I’m fairly certain my cat thinks I’m a disappointment.
She hasn’t said so — she doesn’t need to.
The message comes through loud and clear in the slow blink of judgment she gives me when I try (again) to meditate while checking my phone.
There’s a hierarchy in our home, and it isn’t democratic.
She sits at the top — serene, self-assured, and unimpressed — while I stumble through the clumsy choreography of human life: emails, errands, existential questions, and the eternal pursuit of productivity.
She doesn’t hustle. She doesn’t strive. She simply is.
I think that’s the core of her disapproval.
In her feline philosophy, need isn’t the problem — admitting it is.
She meows for dinner like she’s doing me a favor, naps on a schedule known only to ancient stars, and regards my fixation on “purpose” as a quaint hobby best enjoyed by amateurs.
When I talk to her — “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had” — she listens with the patience of a therapist who’s already written the diagnosis: overcomplicates everything.
Her disappointment, I suspect, isn’t in my failures but in my noise.
Cats are fluent in silence — in the long pauses between doing and being.
They don’t over-explain their motives or rehearse their next version of themselves.
They walk into a room as if the world has been waiting for their entrance, and somehow, it has.
Meanwhile, I trip over my thoughts, apologize to furniture, and fill every quiet moment with something — words, work, worry.
She watches all this with a mix of fascination and pity.
Sometimes she yawns in the middle of my existential monologue, then curls into a perfect circle — a punctuation mark at the end of my unnecessary sentence.
Still, every night, she settles near me — not too close, not too far.
A presence both aloof and oddly comforting.
I like to think it’s her way of saying, You’re not entirely hopeless. You feed me, after all.
But maybe it’s more generous than that.
Maybe she understands that disappointment is part of loving something imperfect. Or maybe she’s just waiting for me to finally figure out how to open the treat bag without sounding like I’m summoning demons. Or she’s sticking around for the free heating and the nightly soap opera I call “checking emails after 10 p.m.”
And so I keep trying to live up to her impossible standards:
to walk like I own the floor beneath me,
to trust that stillness counts as success,
to nap with the moral authority of a saint,
to hold eye contact until the universe apologizes,
and to convey disappointment using only eyebrows.
Progress report: I’ve perfected pretending not to hear my name. Next up: eating the same meal daily while acting surprised and slightly insulted.
Ultimate goal? Enlightenment—by which I mean becoming the kind of person who can knock something off a table and make it your fault.
If she could speak, I imagine she’d say,
Stop trying so hard to become something. Just be. Also, feed me….on time, and more tuna.
I’m working on both.
