Writing practice: keep trying for that cat soliloquy
[actually just going to work through some more stuff]
[you just have to extract one word at a time, if that’s what it takes]
[ok, back to the cat]
So the cat has a backstory for why he’s like that. He’s sent from his mother’s womb, against his will and in breech, to a cold world. He’s the runt, small, weak, cannot get the nurturing and nutrition he needs. Is put up for adoption (or maybe is simply left to fend for himself and picked up by animal control and sent to the pound?) and isn’t chosen at the adoption place, escapes before he is put to sleep. He lives in hiding near the adoption place, feeding off scraps, watching other animals leave with their new families. This breeds anger, resentment, which grows the more he fixates on it, causing him to fixate more on it. Then he plots to take his revenge by manipulating and subjugating the happy homes of other small creatures (young children).
It’s almost like what you see of people is a circular shadow on a table, but the object that creates that shadow could be a disk, or a sphere, or a cylinder, or a cone, or any of an infinite number of other shapes. You can never see what those shapes are, and for the most even the individual himself doesn’t know what his shape is, but it’s the shape that determines his behavior (the parts we can see, the shadow).
So we can’t know the other person, he doesn’t know himself, we use our worldview to estimate the other person, much of what we do is a result of the part of ourselves we don’t know. The whole thing is a big mess.
And we allow that which is in our interest to allow, then we adjust our mentality to accommodate that, which distorts us even more. Plus we distort to allow things about ourselves we want to accept rather than change. The whole thing is ignorance and distortion.
[just write some lines for cat]
CAT
A heart too weak made worse by circumstance
[maybe true empathy begins when trying to imagine yourself as the other]
[anyway, i got one line out. that’s ok. try again tomorrow]