It Happened To Me: I Gave My Cats My Eating Disorder
PLUS: Get paid for your It Happened To Me story, even if its headline is not as award-winning as this one, by sending it to me, Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com!
Hello, truly lovely people!
I am so so so glad you’re here, longtime subscribers and cute brand new ones and even people who just haven’t bothered to cancel their subscriptions. I’m going to use my limited introductory space* to tell you that over the last few days I’ve gotten an inordinate number of lengthy and thoughtful emails and DMs critiquing stories, writers, me or other aspects of AJPT. We’ve talked a lot and I’ve learned a lot. I have also been letting the letter-writers know that they don’t need to apologize for criticism toward me ever - seriously where would I be in my career without it? Well, where am I in my career actually? I guess that’s another subject.
Because Substack is a writers’ platform, and because there is no anonymity, most everyone here understandably wants to publicly support other writers (almost to the point sometimes of 7th-grade-style gaggery: “Your writing is perfect.” “No, YOUR writing is more perfect than mine could ever be. It’s unconscionably unfair that you’re not a best selling author already seriously!!!!!” ). And all that praise is certainly better than the alternative. However we are all adults (or kind of) and I think that hearing critiques and counterarguments about our writing or our ideas could be useful for us all. So I’m not standing here screaming “Fight! Fight!” (even though I do love drama and is anyone else watching Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills and if so, does Amanda bug the shit out of you as much as she does me?). But I don’t think there is anything you are telling me in private that you can’t say in front of the whole class and I welcome you to do that in the comments. I definitely always want to hear there about what I could be doing better.
Now I’m sorry to Christina that I decided to post this alert on the day of her piece in particular, in case she is the recipient of a bold new unleashing of pent-up disapproval, but I don’t expect it for this story - I expect a lot of you to relate to what she has been through and the beautiful way she expresses it. I loved her premise instantly when she sent it and loved her deeper and less predictable execution of it even more. And I’m not just saying that. But tell us what YOU think.
LUV U 4EVA!
Jane
*I am now officially dragging on my whining about this one minor criticism the same way I did when I was 5 at the zoo one day and my grandma commented that I was walking on my toes so I spent the entire rest of that weekend walking only on my heels while groaning to express how miserable I was with each step. So glad about all the maturity that has come with aging. See you in the comments for more!
By Christina Jumper
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you I’m so not a dog person.
Don’t get me wrong, dogs are cool. As a kid, I learned to recognize every breed by name after falling in love with the Samoyed in Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco. I’m a favored dog sitter among my friends, and especially enjoy coming across a dog and their human who resemble one another.
(How does that work, exactly? Does the lithe runner gravitate toward the wiry greyhound because they share compatible traits? Or do we choose pets that resemble us because we can’t escape the primal urge to replicate ourselves?)
It’s not because I hate dogs or anything, I just can’t share my home with a creature that needy. Besides, our personalities clash. I’m quiet, observant, prone to distrust and judgement, and affectionate only to those in my innermost circle. Sometimes I respond to texts instantly; other times I’ll leave my phone in another room for hours. I prefer most activities on my own, unless there are mood-altering herbs involved.
In these ways, I’ve been told I’m more like a cat. But I didn’t start out as a cat person. That happened by accident.
—-
I have to begin this essay by talking about Ruby, my ride or die. She’ll be 10 this July, which means she’s been in my life longer than most people.
Growing up, we had every pet under the sun…except for cats. Allergies ran in the family, and I was not immune. (This only delayed my ascent into cat-person-dom, though it accelerated my descent into antihistamine abuse.) Friends’ cats scared me, as I mistook their independence for animosity.
Everything changed when Ruby appeared in a parking lot one hot July morning in central Texas.
Technically, I took her in with my partner at the time, but she was mine from the start. At work, I’d watch the same few videos of her over and over again until I could rejoin her in person. She was so damn striking with her marbled brown-and-white coat and eyes the color of the Colorado River. As she grew, her fur got long, her affect regal. I was smitten.
When I became single and decided to move to Seattle a few years later, Ruby drove with me in a rented minivan. It seemed as though it had always been just the two of us. On the first night of our trip, we stayed in a Columbus AirBnB, where she growled at drunken strangers outside the bedroom window. She’d never done that before, and I felt touched that she thought she could protect me.
Being with Ruby felt like the same as being with myself. Little did I know how true that would end up being.
—-
One of the reasons my relationship had ended was because I was an alcoholic. In the aftermath, my bulimia came back after a remission of four years. Part of me moved to Seattle because it was far enough away that I could die in peace.
I would have, too, if it weren’t for my stupid cat.
The house we moved into was a charming 3-bedroom in Green Lake. My two roommates were quiet professionals who kindly ignored my odd food habits. Almost nightly, I’d drink a bottle of wine in the upstairs loft that I shared with Ruby and nobody else. The only bathroom was downstairs, right in between my roommates’ respective doors. I tried to be quiet.
As my drinking escalated, so did my binges. I started ordering delivery several times a week, sometimes multiple times in a night, spending hours in front of the TV while I ate and drank my way to oblivion. Ruby bore witness to my blackouts, including the time I fell asleep mid-binge and woke up to find one of the containers had spilled on to the beige carpet, staining it a sickly orange. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like a cat had gotten sick there.
My first spring in Seattle, I was busy evading rehab and plotting my final hurrah. There was just one problem: Ruby. I didn’t want to leave her alone, so I called up an acquaintance—-someone I’d met in a recovery group—and asked if they would watch my cat for “just a few days”. Luckily, they saw through my bullshit and ended up not only taking Ruby, but driving me to the ER and waiting with me until a bed in detox opened up.
Gone were the days of blacking out on the carpet and worrying about whether my cat could tell I was drunk. Of course, the bulimia hadn’t gone anywhere. I was still chasing oblivion, just stone cold sober. It sucked.
—-
2020 was the year my eating disorder got the worst it had ever been. It was also the year Little Fang entered our lives.
I’d been wanting a kitten for months, but the start of the pandemic (and the ensuing stimulus check) was the final push I needed to make all the necessary preparations. I’d been texting someone about a fluffy tuxedo kitten with blue eyes, but they ghosted me the morning I was supposed to make the pickup. Disappointed but still determined to expand my family, I went back to Craigslist.
One kitten jumped out immediately. A tiny void with a puff for a tail, he looked like a cross between a soot sprite from Spirited Away and a baby bunny rabbit. I contacted the humans and they met up with me in Olympia, in the parking lot of a Joann’s Fabrics. A preteen girl handed him to me through the window and I handed cash back. He immediately made himself comfortable on my shoulder, under my hair.
Just like that, I was the parent of cats. Multiple.
—-
I can’t remember when I first started noticing that my cats were weird about food.
Maybe it was around the time Ruby started leaving
