Held awake by care: An autoethnography of interspecies trust, vulnerability, and everyday temporalities

In this article, I offer an autoethnographic inquiry into interspecies care as a site for rethinking trust and vulnerability. Tracing my adoption of an injured stray cat encountered in a habitual workspace, I examine how hesitation, domestic negotiation, and eventual commitment unfolded alongside wider social encounters with animal neglect and my own developing engagement with moral-relational public life. I conceptualize trust not as a calculated expectation of reciprocity but as a redistribution of contextualized vulnerability and a temporal reordering of everyday routines. The cat’s early-morning activity, which reorganized household and scholarly rhythms, becomes an analytic hinge for examining how care inscribes itself into bodily time. I argue that interspecies adoption offers a micro-foundation for understanding trust as an embodied, temporal, and morally generative practice of being held.