With a Sense of Poise and Rationality

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 || 9:33 PM

Been looking into adopting a cat. Now that I’ll finally have my own place, I’ll finally get a chance to get a pet. I doubt my sister will be happy but it’s not as though it’ll be her problem to care for it.

I’ve been reading some studies on the effects a pet can have on patients with bipolarity, and while it all seems pretty obvious, people seem to take the results for granted.

When I was around 8, one bright September morning, which coincidentally turned out to be Independence Day, my father brought home a little black schnauzer. He was a feisty little thing that had us running around the living room half in panic half in excitement, in fear of getting bitten.

Since my brother and sister always paired up together, and most of the time, against me, I was left with pretty much no one, given we lived in the middle of nowhere, and there were no other kids. Just a bunch of abandoned houses in a beach-house complex.

The dog took a preference for me. He already had a name— Jimmy— so I never got to give him one, but I had a bunch of nicknames, one of them being ‘ninenaito’. I have no idea what the hell that means anymore. It was some sort of babified word or something that simply turned into that.

And so that dog was my best friend for around 7 years, which were key formative years, until he ran off to die somewhere or something, after I nursed him back to health from an attack by a pair of boxer dogs one distressing Sunday afternoon.

Point being, there was a specific feeling of stability, and comfort, and belonging in the act of caring for that dog, and loving it, and being freely affectionate with it.

Could be just a coincidence, but I stand by notion that the loss of that dog was a correlating fact in the hardcore triggering of my bipolarity, during my teens. You need a triggering event? That would have been it.

I’ve always been bipolar. In retrospect, I fit the child profile perfectly, but it wasn’t until my teens that I realized there was something very wrong, and no one would listen to me (do they ever?) when I begged to go to a psychologist.

Then finally after my aunt bitched at my mom over one of my lash-outs, they took me to a neurologist… who misdiagnosed me with ADHD (wtf? Where does severe depression for over 6 months and mild mania every once in a while, fit in with ADHD?), until finally, they got it right.

I knew that I needed another pet to love and care for, but my parents refused to ever get another pet, so I remained traumatized by the loss of my baby until… pretty much now, considering I’m not breaking down at the thought, let alone the elaborate mention of him.

I should have been taken to therapy after he was gone, but… you know, he was just a dog. Not like he was a family member, or anything. Not like he was my best friend, or the closest thing I had, or the one thing that kept me grounded throughout those years of teenage alienation and instinctive rebellion, and just general rejection from going to a new school with already established cliques, and feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere for being weird (isn’t that the story of my life, though?).

Not as though that dog was the one thing I loved the most in the world, but whatever.

And so now that I’m making a bunch of lifestyle changes, and I’ll be living… essentially alone, considering my sister and I can live in the same house without so much as exchanging a single word for months at a time other than to check in.

I love living alone, I love being alone. I love having my space. I simply don’t like being lonely, and since I really don’t want to invest that need for companionship in a person, given how fickle human relations are, and due to school being my focus, I’m getting myself a feline companion.

Dogs are too much trouble, need too much attention, and for having a working college student as an owner, there would be too much neglect. I’m not getting a kitten for the same reason. Yeah, they’re adorable, but too much maintenance.

Cats are independent, sleep half a day, and will go to you for attention if they feel like it, making them the perfect roommates for me. They’re also wonderful for just having on your lap and cuddling and sleeping with.

I’m getting a cat that’s grown up, still deciding on gender— obviously spayed/neutered, for everyone’s sake.

I remember a former friend of mine and I were planning on adopting one back in Cali. Went to the shelter nearby and everything, but the logistics of the thing simply didn’t make much sense. Now the logistics don’t seem that complex, so it’s something I’m looking forward to.