I didn’t think I would be able to produce a Wednesday’s Ghost for you this week. Everything feels very immediate right now - my focus is so squarely on how many hours or even minutes are left in this day, how many days to the deadline, how many edits to resolve in my book before the end of the month comes. If I indulge myself with any storytelling, I think, if my focus strays too far from the task at hand, I will be sunk. Every pause to think or write about something else gets tagged with the derogatory label of procrastination.
And yet I’ve done far more pointless and more elaborate things in service of procrastination. When in a state of panic and faced with an imminent hard deadline, I have been known to spend hours shopping for antique candelabras on eBay, in preparation for an Edwardian-house-party-style Bring-Your-Own-Performance evening (also to be planned and executed as the due date loomed).
I have scrutinised photographs of perhaps every church conversion in the British Isles and begun an online loan application with the intent of buying two crumbling Gothic chapels in a remote Welsh cemetery overlooking the Brecon Beacons, because they were on sale for the bargain-basement price of £100,000 the pair.
I have suddenly developed deep obsessions with odd hobbies, such as mudlarking on the banks of the Thames, or covering cardboard boxes with Japanese washi paper, or assembling Lego flowers from the Botanical Collection, when I’ve never particularly fond of Lego or mud and definitely didn’t need dozens of paper-covered boxes.
Anticipating my future assumed decrepitude, I have spent days forecasting the assisted-living and care-home prices I may one day have to pay, comparing the US and the UK and entering financial data on an Excel spreadsheet. I focused my attention on facilities ranging from mid-range to posh, whose websites usually featured photographs of vibrant-looking elders enjoying Champagne around a communal table against a backdrop that looks like Soho House or some other lovely Dean Street member’s club. I’m positive I was on deadline then.
And, of course, when I was crying every night from overwork and overwhelm, gripped with fear that I would never finish the book I’d promised to produce, I decided to purchase first one and then another cat, first a Balinese and then a Siamese, known to be psychologically complex, highly social, extremely demanding, and intensely needy.
You’d think that cats with such qualities would excel at fostering pet-driven procrastination, but you’d be surprised: instead they are having the opposite impact on me, kicking my midlife crisis and my productivity into a higher gear.
The great scholar of the human life span, psychologist Erik Erikson, said that at every stage of life one meets a particular psychosocial crisis. For middle age, roughly 40 to 65, that crisis is Generativity vs Stagnation. Positioned in the middle of this range, I become more conscious of the changes afoot, and the alterations in my body and appearance startle me. Like a dawning realisation, I gradually notice the different ways people seem to view me, how they respond.
The other day, my personal trainer told me I was the oldest woman he was currently training. He said he ‘really respected’ me for keeping it going. We have been doing deadlifts. I am getting stronger, but sometimes I tire. Whether due to training or overall stress, my body keeps breaking or inflaming or generally not cooperating. Sometimes, it grinds to a halt, chucks an axle. My mood plummets, and I want to give everything up, or at least slow down.
When I am poised on that precipice between generativity and stagnation, that’s where the cats come in.
Two people sit in their front room. The man sits in an armchair wearing his slippers and the tatty fleece he puts on when he comes in from work. The chair has been recently reupholstered at some expense to render it more hipster - the craftsperson put it on Instagram with the caption Statement Chair Alert!!! - but it belonged to someone’s grandparents, and its owners know what lies beneath the chic exterior. The man dozes, his greying head tipped back, his jaw slack, an empty teacup in his hand.
The woman is on the sofa, peering at her laptop through a pair of varifocal spectacles just prescribed, collected only a fortnight ago. The sight of herself in these glasses surprises her when she sees herself in the mirror. As though by magic, they turn dark when she goes outside, and this really should feel less exciting than it does. Her slippers lie by the side of the sofa, and she has a heated furry throw over her lap, although it is March now and warmer.
On each of their laps lies a cat, languidly draped in that elegant way they have - the Siamese on her, the Balinese on him.
The other character, hiding away in the house somewhere, is the teenager. This adolescent has been needling the woman a lot, calling her a ‘crazy cat lady.’ She glories in any opportunity to diminish her mother, because in finding her own power, she feels compelled to reduce that of the woman who birthed her. The woman knows what her daughter is doing and why, but sometimes it bothers her anyway. Of all the mockeries she endures at the hands of the 13-year-old, ‘crazy cat lady’ somehow seems the sharpest, even when it is affectionate.
As these people laze in their front room, the snoring cats on their laps, the woman realises they are both more likely to fondly gaze upon these felines than upon one another. Romantic holidays and cheeky weekend breaks are infrequently considered but always nixed, for who would keep the cats company, prevent their being lonely? Sometimes one or the other of them goes away; sometimes, they will phone home. How are the cats, naturally, comes before how are you, if the latter query ever comes at all.
Lots of things bother me in my current mood of existential dread and seize-the-day panic, but in these tableaux, which I suddenly snap out of my body to view as though they were on a movie screen, the cats in our laps are the cherries on top, the coup de grace, the element in the scene that makes waves of rebellion and fight and refusal rise up in me.
I break out of my lassitude, fight through my discouragement. My brain kicks into gear again, the ideas exploding like popcorn in my skull. I will finish this goddamn book, I will take the summer festival season by storm, I will edit the novel, I will stay out too late in Soho, I will be disgraceful, I will wear Doc Martens that lace up to my knees like I did when I was 20, I will put the crazy in crazy cat lady. The last thing I will do is go gently into that good night, trapped on the sofa under a pile of snoring pedigree Siamese.