On one of my worst days this week, I dumped a scoop of cat food into the bowl I keep on my back porch. Hearing the clank of all the crunchy little pieces against the stainless steel, I felt valuable.
The “porch cats,” as I call them, have homes and owners. They are the outdoor or indoor-outdoor cats of my neighbors. Their owners seem to provide food and vet care, but the critters love to visit my porch and enjoy a snack and some pets. As my worsening chronic illnesses have me often imprisoned in my own home, their visits have become a resounding treat for me.
It was one of many days I’ve had lately where work (which I can mostly do on my own terms, by design) was impossible and I again didn’t feel safe to drive. I’m just in this house, reading, watching TV, or doing sudoku puzzles like I’m already a hundred years old. I’m a creative person. I love to make things. It’s who I am. And these days, it’s like I’m creating nothing, doing nothing, contributing nothing, and feeling like I’m wasting good oxygen.
Except one little thing that I am doing is feeding the cats, and that’s something.
You know how we call belly buttons an “innie” or an “outie”? I like to say that my brain is an outie, not an innie. I’m not great at trivia. I did well in history courses in school because I could write one heck of an essay, but it was a lot of work to remember the facts. I excel at both English and math, which sounds odd, I know, but English to me is writing and creating things, and math is solving things. None of it (unless it’s a literature course, and again very hard work for me) involves remembering stuff. My outie brain is made for putting things out into the world. I love to just show up with this wrinkled gray organ and solve and make.
In the depression that comes along with chronic illness, with its disabling limitations and feeling of helplessness, I realize now that I must not only be an outie intellectually, but also reflectively and emotionally. I only worsen my mental health by focusing on what’s coming in. I’ve obsessed over what other people think of me, why people might not like me, what I look like compared to other people, how much I’ve created compared to others, what recognition I’ve gotten and have not gotten, recognition I crave, status, and wins. I’ve taken in toxic attitudes and toxic comments, toxic expectations, toxic news. It’s all quite miserable. It’s garbage.
Just outside Whittier, Alaska, there’s a tunnel for both car and train traffic connecting Whittier to Anchorage. It’s a single lane serving all the car and train traffic, so if you want to drive your car through, you have to check the schedule. There are scheduled times for four separate movements: east-bound trains, east-bound cars, west-bound trains, and west-bound cars.
Darkness and light share a tunnel in and out of me, and I don’t want to let any more darkness in, nor do I want to be broadcasting a bunch of moodiness. I would love to let the light shine in, but when I can’t count on light coming in, the one thing I can do is shine out my light. So, I want to set my own schedule to outbound light. If I can’t be writing, or marketing, or playing music or building LEGO, I can dump a scoop of cat food in a bowl. Meanwhile, I’ll walk if I can, I’ll eat my vegetables and do my puzzles, resting and healing and readying for the next flow of broader light.
And I want to say to you, don’t worry about the brightness of your light. Shine what you can; just shine. Control your tunnel and fend off the toxic traffic that you do not deserve. Feed your porch cats, feed the birds, drop a heart emoji on someone’s social media post, whatever little thing you can muster to keep an outbound flow of light, one little scoop of food at a time.
Even a pinhole of light changes the blackout into shapes that we can find our way around once again.
🥲 This is beautiful….
Thanks so much! ❤️