A LETTER FROM A READER
THE CAT DECOR DRAWER NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
I wasn't planning on writing anything today. But I went looking through a drawer for something else entirely and ended up sitting on the floor for a good twenty minutes instead, and I think I need to talk about it.
When did I start apologising for how much I love this cat?
That's honestly the thought that stopped me mid-search. Not dramatic. Just true, and apparently something I'd been carrying around without noticing.
HOW IT HAPPENS
The drawer I was looking through is where the cat things live. A mug with a cartoon face on it. A pair of novelty socks I wore twice. A little ceramic figure someone gave me years ago that I've never quite known what to do with. None of it unkind, all of it given with love. But sitting there on the floor with all of it spread out, I noticed something. Every single piece of it had been made to be a joke, or a gift-shop impulse buy, or something to laugh at politely and put away.
Not one piece of it was made for an actual grown woman's living room. Not one piece looked like it belonged to someone who's been a cat person her whole life, not someone dabbling in it for a season.
WHAT I HAD WRONG
Here's where I'd gotten it wrong, in two ways, without ever really examining it.
The first was assuming that was just how it was. That “cat lady” was always going to be a bit of a punchline, and the best you could do was laugh along and keep the nice mug at the back of the cupboard when people came round.
The second I only worked out properly this week, when I went looking into where the term actually came from. Turns out “cat lady” isn't some new joke from the internet. It goes back to Georgian England, the 1700s, and even then it was never really about young women. It was always specifically about someone exactly my age. Two hundred years of that same joke, aimed at women like me. Somewhere along the way I'd absorbed the punchline without ever knowing I was allowed to just... not accept it.
THE BIT THAT ACTUALLY SURPRISED ME
I went and read a bit more than I meant to, if I'm honest. There's real research on this, not just opinion. Studies going back to 2010, one of them out of an Australian university in 2024, all pointing the same direction: people who identify as cat people consistently score higher on openness and independence than dog people do. Not a flaw. A documented trait.
And then there was the one that actually got me. A study following older adults who'd lost a partner. The ones without a pet showed depression symptoms more than double the ones who had one. Not a slight difference. More than double. Nobody's saying a cat replaces a person. But that number sat with me for a while.
WHAT I'M SITTING WITH NOW
So here's where I've actually landed, twenty minutes and a very full drawer later.
My cat isn't a decoration, and she isn't a punchline either. She's real company, in the specific, measured, actually-researched sense of that word. And everything currently representing that in my house looks like it was made for someone embarrassed about it, not someone who's spent decades being exactly who she is.
I've started properly looking, this week, for the kind of thing that would actually belong in a grown woman's home. Something that looks like it was made by someone who understands the difference between a joke about cat ladies and an actual, well-loved life with a cat in it. I haven't landed on anything yet. But I wanted to write this down before I lost the thought, because I suspect I'm not the only one with a drawer like that.
Twenty minutes on the floor with an old drawer, and I still haven't stopped thinking about it.
— Sharon