A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Mean Girls (2004) dir. Mark Waters

And then I grew up and it turns out the world is going to shit and there’s a class war everywhere and my livelihood is under constant threat because I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into generational wealth and climate change is coming fast and god, the powerful are so selfish and and and- and yet, I do still dance in my kitchen. Sometimes my cat asks to be picked up and I sway around in a made up waltz with her tucked into my arms. (This is one of her favorite activities)

I play card games and gossip and watch movies with my friends every few Saturdays even though we’re all overworked and exhausted. i create things in the pockets of time between sleep and work and sometimes I create while I’m at work and I race home to finish it with a childlike sort of excitement. I’ve seen very little of the world but it’s still more than most of my family has. and these things are still just as wonderful as I dreamed they’d be, it’s just that they’re grounded firmly in a reality that’s harder to thrive in.

it makes me sad, because I feel like a lot of people are grappling with how much more difficult it is these days to create a life you survived for. And it can feel sometimes like it was all for nothing- all that stubborn determination to stay alive and keep trying, keep going got us to a world on fire, with all the folks who could do anything about it shrugging and saying no, nothing can be done, it’s too late, it’s just how things are.

Except it isn’t. There will always be dancing, there will always be companionship, there will always be room for hope. It’s never useless to hope for a better life. It’s never useless to believe it can be.