On Urchins

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Waterboatmen

Sometimes I feel like I’ve swallowed an urchin. One of the black spiky ones, that look like a mine and act like one too, lying at the bottom of the water to catch you. I stood on one on a beach in Diani, and the ends of some of the long black spines snapped off and embedded themselves into my foot, got yanked out with a needle and a stiff leaf. I saw the strange sight of nine black dots in the pad of my foot, just below my big toe, felt the oddness of a needle rummaging inside me to remove them.

When coral dies, urchins can still live under concrete houses, which seems appropriate. Black mines nestled under grey arches.

I feel like my urchin is lodged underneath my rib cage and even when I am as soft and as gooey and as dissolved as I can be, it’s still there, spiny and sharp. Sometimes it reaches up through my oesophagus and out through my throat and I feel my words turn into black ash, sharp and metallic, choked out, and I want to excuse myself, point out how it’s not me, it’s the urchin - ‘Oh sorry, I’ve got this urchin-thing—‘ - but it would take too long to explain.

Apparently you have to remove the spines quickly but this one has been lodged under my rib cage for so long I’m not entirely sure what to do now, and at what point am ‘I’ simply ‘I-with-the-urchin’. To me, I’m an ‘I’ but I’m not sure how others could tell the difference. The black ash does come out of my mouth after all.

***

Our brain developed in layers. In the centre, right at the core, are the very basic functions needed for survival. This is what controls your lungs and your heart and all the simplest functions for life. As we got more and more evolved, more and more complex, the layers grew in sophistication. We began to reason, to remember, to think. I think of the brain now as covered in a light electrical skin, a pulse that wraps round the outside, a pulse that comprises our most complex, human thought, a pulse of consciousness.

Sometimes I have an attack of the water-boatmen. They set up on this skin, black and spindly and wrap their way around my head, cut their way through that thin electrical pulse, distort it. The past few days, they have been back with a vengeance, whispering a litany of ways in which I am not enough and will never be enough. That I am not kind, a bad friend, more trouble than it’s worth. They are not the urchin but they do point him out, him booming out orders through my spinal cord. There’s something symbiotic between them, although I’m not entirely sure what.

***

I’m solving a puzzle at the moment, how to stay confident and happy in yourself when your brain seems to be pulling every piece of information it can to prove the opposite. Trying to come up with a response, something to shield myself from the water boatman, stop me noticing the urchin. I’m not particularly confident at the best of times - although what sort of statement is that. Like anyone, I have places I’m confident in, things I am confident about. More specifically, I am not always particularly confident about my character - not always sure that I am likeable, loveable, kind. And, as breakups do, this one has given my confidence a bit of a bashing.

So I’m trying, particularly in the witching hours of three to six, to build a case to myself that proves otherwise. To show myself, offer proof or data that I am okay - that I’m alright. It’s not my first rodeo. Growing up, I looked for numbers, chasing grades and times, something that could be written down and made evident. But I’ve written elsewhere about the oddness and inadequacy of these quantifiable traits. Numbers don’t capture the important stuff, and as I grow up, I think less and less of them.

Then, on the gap year, I built up some memories, some surefire proofs I could return to. I shared a tent with a friend for months, in a small room miles from anywhere with someone wonderful, and I remain awed by how lovely it was - no arguments, no tension, just a long sustained block of joy. The same with the commune, and another proof with my friends from home - learning to trust they did actually like me for me, rather than (as the boatman incessantly suggest) because I’m simply around. Another is this Substack (the absurdity of how important a blog is to me). Writing things down gives me data. I look at the version of me in this column and, vain as it sounds, I do like her. I like my type 2, slower self, this me-with-an-edit. Those do, both help.

Last, and most important, is focusing on bravery. I’ve realised that self-confidence is, for the most part, a close cousin with faith. We just don’t know if people find us funny, or likeable, or kind. The data is locked away in other peoples heads, gleaned from conversations or messages, and ultimately we simply have to have faith, believe. The exception is bravery. Bravery seems, to me at least, wholly internal. Only you know how scared you’ve been, only you know what it took to overcome that fear, only you know if you are brave.

And I am lucky, because I do know that I am brave. So this is what I am, trying, to tell myself, tell the water-boatmen scratching around in my head. That I do know that I am brave.

***

Break-Up-Date: I actually wrote the first part of this about a month ago, in a wobble that passed. At the time it was awful, really awful, a big compounding mess shaking my body, my head and my heart. But, as it always does, it passed. And, even in this post-breakup phase, pretty tender and pretty sore, I still don’t feel anywhere near as bad as I did in early Jan. We’ve also had some beyond brilliant news about my trooper of a granny, who is being moved into a rehabilitation hospital, which dwarfs my dating woes by a factor of around million. And I flew home, which was needed. I’ve had friends be beyond lovely, and been fed, watered and generally looked after by my rents.

In the interests of full disclosure - my #OperationClassAndGrace didn’t quite work out as intended. I ended up a bit less saintly, and a bit more human than I seemed in my last Substack. After finally seeing Adam in person, the whole thing caught up with me, and I lost my rag (me, not urchin, although it’ll be delighted). Not a great moment, but I’m trying to cut myself some slack - this has been a massive shock. (There’s other elements, but this sounds petty enough without details. In my defence, everything you write after a breakup inevitably sounds pretty petty. There is simply no way to avoid that ‘Drunken Karen on the Community Facebook Group after a bit too much wine’ vibe).

I wanted to be honest about this, to be clear that I wasn’t as saintly as I intended to be when I wrote immediately after the break up. That level of grace is probably attainable for some, but I don’t want my lovely readers thinking it was for me.