Morgan DiPrimo has always been drawn to butterflies — not just as a pretty image, but as something that carries real meaning. She believes life has a way of sending quiet signs: a song at the right moment, a person calling when you were just thinking of them, a sentence that answers the question you’ve been obsessing over. Lately, for her, those signs have been butterflies.
Years ago, in eating disorder treatment, a therapist introduced her to the butterfly as a symbol of recovery. The caterpillar doesn’t simply change — it dissolves into goo inside the cocoon before becoming something entirely different. DiPrimo writes that recovery works the same way: you don’t go back to who you were before. You go through something. You lose parts of yourself, discover others, learn how much you can survive, and eventually start becoming someone you couldn’t have imagined when you were still stuck inside.
Now, as she builds Align33 Media, she finds herself questioning everything — whether she’s doing enough, whether it will work, whether the gap between where things are and where she wants them to be is too large. And every time she reaches one of those moments, a butterfly appears. She acknowledges the obvious: butterflies live outdoors. But she notices them, and every time she does, something in her settles.
The essay reflects on the idea that transformation doesn’t happen once. There is no single cocoon moment, no clean “before” and “after.” Recovery was one cocoon. Motherhood was another. Building Align33 is another. Life, she writes, may just be a series of becoming, over and over again — outgrowing versions of yourself, shedding identities you thought you needed, sometimes flying and sometimes crawling back into the goo.
When she sees a butterfly now, she doesn’t take it as proof that everything will work out. She takes it as a smaller, more useful reminder: that she has changed before, survived uncertainty before, and become things the girl sitting in treatment could never have imagined. Maybe the butterflies know something she doesn’t. Or maybe they just remind her of something she already does. Keep going.
Originally published on morgandiprimo.substack.com.
