The Creepy Cat Detective... for real
Blurry lines between fact and fiction
Dear Kula Diaries,
About a year ago, I started writing a short series of posts entitled, ‘The Creepy Cat Detective Agency’.
If you haven’t read them yet, it’s one of my most favorite writing projects of all time. I called it, ‘The Case of the Missing Nut Butter’. You can find all of them here:
Part One - Creepy Cat Detective Agency
Part II - Creepy Cat Detective Agency
Part III - Creepy Cat Detective Agency
Part IV - Creepy Cat Detective Agency
The story in this series revolves around a version of me in a different universe — a version of me who is the CEO and founder of a Nut Butter Company called Tiny Spoon Nut Butter. This nut-butter CEO version of me finds herself in a bit of a pickle … she’s discovered that somebody is stealing nut-butter… so she hires an investigator to help her solve the case… and she ends up not only being the victim of theft from her employee… but also, in a delightful turn of events, being scammed by the investigator himself. Magically, in the midst of the chaos, she is visited by a mystical being — an all knowing Creepy Cat Detective, who helps her solve the case … which ends up being something much more than simply the things that were going ‘wrong’ on the surface.
When I wrote those ‘fictional’ stories, I didn’t say much about their origin, and while I won’t go into any significant detail here (or ever), I want to transparently share this: the entire series is based on true events. Most of the important facts about exactly what happened have been changed, but the overall premise of the story is 100% accurate… including the part about me being scammed.
At this time last year, I felt like I was living in a twilight zone. I felt like the biggest failure in the world as a supervisor and the founder of a company. I felt like I was in over my head… and drowning. I felt stupid and idiotic that in the midst of what felt very chaotic… I had hired somebody to help me who had, in turn, taken advantage of me and stolen from me. I can’t begin to count the days and nights that I spent crying… only to put on a ‘happy’ face for my employees just so that I could get through the day. My mornings walks were spent crying, so that I didn’t end up crying all day at work. Shouldn’t I have known better? How did I let this happen? Was I even cut out for this job? To be honest, I wanted to walk away from everything. I wanted to shut the door on the Kula office… walk away… and never go back. I wanted to do what I had always done throughout my life: run away from things that hurt.
But, each day, I would wake up… and I would do it again. I did not run away. I did all the things that I know how to do: meditation, dancing, writing letters of gratitude, deep breathing, riding my motorcycle, painting… anything to give my mind a break from the racing and obsessive thoughts that were on repeat. Old familiar phrases came back to haunt me … over and over again, they tried to tell me: you are a failure, you are a disappointment, you aren’t good enough for this, you might as well quit.
But, I decided not to listen. Instead, I sat down at my computer one day… and I decided to write. I looked at my situation, and I wondered a surprising question: Could this be a lot more fun if I turned it into a fictional story? Without suppressing my strong emotions… could I transmute them into something better? I didn’t know the answer, but I had nothing to lose, and I wanted to try. If real-life Anastasia couldn’t figure out the moral of the story… maybe nut-butter CEO Anastasia would have some deeper insights.
As it turned out, she did. As I sat down to write every single week, the story of what I was experiencing started to, oddly enough, make sense. I could see how everything was lining up perfectly in order to help me craft this beautiful tale of redemption and love. Nut Butter Anastasia was able to see things that Real Life Anastasia could not see.
I don’t want to give away too much of the story if you haven’t read it, but at the end of the Creepy Cat Detective Agency Part IV, there is a scene with nut-butter Anastasia and the ‘bad guy investigator’ — a character that I named Hagis Scuthins. As I wrote this particular scene last year, I had tears streaming down my face, and I felt my heart open for this person who had stolen from me… a person who had betrayed my trust and hurt me. Even though the real life version of this person disappeared completely after stealing my money, this fictional moment was able to give me something that I would not have the opportunity to experience otherwise: it allowed me to let go of the anger and pain that I was holding in my own heart.
As I finished writing the Creepy Cat Detective Agency, I welcomed healing into my life so that I could move on from the entire situation — and I felt a sense of newness and hope for what could possibly bloom from the rubble. I didn’t know what that could be, but in retrospect, it’s only fitting that the Creepy Cat Detective themselves arrived… for real.
When this ‘cluster of clusters’ occurred last year, Aaron and I installed security cameras around our home. We didn’t have anything specific to be concerned about, but given the tension that we had experienced, we wanted to be prudent. And so, we installed a few different cameras around our house. Aaron, with his infinitely dry sense of humor, named our cameras after fake characters from the show Bridgerton, which he despises with a passion (we made it through less than 2% of one episode):
Our security cameras are named: Sir Jasper Average Shanks Lady Wobbily Boobily Lord Stumbly Bumbly and... Kevin
(I’m not sure how Kevin ended up in the mix… so, you’ll have to ask Aaron about that.)
We live in the middle of the woods, and so most often, it’s a windblown branch that activates the cameras. But one night, much to our surprise, the doorbell camera went off at 8pm. Quickly, we checked the recording… and we were startled to see a cream colored cat darting across the video clip. It was about 5 degrees outside, and we were concerned for this cat’s well being. The next day, we put a small dish of cat food out… and the following morning, the food was gone. Again, we put more food out, and again, the following night, the food was gone. Finally, we managed to get a glimpse of this critter on the camera — a beautiful, blue-eyed Siamese cat. We named him Jasper, after the camera that caught him for the first time.
I didn’t realize this until many months later… but Jasper the mysterious cat arrived on our porch just 2 days after I had published part 1 of the Creepy Cat Detective Agency… a story about a mysterious cat that arrives to help ‘fictional me’ uncover the truth. At the time, I couldn’t have possibly connected the dots — it was just ‘something that happened’. I was so lost in what had gone wrong that I couldn’t yet see that something else was trying to go very right.
The Jasper saga went on for nearly a year… we unofficially ‘adopted’ Jasper and fed him daily — only ever watching him covertly out of a window or on our security camera. Unfortunately, our cat Cinder encountered Jasper a few times ‘in the wild’ and experienced a severe dislike for this strange new cat. She made it her unofficial life mission to try and chase him and attack him at any cost. Then, our house started getting frequented by a small racoon herd who were also interested in the cat food on our porch. The outdoor feeding situation became unsustainable, and so we decided to try and trap Jasper. It took us nearly 6 months to train him into walking in to the trap, but we finally did it… and now, Jasper is living in our guest bedroom and is very, very slowly acclimating to life as a domestic cat.
Jasper is feral, and I had never dealt with a feral cat in my life — it’s challenging and requires constant work and a fiercely dedicated commitment to the cat. Each day, Aaron and I eat our meals in the room with Jasper, just so that he can become accustomed to our presence. Nearly 2 months into living with us, we can now feed him treats and food from our hands… and pet him while wearing a leather glove. I’ve been hissed at and smacked more times than I can count, and I’m getting better at not being so ‘jumpy’ around him. He seems to trust us more when we are deliberate and confident with our actions, rather than showing any sign of hesitation or weakness at all.
The other day, as I was gently petting Jasper, I realized that he had been living with a hardened shell for most of his life. In fact, it is this hardened shell that has kept him alive in my neighborhood, which is home to a significant population of predators — including a family of cougars. With a feral cat, you can’t force them into anything right away… instead, you take tiny steps. You offer tiny little doses of love… over and over again. And gradually, that hard outer shell starts to soften. Progress does not come in large leaps, but in tiny moments of noticing that a subtle purr can be heard… or that you can feel him ever so slightly pushing back on your hand as you scratch behind his ears.
As I sit in patience and presence with Jasper, I can’t help but notice that Jasper wouldn’t be in our life right now if that whole mess hadn’t happened last year. Without the security cameras, we never would have seen a sneaky nighttime cat lurking on our porch. It’s not lost on me that writing a story about a cat that magically appears in the life of a fictional version of me… also coincided with a very real cat magically appearing in my very real life. Which made me wonder: what was Jasper trying to tell me? What was he helping me to notice that I could not see?
When I reflect on the events of last year from a distance — when I can zoom out and look at the ways in which they’ve impacted my life, I can see the tiny green shoots of beauty and newness that grew in the places that I thought were ‘ruined’. I’m glad I didn’t hold onto the anger… and I’m glad that I allowed that experience to transmute itself into something much more important. I also have accepted my own actions, and learned to offer myself some kindness. I know that I was doing the best that I could. I know that I felt vulnerable and overwhelmed, and I while I am saddened that somebody took advantage of that, I also release myself from blame. I didn’t do anything wrong — because who is to say that anything wrong actually happened? What if those things needed to happen in order for me to get where I am now? What if they were simply a part of this wacky and confusing process of life? What happens if I can allow myself to be swept by the current of life… to trust it implicitly… to surrender to the flow?
I don’t have a map forward, and it’s only through looking at my previously recorded tracks that I can make sense of anything. Maybe none of it makes sense — maybe, as Homer Simpson wisely says, ‘It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened’… or, maybe, it’s just life finding a way through the murkiness to remind me of what really matters. It’s funny and ironic to me now, because the ‘peak moment’ of the Creepy Cat Detective Agency is a beautiful moment of forgiveness — of being able to look beyond the ugliness of another human… and to peer deeply into a precious place in their heart… into a place that they might not even know exists. In a much smaller way now, I sit with this cat and he also reminds me that I can take deep breaths and I can be with the hissing and the growling… and that I can choose to see the potential that has not yet been revealed. Without saying anything, he reminds me to be patient… to be present… and to continuously offer tiny glimpses of love and kindness, even when they do not seem to matter or make a difference. Maybe especially when they do not seem to matter. One tiny droplet of love might not make a difference right now — but millions of droplets over time can create a wave.
We can’t know how our interactions with others will ripple out into the universe, and I don’t know what happened to the man who scammed me last year — but I have to imagine that he was not in a place where good things were unfolding in his life. If I’m being honest, it felt hard to let it go — because I wanted him to ‘pay’ for what he had done, because it simply was not right. But, at what cost? Was it worth my energy to try and track him down to recoup what felt like a loss? Or would I have simply compounded the loss by spending my valuable energy on fighting… instead of throwing myself fully into creative acceptance of a situation that I did not understand? It was a moment of deep trust and surrender to let go of something that felt un-let-go-able. It was a moment of falling into the deep abyss of the universe, and believing that, in some inexplicable way, things were going to work out… that maybe, at the very least, a story with a happy ending could be born from the chaos.
Over the past year, the sun has continued to rise each day, and I have witnessed the most beautiful mornings and the most spectacular sunsets. Today, I held a leaf in my palm and I watched as diamond-shaped dewdrops clung to its waxy skin. In the dark, I watch the glowing eyes of a deer as it looks at me curiously while I walk. I look back on the past year — and forward towards whatever is coming — with a sense of renewed peace and hope. I let go of the things that attempt to dissuade me from the truth, and I remember the love that continually and infinitely ties all of us together. I hold onto that hope — not just for mysterious feral cats and con men — but, for all of us.
Friends — thank you so much for being here today and for reading my words and for your kindness and support. The Creepy Cat Detective Agency stories brought me an unfathomable amount of joy last year — and revisiting them this week felt like a breath of fresh air. It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full year since ‘the cluster of clusters’ — and I’m so deeply grateful for the entire experience. It has shaped and shifted how I’ve continued to move forward as the founder of a small outdoor gear brand, and it has taught me how to implicitly trust my intuition.
I am sending you all so much love, wherever you are today. Remember: even the tiniest dose of love to another human does matter. Over and over again, we can make a difference by showing up with kindness for each other.
For some reason the term, “Hard Hearted,” popped into my thoughts. It’s so easy to shut ourselves off when difficult situations come our way and live in anger and blame. Being soft hearted and loving can be perceived as weak, but it actually takes courage. In the end, it will create the kind of world we all want to belong to.
Your story reminds me of one of the meditations from a few days ago! https://mindfulness.com/mindful-living/are-these-bad-times-or-good-times-the-story-of-the-zen-farmer