Inside the Cocoon, There's Goo

Our miserable, messy, renaissance muck.

Grounded in the mess of America

After a four-year hiatus from public writing, I started this Substack newsletter in December 2021. For a decade, at the highlight of my writing career in periodicals, I reached 40,000 monthly readers in regional print. My background is in journalism, copywriting, and technical writing, and in those fields, I won awards and made great (for me) accomplishments. And then I decided to go to grad school to get a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing.

Until then, I was a writer, earning my income from writing in some form, for more than 25 years. And I was a good writer (or so I thought) until I spent time around people who examine the logistical tools and science of writing to produce what is determined to be art. And here I thought creative writing would be more fun than my 25 years of business writing and journalism. No. At the master’s level, they are very serious about the art of writing. In academia, it’s all about the BOOK, what I assume is a side-effect of the “publish or perish” pressure on faculty in higher education.

Among such talented, detailed, serious scholars of the craft, I very quickly realized I was not worthy to be among them. Following my graduation, my inner creative child who serves as my muse pouted for four years, providing zero inspiration. And then, in the miserable winter of 2021, I decided to write again for the public. With no purpose, no plan, and no goals other than to write for an audience again. I was fresh into the “new normal” that came post-pandemic, at the beginning of understanding that most of the radical shift results of 2020 were actually happening within.

Yes, the world has gone topsy-turvy, but in many ways, I feel I have been a different person with a different perspective for each of the four years following the pandemic.

• 2020 - total survival response

• 2021 - throwing my cards into the air for a game of 52 pick-up

• 2022 - picking up and evaluating the new cards

• 2023 - confusion and depression

• 2024 - disappointment and anger

Here we are now, early 2025, and in many ways, any pre-pandemic sanity of our collective system has completely evaporated.

For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it wraps itself inside a cocoon and turns to goo. Total goo. For us to achieve rebirth, we have to forfeit any sense of form. For us to reach our personal or social renaissance, there first has to be a refusal to behave as we have always behaved, a rejection of the current paradigm, and a reconnection to authenticity.

In a world where we have been reduced to digital consumers manipulated by algorithms and misinformation, we really have forgotten how to be happy, healthy humans. Our leaders and our government have been killing people for profit for decades. It has become morally acceptable for the ends to justify the means. But the true core survival skill in this day and age is the ability to change within to create ripples of change without.

I felt, in 2021, that we were at the beginning of a renaissance, which is why I worked to incorporate that concept into my title. I was writing again, we were facing a new normal, and we’ve been shifting to a new paradigm. Clearly, it is a messy, murky, miserable process that makes many of us feel like we’ve been slimed by toxic goo.

But, something is stirring in our cultural fog. The patriarchal paradigm now serves so few that the masses are no longer following along blindly. Consumption of national news has dropped over 60% since the election. Users are leaving Facebook, X, and Amazon in droves. Bookstores are becoming popular again, as are typewriters, vinyl records, baking bread, spiritual searching, and creating by hand.

The inauguration of oligarchs is enough to make anyone feel slimed and gooey. The fact that it happens during a rare planetary alignment with flags flown at half-staff is not lost on me. And those are the thoughts that keep me from writing, the ones that, once said, draw hate from one side or another - criticism, and feigned concern.

This is a society that functions now on judgment and shame. It’s difficult to write with any candor or authenticity much less be creative in a digital world that expects us to make the process profitable.

I don’t have a plan here. I don’t have a niche other than I simply no longer have any inclination to be a functioning member of our society’s current paradigm.

Why not cocoon and turn to goo? Why be defined by a society that counts us as algorithms and acceptable losses? (Or even worse, difficult women.) Be you. Be goo. The days are growing longer. Spring is not so far away. Eventually, we will have to emerge, and four years isn’t forever.

But if you want to, just for now, feel free to be goo.