Ditching My Career to Care for Kittens

I was in my late 30s the first time I decided to quit my job and work in a kitten nursery for minimum wage. (Yes, this happened twice.) I had a steady 9-to-5 contract position as a writer and editor for a semi-popular crime website. I worked from home and made $85k, which was good money for a writer/editor at the time. I had kind coworkers and ample free time to pursue friendships and hobbies. But I was utterly burned out and growing more miserable by the day. The 9-to-5 desk-job life seemed to suck me dry; I felt stagnant and stuck.

On a whim, I decided to apply for a job I’d read about in the news: a caregiver position at a kitten nursery. Part of a large animal welfare organization, it was a dedicated kitten shelter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (If I got the job, I would have to move from Washington, DC to NYC.) Though it paid minimum wage — about $12 at that time — the job sounded adorable: bottle feeding and cleaning up after scores of tiny stray kittens, all under two months old (some were just days old). I had a phone interview with the nursery manager and soon after that, she informed me that I’d landed the gig. I quit my editing job and made my way to NYC, where I quickly found a less-than-lovely apartment in a leafy Brooklyn neighborhood.

The shift in my day-to-day life was massive. My new full-time job was exhausting in a relentlessly physical way I had never experienced before. My start time was 7 a.m., which meant getting up around 5 to put myself together. There were hundreds of kittens on site, and I was on my feet all day, scrubbing poop-encrusted cages, changing litter boxes, and running back and forth to the kitchen to grab wet food and bottles of kitten formula for the neonates. There were no cell phones allowed on the floor, and my coworkers provided a constant, inescapable hum of drama as they broadcast the inner workings of their daily lives in the crowded space.

I was utterly drowning in kittens, and though it was grueling, I loved it. My brain was forced to go quiet and focus on the demands of the tasks at hand. Taking care of these kittens was literally a life or death matter, and I had no time to ruminate about my petty anxieties the way I did when I was at home on my laptop. Though the money was laughably bad, I was making it work, and I returned to the nursery year after year until I landed another crime-related desk job in 2019.

That role followed a familiar arc: fine at first, then slowly not. I burned out during the pandemic; writing and editing felt meaningless to me, and I was hungry to feel useful again.

So I reapplied to the nursery and went back for another four seasons. Caring for our kittens gave me a sense of purpose I hadn’t experienced in my life before, not even from writing. I ended up adopting one of these animals myself. One of my cats, Little Baby, came into the nursery at five weeks old with her eyes swollen and infected to the point that she was essentially blind. After an extensive eye-drop routine, her eyes cleared up, and today, apart from some mild cloudiness, she can (mostly) see.

In 2026 I stepped away from the nursery again; I was tired of being physically tired all the time. But I’d be lying if I said I’m definitively done for good. For whatever reason, I just can’t seem to quit the kittens.