the stories often move in loops. They rarely have clear beginnings or endings. And yet, when someone asks a simple question like “How’s it been?” or “How do you work through this?” it feels like trying to remember all those 17 years underground: like the cicada, you’ve gone through so much out of view that putting it into words that still might not be understood, even when people are well-meaning.
But what if a transformation story didn’t have to be quick, simple, linear, or legible to everyone to be worth telling?
What if there was still room for stories to fly, and live a loud, full-bodied presence in the world, even if everyone didn’t fully understand?
Something else I’ve learned about cicadas is that when they fly, they do not lift off in perfect arcs. They don’t fly as many butterflies and birds do. Their flight is clumsy, short, and sometimes sudden. And perhaps what we can learn from this is: even as you rise, even as you begin to speak or move forward with fear or awkwardness or self-consciousness still present, it might not look the way others expect or the way you pictured it yourself.
But even then, like the cicada, your flight is still your flight.
The way you spread your wings is still the way you spread your wings.
The way you must face the cost of transformation aboveground doesn’t take away from the aliveness you encountered at the root, underground.
If anything, I hope this can be a reminder that whatever it is you’ve been underground about, it is okay to acknowledge what it costs. It’s okay if the journey you are on does not feel like it matches on to something that’s easy to understand or explain, like clean images of a butterfly’s metamorphosis. All of this may feel beautiful and terrifying all at once, and as you feel it all, it will be felt with wholeheartedness. You might encounter the pressures of perfection, but you might also just encounter the fullness of wholeness, too. There will be room to get up close. And there will also be room to acknowledge what all this transformation costs. And there will also be room to dare to sing, anyway. To be the cicada that knows no matter what others see in it or fear in it, you were still meant to rise.
Reflection Questions:
What parts of your life have changed quietly, beneath the surface, without others noticing?
Look up an insect you already like or feel familiar with. What’s something about its life cycle or behavior you didn’t know before?
-Morgan Harper Nichols is an artist, author, PhD Student (Communication Studies), and creator of the Storyteller app based in Georgia, USA.