How To Catch A Butterfly

I used to think love was something you went out and caught. Like a butterfly. If you were fast enough, careful enough, beautiful enough… maybe it would land in your hands and stay.

But love—real love—doesn’t work like that.

When you try to catch a butterfly, you risk damaging its wings. You can trap it, but you’ll never see it fly. Love is the same. Try to hold it too tightly, try to make it stay, and you’ll crush the very thing that made it beautiful in the first place.

It took me years to understand this. Decades, even. Ten years of deep digging—pulling my life up by the roots, stripping away every illusion—before I finally faced the truth:

I had never been unconditionally loved. And I realized I wasn’t alone.

Most of us haven’t. We’ve been taught that love is something we earn, something given to us only when we behave, achieve, please, or sacrifice. We’ve been told to search for it in other people, to grasp it before it slips away. But that kind of love is just an imitation—a bargain dressed as a promise.

Unconditional love is different.

It can’t be caught. It can only be given away.

This is my story—the years I spent chasing butterflies, and the moment I realized the only way to have one land on you is to become a safe place for it to rest.

I am no longer chasing. I am becoming. 🦋