Dear Human 💕,

That was not one of your best moments. That human wanted to be encouraging and offer support, and you reacted like they stepped on my tail on purpose. You got defensive and you lashed out.

You clearly regret how you reacted, and now you’re feeling bad about yourself.

I push everyone away

I am so sensitive

I am so ungrateful

You think only a bad human would react like that, so you must be a bad human. Now you feel miserable, and you’re avoiding the other human. That’s not making it better for them or for yourself.

The other human wanted to help, and you attacked them. You should feel bad. But you should not feel bad about yourself. You should feel bad about what you did. And it makes a big difference what you feel bad about.

Here’s why:

If you feel bad about yourself as a person, it’s shame.

I am bad

Shame attacks who you are as a person. It tells you that you’re fundamentally flawed and worthless. Shame doesn’t help you improve – it is paralyzing and makes you want to hide.

If you feel bad about what you did, it’s guilt.

I did something bad

Guilt can actually be helpful. When you feel guilty about something you did, it motivates you to make things right. You can apologize, you can do better next time. Guilt is about your actions, and actions can be changed.

Doing something bad does not make you a bad human. Considering how much humans mess up, all humans would be bad humans. But they’re not.

And if doing something bad made everyone a bad creature, I would be a bad cat as well. I am not.

I scratched your hand when we were playing with the string. I got too excited and my claws came out. I’m not a violent cat, I just got carried away in the moment.

I stole the shrimp from your plate. I saw that big, tasty-looking shrimp on your plate and I couldn’t resist.

What happened, happened. You regret what you did, but you can’t undo it. You have to accept that you messed up, but you can do something about it.

The fact that you feel terrible about this shows that you care about them and that you have a conscience. Bad humans don’t feel bad when they hurt people.

You are not a bad human. You’re just human, which means you’re imperfect and you mess up every now and then. Just like everyone else. Cut yourself some slack and focus on what you can do now.

You can’t avoid that other human forever. Go and make things right with them.

Yours,
Cat 🐾