Bella

Last weekend, I had my normal shift(s) at the animal shelter. 

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to get off of Instagram because I didn’t want to be constantly exposed to a bunch of triggering stuff. Instead, I spent this past week feverishly refreshing Bluesky to hear every horrifying detail about Elon Musk’s takeover of the U.S. administrative state. It is all so overwhelming, and scary, and sad. 

I managed to get myself out of bed and make it to the animal shelter by a little after 8. On Sundays, I have my normal cat caregiver shift, which is mostly cleaning cages, refreshing water, and changing bedding, a brief break, and then another shift doing clicker training with select cats, so I’m at the shelter for four hours or so. 

I was very grateful to be there this weekend. I really recommend volunteering to anyone, but especially to anyone feeling powerless in the face of such overwhelming stupidity and evil. I always leave feeling better than I did when I arrived. 

This week was bittersweet. If you have followed me on Instagram, you may have seen posts about Bella, a senior cat who has been the star of the clicker training program – called Cat Pawsitive – and an overall staff and volunteer favorite. Bella is so smart and sweet and we’d all been a bit baffled that she hadn’t been adopted.

She’s 12 and has lymphoma (well managed with steroids and anti-nausea meds), but cats with less personality and more challenges have been adopted much more quickly. When I would go in to do her training sessions on the weekends, a crowd would sometimes gather around the door. People would get out their phones, gesture to others to come look. 

I entered the adoption floor and saw that Bella’s enclosure – one of the “get acquainted rooms” that were originally intended for meetings between pets and adopters but are instead used as housing for longer-term cats or bunnies – was empty. For a moment, I was worried that maybe her health had taken a turn. 

“Did Bella get adopted?” I asked Gail, one of the other volunteers, a woman in her 80s. We had been expecting it for so long, and it kept not happening, that I had started to think it never would.

“Yes!” she said with happiness but a tiny bit of regret. 

“Yay," I said. "I will miss her.” 

“Yes, you get attached to them,” Gail said. 

I thought of other long-term residents – usually older, sometimes with health issues – who reigned over a GAR or one of the cat colonies. There was Tobey, who was also a Cat Pawsitive cat, though one with whom you had to throw the reinforcement treats a little ways away because she was eager to nibble on your fingers. Or Wigs, a cat with diet-managed diabetes who was at the shelter for months despite being perfect. Or Lemon, a handsome tuxedo cat with urinary issues who was adopted by a school bus driver who drove past the shelter every day and finally heeded the the “Adopt Lemon!” sign on the electronic display. 

T, one of the shelter staff, told me Bella had been adopted on Thursday. They had missed it because they were out sick. Their last interaction with Bella, a social eater who needed someone there for her to finish her food, had ended with her getting overstimulated and hissing. They seemed sad about it. Later, another volunteer who had come into Bella’s room last weekend while I was doing a training shift, came to ask me for details about her adoption. 

What I'm saying is that Bella was quite beloved.

I was more emotional than I expected, crying a little as I tended to a pod of cats from a hoarding situation. I think it was just another change, another loss, in a time that has been so full of both. I have only cried one other time at the shelter, when I learned about the congenital heart defect of a sweet, energetic kitten named Cadbury. (Another volunteer did a hospice foster for Cadbury, who lived only a few months.) 

People sometimes ask me how I can tolerate volunteering at the shelter; they presume it must be very sad and hard, that I must want to adopt every cat. It isn't, actually, and I don't. Part of the reason is that cats move through the Animal Refuge League very quickly, with obvious exceptions like Bella, Lemon, and Wigs. Southern Maine (or certainly this shelter) is lucky because there are more people who want to adopt rescue animals than there are rescue animals available. They take in transports from other states, usually in the South.

If you come in on a Saturday, the place is buzzing with visitors and people often show up early to get to meet a cat they’ve seen online. I was on the adoption floor a few weeks ago (for training, not as an adoption counselor), and a man stopped me and asked with some urgency, “Where is Granola?” I could not tell him. Kittens go quickly but so do older cats, even ones with medical issues. 

When I was volunteering on the adoption floor, I would often see a cat just once. Now that I volunteer in the back of house, where cats hang out for longer as they are evaluated for medical or behavioral issues (or because they’re part of pending court cases), I get to develop more of a relationship with them. But I still don’t feel like I have to adopt all of them, mostly because I have confidence they will find good homes, and, until then, they will be carefully looked after at the shelter or in foster.

It’s not that there isn’t sadness – every kitten season brings with it a fair amount of loss. I can name the little guys who didn’t make it: Kodiak (not gaining weight, persistent diarrhea, general failure to thrive), Pumpkinhead (an extremely uncommon, almost unheard of case of bordetella, which led to four other cats getting pneumonia, though they all survived), Fish (one of two kittens who were born with a rare genetic condition where their ribs were malformed, compressing their heart and lungs; Fish didn’t survive the surgery to correct it, but his littermate, Bunyan, made it and was adopted) and Ebony (a severe case of cerebellar hypoplasia along with intractable digestive issues that would have made his life constant misery). I was sad to lose them but very grateful I got to meet them during their short lives. 

Despite these unhappy events, it’s a very happy place – people are smiling while they clean litterboxes and wash food bowls. There’s a sense of purpose. It feels very rewarding, which is not something you can say for many aspects of life in America these days. 

An abundance of care

I recently watched Roy Wood Jr.’s newest comedy special, Lonely Flowers. Its basic premise is that everything sucks now because people feel so uncared for and unconnected. We removed the inconvenience of human interaction from so many parts of our lives and now everyone’s lonely and feels abandoned. Technology has made it easier than ever to treat others as disposable or to blame them for our own unhappiness. 

The pandemic didn't start this trend, but it certainly accelerated it. I think it explains why online dating is horrible now or why people yelled (mostly past) each other on TikTok for weeks about whether cashiers “have” to say hi to customers. We’ve mistaken a transaction for reciprocity, obligation for generosity. We’re more comfortable thinking in terms of contracts, of terms and conditions, than in engaging in free and voluntary exchange. It’s all about what we owe or are owed, rather than what we want to give or are capable of receiving. 

Scrolling through TikTok, I see a lot of learned helplessness, especially when it comes to relationships or trauma. People have been given the language to describe what happened to them and why they behave the way they do, but no tools (or capacity) to actually change anything. Instead, they cry out for accommodations from others, who must see how badly they have been hurt. They perform their sadness for an eager audience that feeds off their despair because it mirrors their own.

I think this keeps everyone stuck. What I think one has to do, instead, is create, to the extent possible, a social universe for yourself where care is abundant. This is particularly important for people who have experienced neglect, abuse, or abandonment (which is most people) – who have existed for much of their lives in a universe where care felt scarce and who may have come to believe that there just wasn't enough for them. Having been convinced that they do not matter, they seek out people and situations that reinforce that narrative. (Obviously, I'm mostly talking about myself here.)

Creating a universe where care is abundant mostly means letting go of relationships and places where care is absent (instead of hanging around in the hope that things change), and leaning into those where it is present. And not just places where care is available to you but places where the care you offer is received warmly. (These places might not be one and the same.)

The animal shelter has very much been such a place for me. It’s a place where I’m valued (and often for traits that are criticized elsewhere or that make my life more difficult) and where the care that I give has a very obvious impact. (As I talked about in this TikTok, rescue animals are remarkably resilient and make recoveries humans are not really capable of – if you consistently show them care, they soften. You can't say the same for humans.)

It’s not a place where I receive care, necessarily, but it is a place where care is abundant – readily available, happily given, with no expectation of anything in return. And just being in such an environment is restorative and replenishing. It gets you out of that scarcity mindset. This makes it a really great place for people who have experienced neglect, abandonment, or abuse. You not only get to see these animals recover from the very things you have experienced but actually participate in that recovery.

I did not expect this for myself when I started volunteering in 2022. I was just trying to get out of the house more and wanted to pet some cats. But it's been really – I hate this word, but it is accurate – healing. It's helped me process some of my own neglect. To name the most obvious example that is pretty relevant to the work I do at the shelter, when I was about three or four years old, my mother drove off and left me, home alone, locked out of the house, in the middle of the country. (We lived about ten miles outside a small town.) I walked up the road toward my grandparents' house with our golden retriever and got picked up by a school bus.

No one ever acted like it was a big deal so I never really thought of it as a big deal. It was sometimes even talked about like a little adventure for me, which it very much was not. Clearly I did not have any idea how it was going to turn out while it was happening and the resolution itself did not provide much in the way of reassurance or repair. There was no misunderstanding or mitigating circumstances – my mother had just forgotten about me and did not wonder where I was until she received a call from my grandmother, who had been summoned by someone at the school district to come pick me up. (In a remarkable bit of luck, the bus driver not only spotted me – I had been crouching down whenever a car approached to avoid being seen – but was familiar enough with the route that she quickly identified who I probably belonged to and could use the bus radio to call for help. The universe was looking out for me, even if my mother wasn't.)

My mother did not learn any lesson from this. Less than two years later, she left me home alone again, on purpose this time but with a similar outcome. A few years after that, she left me to loiter by one of my older sisters' soccer practices while she did other things and I ended up in the ER getting my eyes flushed out because my similarly neglected friend and I stumbled upon a spent tear gas canister. (The leftovers of the local police.) Just a pattern of low-level recklessness that didn't really end until I was able to drive and became much less dependent on her. The narrative was never that she was neglectful or unfit, but rather that I was a little troublemaker who couldn't be trusted (....to be left alone.... at age 5.... in – or outside of – an isolated farmhouse).

Caring for these cats, many of them abandoned and left to fend for themselves, has been a way to provide myself the comfort and care that little me never received. I, too, was once found by a stranger on the side of the road. I think it's partly why I really like cleaning their cages, an objectively disgusting task. It's a way to show them care and consideration, not just affection, which is cheap. I love it when I can give them a really nice blanket or bed.

And giving them this care, I see that it's just not a big ask. There's no excuse for failing to provide it.

The cure for loneliness is connection, not coercion

There's no faster way to get engagement online than to talk about how awful other people are. (I have one very tossed-off comment on TikTok that keeps getting likes and every time I get a notification, I'm like, "Oh no, I'm encouraging this misguided behavior.") People are constantly seeking evidence that all of their problems are because of other people. (Or capitalism.) And it's true that people can be really hurtful, cruel, and thoughtless.

Like these TikTokers, I do believe that we owe each other things, but I also recognize there is no actual enforcement mechanism for that obligation, and that anything that must be enforced in that way isn't worth having, anyway. When someone posts about how you do, in fact, owe other people things, they mostly mean that someone – a specific someone – owes them. (It's usually a text, which has come to stand in for respect.) And they are probably right. But you can't lawyer someone into caring about your feelings. You can't negotiate with someone who isn't even at the table.

What you can do, however, is find ways to contribute to the overall store of care and goodwill that exists in the universe and trust that it will come back to you in some form. (Instead of expecting it in a very particular one.) You can place yourself in situations and around people who are more likely to be kind.

Things are bad right now, but good people do still exist. You just have to find them.