Rosie - Hug Your Cat Day

Hi again,

Please don’t be expecting twice weekly posts from me but I couldn’t not mark Hug Your Cat Day!

As you may remember, my very first blog was accompanied by a picture of my cat. At the time I was annoyed as it was a Christmas-themed photo and I was scared people would think I was the kind of person who put decorations up before December – the horror! But the photo had to be of my cat.

I love cats.

I am sorry but they are better than dogs. However, even liking cats can cause problems for me.

Numerous studies suggest neurodivergent individuals have special bonds with animals, but I feel like these findings sometimes gets filtered through stigmatising stereotypes.

It seems like when people talk about this ‘unique connection’ it plays into an idea that neurodivergent people are unknowable, childlike or even that because of our communication challenges we are actually more like pets than humans. Yes, my relationship with cats might be different, but it’s not that different – there’s a whole array of pet industries that attest to the huge variation in what is considered a ‘healthy’ relationship with pets.

Cultural endorsement of pets made me think cats was a safe conversation topic and it became my default answer to the dreaded ‘tell us an interesting fact about yourself’ question.

At school, that question would have me bright red and trying not to throw up. My mind would be in overdrive trying to analyse my peers’ care-free responses to determine my next move. I couldn’t talk about TV shows - my interests were too ‘babyish’. I couldn’t talk about reading – too ‘nerdy’. I didn’t have any famous relatives or special skills but I did have 5 cats. It felt like a win-win - unusual enough to pass but not personal enough to mean I would have to talk about myself.

Music is another safe topic I’ve used to try and survive ice-breaker/ team-building activities but this turned out to be more positive that my cat experience.

I only got into music as a way to fit in. I spent hours watching MTV and listening to Kiss after a girl in my class mocked me for not having heard a new song – before that I just listened to what my brother because he had friends and I looked up to him. Unfortunately (or fortunately for the rest of the household) he didn’t like Kiss. I would try to learn lyrics to try join in but the song changed every day and I was always behind. My MP3 player, gifted to me to support my new interest, had only 6 songs. My obsession with the Beatles led to a highly comprehensive but not exactly friendship-winning school project. I didn’t like music in the right way. I liked old bands or random songs instead of albums. I wasn’t a talented singer and I struggled to learn the right language to be accepted as someone who liked music.

The same thing would happen when people talked to me about cats. I didn’t like taking lots of photos or playing with them. I didn’t even like them in a ‘usefully’ autistic way by accumulating detailed scientific knowledge about them vis-à-vis the ‘special interest’ stereotype.

I just like my cats. I find them comforting. When I see a cat on my walk, I have a good day. They just make me happy.

When asked about my cats, I wanted to talk about the funny position they slept in or how we rescued them from a tree or how we had loads of nicknames for them or how they were so cute and soft I just wanted to hug them or how one time we discovered a whole den of food that one of them had stolen over a period of weeks from the kitchen without us knowing or give a frame by frame breakdown of my favourite cat video or a description of every cat I had seen in the last week. Funny enough as anecdotes but probably not that interesting if you don’t know my cats or if I deliver all that information in an unbroken sentence. But I can’t help it.

My furious ramblings would be met with at best a ‘wow okay’ kind of expression and an unconvincing ‘nice’ as people would desperately try to shut down the conversation. Others would misunderstand and try and support my perceived cat interest by buying me solely cat themed gifts or assuming that cats was the only topic I was capable of speaking about and infantilise me for it.

I started to dread being asked about my cats. It felt like a way to shut me up as it meant people wouldn’t actually have to have a conversation with me. It put me at risk of being detected as the autistic person in the room. I would struggle and try not to cry as I physically bit my tongue to stop myself saying what I wanted.

Eventually, I became practiced. Now if I get asked about cats I tend to just say ‘I’m a crazy cat lady – don’t get me started’. People laugh politely and the conversation moves on to the next person.

It’s easier but sometimes it makes me sad and sometimes I forget. The other day, my godmother said ‘you do see a lot of cats while you’re out’ and my heart sank. I had let the mask slip and unleashed my crazy cat rambles on the world or let my neurodivergence out of the bag if you will.

Liking things is complicated.

The irony is that what I love most about cats is that they are simple. I know when they are grumpy, when they are hungry and when they are happy. They (unlike shameless dogs) don’t pretend to like you when they don’t. They’re honest and if you don’t interest them, they ignore you. It’s refreshing. But they’re also incredibly comforting and grounding for me.

Navigating a maze of social conventions leaves me exhausted and sensory sensitivity makes me frequently overwhelmed. My cats are warm, their hearts beat in a regular rhythm that makes the world slow down, their fur is soft and they know when I’m upset. They don’t ask me to mask. They make sense.

When I had to go into hospital, my upset at not being able to see my cats wasn’t because of some incomprehensible obsession but because my cats help me cope and when I struggled to make friends, they were there for me.

Similarly, when I listen to music, it blocks out the world. But my relationship with music was a bit different. Music ended up giving me words.

Some of this is about context – away from the competitivity and ‘correct’ consumption of music in school, I discovered that people actually do just like different music and like music differently.

When I was in hospital, I became in charge of choosing the music. At first, I was terrified and was desperate to research and find what was acceptable from other patients. However, my findings were incredibly incoherent and covered just about every genre imaginable (think Guns n’ Roses followed by Katy Perry). I was perplexed and too scared to add my own favourites to the playlist with the criticisms and school jibes still censoring my own private listening. But here when people asked me about music, they actually wanted to know and they wanted to know why. I got to talk about why I liked certain genres or the meaning that some lyrics had to me. My interest in music wasn’t pre-determined, it didn’t have to fit the noise-cancelling headphones stereotype people had and my answers didn’t have to be profound or definitive. It was safe to say you didn’t like something. It let me actually find out what music I liked for the first time.

Like my cats, music soothed me and comforted me by articulating anxieties I couldn’t put into words. I started to use lyrics to explain feelings I couldn’t translate by myself and I used my learning about other people’s favourite genres to express my empathy with a struggle I couldn’t see and that also left them speechless.

Music wasn’t a special interest or a self-care tool, it was a lifejacket when I was drowning in my stresses and a lifeline that when people actually wanted to hear why I liked music gave us a mutual language to share. We liked music differently because of our respective brain functioning but that didn’t mean the experiences were mutually unintelligible.

My point is when we think about special interests and sensory comforts these can be very stigmatised – sometimes we need these things because the outer world is harder for us to bear. It’s not that I can’t grow up or that I can’t talk about other things, it’s just that I find those things interesting and comforting in the same way that a neurotypical might find a daily walk and chatting about celebrities relaxing.

I don’t always know how I am allowed to talk about these things and so when it came to cats, shame and stigma made me stop. But my experience with music shows special interests and sensory comforts can be opportunities for translation – a medium where we can understand a bit of what each other means and a way that I can show affection and participate.

Maybe we should be more like cats – you don’t have to understand but you also don’t have to judge.

Thank you for indulging me, I’m off to hug my cats now.

Much love,
Rosie
xxx