The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

by Evanna Lynch

My mum smiled fondly as my cousins giggled in the background, but a small frown creased her forehead as she explained to me that I couldn’t actually be a cat or a pony or a butterfly. I was a girl, and that meant that I’d grow up to be a woman. Woman. I let the word pass quickly and inconsequentially over me like a bad smell.

What daft law of nature insisted we must all live such dull, segregated lives?

‘That’s just science,’ Mum answered. ‘That’s just our biology; it’s not something we get to choose.’ I decided, in that moment, that I didn’t like science. It forced brutal, uncompromising restraints on my imagination that there was no coming back from.

I started to worry that given that every human girl on the planet and in the history of human evolution had never matured into anything beyond the scope of Homo sapiens, it was unlikely that I was going to be the first. Apparently, out of the 8.7 million forms of life on earth, I’d been born into the most mundane of them all.

But not really…It didn’t matter what kind of guise she came in, and that was where everyone misunderstood me: I didn’t want to be any kind of woman. I wanted to be a mermaid. I wanted to be a Jigglypuff. I wanted to be a hand-drawn cartoon fairy. I wanted to be a singing pony with magic rainbow hair. I even wanted to be a girl in glittery jeans and a butterfly top. I just could not see myself becoming a woman.

have to admit that my sartorial choices were eyebrow-raising, and I didn’t have the bold personality to back them up. But I was trying to show up as the person I wanted to be. It just so happened that this boy saw right through this pitiable facade to the lost, empty space I was trying to fill.)

I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good. But that’s the tricky thing about art: it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression or excretion. It couldn’t be measured by scales or charts or contained in small manageable segments of the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect – and the imperfections drove me mad.

If you’ve ever been held down by hands that didn’t care for you as you fought, tooth and nail, for your life, then maybe you know what this feels like. Maybe you understand this kind of defeat.

Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.

I don’t approve of solely treating the body and turning a deaf ear to the soul crying out for help. A soul can still drown in a healthy body.

Dreaming is underrated, I think, so often dismissed as a fanciful, childish, passive activity for immature people not rooted in reality. But sometimes, reality is truly unbearable, not worth enduring, and dreaming offers the only way out of it: a light in impenetrable darkness, even if it’s an illusory one you conjured by your imagination.

And that’s the great thing about dreaming; you don’t have to have a shred of self-worth to do it, you only have to have imagination.

it’s easier to medicate it than it is to sit with the raw pain of “why am I here?” Kids are getting younger with it; they’re asking questions of “Why am I here? Who put me here to do what?”, and those questions must be answered. If they can’t find solutions to those questions, they’re not going to bother buying into the three-dimensional currencies of food, sex, getting a job: all that stuff just feels rudimentary and pointless, so they don’t bother. That’s why these people tend to fall between the cracks, because they’re not treated properly.’

has a theory on this: ‘If you spot it, you’ve got it,’ she continues to remind me in moments of too much jealousy or awe for another person. She means that when something or someone else captivates you to the point of distraction, it is because they are reflecting something within you that is longing to be expressed.

The thing that I had spotted, I had got.

Recovery is not a smooth, linear path, and though I was literally living my dreams, inhabiting this awe-inspiring world of storytelling, art and magic, I still woke up to myself every day: this person who I struggled to accept and had tried to undo.

‘Why don’t you worry in the other direction?’ she demanded, nailing me with her penetrating green gaze, which lovingly refused to ever let her students off the hook. ‘Why don’t you worry that it will all work out and you’ll meet all your creative matches and you’ll be too successful and too happy and too busy with how much work you have? Why must you always anticipate the absolute worst-case scenario, when you could worry that everything will just be too wonderful? Why do you do that? Why?’ Good point, I thought. Why do I?

Negativity always leads you to a dead end; you can crawl into the darkest, dankest corner, and though it is lonely and miserable, you know where the wall is, your back firmly pressed against it, and there is something wonderfully safe about that.

The safe problem – if you continue down that path – becomes the rock on which you perish.’

I think you never outgrow it, because it’s part of your psyche. How can you cut off a part of yourself? You don’t pull your ear off because you don’t like what you hear. You’re not going to root out a part of your inner design because you don’t like what it’s designing.

If you spot it, you’ve got it, and all that – there is healing that happens when we reclaim lost parts of ourselves that we find reflected in others.

I think the safe path always leads to a dead end.

Maybe perfection isn’t for women at all. Maybe it’s just for butterflies on the wing. Or flowers. Or drawings of women, or photos of women, or maybe even the briefest, most fleeting moments of women. Maybe actual women are always, in their fullest expression, bodies, not ideas or images or dreams of them, and maybe every body changes when we choose to fully live our lives. And maybe I will live a happier, wilder, more colourful and unpredictable life if I can finally abandon the debilitating and brutal pursuit of perfection. If I can learn to love butterflies from afar, and watch them fly away.