Been laughing for the past 10 minutes, thanks for this one.
(I tried the death of my cat by car in front of my house in a Go Girl manner, absolute cinema)
Ladies, I need to tell you about the day Mr. Whiskers died in front of my house and accidentally launched my most powerful era.
It was a Tuesday. A sedan. A tabby who had genuinely never once respected a boundary in his fourteen years on this earth.
And in that moment, watching him go, something shifted in me.
Because here is what nobody tells you about grief: it will make you walk into the street in your bathrobe, screaming at a departing Camry, completely unhinged, in front of your entire neighborhood.
And THAT is when the sisterhood showed up.
Three women from my street — women I had waved at for six years without learning their names — came out of their houses. Not to comfort me. To scream at the Camry WITH me.
We did not know each other. We did not need to.
We were simply women, in various states of morning dishevelment, collectively losing it on a residential street at 8am, taking up ALL the space, unapologetically.
Mr. Whiskers would have hated every second of it. He was famously not a team player.
But we stood there anyway, four women building a table in a cul-de-sac, united by one flat cat and one disappearing Toyota, and I thought:
THIS is what they mean by collective power.
Rest easy, Mr. Whiskers. You changed the game for women everywhere.
You didn't mean to. But you never meant to do anything.
Here was mine, I thought it was very good. My prompt was: reinvigorating the desire for work after a sabbatical.
AI below ----
Six weeks into my sabbatical I was genuinely thriving.
Week seven I started narrating my own grocery runs in the style of David Attenborough.
By week nine I had developed a parasocial relationship with the pigeons outside my window. I named them. I had favorites. Gerald was getting too big for his boots and I resented him for it.
My therapist suggested I "find structure." My mother suggested I "get a grip." My accountant sent a single email that just said the word "savings" with no other context.
The thing that actually pulled me back wasn't a TED talk or a journaling prompt.
It was a documentary about competitive Scrabble players — specifically the 1999 North American Scrabble Championship — where a retired postal worker named Marlon Hill drove fourteen hours to compete, placed forty-third, and described it afterward as the best day of his adult life.
Forty-third.
He was beaming.
Something about that broke the spell. The sabbatical had convinced me that returning to work required a perfect reason. Marlon just needed a reason.
Gerald the pigeon watched me update my LinkedIn profile from the windowsill.
