You Don't Need to Fix Yourself

The stray cat doesn't try. It doesn't strive to be more than it is or fret over its perceived shortcomings. It doesn’t pace in circles, self-consciously examining its fur in dirty windows. It roams the streets, indifferent to passersby, occasionally landing on a warm porch with its presence but never staying long enough to belong. In the end, everything it needs is already within reach: a patch of sunlight, a leftover meal, the fleeting warmth of another living thing brushing past. The stray doesn’t look for validation in the eyes of strangers. It simply exists. It focuses on what’s in front of him.

It's easy to envy that life, a life of uncalculated, indifferent being. After all, anything that ever truly resonated with me, anything that stuck—whether a book, a place, or a rare moment of connection—was something I stumbled across. An accident, a chance encounter. Not that you deserved it, or that you earned it through some effort. No, it simply happened. Right place, right time, without reason or intention.

I recently came across a book, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray, and it felt like vindication of my life principle. In his reflections on feline existence, Gray dismantles the entire modern apparatus of “self-improvement’ and constant striving. He suggests that we don't need to mold or force ourselves into something different. There’s no need for supplements, affirmations, or morning routines designed to make us better versions of ourselves. Like stray cats, we already possess everything we need, both the good and the bad.

But we live in an age that conditions us to believe otherwise. We are told that happiness lies in endless optimization, perpetual improvement, and the obsessive management of our thoughts and bodies. “Positive Vibes” is what they call it. We are driven to see our flaws not as inherent traits, but as parasites that need to be expelled. It's all so insufferable.

You don’t get to pick the cards you’re dealt; your hands are decided long before you know you’re even in the game. The illusion that we can somehow curate ourselves into a state of lasting contentment or significance is a joke.

Cats, on the other hand, embrace the cards they’re given. They don’t try to fix themselves or overcome some manufactured notion of inadequacy. They lie in the sun when they find it, eat when there’s food, and sleep without the burden of existential dread gnawing at their thoughts. They exist on their terms, not by constantly trying to modify themselves to suit some external demand.

Of course, this doesn't mean life is free of challenges, nor is it an excuse for complacency. It's not about resigning yourself to mediocrity or giving up altogether. It’s about understanding that you already have what you need within you to navigate the world. And if you don’t, then it wasn’t ever going to stick with you anyways.

I suppose there’s a kind of liberation in accepting that no amount of strategic thinking or obsessive tweaking will lead to the life we’re conditioned to believe we deserve. The stray cat doesn't aspire to find meaning or purpose. It simply lives, and in doing so, comes across what’s meant for them. And maybe that’s the real answer: letting life unfold as it will, not forcing connections, not manufacturing ambitions that aren’t ours to begin with. Simply allowing the cards to play themselves out, without the need for elaborate justifications.

Life, despite everything, sometimes offers unexpected moments of beauty and connection, not because you engineered them, but precisely because you didn’t. Because you followed where your heart took you.

That book you find on a secondhand bookstore’s dusty shelf, that one person who shows up when you stopped looking, those fleeting moments of human connection. These things don’t happen by design, and they can’t be captured in a five-year plan, a manifestation, or life-hack blog post.

Maybe the goal is not to become something greater, but to become more attuned to what already is. To what you already are. To live like the stray, indifferent to expectations but open to possibility. After all, if everything you truly need is already within reach, then maybe what’s out of reach wasn’t meant for you anyway.

So, we stumble through life, not as architects of our fate but as wanderers in search of sunlight. And if you can accept that, if you can truly let go of the need to force meaning or control outcomes, then perhaps, like the stray cat, you can find a quiet grace in simply being alive.

And then just maybe it’ll all work out for you.

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