New Skin

"Sometimes snakes can't slough. They can't burst their own skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern.
It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don't care what happens to you, so long as you do get out. It also needs a real belief in the new skin. Otherwise you are likely never to make that effort. Then you gradually sicken and go rotten and die in the old skin."

---D.H. Lawrence