“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
— Joseph Campbell
Every year, around my birthday, my father and I waited for the cicadas.
He was an artist and photographer, interested in the moment of emergence. He would set up his cameras, reflectors, and lights, arranging everything so he could get close—very close—to something most people would never think to examine at all.
Then we would go inside and celebrate my birthday.
There would be candles and cake and the usual annual evidence that I was another year older.
And somewhere between the candles and the last crumbs, we would go back outside.
The cicadas would be beginning to emerge.
My father would move in with his camera.
I would watch.
A creature I recognized as a cicada would slowly pull itself out of a hard brown body that also looked remarkably like a cicada.
The back would split.
Something pale and vulnerable would begin the difficult climb out.
Eventually it would be free.
The shell would remain behind.
Then, I suppose, we went to bed.
I was a child.
I had no idea I was attending an annual seminar on becoming.
I thought it was just my birthday.
It has taken me all these years—and another birthday—to understand what my father was showing me through the close-up lens of his art.
Grow.
Emerge.
Become.
And when the thing that once held you can no longer contain you, leave it behind.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
I used to think that was advice for young people.
Of course it is.
Young people stand at the beginning of things. They choose careers and partners and cities. They make plans and change them. The life waiting for them seems enormous because most of it still is.
But I wonder now whether Campbell’s words become even more important when we are older.
Because eventually the life we planned has already happened.
Then what?
I have just had another birthday.
At a certain age, that phrase—another year older—is generally spoken with a certain tone. Sometimes rueful. Sometimes congratulatory. Occasionally accompanied by jokes about knees, memory, reading glasses, or the alarming number of candles required to represent the situation accurately.
The assumption underneath all of it is that aging is primarily accumulation.
Another year added.
Another candle.
Another layer.
But the cicadas my father photographed were teaching precisely the opposite lesson.
Growth sometimes requires subtraction.
The cicada doesn’t carry its old body with it.
It grows until the thing that protected it becomes too small.
Then it leaves.
I have spent much of my life becoming the person I thought I was supposed to become.
Wife.
Mother.
Teacher.
Administrator.
Friend.
Neighbor.
Keeper of calendars and traditions and family stories.
I was good at much of it.
I loved much of it.
That matters.
We are sometimes too eager to describe transformation as escape, as though becoming someone new requires repudiating the person who came before.
But the cicada does not condemn the shell.
The shell worked.
It protected something vulnerable while it grew.
And then one day, because the growing had succeeded, the shell no longer fit.
That is different.
I understand that now.
There have been several shells in my life.
Identities that fit perfectly until they didn’t.
Plans I was certain would carry me all the way through.
Ideas about who I was, what mattered, what permanence looked like, and what the rest of my life would contain.
Some of them split open.
Some I climbed out of willingly.
Some were taken from me before I understood that I would have to become someone who could live without them.
And now, unexpectedly, I am writing.
Not someday.
Not when I have more time.
Not when everything else is finished.
Now.
I write essays. I send them out into the world. I submit them to editors who may say yes and editors who may say no. I begin again. I revise. I discover things I did not know I thought until I see the sentences on the page.
I have become a beginner at an age when I once imagined I would be finished becoming.
Perhaps that is why those childhood birthdays have returned to me so vividly.
My father was an artist. He understood that changing the distance changes what you see.
From across the yard, there was a bug.
Through his lens, there was transformation.
From across the years, there was a little girl having another birthday.
Look closer.
She was becoming.
So was the woman she would become.
So is the woman I am now.
My father never sat me down and told me any of this.
He didn’t say, Someday you will build a life you love and discover that loving it doesn’t mean you must remain unchanged inside it.
He didn’t say, You will become many people.
He didn’t say, Some things you believe are permanent will not be.
He didn’t say, When that happens, grow anyway.
Instead, he gave me birthday cake.
Then he took me outside.
He adjusted the lens.
He showed me a cicada climbing out of a body it no longer needed.
Year after year.
Another birthday.
Another cicada.
Another emergence.
Another lesson I wouldn’t understand until I was old enough to need it.
Perhaps this is what another year older means after all.
Not one year closer to becoming less.
One more year of becoming.
One more chance to discover that something I thought was fixed can still change.
One more shell that may fit until it doesn’t.
One more life waiting inside the one I planned.
My father taught me what to do.
Look closely.
Grow.
Emerge.
Become.
And when the old shell finally splits, don’t mistake it for the end.
It may be evidence that you have grown enough to leave it behind.
Helaine Fiedler splits her time between cities and sandy shores. She writes about life, growth, and all the wonderfully imperfect bits in between. Her Substack, Quiet Roars, explores connection, everyday rhythms, and the small moments that matter most—where the softest observations often leave the strongest echoes.