What does “pull yourself together” mean in English?

Pull yourself together means: stop feeling upset, and get control of your feelings again. In the story, a kitten tries and fails many times to reach a bowl of milk in the sky. Each time, she pulls herself together and tries again. The idiom paints a picture: your feelings fall apart like loose pieces, and you put them back together. People use it after bad news, a shock, or any hard moment, when it is time to act calm again.

You can say it to a friend — “Come on, pull yourself together!” — or to yourself: “I need to pull myself together before the meeting.” One theory says the phrase comes from rowing, where a team calls “pull together!” to row as one. In the clip, the kitten falls, tumbles, and even gets scared, but each time she pulls herself together and tries once more. That is the heart of the idiom: get up, and keep going.