PUNCHing Up
This is my circus. These are my monkeys.
It was the Year of the Fire Horse, and the world was collapsing on schedule, yet we all found ourselves suspended, briefly, gloriously, from the crumble, globally fixated on one tiny monkey in Japan looking for someone to hold him…
I recently wrote, from a bed, in a fever, three days into a self-imposed silence while the old world fell apart, that I had made a very deliberate, very ruthless decision not to participate in what was not mine.
Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
And then along came Punch, the monkey.
Imagine my absolute surprise, my initial horror, and my eventual, inevitable delight, to discover what had risen above the war stories, the outrage cycles, the horrific revelations of the calculated malice of so many powers that be.
A baby monkey in Japan was capturing the world’s heart.
His name is Punch.
I had resolved, quite firmly, not to get involved. A little too aware and sensitive to the harsh realities of Mother Nature, I made a swift executive decision not to watch the videos, not to get invested, not to let my bleeding heart get tangled in whatever was happening to this small creature on the other side of the world.
Tap head. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
Except…
As the self-appointed ring leader of my own adopted circus of Italian greyhounds, who are, in every meaningful way, monkeys in small dog suits, it was too literal an analogy to ignore.
These are absolutely my monkeys.
While we have families torn apart, doomed to never speak again over things that once seemed small and now feel enormous. While wars rage and the very architecture of the world we knew crumbles in real time, people from every corner of the globe were making pledges and rallying together for the well-being of one tiny, abandoned baby monkey in Japan.
What is it about him that managed to unite us?
Maybe it is the helplessness, our own quiet recognition that we are, in fact, that monkey.
Or maybe it is something more specific. The shared awareness of our own vulnerability to belonging. The reflection of a pain we have all carried and rarely named out loud.
Are we crying for the monkey? Or are we crying for the part of ourselves we recognised in him?
Because here is what wrecked me about Punch’s story:
When he was reintroduced to a group of other macaques, they pushed him away. Scolded and rejected him. And after every rejection, every scolding, every time he was pushed to the edge of the group, Punch ran back to his stuffed orangutan and held on.
Every night, he had to go to sleep alone.
But as he slept his restless and lonely sleep, the entire world rallied for him, pulling for him, hoping for him behind the scenes, but he didn’t know any of it.
He just knew he was alone again. So he held his substitute comfort and waited for morning.
Dance, monkey, dance.
Punch knew, on some level, that Ora-mama was not his mother. He knew the way we all know, the way the body knows, that the substitute is not the real thing. And yet he held on anyway, because something that almost works is better than nothing in the dark.
Sometimes the smallest comfort becomes our universe.
This is the human condition in miniature. We reach for the cheap comfort, the almost-love, the version of belonging that sort of fits, and we wonder why we can never get enough of it.
You cannot get enough of something that almost works.
That is not a personal failing; it is physics. A hole shaped like real love cannot be filled by anything but the real thing, and every substitute, however tender, however well-intentioned, will always leave you reaching again by morning.
The gift Punch did not know he was receiving was this: the substitute held him just long enough to keep him soft. To keep him showing up. To keep the door of him open until the real thing finally walked through it.
That is what the almost-enough is actually for.
The parts of us that responded most fiercely to this story are showing us exactly where we still need healing.
Because is that not the most real and universal thing: to desire love and acceptance most from those who will not or cannot give it?
To keep showing up at the door of the place that keeps turning you away, clutching whatever substitute comfort you’ve found, waiting for the group to finally make room?
I wrote about this too, in that fever bed. About looking for acceptance in the wrong places. About belonging where it was not being offered, knocking on doors that were never going to open, not understanding that the refusal was its own grace.
Thank goodness, I thought then. Thank goodness I didn’t find it where I thought I wanted it.
The monkey didn’t know that either. Not yet.
But then, the hug the world felt.
A monkey in the troop finally approached Punch and held him. Just held him.
And something in the watching of that moment broke people open in a way that weeks of world news had not.
Why did that feel so good?
Because the hug at the end was not just another hug.
We collectively had felt the weight of rejection. It was the deliverance of relief that only deep pain can appreciate. It had meaning that only arrives after real waiting, real trying, real showing up in the face of repeated rejection. Without knowing what it cost, without having felt those days with him, it would have just been two small animals touching.
But we knew what it cost.
We felt that hug in our own bodies because we recognized it. Because some part of us has been Punch, holding our substitute comfort in the dark, running back to the stuffed thing that would hold us when the real thing wouldn’t, trying again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
And finally, finally, getting what we were looking for. If not better.
Behind the scenes, beyond the edges of his awareness, people were working. Keepers watching the troop, adjusting the timing, rallying for his belonging without him ever knowing the half of it.
The support was real and invisible to him.
Love goes very far beyond the physical presence of the beloved.
The monkey still had to face his nights alone. He still had to show up each morning not knowing if today would be different. He never stopped seeking. Never stopped hoping. Never stopped trying.
And the world never stopped hoping with him, even when he couldn’t feel it.
Acceptance comes when you make space to accept where it is given, instead of only fixating on where it is not.
You have to first belong to yourself.
The hug lands so much harder when you know what it took to get there.
When you have sat inside the rejection and not let it make you hard.
When you have held your Ora-mama in the dark and waited, tried again in the morning, and kept the door of yourself open even when every instinct said close it.
The parts of you that respond most show you where you still need healing.
So feel it. Let it move through you. Let the monkey’s hug be your hug too because in some way, it is.
This is our circus. These are our monkeys.
And I, for one, am holding the empty centre with you, right up until the hug arrives.
Which, for the record, it will.
Until then, don’t be shy about giving yourself the hug you’ve been longing for. You might be surprised to find it more powerful than you anticipated.
The self that is waiting to hold you has been there the whole time, and it turns out they are more than enough.
To punch up, in the oldest sense, means to direct your force upward. Toward the light, toward growth, toward what is greater than what hurt you. Not punching down at your own wounds. Not punching sideways at everyone else’s. Up.
That’s what Punch did every morning. He was rejected countless times, left to spend the night alone in the dark, back to his plushie, yet every morning, he got up. Trying again. Showing up again. Refusing, with the kind of mystical tenacity that we admire in our heroes, to let the hard thing make him smaller.
So what have we learned? Aren’t we all, in the middle of our own personal circus, just little monkeys needing to be held? The chaos does not stop. The acts keep coming. And still, underneath all of it, the most human thing we carry is this: the need for someone to notice us, reach for us, and not let go.
What Punch teaches us most simply is that resilience is not the absence of need. It is the courage to keep showing up for it anyway.
If you can rally for a monkey you’ve never met, crying real tears over his real loneliness, you can surely extend that same ferocious tenderness to yourself.
That’s the move. And it’s only yours to make. You are worth it.
— Punching up with you, SJT 🐒
In dedication to everyone still holding their Ora-mama in the dark and to actual Punch, who found his real one.