There is something about a dragonfly that stops time. Maybe it is the shimmer of its wings—each one paper-thin but iridescent, as if painted with the memory of light. Maybe it is the way it hovers: suspended, alert, always half a second from vanishing. Or maybe it is the story you do not see—the one that begins underwater, in darkness and mud.
Dragonflies do not start in the air. They begin their lives submerged, as nymphs crawling through algae, feeding in silence at the bottom of ponds and slow-moving streams. They live like this for months—sometimes years—before rising. And when they do, they do not crawl out quietly. They shed their skin, climb the reeds, and take flight.
No one tells that part. People just see the wings and call it beautiful.
But if you are reading this, if you have survived anything that tried to bury you, then you know better.
You know the wings are earned.
The Storm That Found Me
Several years ago, I lost my right arm. That sentence sounds so clinical—like an accidental subtraction. But it was not clean. It was a storm. One I did not walk into voluntarily, but one that came for me anyway. And it did not just take a limb. It brought grief. It brought stares. It brought stigma, pity, and silence. It brought the slow realization that the world does not know how to treat people whose bodies no longer conform to its assumptions.
In those first weeks of recovery, I thought I was being tested. I tried to be brave, to stay strong. I leaned into the grit that trauma had taught me. But no one tells you how heavy “being strong” feels when all you want is to be allowed to be human.
And then—during one of those sterile physical therapy mornings—I saw a dragonfly just outside the window.
Its wings quivered. Its body tilted and adapted to the breeze. It was not resisting the wind; it was responding to it. That was the lesson.
That moment unlocked something in me.
Strength, I realized, was not about force. It was about flexibility. It was not about pretending everything was fine. It was about learning how to move—honestly, imperfectly—through a world that had changed.
I had spent my whole life trying to be unshakable. But the dragonfly did not survive by being unshakable. It survived by changing.
Surface, Do Not Shatter
The most beautiful thing about the dragonfly is not its colors. It is the fact that it surfaces. That it lives hidden, unseen, unknown for years—and then rises.
“Some of us do not just rise—we surface. Like the dragonfly, we come up from the depths carrying the truth of what we’ve lived through, not the shame.”
That became my new theology.
I stopped trying to hide the parts of my life that people called “too much.” I stopped apologizing for the stumbles. I stopped rewriting my story to make others comfortable.
And I began becoming.
What started as a blog post turned into a project—a community really—centered on mental health, identity, disability, stigma, recovery, incarceration, queerness, and healing. Not from a textbook, but from lived experience. From real people who have been silenced, erased, or simplified for the sake of other people’s comfort.
I did not want to “inspire” them. I wanted to recognize them.
And when they found me, something amazing happened: they brought their wings with them.
The becoming Community: Carriers of Light
If you only knew what my inbox looked like.
Letters from people who survived overdoses and now walk into courtrooms with Narcan in their pockets, saving others. Notes from men who spent 20 years in prison and are now teaching creative writing to teens. Confessions from queer teenagers in rural towns who finally said, “I think this is who I am,” and dared to say it out loud.
Not one of them claimed to be healed. But all of them had decided not to disappear.
For us, the dragonfly is more than symbolic. It is sacred. It is how we speak to one another without saying everything. It is shorthand for survival. It is code for the kind of transformation that does not fit on a bumper sticker.
They do not need Hallmark. They need truth.
“To the world, the dragonfly is delicate. To us, it is proof that wings can grow from wounds.”
That is what I see in them. That is what they mirror back to me.
These are not passive readers. These are people doing the impossible—choosing to keep showing up, keep feeling, keep surfacing. They have taught me that shame cannot survive visibility. That language matters. That storytelling is not therapy, it is survival.
On Not Breaking
When people ask what becoming is really about, I sometimes say: “It is where we bend instead of break.”
We live in a world that tells us to be strong, but it does not tell us what to do when that strength turns brittle. It does not celebrate softness. It does not allow grief to be cyclical, pain to be layered, or recovery to be nonlinear.
But dragonflies? They know.
They do not fly in straight lines. They dart. They loop. They hover. They disappear, only to reappear.
They are erratic and glorious and impossible to pin down.
Like us.
The dragonfly is not a lesson in perfection. It is a lesson in movement. It is a reminder that even when our past is murky, our wings can still catch the light.
Quotes That Echo Our Lives
When I first read the line, “The dragonfly exists for but a moment—and lives it fully. Let that be enough,” I froze.
It was not fatalism. It was freedom.
So many of us live like we have to earn our breath, like we must produce joy or triumph to justify our survival. But that quote reminded me that being here—being alive—is enough.
Existing is enough.
And sometimes, existing fully means feeling everything: the joy, the grief, the rage, the numbness, the quiet victories that no one claps for. Dragonflies do not explain themselves. They just are.
So are we.
Your Wings Are Yours
If you are reading this and you feel like you are still underwater—still crawling through the muck, still waiting for the moment when the light hits—you are not alone.
You do not have to be shiny to be seen. You do not have to be whole to be worthy.
You do not have to fly to be free.
And when the day comes that you surface—and it will—you may find that your wings do not match anyone else’s. Good.
Let them be crooked. Let them be scarred. Let them be yours.
Because in the end, what the dragonfly teaches us is not how to escape the storm. It teaches us how to be beautiful in it.
Not by being unbreakable.
But by becoming.
If this spoke to you, you are part of the becoming community now.
Come as you are. We surface together.
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What can a dragonfly teach us about healing? Everything. From survival after amputation to stories of reentry and mental health recovery, this post explores how wings can grow from wounds—and why being flexible, not unbreakable, is the real strength.
