The ice-grey tee hangs on the back of a chair in Bradford like it has somewhere better to be. Four kitten faces stare out from the print, blue-eyed and ridiculous, stacked on a shape your brain recognises before your manners catch up. Underneath, in blunt letters: Show me your kitties.
I used to say versions of that line out loud.
The line I used as armour
Not as a joke for a shop. As armour. When I was drinking far too much, when I covered feelings with other substances, with food I didn’t need, with nights that started as flirtation and ended as fog, my mouth had a ready script. Crude. Fast. Funny if you weren’t the one on the receiving end. Pickup lines that treated another person like a punchline. I told myself it was charm. It was a smoke machine. The louder the gag, the less I had to feel what was under it.
Hard chapters left their mark: addiction, the low years, the kind of mental weather you don’t put on a flyer. Around forty, after a very low point, I reached for help. I don’t sell that story as a before-and-after. I only name it so the punchline has somewhere honest to stand.
A mind like weather
Somewhere in the rebuild, Buddhism stopped being a mood and became a morning. Most days now I chant and I meditate. Nothing fancy, nothing holy. The point was never to become a better-looking version of me. The point was to watch how this mind actually moves: what it grabs, what it hides behind, and what it calls “me” when “me” is mostly habit under pressure.
That’s where one of the Buddha’s teachings landed for me, not as a lecture but as a relief. He taught that there’s no fixed little soul sitting behind the eyes, running the show like a permanent manager. What I call “me” is more like a crowd of moving parts: a body, some feelings, some old stories, all coming and going. So the man who needed the vulgar line was never a solid statue. He was a weather system. And weather can change.
Why it’s cute, why it’s funny
So the graphic stopped being only a dirty joke and became a small joyful thing I could wear.
Why is it cute? Because the kittens are unreasonably earnest. They look like they turned up for a school photo and somehow ended up in a surrealist still life. Cute takes the swagger out of the old line.
Why is it funny? Because the double meaning is still there, and adults can hear it. Then the cuteness trips up the whole performance. The line that once reached for a body now reaches for a laugh first. Same words. Different aim. That’s the reclaim: not scrubbing the past clean, just refusing to let the old armour keep talking for me.
Three cats and a quiet table
I’m dad to three cats. Their names stay off this page; the purrs don’t need branding. The cats in this house aren’t a café pitch or a programme. They’re a warm weight on a lap, and ordinary comfort for a nervous system that once preferred noise. When Mindful Bee grows into a real table somewhere in the UK, maybe Bradford (still a project, still soon), the welcome I want has the same shape. You can sit, you can leave, you can say nothing. No pressure dressed up as wellness.
The tee is coming to the shop soon for anyone who wants the joke on cotton. This post isn’t a sales pitch with incense, though. It’s me admitting that some of my funniest lines were once about surviving, and that practice taught me I don’t have to keep surviving in the same costume. The chanting, the sitting still, a drum nearby, bees in season and food on a real plate all helped.
Letting go of a fixed “me” doesn’t mean I disappear. It means I’m not stuck with the worst version of my punchlines.
What old joke of yours is ready to become something kinder without losing its teeth?
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