Video – My Cat
Video is the name of my cat — and the name of a video series I made about her. She arrived at the start of my recovery and became a kind of emotional mirror. Some clips show me annoying her, others show her pushing back. It felt symbolic — that push-pull dynamic, my longing to be loved constantly, and the way I took it personally when she just needed her own space. But at the same time she was just a little cat with her own autonomy and life-it wasn't about me, which was helpful to always have in the background. My best friend calls this “bigger cat stuff going on.” In other words she was not an extension of me.
At my old job, they used to say “relationships are the treatment,” and I agreed. Everything comes back to our early connections. But I never felt like one cohesive person. There were too many versions of me, each one in a different kind of relationship. So this work is about starting small — with one cat, one room, one thread of connection. It was about building a relationship where none of the parts had to be hidden.
