Why You Shouldn't Be This Good at Keeping It In

I'm very good at not crying. My cat had other plans.

Tobias loves to travel. I want to make that clear right away, because in a few lines he is going to have a very bad time, and I would hate for anyone to mistake me for one of those people who drag their cat across the world against its will. Toby is a willing participant. He likes bags, cars, unfamiliar windows, the smell of airports. He travels better than most people I know.

So we had taken him to an island in Thailand, because after Dubai, after Bangkok, after months of concrete and air conditioning set too cold, we needed trees and the illusion that we were about to breathe differently. We did not stop working for it, of course, you do not do that when you run a studio and your clients could not care less whether you are watching a sunset. But we wanted a parenthesis, a bit of green, the kind of break you grant yourself while telling yourself it counts as rest.

And then Toby started throwing up.

The fever climbed in a single day. He went limp to the point of not being able to lift his head, eyes half shut, and you should know that a sick Sphynx does not get to hide anything, he has no fur to soften the news. On the island, naturally, no vet. A very kind American vet tried to help, without any equipment to make even the smallest diagnosis, which amounted to holding our hand politely. For the rest, the island offered smoothie sellers, two or three half-abandoned resorts, a handful of Seven Elevens, and men who rent out scooters. Nothing that cures a cat. So we took the first ferry at five in the morning, then drove three hours, the carrier on my lap and Tobias staring at me as if I were personally responsible for the situation, a theory I had, deep down, already accepted.

The thing is, this is how I operate. I have a ten-year vision, one, clear and slightly stupid: build something, make enough money to be free. It is the only distant horizon I can name. For everything else I have no plan, I have days. I get up, I throw myself at the pile, I push forward, I tick the boxes, and the next day I start again, and the whole machine runs perfectly as long as you never stop. And to never stop, there is a trick I have mastered for a long time: you put your emotions in a closet, and you shut the door with your knee.

Three years of shutting that door with my knee.

I left a real job, the kind that reassures the people around you when you mention it. I left a city I deeply loved living in. I left my region, and therefore my parents, which is something you never really say out loud because it is supposed to be the normal price of ambition. We moved to Dubai, took Tobias with us, started again from nothing. Then came the war in the Middle East, which touched us closely, and we had to leave somewhat urgently for Thailand. At every step, the suitcases, the time zones, the addresses that keep changing, and always the clients on top, because you do not put a studio on pause just because your life is relocating by six thousand kilometers. Filing it away, filing it away, filing it away. It had started quietly with stomach aches I blamed on what I was eating, while the body was simply sending its invoices long before it would even consider cutting the power.

Tobias lying on the bed in his brown blanket, and the medication meant to save him making him sicker than the illness itself, that was the full invoice, presented all at once. The closet opened, and everything came out together.

I do not know how to describe this to someone who has never been through it, so I will stick to the facts. This week I cried about fifteen times a day, with no identifiable grief, no trigger, waves that rise without warning and fold you in half in the middle of a sentence. A lump in the throat that never loosens. Another in the stomach that seals the entrance, so that you end up looking at a plate like a math problem set by someone cruel. And at night, an anxiety so dense that sleep refuses to come, even wrung out with exhaustion, even when the body is begging for mercy. The highlight, of course, stays the treadmill, where I walked and sobbed facing a wall, drenched in sweat, for reasons I could not have named even under threat.

Here is what nobody bothers to tell you about the art of keeping everything to yourself. It does not disappear. You think you are emptying out, you are actually storing, and it does not sit flat, it runs in silence, at a rate you never agreed to. Every emotion refused in the moment keeps turning in the dark, quietly, gathering its interest. You think you are solid because nothing shows, when in fact you are signing a debt. And the day it comes due, it never comes due in reasonable installments. It comes due in full, on a Tuesday, because of a cat.

The funniest part is that it was raining without pause. We were deep in the rainy season, water streaming from morning to night over the roof, over the trees, over the whole world, and I, who had pulled off the feat of staying perfectly watertight for three years, had chosen exactly this setting to start leaking from everywhere.

Today Toby is better. He stopped the medication that was doing him no good, he is eating again, and he still looks at me as if I were guilty, in which he is not entirely wrong. Except he interrupted the antibiotic before the end, so the bacteria can come back, and a countdown has installed itself in my head. I think about it constantly, watching for the moment he tips over again. And I suspect that countdown of hiding others, all those things from the last three years that have not had their turn yet and are waiting in the closet, neatly stacked, holding out for the right Tuesday.

I keep going anyway. I am writing this today, and I am rather proud to be writing it instead of swallowing it one more time out of habit. In forty minutes I have a call for a project that matters to me, and I will take it, with the lump in my throat and slightly trembling hands, because being an entrepreneur is also that, never quite stopping, taking care of yourself as best you can but moving forward regardless, sometimes in pain. The trap is that I spent three years doing only that last part, moving forward in pain while jamming the door shut with my knee, and I have seen where it leads. So I am looking for the balance point, the one that means going on without sealing myself watertight, letting the water through as it comes, in small bearable amounts, so I never have to settle the whole thing on the same day.

The call is in thirty-five minutes. The rain will be back soon. Toby is asleep by the window, perfectly calm, and he is the only one of us who is, I think, actually at peace.

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I’m Adeline, a French writer who built a business so she would never have to stay quiet to keep a job. I grew up in a small town in Lorraine, France, with no family money and no one who knew how to make any. I got out. I did it without becoming a different person, and that, more than the money, is what I write about.

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