Communicating with my cat is so crazy, it’s like, you watch my back for predators when I sleep. You meow only because you know that I vocalize often, but the words I use are nothing to you unless they’re associated with things relevant to your little baby life (food, for example). You slow blink at me because you feel safe with me. You point your ass at my face, indicating that you trust me to watch your back for predators, because you feel safe with me. You sit in my lap and sleep pressed against my side because you need to warm yourself up, and you trust me to warm you. I know this because I have access to information. If I didn’t, these things would be weird to me. I call you Lulu, but you don’t need a name for me; you have your senses to identify me. You smell me to identify me. You nuzzle me with your head to mark me as family with your scent. We ARE family. You are both the baby I feed and the elderly little lady who watches over me. It’s a very special and pure interspecies bond. I have a concept of “love” that is metaphysical, conceptual; you have an instinctual bond to those that you “trust” to help you survive (and that you, in turn, help to survive). You DO aid my survival on an emotional level that you can’t possibly understand, because you try to aid me on the physical level that comes naturally to you. Who said survival of the fittest has no room for love? We share the pure love of deep friendship because you and I must survive. My creature, Lulu, my best friend. My stinky.
The comments and tags on this post have been very sweet, I really love hearing about everyone’s cats. Feeling a little self-conscious because this drunken emotional outburst (seriously, I had a few drinks, looked at Lulu, and started crying and writing this) has been tagged as poetry a few times. Now I wish I could go back in time and edit it for flow and word choice, but it’s too late now…
The very excited blonde lady owns the resort where this is taken. She’s super excited because this is the closest they’ve ever come in before. Everyone else is less excited because this was taken crack of dawn; when blonde lady realized how close the whales were coming, she ran around waking everybody up to see it.
A good, wholesome post.
I’d be so stoked to see that in person.
The resort lady has the correct level of excitement for watching a bubblenet THAT CLOSE.
“Isn’t it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal” I mean, there’s a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn’t have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We’re not fast and don’t have a lot of natural weaponry but we’re bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
adhd is so embarrassing ur basically like “I have to have fun right the fuck now or I’m throwing myself off the roof” 90% of the time and you also have very little control over this
This was the single most important thing for me to start understanding re: my undiagnosed ADHD, and it’s the thing no one tells you except other ADHD sufferers. My brain’s reward system is so broken that boredom rapidly becomes indistinguishable from a depressive episode. There’s no healthy, normal ability to experience something as simply being a little dull–as soon as my brain isn’t getting regular hits of stimulation, I start clawing at the walls. This is what makes working in a structured environment and initiating tasks so difficult for me, not malice or other character flaws.
What makes it worse is that, if you’re like me, when you were growing up, the only way your authority figures knew how to perceive this was “they’re just goofing off,” and therefore, would deprive you of anything remotely stimulating until you’d done your work, thinking that – if it worked like it would with an NT kid, you’d do your work faster so you could get back to having fun.
Instead, they just pulled the plug on any tiny bit of power you had running to your necessary brainwaves and put you into longterm shutdown mode.
But then….you grew up…with only that method for coping ingrained into you. So no matter how much you may know logically, now, that you have to have the “fun/interesting/challenging” cord plugged in for your brain to have any juice at all, you feel guilty for having to plug that in FIRST instead of as a reward for doing Adulting. So you just sit there, unplugged, not getting anything done.
Or maybe that’s just me.
even the most supportive and well meaning people in my life struggle to understand how painful lack of stimulation is, how immobilizing executive dysfunction is, and how i cannot feel satisfaction the way they do. the number of times i’ve been told “won’t it feel so nice to accomplish it and have it off your plate?” and having to explain that i don’t feel relief or pride when i finish a task, just exhaustion, and that’s part of why it’s so hard to even start it
