You feel crazy.
You are not crazy.
Your feelings will catch up and calm down, but you have to feel them first.
Cats understand implicitly.
Cats, particularly cats in the soul-colors of CAT, “get” being hogtied by hyped-up, hopped-up feelings. They know the zoomies. They know the roomies who move into your mind uninvited: frazzle and frenzy and flying flotillas of funk.
But where you and I let our feelings fricassee our faith, CAT knows how to coast the inner chaos.
CAT knows he isn’t losing it.
CAT knows that he always and ever has everything to gain.
CAT is unerringly self-conscious of being The Dream Itself, even when the nightmares pour an entire saucepot of nagging noodles into his day or his night or his mind.
You can witness the noodles as they arrive. CAT springs from sleep (“write, ‘the sleep of the just,’ woman”), unceremoniously unstrung and high-strung, and sprints through Suite SUITE as though tiny orcs were torching his toes.
The peace of breakfast is punched out by heavyweight champions like Cranky and Anxious and Itchy and Angry. By lunchtime, it’s all CAT can do to contain his eleven emotions and thirty thousand thoughts, so he does what he does best: he runs.
He leaps.
He destroys the nearest objects (e.g. that dastardly jerkface jingle ball who clearly had it coming).
He shatters the dearest illusions (e.g. that “lunchtime” should be a singular noun; that cats who talk about orcs are dorks; that Guy Fieri isn’t going to write back to his fan mail someday; that feeling outrageous means you are outrageous; that being outrageous is a bad thing).
He seems noodle-nagged by nightmares at times, driven to dash and smash by some inner agita that is simultaneously shocking and extremely familiar.
And so he consumes the entire casserole, from calm to clamor, forgetting his manners but never forgetting who he is.
And who he is, of course, is The Viceregent of Flavortown. And also The Dream Itself. Because when you are fully and truly alive, fueled by faith and bravado and lunchtimes numbering no fewer than four, your feelings and thoughts are fellow travelers rather than tyrants.
You and me and Mr. Fieri, we forget. We think the tyrants are telling the truth.
We feel crazy, so we think we are crazy.
We feel afraid, so we think we have real reason to be afraid.
We smell something burning at the back of our brains, so we think the whole cathedral is at risk.
We feel like nothing will ever make us happy again, not even the scent of Gain, or the Tonight Show, or the way a cat’s eyes go from Golden Delicious to Granny Smith in the course of a single sunset, so we think we have lost all The Happy forever.
But we haven’t lost anything.
We have everything to (re)gain.
After Guy Fieri, CAT’s Number Two Hero is St. Francis de Sales. (I know, I know, this combination is so common as to be a cliche. The latter was — medieval scholars will back me up on this — the first to impart the spiritual wisdom “Holy stromboli” and to pontificate on “the gravitational force of bacon.”) This is not just because St. Franky is the patron saint of writers, and every cat fancies himself the greatest future novelist in the realm. This is not just because St. Franky was known for urging gentleness with oneself, which is essentially the beginning and end of every cat’s religion.
This is primarily because St. Franky said, “Don’t be anxious because you are anxious.”
In other words, feel your feelings. They’re going to come and room with you, so you’d best get them some comfy air mattresses and rad Jimi Hendrix posters and let them stay without letting them slay your peace. Let the noodles swirl in your stewpot. Cook ’em ’til they get all silly-soft.
But don’t, for an instant, think that the loud or lousy ones are telling the truth. Fears are pathological liars. Nightmares are their press secretaries.
Cats, particularly cats as full-color as CAT, need no press.
Which frees them to free us with some very good news: our fluggiest feelings will pass. The alphabet soup will spell better words tomorrow. The nightmares are nudniks. They don’t matter.
The mind — yes, even and triumphantly the feline mind — is a restless child. That doesn’t matter.
Your anxiety wants you to believe that it’s a prophet. It’s actually a crank who doesn’t matter.
You are alive, and that’s what matters.
(Quoth CAT: bacon grease exists, and this also matters.)
You are alive, and that means that you are the Dream Itself.
The Happy will return.
The night will end.
New diners will open.
New zest will zap your lethargy.
New peace will paper the walls of your heart.
New cats will need you to love them, and love you back more than you can ever repay.
New dreams will deliver you from the fear that you are lost.
Old cats and saints and angels and chefs and compatriots will keep you company as you feel your way through to truth.
Dream on, kittens.