Hair Ball

This morning I sat and watched my kitty cough up a hair ball. If you're not a cat owner, you may not be familiar with this extraordinary sight. The cat freezes, makes a series of other-planetary sounds, extends her neck so that she looks like some sort of creature out of Dr. Seuss, coughs, gags, coughs, gags, and then convulses. Rewind. Repeat until hair ball (one of life's more disgusting byproducts) appears.

As I watched, this overwhelming sense of deja vu enveloped me. I dismissed it: of course I've been here before; I've had cats for years. But then I realized it wasn't deja vu, actually, but more that sense of being reminded, of parallels pushing you toward a memory not of what was in front of you but of something else, something sort of similar but really very different. And slowly, fitfully--rather like coughing up a hair ball, actually--I recognized the memory evoked by my gagging kitty: therapy.

My kitty contorting herself to produce this mass of indigestible, glutinous gunk perfectly embodied the process of undergoing therapy (when the therapy is working, that is). You sit there and at first you freeze but eventually these noises emerge and then you find yourself coughing and gagging and over many many sessions and much more emotional coughing and mental gagging, you find yourself stretching and straining and it's not right and you weren't meant to feel this way and you want it to stop but it doesn't, you don't, and then, and then, and then, eventually, maybe, there's the hair ball. But it's not over, because now you and the therapist have to dissect the hair ball, and seeing what's in the thing is almost as bad as coughing it up in the first place.

Curled up like a fossilized ammonite, my kitty sleeps on the wooly blanket atop the sofa. She clearly has no memory of and no interest in her hair balls. She wretches them up and moves on, unaware.

I gotta say, measure me against my kitty on the scale of emotional wellbeing and the kitty wins, hands (paws) down. Self-awareness is just not all it's cracked up to be.