The youngest member of our family is sporting a cone of shame. She’s our six-month-old shorthair female cat, Phiona, and last week she had an overnight stay at the veterinary office to get spayed. We picked her up Wednesday morning, with a page of post-op instructions and a bag of syringes pre-filled with kitten-sized doses of pain medication. The vet assistant who discharged her instructed us to keep her as calm as possible for the next ten days, so we moved her food and litter into my office and there she convalesces.

Half of Phiona’s belly is shaved, with a one-and-a-half inch incision in the center, neatly sewn up. She wears a small cone on her small head, though it must seem large to her, and tremendously inconvenient. She can’t eat or drink without a person there to hold the dish still. Noises seem to come at her from strange directions, funneled through the cone. She licks the cone instead of her fur, and when her ear itches, the hind foot that pops up scratches at smooth plastic. There is no curling up to rest, no itching, and no bathing. Poop sometimes gets on the cone when she uses the litter box. Playing is a difficult proposition, as she can’t quite see her paws, nor coordinate them with her mouth to bite what she grabs, as kittens do.

Phiona doesn’t know the cone will come off after 10-14 days. As far as she knows, this may be her new normal—cooped up in one room of the house, wearing a constricting cone, unable to eat or drink until she has a visitor. If I were she, I would find this unbearable, and my attitude and behavior would follow suit. I’ve been watching her and imagining the deprivation of cat pleasures—a luxurious licking bath; a nap, curled up with nose tucked under tail; or a fierce romp, attacking string or toy with body, mouth, and all four appendages.

Phiona wears a cone of shame—or “Elizabethan collar” as it is called on the vet’s invoice—but she has no concept of shame. She doesn’t hide or hang her head. She purrs and plays and eats and drinks, and takes her medicine without complaint. How does she do this? I have watched her in amazement for a week, and I have no answer, only an increased awareness of how quick I am to sink into despair, to become angry when things aren’t how I want them to be, and to receive shame as my rightful state of mind. Phiona’s disposition is a compelling suggestion that there may be another way. Perhaps my humanity is not as volatile as I think, and the essentials of being human are more dependable than I realize. When I am limited, inconvenienced, slowed down, I do not lose my identity as a human being. I belong and I am invited to pleasure and peace as surely as when things are going my way.

I don’t have to always be well, productive, respectable, functional. I can rest when I am unwell. I can slow down when I am tired. I can enjoy the company of friends when I feel un-respectable. I can be waited on when I am not functional. I have permission to be human, and being human carries dignity with it through any circumstance. Whether buried in dept, or addiction, or depression, weighed down by sorrow and loss, or suffocating under secrets, each person is dignified. Whether disappointed in myself as a mom, humiliated by misunderstanding, or fearful of fallout after a mistake, I am dignified.

Thank you, Phiona, for teaching me that dignity is not complicated. You have modeled it through pain and confusion and the cone of shame, and have taught me again that my value is not in performance and my happiness is not in circumstances. But, I look forward to taking that cone off and watching you run and bathe and eat and drink, unrestricted.