Hugging a Porcupine and What it Taught Me About Embracing a Difficult Year
From a distance, you might mistake porcupines as cute. Get closer though and you will likely have a change of heart because one touch will prick and burn. How much more the sting when you hug them?
Today, I learnt about ‘hugging porcupines’ and how it is a metaphoric representation of loving difficult people.
These ‘porcupines’ are prickly and insatiable. Sometimes, they’re detached. But we love them, so like porcupines who huddle together for warmth in the winter, we embrace them. Though hurtful, this embrace is necessary to build a relationship with them.
That’s how I felt about 2022, like it was a prickly year that stung far too sharply than I had anticipated. Even then, I had no choice but to embrace it.
2022 was a hard year for me, and it appears it was for a number of people too. It started for me on the heels of my grandma's death, held dreams that did not materialize and hopes that have all but disappeared 12 long months later.
I shed too many tears in 2022 and found myself in a confusing limbo that I don’t have the will to handle in 2023. In all this, 2022 taught me some of my biggest lessons on courage, failure, and what I want for my life.
2022 taught me that our lives are ours to create and sometimes failure, however unsettling, can be a redirection towards the right path.
Just like we cautiously yet boldly hug the porcupines in our lives: the difficult parent, friend, colleague, etc., we have to embrace the hard years too. As we do so and acknowledge the discomfort, pain and disappointments that they bring, we have to also recognize the little miracles they present in the lessons they teach us and the ways they force us to grow.
The dead will not come back, but we can take solace — however dull — in the memories we once created with them. So too with lost opportunities. But we are at least better, wiser, and more gutsy for having pursued them as intently as we did.
These are the instructions I am taking into 2023, hoping that it offers better experiences and restores lost passions for you and me.
