Whenever I suffer an emotional blow, I have a coded phrase that my husband and daughter both understand. I say, “The urchin has been activated.” That’s because I have a sea urchin living in my chest and whenever something hurts me, the urchin wakes up and starts poking me with its spikes. Sometimes the urchin is only activated for a few hours or days but sometimes it can go on for weeks, interrupting my sleep and draining pleasure out of joyful things. My urchin was very active for several years after my mom died and sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, those spikes were so sharp.
The upside of all my urchin experience is that when the urchin strikes, I’ve developed strategies to deal with it. No. 1: I complain very loudly to my husband. He’s my chief urchin tamer. He listens well and says sensible things and eventually the urchin gives up and goes back to its hole. My daughter is also very good at urchin-wrangling. The urchin can’t resist her calm sympathy and good humor and she has the little echinoderm practically purring in no time.
Occasionally, the urchin resists coaxing, digs in and makes me miserable. Then I have to deploy my personal array of sea otters, starfish and crabs — the urchin’s natural predators — to show it who’s boss. My go-to method is reading fiction, because that immediately takes my attention away from pokey urchin spines. If that fails, I write. If I can get my thoughts down on paper and sort them out logically, that’s the equivalent of an urchinectomy. Writing about the urchin allows me to get it outside my body so I can see that it’s really just a little thing and easily dealt with.
The next line of defense is to do something constructive, either for myself or someone else. This is tough because, when I’m having an urchin attack, I really don’t want to do anything. Any kind of movement or action hurts too much (or at least I think it will). The key here is to ignore the pain and go do the thing and then pretty soon I’m involved in the activity and I’m not thinking about the urchin anymore. Gardening is great for de-urchin-ification. So is drawing or painting or anything creative. Tackling a cleaning or organizational project is guaranteed to substantially reduce urchin pain.
