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The Kitten Psychologist and The Kitten Come To A Conclusion
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As I was writing what I knew was the last part of this story, I felt this nudge to go back to the beginning. Why did the kitten need help to begin with? What good had that done, both for the kitten and the psychologist? And how did those initial circumstances tie in with the ending, anyways?
The thing about writing what you thought would be a silly one-off, and then deciding later you'd write a series, means that the whole thing feels so... random. I'd worried whether the first part of the story even made sense as part of the series, or if it was this odd part, hanging out with the rest so their existence could be justified.
So, as the bomb of the kitten having a conscience had dropped and the aftermath played out, I was taking a whole new look at what had really happened leading up to and during that kitten’s first session with the psychologist.
Because if this had happened that way, then really... really.
And then I found the first lines of the story going through my head again, and I understood.
The story had never been about the kitten.
It had been about the psychologist.
I’d started writing these stories with the psychologist as a humorous, semi self-insert, to help this kitten through the problem I’d personally been having with stepping out. And, as it turns out, when you write a series of stories as therapy sessions for yourself, the story’s not over until the character you’ve really based on yourself gets the help you’ve been needing.
Funny how that works.
(P.S. I really want a cat cafe called Take a Paws to be a thing irl. Someone, go do that.)