Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

I was mid-thought the fifth of sixth time I told it. The Frog and the Scorpion. You know the one. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates. The scorpion makes its case: why would I sting you, we’d both die. The logic sounds tight. The frog agrees. Halfway across, the scorpion stings. As they’re both sinking, the frog asks why?!?!? The scorpion, already drowning: It’s my nature.

I was using it to make a point I’d learned the hard way: stop being surprised by people’s patterns. When people show you who they are and you don’t want to believe them, when you bypass hard truths by virtue-signaling your own generosity, it might not end well. The why-asking, the dumbstruck faces, the clutching-pearl-guffaws. I’d lived all of it.

But something kept nagging at me.

Why did the frog have to die with the scorpion?

I went searching on the interwebs for some academic or philosophical or even a Reddit on the topic. And I found something I didn’t expect.
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Another version!
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Turns out the frog variant is modern-ish, Russian, 1933. The original is Persian and far older, at least the fifteenth century: The Turtle and the Scorpion. The turtle’s shell changes everything. In some tellings, the sting doesn’t penetrate. In others, the turtle surfaces, scarred but breathing. The scorpion slides off and drowns alone.

But armor as a life strategy?
Armor is designed for emergencies, hard seasons, crises, not a permanent baseline. Not a lifestyle. That’s not honoring our lifeforce energy to be infinitely on the defensive, braced for the next sting around the corner. That’s survival mode. That calcifies something tender in you (something you actually need).

So I decided to rewrite it myself: a luna moth, drawn to fire, has gotten burned, has earned wisdom.

My first draft was telling.
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The moth lands beside the scorpion and named the wound underneath the pattern:
​You sting because you don’t know what else to do when someone gets close.​
​You sting because you it’s your wounded child’s coping mechanism.
You sting because you that’s all you know.
You sting because it's easier than learning to swim.
You sting because it works.
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​Basically, I psychologized the toxicity into something softer, something the moth could gently illuminate from the safety of its own self-awareness.

Woop, there she was! My over-functioning self. Dressed up in moth wings.
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I went back to the pen and paper. And I realized the problem: every version of this fable argues with the scorpion’s nature. The frog tries to override it with logic. The turtle armors against it. My first moth attempt tried to reframe it as a wound. All of them resist the one thing the scorpion actually said that was true.

It’s my nature.

What if the moth just believed it?

In the version I decided to keep, the moth says no. Plainly. The scorpion makes its argument. The moth listens and says the two words no other animal in any version ever managed:

I believe you.

The moth’s credibility comes from its own flame-scarred history. I know what it is to be built toward something that can destroy you, it says. The difference is I stopped expecting the flame to be something other than fire.

The moth doesn’t reclassify the scorpion’s behavior. Doesn’t call the sting a preference or a fear response. It says: I see what you are today (and I’m not offering my back).

Then the moth flits off the bank. Flies to the other side. Lands in the grass. Whole.
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​(Your refusal is as sacred as your participation. It's knowing when to do which).

The scorpion stands at the edge for a long time. Whether it crosses is its own work, its own story to rewrite.

The frog teaches you that danger is real. The turtle teaches you that protection is possible. The moth teaches you that believing someone the first time (really believing them, without needing to fix or explain or reroute what they told you) is sometimes the most honest, generous, whole thing you can do.

We can always rewrite the learnings in our lives.

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The moth’s refusal maps onto something the brain already knows how to do. When we let it.

A 2025 study from Caltech and the University of Melbourne discovered that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) doesn’t just register threats. It actively builds what researchers call a meta-representation of safety: a live, updated internal model that integrates both threat signals and your own capacity for self-protection, simultaneously. Separate subregions handle each signal. The posterior vmPFC tracks external danger while the anterior vmPFC processes protection and together they produce a calibrated estimate of how safe you actually are, right now, in this moment.

(Which is a very sophisticated way of saying: your brain can simultaneously hold I see the stinger and I know I have wings in the same neural breath.)

That’s the moth at the riverbank. It doesn’t argue with the threat. It doesn’t pretend the stinger isn’t real. It processes both and makes a clear decision.

The frog’s neuroscience is different. It operates on a single input: the scorpion’s argument. No internal protection estimate. No pattern recognition drawn from prior crossings. When the logic sounds good, the frog climbs onto the raft of someone else’s reasoning and hopes for the best.

Now layer in the empathy question. Social neuroscientist Tania Singer’s 2025 review synthesizes two decades of fMRI research confirming that empathy and compassion run on distinct neural circuits. Empathy, the felt sharing of another’s suffering, fires up the anterior insula and midcingulate cortex. Compassion, the warm motivation to care without absorbing someone’s pain activates an entirely separate network: the ventral striatum, pregenual anterior cingulate, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Brain regions wired for affiliation and positive affect.

In compassion-training studies, participants who were first trained in empathy alone showed increased negative affect and greater distress when witnessing suffering. Their anterior insulas lit up like alarm panels. But when subsequent compassion training was introduced, that distress reversed. Positive affect climbed. The empathy-circuit overwhelm quieted. Compassion training didn’t numb the signal. It rerouted the response from absorption to clarity.

Singer’s lab calls what happens without that rerouting empathic distress fatigue. The language matters. Compassion doesn’t fatigue you. Unchecked empathic absorption does. The frog didn’t die from too much compassion. It died from absorbing the scorpion’s logic as its own safety estimate and calling that trust.

The moth operates from the compassion circuit. It sees. It feels. It does not absorb. Its self-other distinction stays clear which is what allows it to say I believe you and still use its own wings without guilt.

PRACTICE

Sit with this. Pull out a journal or a blank page.

Write something you know to be true:

About them. About you. About the pattern, the situation, the thing that keeps repeating itself.

Where have you been the moth? Where have you been the scorpion? (because I’ve been both the moth and scorpion).

What do you already know to be true?

Say it out loud if you need to. Then put it down. Walk to the other side of your own river. Land in the grass.

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P.S. You were always the one with wings, Reader.