The Fur Babies Who Witnessed My Relapse and Comforted Me Through Alcoholism

Especially cats.

In many ways, they felt safer to me than humans did.

They gave me affection in ways humans sometimes could not.

Comfort without questions.

Love without conditions.

They simply stayed.

And even as a child, I felt understood by them in a way I struggled to feel understood by people.

Cats became my emotional safety.

My companions.

My best friends.

Soon our family home in England became filled with cats.

At one point, we had five altogether, including Mimi.

The house always felt full of life because of them.

Noise.

Fur everywhere.

Cats stretched across beds, sofas, and windowsills.

And honestly, I loved it.

When I used to visit my biological dad during the holidays, he would jokingly ask me:

“Who do you love more, me or your cats?”

And every single time I would answer:

“I love my cats more, daddy.”

It became a running joke between us.

But looking back now, there was truth inside it too.

Animals always felt like home to me.

Safe.

Comforting.

Predictable.

Even as a child, I think I attached myself to animals deeply because they loved so purely.

No complicated emotions.

No conditions.

Just comfort and affection.

And honestly, I think a huge part of my healing throughout life has always come through animals.

And throughout my life, there were three different cats called Mimi.

The first Mimi was in the Seychelles when I was younger.

She was my first real emotional attachment to an animal that I can truly remember.

I adored her.

And even years later, she stayed in my memory.

Then years later, whilst living in England, my mum decided to get another cat to join our two existing cats. One of them looked almost identical to the Mimi I had loved in the Seychelles.

So I named her Mimi too.

And from the moment she came into my life, we became inseparable.

She followed me everywhere.

Honestly, she behaved more like a dog than a cat.

She slept beside me constantly.

Waited outside doors for me.

Followed me around the house.

She was my favourite and I adored her more than I can explain.

My mum used to laugh and say Mimi had the exact same personality traits as me.

She was mischievous.

Strong-willed.

Naughty.

And strangely human at times.

She was also unbelievably clever.

She somehow learned how to knock over the bin whenever she wanted attention or food.

And despite being tiny, she could even open the sliding door to my bedroom with her bum.

I still have no idea how she worked it out.

You would suddenly hear the door slowly slide open and there she was casually walking into the room as if she owned the place.

She genuinely behaved like a small furry roommate.

I will never forget how she used to remove the Pringle lid off unfinished tins of Whiskas with her paw because she had worked out exactly how to get into them.

She also had an obsession with Honey Roast ham.

Whatever I was eating, she wanted too.

And bizarrely, she even developed habits that mirrored mine.

When my drinking became bad, there were times I was so lazy and dysfunctional that instead of walking to the bathroom, I would use the sink in my room.

And somehow Mimi started doing the exact same thing.

It sounds ridiculous now, but it became one of those strange memories that somehow made me love her even more.

Later on, just before I went to Thailand, Mimi became very unwell.

She developed Hyperthyroidism, which is a condition where a cat’s thyroid becomes overactive and speeds their metabolism up too much.

It causes dramatic weight loss even when they are still eating.

And that was exactly what happened to Mimi.

She became thinner and thinner.

Smaller and smaller.

Almost like she was disappearing in front of us.

We had to give her medication every single day.

The only way we could get her to take the tablets was by hiding them inside pâté because she was so clever she would refuse them otherwise.

But eventually Mimi became too smart even for that.

She somehow learned how to eat around the medication without swallowing it.

You would find the tablet left behind whilst all the food had disappeared.

Watching her lose weight was heartbreaking because she had already been such a tiny cat naturally.

Around this same period, I made the decision to go to Thailand.

People often imagine Thailand as some glamorous escape story, but the reality was much more complicated than that.

I went there for a very specific reason.

I wanted sobriety.

I wanted to detox.

I wanted to get physically and mentally fit again.

And I also needed to pass my driving medical examination, which had become connected to my drinking and my health.

The second I landed in Thailand, the sole goal was detoxing and trying to regain control of my life before things became even darker.

At the time, I still believed I could outrun what was happening to me internally if I changed countries, routines, environments, and versions of myself.

But addiction follows you wherever you go.

What was originally meant to be a short holiday turned into something much bigger.

I ended up staying there for over a year after choosing not to board my flight home due to other reasons happening in my life at the time.

And whilst I was away, Mimi died.

I never got to say goodbye to her.

That grief broke something inside me.

I remember my mum describing how she had been found outside the house, flies around her eyes, and the image haunted me deeply.

Especially because Mimi had always been such a tiny cat compared to the others.

Fragile.

Delicate.

And suddenly she was gone whilst I was on the other side of the world.

I did not cope with Mimi’s death very well at all.

Looking back now, I realise I turned grief into rituals.

I could not process losing her properly, so instead I tried to keep emotionally attaching myself to her in physical ways.

I remember thinking desperately: what can I do right now to stop myself completely falling apart?

So I got a tattoo saying “Mimi.”

And then later I even had it gone over again so it stood out darker and stronger.

I also got permanent cat eyeliner tattooed onto my eyes because I loved cats so much and wanted them reflected in me physically forever.

I started buying cat-themed things constantly.

One of them was a Karl Lagerfeld bag with his famous white cat on it.

Looking back now, I realise none of these things were really about fashion or beauty.

They were rituals.

Ways of coping.

Ways of distracting myself from grief, guilt, loneliness, and addiction.

At the time, I thought I was helping myself feel better.

But really I was trying to emotionally survive without completely collapsing.

And whilst all of this was happening externally — the tattoos, beauty treatments, shopping, and reinvention — my alcoholism was still quietly progressing underneath it all.

And then came the third Mimi.

In 2024, for my birthday, I was given a Bengal kitten.

And without hesitation, I named her Mimi too.

It almost felt like the name kept returning to me during different chapters of my life.

Different countries.

Different versions of myself.

Different stages of grief, addiction, healing, and survival.

But always the same comfort.

Always a cat called Mimi.

And this Mimi entered my life during one of the darkest periods I had ever experienced.

She witnessed relapse.

Chaos.

Instability.

Hotels.

Rentals.

The emotional collapse addiction eventually creates around a person.

The animals could sense there was something wrong with me.

I truly believe that.

They could see I was unwell, emotionally unstable, anxious, exhausted, and unpredictable.

And that thought breaks my heart now.

One of the most frightening parts of my alcoholism was realising my body stopped properly recovering between drinks.

I was never fully recovering from the alcohol before drinking again.

Alcohol stopped being enjoyment.

It became relief.

Maintenance.

Survival.

And addiction becomes incredibly lonely when you reach that point.

But somehow, through all of it, the animals still loved me exactly the same.

No judgement.

No disappointment.

No questions.

Just unconditional love.

There were moments during my relapse where they were genuinely the only comfort I had.

They sat beside me during panic attacks.

During crying on bathroom floors.

During sleepless nights filled with anxiety and shame.

Sometimes I would wake up and one of them would already be curled up beside me, as if they somehow sensed something was wrong before I had even opened my eyes.

Animals feel energy.

They feel sadness.

They feel fear.

And eventually our home became completely unliveable.

I am not talking about a few dirty glasses or bins needing to be emptied.

I mean the place was in a complete and utter state.

Like a bomb had hit it.

Chaos everywhere.

The kind of environment where you stop even knowing where to begin fixing it because everything has spiralled so far out of control.

Addiction destroys routines first.

Then slowly it destroys environments.

When I relapsed in 2024, I relapsed with other people inside the home, and the environment completely deteriorated around us.

Eventually my partner and I had no choice but to leave.

We stayed in rentals.

Hotels.

Temporary places that never truly felt like home.

And we brought the animals with us through all of it.

At the time there were only two — the dog and the cat.

The dog barely got properly walked because my life had become so dysfunctional.

The cat suddenly found herself in unfamiliar environments, moving from place to place with no understanding of why.

And during my relapse, I accidentally let her out more than once.

She disappeared.

Missing.

And I remember the panic and guilt being unbearable.

Even the dog went searching for her.

Everything felt unstable.

Not the house.

Not my mind.

Not our routines.

Nothing.

Looking back now, one of the hardest things to accept is how much the animals lived through beside me.

Because whilst I was trying to survive addiction, they were surviving the environment addiction created too.

And somehow, despite all the chaos, heartbreak, relapse, grief, and destruction that period of my life brought, something beautiful still came from it.

My third Mimi — the Bengal kitten I received in 2024 — later had three kittens of her own.

All boys.

And now, somehow, I have four Mimis in my life.

There is White Socks, who always eats his food last like a polite little gentleman waiting for everybody else to finish first.

Then there is Simba, clearly the leader of the tribe, full of confidence and personality.

And Maximus, with the most beautiful face, who stays closest to his mummy out of all of them.

Sometimes I sit and watch them all together and it feels strangely healing.

The house that once felt heavy, unstable, chaotic, and emotionally dark is now filled with movement, affection, noise, and life again.

Tiny paws across the floor instead of emotional destruction.

And sobriety has completely changed the environment for all of them too.

There is calm now.

Routine.

Safety.

Presence.

But alongside that healing, there is still guilt.

Because looking back now, I know they lived through instability beside me.

They saw me emotionally collapsing in ways they could never understand.

They were dragged between rentals and hotels because my life had become chaotic.

And I still think about the moments where the cat escaped during my relapse.

The panic.

The fear.

The guilt of knowing my own instability had created instability for them too.

Because addiction does not just affect the addict.

It affects the entire environment around them.

Including the animals quietly living inside it.

Sometimes I wonder whether the cats saw versions of me I could not yet fully see myself.

The innocent version.

The grieving version.

The addicted version.

And finally, the recovering version.

And somehow, through every single one of those versions, they stayed.