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By:
Courtney Gustafson
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Illustration by Martha Pluto
For a decade I did everything right: I went to the college that offered a full scholarship, graduated at the top of my class, got into grad school. I moved to a city with a lower cost of living and got a stable job. But it never mattered how hard I worked or how many overtime shifts I signed up for or how many hours outside of work I spent trying to figure out other ways to make money. Rent would go up again. My car would break down. I lived paycheck to paycheck. I got laid off.
The Unlikely Video That Everything Changed
There was one crucial move that saved me, one thing that catapulted me from unemployed with mounting medical debt to a homeowner with steady income, financially stable for the first time in my life.
Here’s the secret, the thing that changed it all for me: I filmed a video about cooking a miniature Thanksgiving dinner for stray cats. And the video went viral.
Here’s the secret, the thing that changed it all for me: I filmed a video about cooking a miniature Thanksgiving dinner for stray cats. And the video went viral.
A Miniature Thanksgiving Dinner for Cats Goes Viral
I had been feeding the stray cats outside my house for almost a year when I saw a Cornish game hen in the store and thought how cute it was, how it looked like a miniature turkey. How shocked I would have been to know that that moment would be the start of a whole new career. Does it count as a career? Making cat videos?
I cooked my miniature turkey in a miniature baking pan. I mashed a single potato and bought a can of pumpkin puree and a pouch of turkey-flavoured gravy for cats. I searched thrift stores until I found miniature plates, white porcelain with gold edges. The meals—a whole tray of them, one for each cat—were garnished with a single green bean each. I had obsessively researched which Thanksgiving foods are safe for cats. And then I placed the plates around the driveway, the fancy dishes on the dirt and gravel, and filmed as all the feral cats came over to sniff them. Francois—a big cat the colour of a toasted marshmallow—was the first to take a lick.
That was the whole video: preparing miniature meals, making them look fancy, and Francois, with his goofy cross-eyed face, gobbling his down. Making Thanksgiving dinner for stray cats, I captioned it.
That’s all it took. The video blew up.
The viral Thanksgiving dinner for cats TikTok video that changed Courtney’s life.
My first month on TikTok I earned over a thousand dollars. That was nearly a paycheck for me, nearly 80 hours of work at my office job. The next month I made over $2000 from cat videos, and that monthly number kept going up.
My first month on TikTok I earned over a thousand dollars. That was nearly a paycheck for me, nearly 80 hours of work at my office job.
I shared videos about rescuing kittens from dark alleys, about trapping feral cats at trailer parks, about delivering donated cat food to hungry cats. It didn’t escape me that the neighbourhoods I worked in were in the poorer parts of town, that the places where stray cats proliferated were the places with the fewest resources. At the same time my weird internet success had allowed me to catch up on bills, I was witnessing poverty that I had never known. My daily life—my every morning with the cats in my driveway, filming silly videos—started to require a constant reconciling of this. Every day, with every cat I saved and every bill I paid, I was thinking: Do I deserve this?
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