Seeking Pockets of Happiness in a 30-Member Cat Chat
Maggie Slepian
On the morning when the news was dominated by the murders of eight women in Atlanta, my phone was blowing up. It was a 30-member group chat, and it was all photos of cats. The group is called Cat Chat, and I was added by a writer friend who figured I belonged on there because of the incessant photos I force upon the internet of my cat wearing tiny replicas of human clothing.
While news, conversation, and social media were rightfully centered around the act of violence from the night before, Cat Chat was an endless stream of group members’ cats hiding behind sweaters, walking on leashes, snoozing in patches of sunlight, and doing that thing where they put their paws over their faces. It was a tiny bubble of innocence on a screen otherwise dominated by yet another cruel continuation of the deep-seated racism and misogyny we are being forced to finally confront as a nation.
The outdoor community is no stranger to this, as witnessed this past summer when we worked to understand the prejudices inherent in our primarily white outdoor industry and community. We’re still trying to help remove barriers to entry for BIPOC and the LGBTQ+ community, and I think we’re doing an ok job, in our own way.
People like me can’t pretend to understand what life is like for any member of a marginalized group. The most we can do is use our platforms to amplify their voices, learn how to be allies, and seek to understand their perspectives. I know what it’s like to be a woman, scared walking home alone at night. But I don’t know what it’s like to be targeted for the color of my skin or who I love as a partner.
Sometimes it feels like we’re peeking at the news each morning through a fan of fingers, timidly lifting the blinds on each new day. What horrors have the previous night brought to this morning? Some mornings we breathe a sigh of relief. A new shipment of vaccines arrived, our local nursing home residents can have in-person visitors for the first time in a year, a bill has been passed protecting more wild rivers. Other mornings we find out a white man went on a shooting spree in Atlanta, and there are eight lives who can never be brought back.
Some days it’s too much, and we have to seek out pockets of joy. We aren’t ignoring what’s happening around us, rather we’re giving ourselves a brief reprieve from mourning.
There must be space in our community conversations to discuss issues of racism and sexism, but maybe not in Cat Chat. I can talk about the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community with my industry friend, but when he sends me a mockup of his product emblazoned with an image of my cat in a hawaiian shirt, there is another bubble of joy. We send videos back and forth teaching our cats to high five, and during those interactions, the space is filled with serious discussions about the training techniques and the trick progression of house cats.
It brings me back to the famous quote from Mr. Rogers. He said: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Sometimes I think that’s what we do for ourselves, when things just seem so scary and sad: we’re looking for our version of helpers, because we need to feel like there’s some light. Our bits of happiness lie in the people trying to help, and in group chats with strangers about our cats.
We aren’t ignoring what’s out there when we take a break from it all. I will argue until my face falls off against people who say there’s no space for these conversations in our industry, because it’s simply not true. To think that racism and sexim don’t exist in our industry, you must be very privileged indeed.
But if we want to grant ourselves a brief reprieve from whatever sadness the day has brought, and that comes in the form of a Cat Chat free from any semblance of current events, we have to allow ourselves that, free of guilt.
I hope in whatever your day brings, you have your own version of Cat Chat, where it seems like nothing else exists besides another cat twisted into an impossibly cute position, sleeping in a patch of sun.
