i don't have anything worth writing about
philosophizing cat cuddles
The other night I’d finished the last episode of the sci-fi fantasy show Arcane when our cat, Dooty, a spoiled and mischievous tuxedo, jumped up on my chest just as I was about to get up and go to bed. Dooty likes to do this thing where she lies up against your neck and flips upside down and begs for pets. She never stays still in this position, always rolling around and reaching her paws towards my face to remind me to never stop scritching.
For a few moments I tried to keep scrolling on my phone, but after a claw in the eye, I decided to give her my full attention. I put my phone down and sunk both hands into her soft white belly fur. I relished her warmth as I relaxed into the dim light of the living room lamp and the pink glow of the Roku save screen on the TV. After many recent late nights spiraling in social media voids, it felt good to connect to something real. Something as simple as touching my cat’s fur felt grounding and lovely.
The next day, I found myself listening to an episode of the Material Girls podcast. In this episode, the hosts were critically examining health and wellness fads like biohacking and “dopamine fasting.” In their discussion, they referenced an article about tech billionaires wanting to cheat disability or even death.
Thinking about the ambitious striving that would want someone to try to find a way to solve death felt like a sharp contrast to that moment with my cat on the couch, just the night before. There are a million things that can be said about the idea of “solving” death (highly recommend listening to the episode of Material Girls) but all I could think of at that moment was, how sad that these people want to skip all of these wonderful slow, complicated human moments for the sake of becoming some sort of optimized superhuman. I know the moments I feel most alive are the little moments; away from screens, away from ambition, in nature, with friends, being silly with my partner or my cats.
I share the common writerly fear that I don’t have anything interesting to write about. I’ve lived a fairly basic, boring existence. I’ve lived in the same city pretty much my whole life. I haven’t really done anything that exciting or had any significant success or even awful failure to overcome. Even the mental breakdown that resulted in my first book seems now like a common rite of passage for that life stage. I write what I know, so I write about small experiences of interpersonal relationships and self-discovery. I’m not bestselling memoir material.
But thinking about the beautifully mundane moment of burying my fingers in my cat’s belly fur against the ugliness of those trying to fight mundanity no matter the cost, I have to believe there is some kind of power in writing those basic human experiences. The every day, the small, the local, the interpersonal, the supposedly unimportant. My writing doesn’t need to change the world, if at least it can make someone - or even just me - feel more connected to the world and other people in it.
Happy November,
Alyssa