The big 3-0. Volume 30…30 times we’ve set the table for the weekend together…that’s a dang milestone if I’ve ever seen one…right? I think so :)

Tomorrow I have my second pop-up with the Catskills Cocktail Crew and I am SO excited to do this again. There is something about the pop-up life that I truly love…I get to see what went right, what went better than last time, and what I still need to improve on. It’s the best of both of my worlds: private chef and restaurant life…all in one. The hustle, the energy, the people…that deep, warm, soul-level connection I’ve missed so much since leaving restaurant kitchens…AND I get to make my food, my specialty, and feed people from my soul to theirs. I really LOVE it…all.

And this time…Millie will be helping me in the kitchen, and Yas will be on register again…a true family affair. If you’ve been here a while, you may have read the essay I wrote about my daughter and her complicated relationship with my work in the kitchen. She spent so many years resenting it, not understanding it, feeling like it took me away from her. And…I think we’re finally turning the corner. She’s excited to help me…she WANTS to be there (maybe, too, because I’m paying her)…but yeah…my heart might just burst wide open.

Something else has continued to bubble up in my mind this week…I read something on Substack a little while back that has really lingered with me. And not in that generic AI-prose kind of way that Claude and ChatGPT like to say things linger…it truly has haunted my brain waves. I even talked about it with my therapist yesterday. And I cannot find it to link it here…ugh….but anyways, the gist of it was this: I’ve been in a season of peeling back the layers…the “why”…why I am the way I am, why I feel the way I feel, why I fall back into the same patterns, why things have to feel or be so hard. It’s been a long year+ of excavation…of letting things boil over…of sitting with the parts of myself I’ve been avoiding for years.

But I’m feeling a little…trauma fatigue these days.

Not because the work isn’t worth doing. It is. But I don’t want to stop at just figuring out my trauma and how it’s shaped me. I want to actually move…shed the things that no longer serve me and live past them. I don’t want to be defined by what happened to me. I am not my trauma. Yes, things happened. Life happened. And I’ve been working through it, I really have. But once something bubbles up, I want to DO something with it…not just let it sit there as justification or defense. I want to heal from it and move on. The whole point is to live. To really live. And to live in abundance and not in scarcity.

And maybe that’s why I’ve been so drawn lately to Japanese philosophy. Ikigai …the concept of bringing value, purpose, and joy to life. Wabi-sabi…the philosophy of finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. And this week, Doshingaku…a reflective framework that uses your birth date to map out behavioral archetypes, natural personal rhythms, and life cycles. I am TOTALLY into it. I bought the book. I’m ready to learn more.

Maybe it’s because my birthday is exactly a month away. September 22nd…the fall equinox. My new year begins then, friends. It’s no coincidence.

Let’s dive in together. There are some really good ones this week…pull up a chair ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• I’m no longer learning; I’m letting go
  Instead of writing 28 new lessons, she wrote 28 permissions…things she’s giving herself the green light to do this year. “Feel upset without immediately trying to find a solution or self-soothe. (Cry more!!!)” “Be bad at something new.” “Stop saving the good candles and perfumes for the perfect moment.” “Let things be easier than expected.” “Be a regular without feeling guilty about trying a new spot.” “Enjoy 28 without planning for 29.” I read this a month before my birthday and inspired to think through the same list…though I’ll need a few more than 28…try 43 on for size <3

• A Big Part of Who I Am Is Who I’m Not Anymore
  “We aren’t just one person for our entire lives, we’re a collection of versions of ourselves. The insecure version. The people-pleasing version. The one who begged to be chosen. The version that stayed quiet just to keep everyone else comfortable. Every version had a purpose. Every version got you here.” About healing as losing things…fear, shame, the constant need for approval…and about owing your old self not your future, but your compassion. “You don’t owe your old self your future, but you do owe them compassion.” And the closer: “A big part of who I am isn’t found in the things I do today. It’s found in the things I no longer tolerate, the fears I no longer obey, the people I no longer chase, and the person I no longer have to be.”

• A Haunting Quote by Thich Nhat Hanh That Inspired Me to Change My Life Forever “The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.” We spend most of our lives waiting…for things to settle, for conditions to align, for permission to finally show up in the life that was happening. “I was not suffering only because life was difficult. I was suffering because I was constantly leaving the only place where life actually exists.” The question he ends on: what am I waiting for before I allow myself to fully live? woof.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

• Why Your Memoir Isn’t Working (Even If You Have an Incredible Story)
  Its started by reading a memoir about wild hares…which went on to become an international bestseller. Subject matter has almost nothing to do with whether a story works. What matters is what the writer sees in the subject, and what questions they use it to investigate. A three-part framework worth applying to anything you’re writing: what happens on the surface, what phenomenon it actually studies up close, and what question about being human it won’t let go of. “The more closely a memoirist observes the particular, the more likely they are to uncover something universal.” If you’re writing anything …essays, a book, your Substack…this is worth printing out and taping to the wall.

• The Art of Existing Without Editing Yourself
  Raw. No polish. Karun writes about the version of yourself you’ve been hiding because it’s too much, too weird, too honest …and how after a while you forget you’re performing and start calling it your personality. Getting there the hard way: numbing, scrolling, the whole thing. “It was conditioning. How I was raised. How I was treated as a child. How my feelings were dismissed. And all that shit made me believe: behave to be more acceptable.” And then the line I can’t forget… “Stop lying to yourself just to be acceptable. Trust your soul. Live your life honestly. You know who you are…and you know what feels right in your heart.”

• Ikigai (生きがい) Was Never Meant to Be Solved
  What you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for …it’s all useful, she says, but it’s not the Ikigai she grew up with in Japan. The one she knows is quieter…less meme’able…it’s the morning walk before the day gets noisy..the fragrance of the specific incense she loves…the cup of coffee held in both hands. It’s a quality of attention…a way of letting your ordinary day show you what matters. “Perhaps Ikigai is simply knowing what matters to you and allowing your life to reflect it naturally. And perhaps that richness is not waiting somewhere extraordinary. It may already be there, quietly, in the middle of an ordinary day.” I LOVE LOVE LOVE this one…and already bought her book on Doshingaku…who wants to join me in reading it??

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• The Art of Belonging to Yourself
  Her fiancé said he wasn’t coming to the gym that morning, and she felt something she was almost ashamed to admit: relief. “It was the first time in days that no one had needed my attention, and I could finally hear myself think.” About the years she spent treating solitude as a waiting room for love: how she could have painted more, written more, discovered the parts of herself that only surface when no one else is present. “My feeling of loneliness had convinced me that my unshared time was empty, but I understand now that it was not empty. It was simply unclaimed.”

• Can Ambition and Contentment Coexist
  Opens with: “one of the unique experiences of getting something you have wanted for a long time is how quickly it becomes the furniture of your life.” That line alone. She writes about the gap between where you are and where you want to be…and how some people live there comfortably while others let the gap become evidence that something is wrong. She talks about a “cost ceiling” for ambition: what you want to gain, but also what you’re unwilling to lose. I want the business to grow, but not at the cost of family dinners. I want to get excellent at this, but not by spending five years being miserable to prove it.

• The Only Way Out Is Through: Grief as Transformation
  Linnea is a psychotherapist writing about grief that has nothing to do with death…the grief for what you never had, the version of your life the old belief quietly closed off before you ever got to choose it, the parent who wasn’t there. She calls this “disenfranchised grief: a loss with no funeral, because nothing technically died.” She maps three distinct types of grief in the work of transformation and notes we only ever talk about one of them…which leaves us confused when the other two show up in the middle of therapy, or a Tuesday, or a season of peeling back layers. “You cannot out-think the nervous system. You have to feel your way through.” I was once told by my therapist that I was bad at grieving because I just wanted to rush through and pretend everything was okay…this was for me:)

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Summer Heat in Carolina Has Moods: Ask Any Southerner
  This one made me giggle…that Carolina summer heat is something else! There’s the Lazy one, the Angry one, the Storm-Brewing one, and the Confessional one. The confessional heat is why family reunions get messy…it’s why someone’s aunt ends up saying “I never liked your daddy’s second wife” even though that woman has been gone since 2003. Growing up in the South, I felt every single word of this. Heat isn’t just a temperature down there. It’s a whole character.

• Seeking Wabi-Sabi Close to Home
  Living in Tokyo in the late 80s and early 90s, she fell in love with worn things…moss-covered roadside statues, shop signs from the early Showa period with flaking paint. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi: beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete. What she finds in the English village is the same thing she found in Tokyo. Wabi-sabi isn’t only in Japan…it’s what the world can look like when you stop trying to upgrade it.

• The 10 Year Closet 008: A Theory Dress That Still Feels Current
  In 2015, she stopped into Nordstrom Rack before dinner with friends in the East Village and found a Theory t-shirt dress: navy in the front, white in the back, 100% pima cotton. This whole series is about the longest-lasting pieces in her closet and what they teach her about shopping, quality, and the satisfaction of something made well. A palate cleanser for the fast-fashion scroll.

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• Pain as Such: The Wabi-Sabi of Dukkha
  I told you these concepts were on my mind this week…he opens with the Buddhist proposition that tends to make people uncomfortable: Dukkha, "the inherent unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence." Most people read that as pessimism and dismiss it. He says that's exactly the problem. "To ignore the essence of this proposition is not to escape it, it is only to be governed by it unknowingly." Then he does something unexpected and reframes the whole thing through wabi-sabi, asking us to find something worth honoring in the crack, rather than something to fix. "The crack in the bowl is not the failure of the bowl, it is only the part of it that has lived." Short, dense, a piece to read slowly.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Still Hungry for This City

  This one is mine…don't be scared off by the "17 min read" disclaimer. It's a pretty comprehensive love letter to NYC and every place in it that I love…save it, bookmark it, send it to your friends who need a city fix. Refer to it when you find yourself in the greatest city in the world. ♥

Join (& yours truly)
for a NYC author gathering & reading

NEXT Tuesday, August 25th, 7pm
at the Lower East Side Printshop

Writers and readers, come! Let’s meet!
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Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3

xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…
the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll
have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

Between 2005 and 2020, I literally flew up two or three times a year, for any and all reasons…weddings, work trips, SO many girls trips…or even just a long weekend I talked myself into needing. I was a woman who was falling madly in love…a moth to a flame…who simply couldn’t visit this city without trying to map its soul.

This isn’t the first guide to New York I’ve ever made…it’s not even close.

Over the years, I became the one people called before their own trips. One time, my mom’s boss flew me up to be a personal tour guide for his entire office staff, women I’d never met, on his dime. I showed them the best of the best. Did I walk at true New York pace and nearly lose two of them somewhere around midtown? Absolutely…But did they also leave having the time of their lives, including a surprise set from Amy Schumer and Aziz Ansari who wandered into our show at the Comedy Cellar that night? Hell yes…they did.

There are literally a million lists already out there...Top 10s, Hot Lists, Best Ofs…a shit ton of algorithm-fed roundups, cool-kids table, pay-to-play placements dressed up as genuine recommendations. There’s a reason you see the same 20 spots highlighted. Check Eater, Resy’s Best of, or The Infatuation, they update constantly, but tread lightly, and consider these with caution.

When I was finally able to make the move here in 2020, I would walk this city almost every day, tippy top to tippy bottom…even in the height of the pandemic when it was silent and still for the first time. I was able to see and experience this place, not as a visitor, but as someone who really lived here.

I still get requests for my “spots”...the ones I’ve carefully curated and edited down for the past 20 years now. I decided to take the 20+ PDFs and pull together my own “best of” to share. Freckled Fork verified and vetted, here’s a thoughtful roster of spots I keep on repeat…and of which, I can categorically say, these gems have yet to miss.

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Mise en Place

Before anything hits the pan, everything gets prepped...every ingredient measured, chopped, and in its place…that’s mise en place. And, it’s exactly how you should plan your way through the city.

There’s a temptation we all fall victim to when building itineraries for NYC. We have a loose plan, a long list and are naively convinced we can possible do it all. But, with no rhyme or reason and before you know it, you find yourself smack dab in the middle of your ill-fated plans to have breakfast on the Upper West Side, lunch in FiDi, a museum tour on the Upper East Side, and dinner in the Lower East Side. I’ve done this before…and after walking more than 13 miles and over 20k steps in one day, I wore the absolute hell out of my own and everyone else’s feet that day. You can do it this way, but I’m telling you now, you’ll hate yourself, and so will whoever’s with you.

Pick your priorities…your MUSTs…and then map them out by the neighborhoods where they reside…Broadway shows, museums, historical sites, shopping spots…map those out first and then build a few solid food and snack options around each one.

Give yourself multiple choices, and leave room for flexibility. That gap…the unplanned part…is where you actually get to feel like you live here instead of just touring it. A few loose blocks between the things you came for, where you can just walk or sit and let the city do its thing.

Food is always my priority, so years ago I came up with the best way to check off multiple spots on the list in one go: the progressive meal. For it to really work well, sharing isn’t optional. I pick four or five spots in a neighborhood and move through the day in pieces...coffee/pastries at one, a light breakfast at another, lunch split three ways at a third, an aperitivo at a fourth. Dinner is the grand finale, and it’s not one restaurant; it’s three...apps somewhere, mains somewhere else, dessert at a final spot. I know it sounds like a lot, but it’s truly one of the best ways to actually taste a neighborhood instead of just eating in it. And be adventurous…this city has more cuisines and cultures than you have days; eat something you can’t get at home.

Splitwise is a godsend of an app…because most places will NOT split checks beyond 2 or 3 cards at most (and don’t you dare try to ask for it to be itemized). Plan to rotate who covers which costs, or have one person cover the spread, and then split at the end.

Two other non-negotiables, and I don’t budge on either…nothing under a 4.0 rating (& honestly I hover between 4.5-5.0s to be safe)…this city is HUGE, and there are a thousand mediocre rooms that’ll try to charge fine-dining prices for shitty food. And two…nothing under an A rating from the Health Department. I say this as a former restaurant chef...violations happen, BUT the city gives you time to fix them, pay the fines, and get back to an A. If a place is still showing anything less than an A…it’s not bad luck, it’s a choice someone’s actively making…trust that.

Once you’re here and working through your list, there’s little opportunity to slow down to think about it; you just move. Here are some tips for how to actually get through this city without getting run over.

Your shoes are NOT the place to make a fashion statement…save it for the top half. Wear the shoes that’ll actually hold up to the mileage, the cobbled, uneven streets and inclines of Manhattan…let your jacket…earrings…whatever else do the runway work. No amount of cuteness can mask the swollen feet and awkward limping you’ll be doing by 2pm…mark my words.

Apple Pay will be your best friend…on the bus, the subway, etc. Don’t be the one fumbling with a card at the turnstile...people will literally run you over. When the train/bus arrives, wait for people to exit FIRST, and then get on…you will get hit if you try to muscle your way on before people can leave. Do NOT go in a subway car that’s empty…it’s either a hot car with no air OR worse…make good choices, people.

Manners go a LONG way. New Yorkers get a bad rap for being rude, but honestly, treating people with respect and kindness will make for a beautiful experience. Walk with purpose, and do NOT try to walk four-wide on the sidewalk. Just pay attention to whether you’re headed uptown or downtown, and step aside if you need to check your map. You know…common sense things:) Okay…here we go…

Uptown, baby…

I live in the Upper West Side and love every bit of it. These are the backyard spots I head to on my day off…

● Banh My order includes the Banh Tieu, a savory stuffed donut with sausage, sticky rice, quail egg, chicken liver pate, and pork floss, and the Bun Cha, the Vietnamese BBQ plate goddess herself every single time. Weekend brunch is a go-to; line forms at 11:30am.

● Amélie This has been on my list long before I lived here, and it’s stayed tried and true through the years. Either the West Village spot or this one; the happy hour wine flight is three amazing glasses of wine for $14. Also, get the goat cheese balls and the truffle fries and don’t overthink it.

● Tiki Chick The best tiki cocktails, hands down, and truly EPIC $5 sandwiches that punch so far above their price it’s almost rude. Get the Hot Honey Chicken, Pink Wave, and the Spam ‘n Cheese. Fun fact…it’s the same chicken from Jacob’s Pickles up the street…skip the crowded room, get the sandwich.

● Tatiana Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s pan-African spot in Lincoln Center, and this one has a special story. I walked one day and saw Kwame standing right outside, so in true Jess fashion, I said Hey, and told him how much I’d loved watching his journey on Top Chef, congratulating him on his new spot. I told him I was the chef up the street at Malka, and he then personally invited me to come eat whenever I could get a night off, and handed me the GM’s email. I took him up on it and got a reservation that same evening. I brought my friend Lauren, and from the second we walked in, we were treated like queens. The GM brought over a glass of champagne to start the meal. They all called me Chef, and I nearly died, because compared to Kwame I felt like the title didn’t even apply; I was a chef too but nowhere near that stratosphere. They sent extra dishes from the kitchen...curried goat patties with mango chutney, braised oxtail, and for dessert a cosmic sprinkled brownie with ice cream. One of the most special meals of my entire life. Snag a seat if you possibly can.

● The Owl’s Tail Inventive, delicious cocktails, great happy hour specials, and the cornmeal biscuits, which are truly to die for and can’t be missed.

● Ella Social The Brussels sprouts and the croquettes are the shoutout here, and my drink order is always the Aceitunas y Almendras...a glass of vermut with a side of their artisanal Spanish mixed olives.

Coffee is always Black Press, Frame, or Solid State, no matter what.

And yes, fine...Levain if you must. There are two locations basically on top of each other near 74th and Amsterdam. Pick whichever one doesn’t have a line, which is usually the Amsterdam one.

If you pass a Housing Works sign anywhere in the city, go in. Great thrifting, best random finds, every time. Goods for the Study, a few blocks over, is where I go for my paper obsession and things I don’t need in the slightest, but love all the same.

Midtown

I don’t love Midtown, and if it weren’t for working there, I avoid Times Square area like the plague. This isn’t a neighborhood I’d choose to hang out in, but it’s certainly worth the pass through…see the lights, see a show, and move on. But if you must, there’s a small handful of spots I’d dare detour for:

● Valerie A beautiful art deco spot for a cocktail and a snack; their gin selection is extensive and impressive.

● Mitr Thai With a 4.9 rating, this spot is near perfection…A full trip through Thai regional cooking without ever leaving the block...choose dishes from the south, east, west, and north regions, grab a signature pandan or sticky rice cocktail, and forget you’re in Midtown altogether.

● Let’s Meat My favorite all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ in the city, and the best deal going, especially at lunch ($40!). Smoky cap-grills at your table and the banchan is just as good as the mains.

● Her Name is Han Mama Han’s spot, the sweetest place right in Koreatown. Start with the kumquat Caesar salad with fried capers, tuna fish sauce Caesar dressing…an absolutely killer way in. The rice cakes and the K.F.C…boneless Korean fried chicken that’ll make you forget about the other white meat under the same name, no contest. And the kimchi pancake is the stuff of actual dreams.

NoMad / Flatiron

This is where things start to feel less like passing through and more like eating my way somewhere on purpose.

● Lola’s A fellow South Carolina girl, Chef Suzy Cupps, is behind this one. The pimento cheese, the Paraiso salad, and the heritage pork BBQ are musts for a stellar starting place and meal every single time.

● Bar Jamon In the Casa Mono family, around the corner. Vermouth from their vast selection & pan con tomate. A small, always appropriate order, and sometimes that’s all you need.

● Eataly Sometimes you don’t need a restaurant; the day is beautiful, and Madison Square Park is across the street. Pop in and grab some provisions, bread…cheese…olives…prosciutto and go enjoy the people-watching.

Not restaurants but still MUSTS in the hood. Fish’s Eddy, ABC Carpet/Home, The Grey Pearl or Nickey • Kehoe are my stops to pick up little surcees for the home, kitchen or unique gifts. Devocion or NewsBar Cafe are my stops for coffee. Union Square Greenmarket for the best of the best from local farmers, flowers, and more. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, stop through.

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East Village

● Ramen by Ra A super tiny reservations-only spot, but also featuring an epic walk-up window. The BEC ramen is as epic as it sounds, and perfectly served in a convenient cup for your stroll through the neighborhood. The breakfast bao can’t be missed either.

● From Lucie I’ve been an OG fan since her early Instagram days back during the pandemic, and have ordered my birthday cake from her every single year since 2021. Her mini cakes are the cutest littles, and she makes the best gluten-free and dairy-free cakes I’ve ever had in my life; you’d honestly never know the difference. My order is usually the citrus olive oil cake with elderflower icing and raspberry, but you literally can’t go wrong with the carrot cake, and honestly everything else, too. There’s also a fun hoodoo voodoo crystal garden right next door that’s worth popping into.

● Librae. Speaking of bakeries, this spot is guaranteed to have a line, but it moves quickly. The tahini latte is a must, along with whatever pastry special they’re running for that week.

● LongCount I interviewed Chef Haley for my very first Between Bowls episode and have been a huge fan ever since her start at Cadence. She keeps the menu seasonal, fresh, and packed with flavor. You’d never even clock that it’s all plant-based, and honestly, it doesn’t matter...we could all use more plants in our lives.

● McSorley’s An institution, plain and simple. Your choice is light or dark beer. The end.

● Penny and its treasure trove of companion spots, Claud & Stars, for when you want a really special meal. At Penny. I splurge for the Ice Box, the sungolds yellowfin conserva, and the melon snapper dish. Such a special vibe, every time.

For books and other things you didn’t even know you needed...Wild Sorrel and Bonnie Slotnick for cookbooks, John Derian for gifts to impress, Kalustyan’s and SOS Chefs if you want to upgrade your own spice cabinet and pantry while you’re here.

SoHo / NoHo / Nolita

I mostly stay out of SoHo these days. It’s nothing personal; it’s just not where my life happens anymore. I only go in when I need something specific or need to restock my face lotion at Glossier. I pretty much stick to the villages and the less touristy streets, but when I have to, I’m hitting up these spots:

● Fish Cheeks An all-time favorite, and the oyster happy hour is so good, 12-5pm daily. I get the oysters, the Zaab wings, the grilled pork cheeks…and I never, ever forget a side of the sautéed cabbage.

● Ma’de This place has had my heart since they introduced their summer special corn dumplings. I always start with the chirashi, grab some dumplings, and finish with the Calamansi Butterfish. Everything else beyond that is just icing on the cake, and totally worth trying.

● King My first trip to King was back in 2016 when it opened, on a trip with my sister and my mom. It was the top of my list before we landed. An all-female team with an open kitchen small enough to watch them work and feel like they’re feeding you from their home kitchen. My first bite of their carta di musica sent me into an actual tailspin. Watching the perfectly choreographed dance of the kitchen staff, I knew right then and there I wanted to do that; I wanted to be a chef like that, and in a space like that. Everything intentional, everything with care, the kind of Italian food that’s light, airy, and fresh…and doesn’t require a wheelbarrow to get you out. Deans is their new one next door, from the same team, and I’m dying to try it, rooting for it all the same.

● Champers The spot where my husband and I had our celebratory champagne toast with friends after our city hall elopement last May. It also has a super fun shop for the most sophisticated host attached to it called Feste.

● Elizabeth Street Garden. No food here, just sit in it anyway. A must to rest your feet and your mind, and hang with the sculptures.

● Nom Wah The fast-casual version, literally run by the kids of the original Doyers Street owners, and with their own millennial spin on the whole thing. The turnip cakes with a taro crust have permanent residence in my mind at this point.

● Freemans. SoHo-adjacent…down an alley off Rivington covered in the most colorful graffiti you’ll find anywhere in this city. I was introduced to this place years ago, and it’s been another constant on my list ever since. I never leave without the devils on horseback and the Caesar salad. And the drinks...oh my goodness. On one of my trips to the city, this time with my parents, my brother Alex (who’d just turned 21) and a 2yr old Millie, we stayed at Off Soho Suites, literally right across the street from Freemans. Each night, Alex and I ended up at the bar for a nightcap and a little sibling therapy session. It was the Freeman’s cocktail for me, but the Night in La Condesa with gin, yellow chartreuse, vermouth, vanilla, basil earned repeat visits that week as well.

Chinatown / Canal / Dimes Square

● Le Dive A great spot to grab Aperol spritz, split the fries, and enjoy the whole see-and-be-seen of this super social section of Canal Street.

● Golden Diner The Honey Butter Pancakes are things of actual legend, fluffy, finished with honey maple butter and lemon zest. And I cannot leave without the Chinatown Egg and Cheese Sando...soft scrambled eggs, American cheese, a hash brown patty, all on a sesame scallion milk bun.

● Ernesto’s Basque at its absolute best, and where I’ve gone for some of my special “treat yo self” meals over the years. The last time I ate there, I saw my favorite writer and chef, Gabrielle Hamilton, sitting at a nearby table, and I just smiled; my sign I was in exactly the right place, at the right time. The gildas, the tosta de gambas, the bikini hemingway and the sardinas a la parrilla, they’ve all lingered in my memory ever since.

● Elbow Bread A line I never mind standing in. The challah croissant is an absolute must, along with the cornmeal chocolate chip cookie and the salted sweet potato pretzel. You won’t be disappointed.

My other non-food favorites here include Magic Jewelry for my annual aura reading and Happy Medium, my go-to for a little afternoon art therapy, and the Tenement Museum for a real glimpse of what old New York was like. For your afternoon caffeine boost to give you strength to muscle your way through the crowds on those narrow Chinatown streets, Hien from Vietnam, Kore, The Mandarin and Paper Sons.

West Village

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again…this is my second home, the Village is where I go when I need a mood boost or to get myself centered…

● Jeffrey’s Grocery I mentioned this spot in my post last week; I have a permanent spot at the bar. Beyond their amazing oyster happy hour, Chefs Matt & Leona kill it each week with their epic specials. The food is amazing, every single time.

● Dante The martini happy hour calls me from 3-5pm, along with their fresh wood-fired bread, butter, and the flakiest sea salt you’ve ever had. I also still dream about a particularly incredible summer special white Negroni they once ran, with a tomato wash and basil oil. I genuinely can’t stop thinking about it.

● Bar Pisellino I bring my book, sit outside, and order an Aperol spritz or a Negroni depending on my mood, and a little prosciutto panini, the one with the paper twisted on it just so. One of Rita Sodi and Jodi Williams’ most adorable corner spots, and a great spot for people-watching.

● Sushi Counter This Australian outpost boasts $5 hand rolls of super fresh fish and vegetarian rolls. One roll for $5 or three for $12, I go three, no contest.

● Dame The grilled oysters with green chartreuse hollandaise, the squid & scallion skewers, and the heirloom tomatoes with peekytoe crab and basil are ALL tops. There’s not a bad plate on this menu (or from their sister spots, Lord’s & Crevette).

I went on one of the best dates down here years ago, a progressive pizza tour of the Village, just moving slice-to-slice all afternoon. John’s is historically good, and L’Industrie is one of two lines in this whole city I actually think is worth standing in. But the slice that won the day, the actual winner, was Bleecker St. Pizza.

And coffee reigns supreme in the village, there’s really no shortage of good spots…St. Jardim, Arcane, Asano, Radiant, L’Appartement 4F and Do Not Feed Alligators. From here, I’ll almost always walk the High Line back uptown for the most beautiful views of the city, you won’t regret it.

For a Night Out

I’ll give you this much...Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, and most of jazz spots this city was basically built on. Boho Karaoke in the LES and Baby Grand if you want to sing badly in a room that makes it feel good anyway. Actually, one of my favorite places is honestly still HaSalon, from my old restaurant group, with Chef Martin & Chef Jero at the helm; the food is the best it's ever been. After 10pm, the garage doors close and dancing on tables is highly encouraged; open Thursdays-Saturdays, reservation-only, and my go-to dance party if I ever need a pick-me-up.

Beyond that, I’m out of my depth, and I’ve made peace with that…I’m not a nightlife girl. If you want a real guide to the after-midnight version of this city, you need someone much younger than me and a whole lot more millennial.

And for my own to-do list…

This city opens new restaurants faster than any one person could ever eat through them, and there’s a real stretch of the last year or two I simply haven’t caught up on, plus a handful of spots I’ve had my eye on.

If money and reservations were no object, these are the ones I’d be sitting down at tonight...Cynthia, top of my list, waiting on a lottery win to justify it. Markette. Somssi. Noury. hed. Cleo. Mommy Pai’s. Adda. Zimmi’s. Phê and Mắm. Mūje. Prosciutto. Oriana. Torrisi. Kabawa. I Sodi. Commerce Inn. Oyatte. Kidilum. Graciela. Sono.

If you beat me to any of them, come back and tell me what to order…or better yet, come with me to cross off my list!

In Memoriam

And one last note…half the folder I used to travel with doesn’t exist anymore. Prune. The Spotted Pig. Uncle Boons. Sel Rrose. Gem Spa. Mission Chinese. Momofuku Ssam Bar. Sleep No More. Egg Shop…and so many more…Already this year, two more have left us…they were still going strong when the rent won anyway...Dan Kluger’s Loring Place and Tom Colicchio’s Craft, his flagship of twenty-five years, both gone within weeks of each other this summer. A decade of favorites, gone the way this city goes, which is fast. This city that keeps closing your favorite places is also a city that keeps making new ones worth falling for.

And I know…this is a Manhattan-based list for today. When you’re living and working every day, all day, and then carting your kid from A-to-B, errands and more, getting to outer boroughs feels like a destination or a vacation I simply can’t justify most days. BUT, it does happen, and I do have quite a list for those spots as well. Another day, another post :)

If you’ve made it this far…whew…I appreciate you, and I SEE you! Feel free to shoot me a DM or leave a comment if you need any further suggestions. You see my map at the beginning…I have WAY more to share, and LOVE doing it. This city is one of the greatest loves of my life, and I’ll take any and every opportunity to wax poetic about her for the rest of my days.

Until next time…

XO,
jess

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Summer is FLYING by. Here in New York City, August is SUPER quiet as everyone has left for some far-away place, and honestly, I’ve never been able to be one of those people. Oh, I’d love to be…but I just can’t.

I can count on one hand the times I’ve taken a trip just to explore somewhere new that wasn’t for work or for visiting family: London and Paris for spring break in college back in 2004, Oaxaca for a life-giving yoga retreat in 2024, and then London and Paris again last spring for Millie’s 10th birthday. And…that’s it.

I can’t speak for what August feels like for the lucky ones who get to vacate the city for weeks on end, because I’m in the other camp…the one where if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, and you're doing the kind of work that doesn’t stop and doesn’t quite translate remotely. (Though I’m manifesting this: life-giving locations abroad that need a chef for retreats, vacations, trips, all of it. You’re seeing it here first. I want to do 2-3 of those a year if the stars align.) That and just MAYBE I’ll get to at least take a vacation…a REAL one…at the very least, once a year…maybe:)

Consequently, August is my favorite month to go out to eat. Reservations are MUCH easier to come by, and walking in to immediately snag a seat at the bar is one of my favorite New York pastimes. Last week I was meeting my friend Massie to catch the Whitney Biennial before it closes this month (don’t worry, you’re not missing anything) and had some time to kill beforehand, so I found myself at one of my longtime favorites: Jeffrey’s Grocery, lovingly nestled on the corner of Christopher Street and Waverly Place in the West Village.

When I was a chef in the village back in 2024, I’d stop by Jeffrey’s almost every week, sit at the bar, take FULL advantage of the oyster happy hour (3:30 to 5:30pm), and I’d work my way through the NY Times game roster. I started doing the crossword because social media was making me feel like a goddamn idiot drone with the same algorithmic content on loop. I could literally feel my brain dying a little with every scroll. The first time I tried the crossword, I felt like a MORON. I didn’t know any of the answers. But day after day I’d post up there for an hour, catch up with the servers, bartenders, and the chefs, and over time two things happened…I fully leaned into my regular status AND I was finally able to complete the crossword.

I can’t believe that was 2 years ago, and when I walked in to take my familiar seat at the bar, a sea of recognizable faces lit up: “hey chef!” “hey jess!” “hey you.” Each one lands so special to me, but that last is the one that ignites my bones from the inside. Hey you. Such an intimate term of belonging that can heal any feelings of loneliness, doubt, blah blah blah that I’ve ever had.

I don’t know much, but I do know there are healing powers in a tray of oysters, a glass of chilled red…the moment you’re recognized, known and loved.

Let’s set the mutha-truckin’ table for the weekend, friends. Here’s what I’m reading this week…pull up a chair ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• you escape competition by figuring out who you are
  What actually happens when you stop looking sideways at everyone else and come back to yourself. She spent years studying other people’s success, trying to reverse-engineer the formula, giving popular formats her own spin, getting nothing but drained for it. Then the essay she almost didn’t post went viral at 800,000 reads. The work that landed with people was always the work she made from the most herself she could be. “There is no real competition when your main goal is to find and bring to life your own personal most creative expression.”

• 31 Prompts to Find Your Authentic Writing Voice in 10 Minutes a Day
  I know August is almost halfway gone, but you can start where you are…there are no rules, friends. One prompt a morning, ten minutes, aimed at “the plain unguarded way you sound before you’ve decided who is reading.” I’ve seen so many Substack notes and posts this week about people being fatigued, having writer’s block, etc. This is a great place to start…week one is meeting yourself on the page…then shedding the borrowed self…telling the truth out loud…and finally coming home. I’m doing the August 1 prompt today and not giving two shits about it being August 13th. Just write:)

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

• The Cure for Your Thinking Addiction
  Alex Olshonsky has been a decade out of multi-substance addiction and says that when he got sober, he was confronted with what he had been medicating all along: the thinking. The voice that never stops, the spiraling at 3am, auditing every conversation on the drive home. He calls compulsive thinking the subtlest addiction of our time, and he gives real tools for unhooking from it: catching the spiral and celebrating it instead of cursing it, somatic tracking, relaxing the actual brain instead of fighting the thoughts. It’s long, but oh my gosh is it worth it. Save it, read and then read again in a few months.

• Substack Won’t Heal Your Instagram
  She posted a café photo on Substack…literally just a shot of her journal, book, coffee…and it went to 2,000 likes overnight. For a few weeks she had it: the algorithm fairy smiled upon her, the subscribers rolling in, the sense she'd finally cracked something. Then it disappeared…she posted the same kind of photo over and over…and nothing, and she had to wrestle with why it mattered. Because Substack is still social media, just a different performance: "Rather than beauty or luxury, Substack demands intellectualism, being well-read, disciplined, and effortless aesthetic." I've felt this as I've pulled away from Instagram and spent more time on Substack...at first it felt SO different, so enlightening...and then...the same anxiety shows up, the comparison follows, and so does the need to perform for an audience that doesn't quite feel like yours. Moving your work somewhere new doesn't fix how you were relating to it in the first place.

• What the Fire Left
  Bella, my first dog, used to crawl back into her open crate and tuck herself in the corner, door wide open, no one guarding it. I am her. The cage I thought the prescribed burn took years ago: I found the bars still standing and my own hands on them, reinforcing from the inside. No one asked me to go back in, and no one put me there…and then, I started climbing again. Give it a read, if you want :)

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Partner as a State of Being
  On the difference between having a partner and actually being in partnership, which she writes about as a practice, a verb, a moment-to-moment commitment to being moved by the other person rather than just extracting from them. She grounds it in the five elements cycle and her own story of realizing she had been treating her cat like a pet instead of a partner, and how apologizing for it changed things. The question she’s asking, the one that hit me so very hard was not who we’re in relationship with, but how we’re showing up to the act of relating at all. “I want to partner with so much of life.”

• No One Will Ever Get You. Love Anyway.
  Why the desire to be fully understood might not be about connection at all. Tamara argues it’s closer to wanting absolution: to hand over the unedited version of yourself and have someone say, I see it, I accept it, you can put it down now. Which is a religious experience, not a human one. She writes about a relationship where she felt fully understood and then realized she had been “monologuing inside the echo of her own voice.” What she’s asking for instead: someone curious enough to keep being wrong about you. “Not I see you completely, but I see you enough to want to keep looking.” Shit. This one…on repeat.

• The Examined Life in the Age of Optimisation
  On the woman doing everything right…the sleep tracker, the supplement stack, the reading log with a target she set in January. By all measures, winning. Late at night though, it all feels oddly thin, like she got “very good at something she had never actually chosen.” Dr. Rodney King draws on Socrates, Hadot, and Byung-Chul Han to argue that we’ve confused optimizing a life with actually examining one. The optimized life asks how to perform better against goals it never questioned. The examined life turns around and questions the goals. I keep asking myself this very same question…what I’ve been sprinting toward, and whether I ever actually chose it.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Marchesa Casati Was Never Just a Muse.
  Loved this one as I’m trying to expand and break free from even the Substack algorithm that’s feeding me the same kind of self-help/mid-life pivot content. Marchesa Casati walked greyhounds painted blue, she kept cheetahs on jeweled leads, wore live snakes as jewelry, and went broke doing it magnificently. Sofia writes about the 1998 Galliano Dior collection Casati inspired and the question at the center of both: what if artifice doesn’t conceal identity, what if sometimes it creates it? Galliano built a dress that extended nine feet and could not enter a room normally. The room had to negotiate with the dress. “Perhaps you do not always dress like the person you already are. Sometimes you dress with such conviction that eventually the person catches up.”

• Be Careful What You Heal For
  Andrea was in a small town in the Himalayas, walking after an afternoon meditation, still checking her phone to get ahead of her boyfriend's feelings. A cow looked at her with "spiritual concern." She writes about the gap between knowing what peace feels like and actually choosing it...how for years she overrode the quiet voice inside for intensity, chemistry, the hope that this time it would be different. "I wasn't outsourcing my worth. I was outsourcing my knowing." She asked for a life that matched her inner world, and everything that wasn't that fell away…not peacefully, not particularly enlightened, and completely worth it. "Awareness has a terrible return policy."

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim
  She writes about summer as not a season but a grief. She talks about nostalgia as love with nowhere to go, about childhood summers and friendship endings and the slow way things leave us in fractions, and not all at once. "You do not wake up one morning and discover your childhood is gone. You wake up and realize you haven't spoken to your best friend from eighth grade in three years." She writes about resilience that looks nothing like heroism. "Most resilience looks like brushing your teeth after your heart is broken. Answering texts when you're sad. Doing the dishes while grieving. Continuing. Continuing. Continuing."

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• the sweetness of doing nothing
  A perfect one to end on. This concept of dolce far niente has literally been following me around for the last week; I’ve literally seen it or heard it now from like 4 different, completely unrelated sources. The Italian idea of the sweetness of doing nothing, and John William Godward's resting girls who sprawl on marble benches not because they've earned it or because they're recovering for the next thing, but because rest is their birthright. Kourtney writes: "I think that rest is what trust feels like entering the body." The flowers in the painting don't need anyone watching them to grow…water them and go take a nap. Okay, universe…I get it…I’m listening…and yes, I’d love a nap.

Join (& yours truly)
for a NYC author gathering & reading

August 25th, 7pm
at the Lower East Side Printshop

Writers and readers, come! Let’s meet!
RSVP here →

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3

xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…
the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll
have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

Bella was my first dog.

Our family had pets since I was a little girl, but Bella was the first on my own. Most stubborn in all the land, she was a crotchety old bird even as a puppy. She remained almost potty-trained for most of her days, but was absolutely never apologetic for it. Because of her complete disregard for potty-trainedness, she had to be crate-trained for the moments we were away. And as the years went by, she spent more and more time in that black metal cage…even when we were home, and she didn’t need to…nor was she asked to. At times, when I was unable to find her around the house or in the yard, I knew she would be in the same spot, every time. She was there, in her crate…having crawled her way back in and tucked herself in the corner…with the cage door, wide open.

I never quite understood why she would choose that instead of the freedom of the house, why she would choose the hard plastic flooring haphazardly draped with an old blanket over the comfort of the couch or her bed in the other room, why loneliness would be more calming to her senses than the congratulatory touch for being a good girl.

I am her.

I’m here now, too…tucked in the corner of my own cage…the one I was so certain the fire had taken with it.

I thought years ago…my prescribed burn singed, indiscriminately, charring every edge, nook and cranny of the comfortable life built around me…including the ME I thought I knew.

I lit the match a really, really long time ago. Years before, when I was in high school, actually. The embers have just laid dormant, quietly rumbling with heat from below, and smouldering on the surface until it would be stifled no more. I remember the moment, the match strike, the first time my feet walked through the cement garden of the City. The smell, the bigness of it all, its ability to make me feel most alive and at the same time, so very, very small. I saw a flash of what my life could be, who I could be…if and when I made this City my own.

The flame waited patiently from 2000 until I moved into my very first Upper West Side apartment in 2020. I knew then, I was changed forever; the fire grew and I did what I could to fan those small settled flames, blowing them until they spread and took on a life of their own.

That cage…my cage…she proved to be resistant and viciously stubborn in her refusal to yield to even the hottest of flames. Why wouldn’t she be? I’ve been building her up, reinforcing her bars and barriers from the inside for more than 40 years now. And I’m here, again, I laid the blame on those around me for building that cage, for keeping me inside, and for not letting me break free.

But as I looked closer…I noticed the door.

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It’s wide open.

I’m in there, lying comfortably, but also begging to be set free…and yet, no one is even there to guard the opening, no one is asking me or forcing me…to stay in.

I certainly didn’t build this cage all on my own. I was there to hold the bars upright so the “cool girls” from school could construct the first row. They hammered those rods into place when they would make fun of me for living in a mobile home, for having bucked teeth and weird freckles, for being a tag-along and a poser. Each birthday that went by with no friends at my party or especially those birthdays where my family was going through too much and the day went by like any other…those moments added mortar to those barriers. Brick by brick, they were reinforced by the chewed gum of my childhood, through my awkward preteens and into high school…my walls grew higher and firmer with every feeling of being “too much,” “not enough,” or even worse, “not anything to anyone at all.”

And yet…

There were chinks in my armor, too…the good days…here and there, where I would be brave enough to step outside of the cage, take risks for something new, and experience life’s moments of happiness along the way. My first marriage began when I was so young, fresh out of college, and at a time when I had been free from those caged walls for the four years prior. My college years were so full, so free, so very happy.

I thought I had left the cage of my youth for good…those metal bars that kept me small and compliant…the doing and saying and dressing and acting like everyone else around me. The ones that were reinforced by all the rules and expectations handed down at first by that cool group at school and then later on by the church and my youth group. They kept my body in line to protect the minds of boys who looked my way and most importantly, for my future husband to have for his own…those bars kept me small in the role of a submissive woman who should be calm, quiet and perform her duties without complaint…they were the ones insisting that certain types of music, certain clothes and certain movies would only cloud my mind, my judgement and cause me to step out of acceptance.

After college, I felt free; I thought I’d left that mindset of being told what to do. I was going to do me…be me…and I had a husband that, I thought, had chosen me. And that’s all I really needed to truly be me, right? To be chosen?

Even in that first year of marriage, I looked around and recognized the inside patina, comfort, and compliance had grabbed my hands on either side and led me back to my corner. When he cheated on me in that first year, I knew it was my fault…for I had let him see all of me, and it was too much…or not what he thought he’d wanted. So I crawled back in, to be the one he did want, the one he could feel supported by, the submissive one who didn’t question him or what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go.

I managed to step out from behind those bars from time to time; it was outside where I found true freedom, discovering more and more about myself in those quiet alone times. I discovered my love for food, for cooking…it was a process I could get lost in…I would pore over cookbooks and recipes as if they held the secrets to keeping me freed for good. I started writing again, journaling and blogging…and with each word, I found release…naming things and claiming them. I found strength hidden in those lines. I took hip hop dance classes and did yoga and run club with friends; I even played adult-league kickball…pushing my body beyond its limits, testing her resilience to bounce back.

I did…I had real moments of freedom where I thought I had abandoned that cage for good. Yet somehow, some way, people and circumstances in my orbit would convince me back into that corner. When our church crumbled under the weight of its own infidelity or when my attempts to have a baby failed, and I fell quietly into a pit of infertility…grieving somewhere no one was looking. It was there, in those moments, the corner would give me refuge and safety. Bar by bar, brick by brick, in there I was a good girl, a good wife, good enough, submissive enough, pretty enough, pure enough, faithful enough, pleasing enough…all for the sake of those around me. I’d scan rooms, search faces, and put on whatever version of myself would be the most accepted, the most digestible for them. I held the walls from the inside while they piled on their expectations, their needs, their standards from the outside. I had to…the worst thing I could do would be to disappoint them, or make them uncomfortable.

Light would shine and find its way in…persistent and bright, it would lure me out…for a bit. Hosting themed pop-up dinner parties in the community, doing small cooking segments on the local news channel, winning a grant to do a National Geographic photography workshop in San Francisco. Even then, I was quickly reminded how selfish it would be to stay in the light for too long…that light wasn’t really meant for me anyway. Why would it be?

The year I stepped out again, uprooting my family to a completely different city, taking one of the biggest risks of my life, stepping onto the line with no formal training but the will and the gumption to give it my all and do the best I could. And I did...I worked my butt off, climbing from line cook to sous to Head Chef in less than 2 years…or the time I was featured in the NY mutha-trucking Times for being one of the crazy-ass people to move TO New York City in the HEIGHT of the pandemic. Or the time I held our tiny baby daughter in my arms as the social worker told us our adoption was final, and she was legally ours.

Even in those peak life moments…when I felt the light SO bright, I was quickly reminded that by staying there too long or reveling in its warmth on my skin, or worse yet, even enjoying it a little too much…I was told to get back in…reminded often of how much work I still had to do, that there’s always someone better, more creative, more patient, more beautiful, more successful, more motherly than me.

It was around the time I became sous chef, busting my ass to learn more, that the flames started to really grow and this time, they consumed. They became unruly…I couldn’t keep them or myself small any longer; I just watched. I watched them scorch the life I had grown comfortable in…they took with them my 17+ year marriage that didn’t fit anymore, they took my apartment, they split my home and my schedule with my daughter in two, they took my safety net and along with it, everything I thought I knew about loyalty, love, friendship, family, sacrifice. They didn’t quite burn it all down to ashes…some pieces and parts were instead refined, taking on a new shape. In some places, the flames cleared the whole land so that new growth could peek through.

The bricks and bars that were put there long ago…the ones that told me I was too weak to leave, too scared to do it on my own…those became ashes with the turn of the key to my own apartment, with the stroke of my pen on the divorce papers and shared custody agreement, and even with the click of the mouse as I sent my resignation letter to the restaurant explaining why I had to choose my daughter over my dream job. I really…truly…thought the flames had finally freed me…from all of it.

Why wouldn’t I? For nearly two whole years, I stayed clear of that cage. I’d stopped monitoring…stopped editing…stopped managing myself for others. I’d adopted a very healthy “it is what it is, I am who I am, take it or leave it” attitude…or like my mama always says “like it or lump it” (I still don’t know what that actually means…).

I did what I wanted, I lived how I wanted, I went where I wanted, I asked questions and took risks. I climbed 3-4 times a week, I walked everywhere in the city and took chances on places I’d never been, I grabbed coffee with friends weekly, I did yoga every morning, stretching and breathing out all of the self-doubt and fear and anything else that threatened to keep me small. I experienced things I’d never been brave enough or even had the opportunity to before…like dating and even having a sex life.

I knew at some point, I wanted to find a partner again; the loneliness was real and consuming…almost enough to send me back in before I’d even had a chance to breathe. It was the loneliest I had ever felt, and yet…I was also the happiest, the most confident, the most content, the most secure in myself I had ever been.

I met my partner that next year, and Yas was introduced to the most secure and assured version of myself I had ever been. I thought the cage was long gone behind me…but as we got engaged the following year and then married later that fall, I looked around, and the shadows started to come more into focus, beam by beam, rod by rod; the familiar metal once again surrounded me, and I was devastated.

We had just single-handedly pulled off the most epic wedding in the Catskills with 100 of our closest friends and family; we were riding that high for weeks after. I had literally worked my ass off for 6 months to blend together our two lives, our traditions, our cultures and religions, and families for the most beautiful Southern & Bangladeshi wedding.

Between working, trying to grow the Freckled Fork brand, the post-wedding exhaustion, and navigating Millie’s school and dance schedules, I slowly drifted…away from my weekly climbing schedule, sleeping in and missing my morning yoga more and more. I found all the excuses in the world to stay home, to escape the NY winter. I simply didn’t have the energy or time to do any of the things I loved, the things that had helped set me free.

I only intended to take a break for a week or two.

It had been seven months since the wedding, and I was there, completely undone…unraveling all the progress I had made during my years alone. I was supposed to be experiencing peak life moments, completely in love and enjoying the honeymoon period of my new marriage, my new life together with my new partner.

Instead, the metal bars had once again closed in around me; I had hit an emotional, physical, and most certainly, a mental bottom. I realized…it had been 7 months since I’d climbed, since I’d walked the city; since I stopped getting coffees with friends, and even stopped my self-care routines of alternating massages and facials. I had abandoned my exploration of the city, and literally stopped doing all the things that had rescued me years before when my prescribed burn took my life in a new direction…all the things that had given me new meaning beyond what I did or who I was.

The strange thing was…this time, there was no one around me to reinforce those walls or keep guard at the cage door. Yas never asked me to stop; he never implied or ever once suggested I abandon any of those things. I’d convinced myself that my busyness was the culprit…all of the things I was carrying, I was simply overwhelmed…and, honestly, I let that excuse run longer than it ever should have.

I had slowly, quietly slipped back into my old cage…the one that was singed and scorched, but apparently not quite destroyed all those years ago. I got smaller and smaller, and before I knew it, my fingers were gripping the metal bars as I crawled my way back into the tragic comfort of that stupid cage.

No one asked me to go in…but there I was, and the door was wide open.

That old pull had me again…the one where I was again measuring myself against something external, always needing someone or something to reflect me back to myself before I actually felt real.

Yas is a beautiful partner for me; he is steady and strange and neurodivergent in ways that somehow make sense, and have made him better at loving me than most have ever managed to. He sees things before I say them out loud; he shares feedback (some unwelcome, but most appreciated) and over time, I’ve found myself arguing with him just because it’s easier to digest than the fact that he might be seeing me more clearly than I see myself. I’ve let myself shrink inside of this good, steady partnership…for none other than my own old reasons, and somewhere along the way…I decided it was time to start taking up less space.

I’ve mended these rods and these barriers from the inside, unintentionally and unaware. As our first year of marriage proved to be anything but a honeymoon, I was handed a late-ADHD diagnosis; I slipped back into my childhood anxiety, making excuses, justifications, and managing myself for the consumption of others around me…only this time, I had a clinical defense to hide behind. It’s been rewarding in so many ways, and still so hard, and in my need for comfort, I’ve crawled back into my corner, reinforcing the barriers and walls with the same patterned cement from my childhood, the same amount of energy to over-explain myself, over-analyze and manage how I present myself…to Yas, to friends, to family, to work…to everyone on the outside.

I want to be free from this cage, and this time I know…I understand that it’s me who has to pull myself out, out from behind these barriers of my own making. But this time, I’m not alone, I have a partner who is trying his very best to love me the way I need, a therapist who is helping me to heal these wounds and dismantle these bars once and for all, my family and friends that I don’t have to pretend for and that finally see right through my weak “it’s fine”, I have my daughter who is actively forgiving me for the chaos of her childhood…and who needs my help to keep her own cage from being forged, to help her keep her own barriers from being built up.

It’s slow going, messier than I expected, but as I peek around those familiar patina’d bars, I know I’m not starting from the beginning. I’m ready to let go and this time…I know the path. I’ve been here before, I’ve stepped out, and this time, I’m going to allow myself to feel all of it, even the parts that sting. I’m excavating and grieving the past, breaking it all down…layer by layer so that I can finally work on what’s actually underneath. I know she’s in there; I know she needs to hear that she’s truly okay as she is…unmanaged, unedited, untethered.

Bella stayed in her corner until the end, but me?

I started climbing again.
And this time, I know the way out.

I feel 1000x better.

Last week I showed up here pretty unraveled…and SO many of you reached out…the messages, the comments, the DMs…I truly appreciate the support, love, and encouragement…they totally helped me tuck my crazy back in a little and keep moving forward.

Apparently…if you’re a Virgo…this is our month…whatever mess we’ve been dealing with for oh…the past 12 years…is coming to an end. I’ll spare you the full download, but “the exhausting karmic cycles, hidden burdens are finally shattering.” Make of that what you will; I’ll be over here…bracing for AMAZING.

The pop-up happened last weekend! My first Freckled Fork pop-up, last Friday at the Starlite Motel in the Catskills with the wonderful crew of the Catskills Cocktail Club...and it was EVERYTHING! And yes…I forgot the trash bags…I forgot the cutting board. But I did show up with heirloom tomatoes, the juiciest of peaches, and fresh sourdough Pullman loaves and kabocha buns from my girl Nicole at Cafe Mutsi…and you know what? She sent me off with garbage bags from behind the bar and an extra cutting board, too. THAT was the theme of the weekend…good food, good friends, stepping out & doing something new…there’s really nothing better to pull you out of a rut than the care and support of an amazing community.

Yas handled the whole front end...the tech, the ordering system, every ticket...systematic and precise and endearingly naive with this being his first-ever service gig. Massie was also beside me on the line all night and didn’t miss a beat. Tickets stacked fast, the crowd came back for seconds and thirds, and somewhere around 7:15pm that old feeling came back...chest tight, brain quiet, hands moving, bones settled in...the exhilarating feeling of being on a line during a busy service…the feeling of being exactly where I’m supposed to be.

I wrote about it for Sunday’s essay…and I’ve already got my second date locked down…I’m popping up again with the Catskills Cocktail Crew …for another night at the Starlite on August 21st. WOOT WOOT.

This week has truly felt like a breath of fresh air...my mind is racing and clear all at the same time...perhaps the infusion of freshness is also from the facial I gifted myself on Monday. I went by my sweet little place in Chinatown with my favorite ayis who take such good care of me…and always nag…I mean…remind me to be better about exfoliating. There’s a certain clarity that comes from having your face massaged for 45 minutes straight....I feel READY for this next season...for the first time in a long time, I’m actually excited for what’s to come…I feel GOOD…renewed…and SO energized.

Join me at the table...let’s get excited together, pull up a chair. ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Tiny Things That Actually Made My Week
  It’s all about the micro-list...not the milestones, not the wins worth posting about, but the very small things that carry a week from the inside. The coffee that was exactly right…the text that came at just the right time…the tiny moment you weren’t expecting that showed up and quietly saved the day. In a week where things are finally starting moving in the right direction…these are the ones I want to actually remember.

• I Don’t Do January. I Do August.
  Why August is her real reset...the energy lifts, something in the body re-orients, and the clean-slate feeling everyone projects onto January shows up here instead. I’m a big fan of birthday resets (vs. new years resolutions) and I also do my intentions/goal-setting on my birthday (September 22nd!) too...great read and reminder that my year-end is coming up this next month. Time to start planning…

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

• They Followed Me In…
  This week on The Table Between: the pop-up. All of it...the heirloom tomatoes, the sourdough, the stacking tickets, and the realization somewhere around 7:15pm…the 15+ years I spent designing and marketing and teaching and organizing and mothering weren’t for nothing…they were all preparation for my NOW. “You don’t really start over when you pivot...everything you’ve built comes with you, whether you realize it or not.”

• August Poetry Prompts
  Jo Sexton at Saltwater and Sage drops twenty poetry prompts every month, and one of this August’s was “the road that led me here.” I read it and I wrote a poem…that day. I’m not even sure I totally get this poetry thing…but these days, this is how my brain is putting words together…It’s called Never Backward, it’s about the roads from rural South Carolina to Charlotte to the streets of New York that finally brought me exactly here...and it lives in my brand new poetry section on The Table Between, which is apparently something I’m “doing”. Come read it, come write to one of Jo’s prompts yourself and tag her.

• Allow Everything to Just Be
  Millie wrote this back in February…but I only recently found it…and it was exactly when I needed to. She writes about the way we’re trained to interfere with everything...fix the sadness, eliminate the anxiety, rewrite the conversation, manage how we’re perceived. “Most of our suffering comes from arguing with what is already true.” She’s not offering more strategy…she’s talking about release, about putting the armor down and letting things settle without you prying at them.

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Love Is Not Completion. It Is Recognition.
  Dr. Vera Hart on what love is actually for. Love doesn’t fill the space or make you whole...what it does is see you clearly, recognize you. Two people whole and separate who can look at each other and say: I know this person, I know them clearly, and I’m here. That’s different from completion, and the gap between the two is where a very specific sort of grief lives. She’s asking us to want the right thing from love so we stop expecting it to rescue us.

• You Need People in the Same Curiosity
  A very specific kind of loneliness...the one that persists even when you’re surrounded by people who love you, because love and curiosity don’t cover the same territory. You need people who get drawn down the same rabbit holes, who light up for the same things, who get excited in the same direction.

• Take People As They Are, Not As You Want Them to Be
  Fatima on the exhausting work of loving someone for who they could become instead of who they are...the projection, the waiting, the quiet hope that the version you imagined will eventually arrive. She writes about releasing that not as resignation or coldness but as one of the quieter forms of real love. Take them as they are, or take a step back, because you cannot build a relationship from the version of someone that only exists in your head.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• May the Bridges You Burn Light Your Path Forward
  The old wisdom about not burning bridges and what it’s actually asking of you…to keep your energy available for someone who already showed you exactly what they had to offer. She’s not writing about dropping people at their first mistake...she’s writing about the scarcity mindset underneath it, the fear that if you let go nothing better will come. “If they had one of the highest most valuable seats at the table of your life and they absolutely squandered it, truly, what could they possibly add of value now?”

• A Portal of Significant Insignificance
  The Art of Being on the ordinary moment as a portal...the thing that looks too small to matter, that you almost walked past, that turns out to be the whole point. One tent, one grill, folding tables with tablecloths and string lights in the Catskills…not what I pictured when I imagined a pop-up, but I was transported to pure happiness in that space.

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• The Weight of Taking Up Space
  Imi on what it actually costs to stop folding yourself small...to take up the room you're entitled to, to let the real size of you be seen, to stop apologizing for existing at the scale you actually exist. She doesn't moralize or offer a pep talk, she just asks why visibility feels like too much and stays in that question with you.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Yes, You Deserve It!!
  Ananya wrote this as a letter…and it’s no coincidence it was addressed to me…Jess. Short, sweet, zero argument to make...just the thing I needed to read. "Know that a heart which prays for the welfare of others deserves love...not just from the one who's meant for you, but from yourself too." I’m not even sure who this was really for, but I’m totally convinced it was especially for me…and also maybe for every Jessica…because apparently all my namesakes are out there feeling exactly the same way.

EVENT INVITE: My new Substack friend
is hosting an author gathering & reading in NYC

August 25th, 7pm
at the Lower East Side Printshop

Writers and readers, come! Let’s meet!
RSVP here →

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3

xo, Jess

The Table Between is a reader-supported publication.
Subscribe, follow, share with friends & “heart” every post you love. LOVE the LOVE.

Subscribe now

Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…
the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll
have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

the dust rises and settles
from the dirt roads
in rural south carolina
with one stoplight
and a thousand judgements
disguised as
bless your hearts
the way it is
the way it’s always been
no room for why

the gravel ones lead
in and out of my childhood home
close my eyes,
and I still hear
the rattling rudiments of the pebbles
the backbeats under tires
the familiar melody
brings me back
to myself

the never-finished roads
of Charlotte
the queen city
who has yet to define herself
before redefining
I was stuck there
in that same loop
before finding
my way out
her definitions
never quite fit

the streets lined with giants
and lights that glow
constant
a persistent noise
a hum of life
and of struggle
pulled me in
like a siren

my 6am walk to work
those busy streets
where smiles pass by
the same nameless neighbors
each day

the faint but stifling heat
rising from subway grates
no matter the season
the clouds that pour
from each crack and crevice
settle on my skin
opening me up
to the most me
I’ve ever been

the roads that led me here
loosed my grip
of control
of fear
of what if
and forced me to
keep going
never backward
and finally
brought me
to myself

on the outside
in my words
my actions
my face
I am a woman who moves
who does
who can

beneath her
something else
holds the throat
tightens the chest
white-knuckled
reaching deep
and wide

it keeps her hidden
and small
and quiet
a cold silence
cooling from the depths

until
the little one
there in the corner
bare feet on wet stone
fans the embers
the ones that sparked
from before

the flames grow
warming from beneath
pulling the silence
to the surface
looking for a place
to seep out
making way

a prescribed burn

Fresh Pullman sourdough loaves, baked that morning in the friendly ovens of Cafe Mutsi, outside rims crisped and hardened by the flames, insides soft with craggy pockets burst open by air. The most adorable bun duos, puffed up by kabocha and yeast and heat, waiting to be piled high with barbecue jackfruit drunk on Cheerwine barbecue.

Friday night, the Catskills sun slowly sinking below the cliffs behind us...one tent, one grill, folding tables with tablecloths holding much more than I actually needed, everything I’d been prepping and preparing for the past week arranged on top.

The Starlite Motel landscaped in front of us, lights on strings and vases of wildflowers spread across picnic tables. Brendan and Lisa, quite possibly the kindest people I’ve ever met, were putting on the final touches to the bar of the Catskills Cocktail Club. Massie and Yas, my two incredible helpers, shifted and prepped and asked me what else I needed.

Cars pulled into the gravel lot beginning at 5pm, and orders slowly came in. My anxiety and by equal measure, my excitement had been cluttering my mind and fluttering around in my stomach for days, but as Yas handed me the first paper ticket, a wave of calm crashed over me. That familiar feeling, that beautiful swirling concoction of anticipation and assuredness and energy and excitement...the same feeling I had working in restaurant kitchens...rolled over me, and I felt at home.

Somewhere around 7:15, the tickets poured in fast, piling up, and our little tent kitchen was moving together in a dance, a pace I had long forgotten. I missed that feeling...the stacking and the calling, the rhythm of service finding its stride, a line forming at the register and a crowd truly excited, some even coming back for seconds and thirds. That feeling in my chest, the tight one that had been quietly grieving the absence of this for years, just...exhaled.

The Catskills Cocktail crew invited me for my first ever pop-up, and I was nervous like the first day of school and also so content and confident like I’d been here before, the way I always am when I’m walking into something that really matters. The night had its own momentum. Yas was at the front taking orders in his sweet, nervous, systematic way...methodical and precise where most people with no service experience would’ve crumbled. My friend Massie beside me, working the line, his hands moving with a certainty that comes from someone whose brain processes things in sequence, completely, before moving on to the next. One grill and a hundred moving parts...and somehow, beautifully, it all came together in such perfect harmony.

As we drove down the mountain the next day, through the trees and the rolling hills of the Catskills, my mind raced, relieved from a job well done and reveling in the knowing that I NEED to do this again. As we made our way back into the city, back into our lives, I thought about the why...that and how I can keep chasing that feeling.

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I stood there, on the line, waiting for service to begin, a few weeks after stepping foot in a restaurant kitchen for the very first time years ago...and I felt something I had never felt before. My bones settled for the first time in almost 40 years. After years of feeling like a foreigner in my own skin and never feeling quite at home in this body...this moment on the line, in the height of a busy service, ironically quieted my racing mind and settled my anxious heart in all the ways. I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be. All the jobs I had worked, all the experiences I had lived through in my previous roles and workplaces...they had all equipped me, preparing me for this very moment with the skills I needed. I was the happiest I had ever been. I felt most like MYSELF in that place. I knew…in my bones…that this was what I had been searching for all along.

And yet…I had somehow lost that feeling for the past couple of years. Life’s circumstances had pulled me out of the restaurant, out of that kitchen and out of that certainty. On one hand, I do love being a private chef...the autonomy, the flexible schedule, being available for my daughter and my family...yes to all of that. But that feeling…the one of feeling wholly me…I don’t have that when I’m working alone in a kitchen by myself, no rush, no beautiful chaos, no one to push through the service beside me.

Friday’s pop-up was more than just a night of food and friends and birthday celebrations. It was a night that brought together both of my loves...the autonomy of a private chef, creating menus and experiences with food...and the rush of service with customers and orders and beautiful chaos. The best of both worlds, under one tent in the Catskills.

And, I wasn’t alone…I had Yas and Massie with me. Yas, who had never worked a day in food service in his life but carries years of experience in marketing and user experience...and Massie, technically in accounting but with years of banked time in bartending and the service industry. A collection of skills that helped me loosen my grip of control on all the things, trust their instincts, and to lean into the parts that were solely mine. And it went so smoothly…it was really lovely.

A conversation earlier in the week turned out to be prophetic…exactly about moments like these. My friend May came to New York to interview me in my living room on Monday. Over bowls of cereal (IYKYK) we talked about multi-hyphenateness...how the accumulation of skills through our life’s work and experiences can be applied across industries, in ways that aren’t always obvious until you need them. So many skills I used in that tent on Friday night came from places far beyond the kitchen.

The plates I composed? That’s my graphic designer’s eye. Fifteen years of visual communications, of thinking about balance and weight and where the eye travels first. I don’t plate by feeling alone...I plate by composition, thinking about negative space and height and how color reads from across a table. The discipline that makes a plate look intentional rather than just full is the same discipline that made a layout work, that made a brand identity cohesive, that made a client’s design feel considered instead of cluttered.

The menu I built for that pop-up, the names I gave the dishes …Thirst Trap, The Main Squeeze, Slow Jam Soda Pop…the way I wrote the descriptions and designed the poster and social posts? That’s my marketing brain at work. Years of writing copy, building narratives, understanding how language shapes what people expect before they’ve tasted a thing.

The stations I set up, the mise en place, the flow I mapped from the cooler to the grill to the pass...even prior to my years on the line, that was my professional organizer training in action. Every system I ever implemented in a client’s closet or kitchen space, every time I had to think through the logic of where does this live so the next step is easy, was practice for this. A kitchen is just an organizer’s problem with more heat and more at stake.

And the people management? The way you have to hold a service together, read the room, keep your energy steady when the tickets are stacking and someone’s in the weeds...that’s a classroom. I spent years managing middle schoolers and coaching a track team, and I will tell you without hesitation that line cooks and eighth graders require almost identical handling...calm authority…clear communication…a bit of irreverence and sass…and a genuine investment and care for the people looking to you for what comes next.

Motherhood is in there, too, somewhere in the depths of it all...the superhuman patience required to teach rather than criticize, the instinct to make sure everyone in your orbit has what they need to do their job well, the awareness that the people working beside you are whole people having whole days, not just hands doing tasks. And the people ordering the food want to be seen, taken care of, and to feel that connection that only food can bring.

I didn’t know or plan for any of those skills would prepare me for a successful career in food...but once I took the step toward the kitchen, they followed me in and made all the difference in the world.

Our conversation on Monday talked about this and more…what it looks like to change into a completely different industry the way I did...to walk away from 15+ years in one field and start cooking professionally without a culinary degree, without industry connections, without any of the credentials that typically open those doors.

You don’t really start over when you pivot, despite how it feels. Everything you’ve built comes with you, whether you realize it or not, and the beauty is in the recognition of how all those pieces of you have given you exactly the tools you need to move forward. You only have to have the flexibility and the creativity to see where they apply.

The people who struggle hardest in career changes are usually the ones trying to shed everything they were before, as if the new field requires a clean slate. But it doesnt…it simply requires translation. Looking at what you already know and asking where it applies, what it can become in a new context.

My design background didn’t disappear when I walked into my first professional kitchen...it reorganized into plating and menu design and the visual logic needed in a service. My marketing brain didn’t go quiet...it found new problems to solve, new language to shape, new stories to build around food and the experience we were trying to create with each dinner service. The years I spent teaching weren’t experience from a different life...they were leadership and communication skills needed to command and care for a line.

The non-obvious skills are almost always the most transferable ones…the lives we lived before aren’t detours…they’re preparation for what’s to come.

Friday night, in that tent in Kerhonksen, NY, with people lined up, tickets coming in one-by-one and that small grill doing everything I asked of it...every version of myself showed up at once. The designer…the marketer…the organizer…the teacher…the mother and the chef, all in the same space, in the same moment. And that familiar feeling returned...the one where my bones settled in and I felt most like myself…and this body that had spent so long feeling like the wrong fit…she finally felt like home.

I’ve spent so many years apologizing for being too many things. Slipping a “but” into sentences when someone asks what I do, as if the breadth of what I’ve done needs explaining or justifying...as if my multi-hyphenateness was something to apologize for rather than the very thing that makes me me.

And Friday night under the string lights, wrapped by the cool summer air and the last of the piled-high tomato sandwiches going out...this was all the argument I needed against those apologies.

You don’t have to be just one thing to be excellent. Most of the time, all the other things…the lives lived, the experiences had…good or bad…they are exactly what excellence is made of. The sooner you stop treating your previous lives and paths as irrelevant, the sooner you realize that everything you’ve carried, everything you’ve built, everything you are...it’s what makes YOU the only one who can do that very thing, the way you do.

And when you finally let all of it show up at once...something in your chest that’s been quietly holding its breath for years just...exhales.

Running so late this week…That first sentence is both a metaphor and the stinkin’ truth...the newsletter is late…I usually get this thing written/compiled by Wednesday morning, but I’m literally putting this baby together as we speak…and too, the late-ness and falling behind-ness is the whole state of things right now in my orbit.

I have a pop-up tomorrow…my first Freckled Fork pop-up ever! I am equal parts thrilled about it and SO anxious…I can’t quite sit still or keep my mind quiet. Feeding people is the one thing that reliably regulates me...the one thing that gets my head and my hands working in the same direction. But…I also know…you CAN’T COOK MAD. You can’t walk into a kitchen carrying what I’ve been carrying this week and make something worth eating. The food tastes like the chaos you came from. So this week, I’ve been consumed trying to get my head out of my chest before tomorrow.

(MRI gown chic…)

I had to get an MRI earlier this week; my girlie doctor had some concern about some persnickety fibroids. Still waiting on results…I don’t really want to think about…but I totally am; I’ve kept myself from doom-scrolling WebMD…but my mind is doing all the stress scrolling for me. My chiropractor worked on me the other day, and she literally couldn’t get any traction...my neck and shoulders are so locked up, so wound tight, so on edge waiting for the fall...she literally couldn’t move me. My bones are bracing for the breakage, I said. And inside…I know I meant it in more ways than one.

It rained this week, and some of our upstate farms and friends are dealing with massive flooding...I watched the photos come through and sat with a quiet kind of sadness about it. The storms have felt pretty all-encompassing lately. Some of the connections I hold most dear are in a harder place right now...I can’t name it exactly, but I’m carrying them, and they are weighing on me.

On Sunday, I wrote a letter to my body. Forty-two years of war, and I’m finally trying to find a ceasefire. If any of that finds you where you are, I’m here too.

These are the twelve pieces currently helping me crawl back out of this hole I’ve been in this week. Let’s set the table, friends. ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Permission to Not Have a Plan
  Life coach Myleik sets out to reframe uncertainty not as failure but as a neutral state of not knowing. Not knowing yet is different from not knowing at all. Being in between things is a real place to exist, and “I don’t know” said out loud is not a confession...it’s just true. She sees right through the impulse to fix the discomfort by making more plans, starting new projects, asking ten people what they think. “You cannot plan your way into every good thing, but you can make room for it.” Woof…I added this to my notes to remember for this week…and the next…

• The Gap Between Deciding and Becoming
  You decide something will change…you feel it shift…and then an ordinary day begins and the old behavior runs the same old route like it didn’t know it was coming. Richa B. calls this Integration Lag...the gap between understanding something and being able to live it. Your insight gets there before your reflexes catch up. The first clumsy attempt at a new way isn’t proof you’re back at square one…it’s just proof the old version has had more practice. “Change often enters quietly. First as awareness, then irritation, then a pause, then an imperfect choice.” I’ve repeated an old pattern at least twice this week while knowing better…so yeah.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

• The Four-Minute Writing Exercise That Beats Your Inner Critic
  Magdalena is Polish, has lived and worked in America for twenty years, and the inner critic that followed her across the Atlantic ran the same calculation every time she walked into a room: how many people will lose interest, how many minutes before the accent registers, how many exits. The truth was, nobody in twenty years had ever actually said they couldn’t understand her. “Your inner critic accepts one currency and it is not enthusiasm. It is evidence.” Two lines, four minutes: write exactly what the critic says, then write what has actually happened on the record. This one is a practical way to get that social anxiety I talk about all the time…outta here.

• Why Embodiment Practices for Anxiety Work Better Than Talk Therapy Alone for HSPs
  Rachel is an HSP and a yoga teacher writing about the gap that talk therapy, on its own, often can’t close: the body. Understanding why you’re anxious is not the same thing as feeling safe in your body, and if you’re a deep processor and a verbal thinker, you can actually come out of a session more activated than when you went in. “Until I brought somatic embodiment practices into my life, I really was just someone regurgitating cycles of burnout and stress, and talking about it all the time.” She covers breathwork, somatic touch, dancing (says dancing has done more for her than any meditation, which, same), nature, and the slow kinds of yoga. With my chiropractor telling me she literally couldn’t move my bones this week, every word of this felt like it was written for me.

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Not to Be Managed
  This week on The Table Between: A letter to my body. Forty-two years of war starting at the mirror in first grade and not letting up...trying to scrub freckles off, pushing teeth back with my knee, years of monitoring and managing and apologizing for the whole thing. I wrote it because my therapist asked me to, and because by writing it all down, something starts to crack open. "I am sorry. I'm sorry for the scanning and the monitoring...for the distrust and for the judgement...for the control...for not listening."

• A Hundred Years
  This piece is quiet and exact and I've been thinking about the tree. An old Jewish folk belief: souls who have suffered too much don't come back right away. They return as trees first, for a hundred years. They don't have to explain what happened. They don't have to forgive anyone. They're just given roots. Michelle writes this as a memory of her bubbie telling her this under a beech tree at age seven...a tree she sat with for years, told things she couldn't tell her mother, pressed her cheek against and felt nothing move. "That was the real comfort. She didn't need to answer." When the tree finally fell after more than a century, there wasn't a drop of rot inside her. YES.

• "When Did I Stop Being a Person?"
  Layered and worth the time to read it a few times through. Hilary Silver writes about gray divorce, but the actual argument runs wider than that: the moment a woman finally hears herself again after years of being the default, the fixer, the one who knows where everything is...and everyone calls it hormones. She calls it something else. "The clarity arrives all at once, which makes it look sudden to everyone who was benefiting from her silence." The question at the center of this piece is the one I wrote in my journal after reading it: "When did I stop being a person?"

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Industry That Sells Authenticity Is Terrified of Sharing a Bad Day
  Ange makes the argument I think about often: the reason everyone else's bad day sounds more manageable than yours is that everyone else's bad day is six months old by the time they tell you about it. The whole industry runs on a delay…share from the scar, never the wound. Which means your present-tense struggle is the only present-tense struggle you can see, and that is wildly unfair. She names her worst day of the month (Day 21, every cycle, reliable as rain), puts a reminder in her calendar for it, and keeps a "proof vault" of screenshots for when her brain starts building a case against her. "Feelings lie on day 21. Screenshots don't." I bet my ruptures happen around the same time every month…*goes to calendar to track the madness…

• Inspiration Is How the Universe Delivers the Answers to Our Prayers
  On inspiration as the universe's actual response to what we've been asking for...not the wish delivered, but the nudge toward it. The sudden idea, the pull toward something that doesn't make sense yet, the grocery store impulse that turns out to be exactly right. We dismiss inspiration when it shows up inconveniently, and then we stand around wondering why we feel stuck. "Sell some of those cars...create a welcoming space so inspiration can visit you." I keep that image…the cars being all the attachment to how things have to go…make the parking spot…let the idea in for some tea.

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• I've Decided to Lower My Standards
  This writer spent twenty years chasing health, doing every single thing the wellness industry told her to do, restructuring her entire life around the future version of herself who would finally be well...and then one day realized she might never get there. "WHAT IF THIS IS IT? WHAT IF THIS RIGHT NOW IS MY LIFE." And instead of that being the worst thing, it turned out to be the crack. She stopped improving and started living. Stopped waiting for the right version of her life to begin…ordinary is not mediocre…contentment is not complacency. Louder for the people in the back! "My life might be small according to someone else's definition, but my joy is huge."

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Fold in the Cheese
  A beautifully argued essay about what "fold in the cheese" actually means if nobody ever showed you, and why David Rose from Schitt's Creek was not hopeless in the kitchen…I LOVE LOVE LOVE this episode…makes me laugh every single time...a recipe that didn't meet him where he was. Recipes are designed systems with hidden assumptions about what kind of reader you are, what kind of body you have, what vocabulary you come with. The history of how recipes communicate, disability-centered food design, and what TikTok cooking actually gets right that print cookbooks miss. I loved everything about this piece.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3

xo, Jess

The Table Between is a reader-supported publication.
Subscribe, follow, share with friends & “heart” every post you love. LOVE the LOVE.

Subscribe now

Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

And while it hasn’t been a full-on assault, I have certainly battled you and treated you like the source of my problems for the past 42 years.

Our struggle started in first grade, really. I was a new student, starting later in the year after moving from Charleston, in a small school in an even smaller town. And while you weren’t wrong exactly, you certainly weren’t right...the freckles wouldn’t scrub off no matter how hard I tried. A cowlick that was smack in the front of my hair refused me bangs no matter how many failed attempts (and yes, I tried more times than I should’ve).

I tried constantly to change...to blend...because I wanted to look like the cool group of girls, the ones who were long-time family friends and thick as thieves...the ones who seemed to live in their bodies without the daily scan and negotiation routine I was already running with mine. They were the ones who would notice me playing too close beside them...close enough that I’d convinced myself I was playing with them…and then they would whisper and laugh and then run away.

And then the teeth...good lord...the teeth came in, the front two far too big and stuck out a little (a lot) too far forward. I was maybe seven…eight years old…and already had a hatred for you...you did NOT cooperate...you were too different in all the ways I didn’t ask for and certainly couldn’t fix...no matter how long I would sit with my knee pressed against my teeth, hoping they would magically push back in. It was never enough.

By middle school, we found a new metric, didn’t we? Whether the boys noticed you, whether they chose to talk to you...whether pretty was something you would ever qualify for. That word would never be used for you in middle school...instead, that same group of girls, now larger in numbers and still as resistant as ever to letting me join their ranks…they would call me a pozer…a loser...or even worse, they wouldn’t call me at all. I was nothing to them.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, I grew up watching Saved by the Bell, 90210, and Clueless. There was a look that was praised as beautiful and popular, the one everyone wanted to be like and to be around. Daily, I would look in the mirror…scan and criticize…I would try my best to make you look like the Kelly Kapowskis…the Chers…the Brendas of the world...but I always fell short, and you always came across as not enough.

Our growing involvement in church and youth group gave us a boost of confidence here and there, but growing up in purity culture, it also gave my daily body monitoring an official purpose. Every Sunday, and especially at summer bible camp, I heard the same lessons in rotating language: you, my body, were a temple...something to be kept pure and holy for the Lord, yes...but more importantly, for my future husband.

For a moment, I took that in, and I believed it...that my wanting to be noticed was vanity...selfishness...a distraction from what you were actually created for. I knew then, more than ever, it was my job to keep you in line. The boys around me couldn’t possibly be held responsible for what they felt when they looked at you...it was on us, the girls, to not give them reasons “to stumble”.

I had already, unsuccessfully, tried to manage and control you from day one...but this was the moment where I stopped thinking of you as only mine. This is when you became something I needed to manage for others…monitoring you for their safety, for their relationships with God. I was twelve…thirteen…fourteen years old, and it had become clear to me: the correct relationship with you was vigilant oversight...not acceptance, not curiosity, definitely not care...just pure, dutiful oversight.

When my teenage boyfriend’s hand would find its way up my shirt, the blame was squarely on me...on my body...you had lured him, caused him to want to. We were blamed, especially in those awkward post-makeout moments, scolded for being “too willing” and “too cute”...reminded that it was our responsibility to keep them in check, to make sure we didn’t go too far. The sin lived in me, the control was mine, the blame was yours.

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I thought marriage would settle this battle between us, once and for all. At 22, I thought handing you over to the right person, the one I’d saved you for, would finally answer the question of whether you were enough.

But it didn’t. You didn’t quite look like the women he’d been with before, or the ones that would still catch his eye. He would make comments...sideways ones delivered as love and helpfulness...maybe you should go for a run or maybe the gym might make you feel better. And after a brief ceasefire, those shots were fired, and I was right back in the audit, doing that same scanning and monitoring, running the same math that never came out right.

I started buying clothes, different styles and different fits, trying to look like and dress like the confident version I wanted to be…that I thought he wanted. But those clothes never quite fit, and I engaged in a series of years-long battles of misguided control and even grew a bona fide shopping addiction.

And then, in our first year of marriage, he went on a trip with his friends and came home with a confession. Somehow, I forgave him...instantly.

To this day, I’m still trying to figure out why that forgiveness was so easy to give out to others, but never to myself. In the moment of his confession, my first thoughts were ones of anger and blame…not for him, but for me. They were directed entirely at you...surely something about my body wasn’t giving him what he needed...surely this was our failure. We were taught for years that you were responsible for the actions of the men around me. That theology had an obvious conclusion...he wouldn’t have done it if I had been enough.

And yet, I still wasn’t.

We moved on, together, and had what I thought were the golden years. In our 20s and 30s, life looked good...good job, good friends, run club and kickball leagues, concerts and restaurants, beach trips and playing house.

On the inside? You and I were engaging in one of our most silent, hardest battles yet.

We watched everyone around us get pregnant, have babies, and start building their families. We quietly battled for seven years, trying to get pregnant. Sure, you passed all the doctor’s tests with flying colors...everything looked “fine” and primed, ready to do the work you were supposed to do…you were designed to do. I mean, come on...women were literally the only ones who could make babies…it’s our God-given gift and purpose, right?

And every month, for seven years, my period would come with the same fucking verdict...NO. This was one of the most damning pieces of evidence for what I’d believed since the bucked teeth and the cowlick...this body…my body…was NOT right. It was NOT enough…this body was truly broken.

I finally had an official word for the uncertainty, the unwillingness to adapt and change, the non-compliance with every attempt at control. You were broken.

I hated you more in those seven years than in any other stretch of our life together. I lived and breathed every day with grief and disappointment...but only on the inside. On the outside, the world saw us happy, joyful, smiling, cracking jokes about being an “infertile myrtle”...appearing confident and solid and okay in our skin.

It was inside, and every moment in the mirror, that I hated you…for not cooperating, for failing, for being broken.

The only time in my 42 years of living that I stopped hating you was when I finally got divorced and moved out on my own.

Those years were ironically filled with the hardest circumstances of my adult life...newly out of a 17-year marriage, single motherhood, hundreds of miles from family, between careers, building from scratch…alone.

And you...you had big opinions about it all, and you let me know…dramatically.

My gut was in revolt, rejecting any and all food, and the weight fell off...thirty-three pounds to be exact. At first, honestly, I kind of liked it. But I caught myself in that mirror…I mean, yes, the wobbly bits had disappeared, and it wasn’t healthy, and I knew it. Your revolt was loud and disruptive enough that I couldn’t manage around it. For the first time in my entire life, I had to actually listen to you.

It was the first honest conversation we’d ever had. Forced on me, yes...but on that I had to finally listen to what you had to say. I stopped molding you for someone else’s gaze…stopped handing you the same old judgements.

Maybe these were actually the golden years? The ones, in the middle of my life’s chaos, where I stopped monitoring and judging you for an audience. The comments stopped…the fertility tracking most certainly stopped…and this temple finally stopped having a congregation.

It was in that silence, in those quiet days…something shifted. Ease, contentment, and gratitude had finally taken up residence after a 40yr absence. For the first time in a VERY long time, I felt solid.

I didn’t even realize the war had stopped at first…I guess when you’ve been fighting the same battles your whole life, you don’t actually recognize peace at first.

And then...I got married again.

This time is different...Yas thinks you’re beautiful and says so, often. He’s never once made a comment that wasn’t generous, and I believe him. I love him for it.

And yet...as I prepared for my wedding dress, my old judgmental scanning slowly and silently crept back in. Without any obvious trigger, the audit of whether you were enough was back, dressed up this time as concern for my middle-aged health.

As we considered trying for a baby before menopause officially closed the window, the grief cycle and the self-loathing returned with it. Each month, the waiting...the wondering...and each month, the same answer. Each time, more evidence that you were still...despite our recent years of peace...still broken.

Last week, I shared all of this with my therapist, and she suggested we have this conversation...that I write you a letter. She helped me realize…the root of it all…was self-blame.

I’ve managed you and managed my emotions for other people’s comfort and acceptance for my entire life. I’ve given that same pre-emptive apology for who I am before anyone has asked me to. I’ve scanned faces to calculate how much of me is, well, too much.

All of this began with you...in those first moments in the mirror when I tried to scrub my freckles off or push my teeth back with my knees...in the moments when the church gave me the measuring stick for compliance and moral responsibility...in those moments in my first marriage when our struggles became failures of you...in the infertile years, in the grief of being broken beyond control.

It’s in these most recent years of peace that I finally learned to hear you, to notice, and was able to receive what you’ve been trying to tell me. My chest tightening when a conversation gets hard, my throat going dry before I’ve found the words...those are you, doing what you’ve actually done for decades...telling me that my micro-managing is becoming too much to sustain. You’ve sent me messages this whole time, and I’m finally learning you were never the problem to solve.

This war with you? This self-blame? This hatred I’ve had for my own body? It’s the wall I built as a child, the one that’s been there all along…and I’ve just kept rearranging my life around it ever since.

I’ve spent the past 42 years trying to manage you…protect you…control you…improve you…apologize for you…and you know what?

I. am. tired.

Maybe it’s time to finally hear what you, and my therapist, have been trying to tell me all along:

I can support you…
but I cannot control you…
you are not broken.

I want to hear that…to believe it…but I know…I'm not quite there.

And yet, this is what I KNOW…this is what I owe you…

I am sorry.

I’m sorry for the scanning and the monitoring…
for the distrust and for the judgement…
for the monitoring and the responsibility that wasn’t yours…
for the hatred and for the control…
for not listening or noticing the messages you’ve tried to send me.

I’m sorry for being at war with you for this long.

Maybe it’s finally time to lay down our swords.
Maybe it’s finally time to listen.
Maybe it’s finally time to accept that you are you…and you are me.

We are not to be managed.

Well, shit. These past couple of weeks have been a doozy for sure, but I believe *fingers crossed* the fog and clouds are giving way to the sun…to the light. Things have started to work themselves out or shift to something different (funny how that happens) and it’s all starting to feel a little lighter. And then I read somewhere that Mercury was in retrograde and well…I don’t even know what that really means, but I feel as good as ever to lay blame on that planet…who invited her anyway? She doesn’t even go here.

And speaking of Mercury…I’ve read so many accounts from women all over the world this past month of some bizarre kind of collective hormonal situation. Some had no period…some had two in one month (it me!)…and some poor souls have been riding out a month-long one that apparently just decided to set up camp. I genuinely want to know what is happening in the cosmos right now and who approved this particular assault on women… we would like a word.

Oh, and Amelia came home last weekend, so I know that helps…she didn’t even know all the things I’d been carrying…she doesn’t need to…but the first day back, that little peanut stayed glued to my side and literally cuddled up beside me. Which, honestly, these days…totally isn’t her default…but good gracious, it was EXACTLY what I needed (and I think what she needed, too).

She’s gone to karate camp this week, and every afternoon, she comes out absolutely lit up…so freakin’ excited to tell me how she broke a board, won the ninja star throwing contest, and officially got a white belt. The physicality is working for her, the kicking and the focus and the discipline, which might also explain why we’ve been bingeing Cobra Kai as a family in the evenings and we are all absolutely in it. And because of my fragile emotional state…I’ve cried at this show more times than I’d like to admit…that Johnny Lawrence has got me in a chokehold.

This weekend, Millie goes to her first-ever sleep-away camp, and I am both thrilled and terrified for her. I truly think she’ll love it…but I guess there’s that chance she won’t, and I’ll have to be there for the latter, if so…but I’m really hoping for that life-changing experience that I hear waxed-poetic from former camp-attendees all the time. I want that for my girl.

Guys…I have GOT to get my head on straight before next week, because I have a pop-up. A FIRST for The Freckled Fork, fully outside my comfort zone, and I’m stoked! I’ll be making MY food…freckled southern comfort with a sidecar of sass…but this time entirely plant-based and vegan, in honor of my friend Rob’s birthday. Rob just said goodbye to his mom a couple weeks ago…she had been fighting cancer for years, they knew it was time, and they were there with her, holding her hand when she crossed over. And yet, it still fucking sucks…losing a parent is losing a parent, no matter the age, no matter the circumstances, no matter how ready anyone thinks they are. Words can’t fix that…they never could…but what I know in my bones…is that food can carry something that words simply can’t…food is comfort and a salve for a grieving heart. That’s what I’ll be doing next Thursday for Rob and for the Catskills Cocktail Club community. I’m so grateful and honored to do it.

Also, we have our first two retreat sign-ups, and I am THRILLED. If you’ve been thinking about it, come. Come hungry, leave held. Link is below…

Sunday’s post is a mystery even to me right now. I’m writing anyway because I need to get it out, and sometimes that’s the only reason that matters. Maybe it’ll find someone else in the messy middle as well.

Let’s set the table, friends. ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• stop assuming!
  LOVE Teodora’s writing, and this time she’s writing about the stories we build about other people and then respond to as though the other person built them too. The mistake is not that we make assumptions, of course we do, but that we mistake our interpretations for the truth and then act accordingly, sometimes for years. Watch what someone does, not what they say, and especially not what you’ve decided they mean. Patterns over moments…actions over explanations… “believe what you are shown.” Woof…

• emotional déjà vu (the story that keeps finding you)
  Hannah writes about the invisible wall…the freakin’ one I’ve been dealing with over the past few weeks: one old belief, one fear, one role you accepted before you knew you were allowed to refuse it, that doesn’t stay neatly in any one part of your life but moves freely between all of them, dressed up differently each time. “If you’ve spent years believing your needs make you difficult, that belief doesn’t just politely stay inside your relationships.” Emotional déjà vu, she calls it: when a new situation reaches an old part of you before you’ve even understood what happened. She offers five clues for spotting your own wall…all five are staring me right in the face.

• Everything Is an Experiment
  It’s the Year of the Fire Horse, and my girl Anjali shifted how she’s holding every decision she made: not as a verdict on who she is or whether she’s on the right track, but as an experiment. You run it, you collect what happens, you adjust. “Either the experiment works or it teaches you something, and both count.” LOVE the mid-year audit…and in a particular moment when I’m trying to analyze my own attempts and failures and give them all the necessary reframing needed to move on to the second half of the year, in earnest.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

Prescribed Burn
Last Sunday, I wrote about the literal cave I crawled out of in Oaxaca, in the small village of Teotitlán del Valle, led by a sha-woman who asked nothing of me except that I breathe. What came out of that cave was not what I expected…less like healing, more like burning away to reveal something new. And the metaphorical cave I just realized I’m tucked away in requires the same kind of renewal and reset…I didn’t even know I had crawled back in here, but here I am.

And if any of that resonated, I invite you to join the Wahe Crew and me for a Fall Equinox retreat in the Catskills this September…September 10-13th in Andes, NY. Join us!

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• the grief of becoming
  Kiki writes about what happens to your sense of home when you’ve left for good, and the heartbreak of knowing you can’t return to the version of the place that held you, because the place has kept going, the people have kept going, and the version of you that lived there has been replaced by someone else entirely. “The people have had days without you”...the grief she’s describing is not specific to crossing a border…it’s the grief of becoming someone new while still missing who you were, of knowing certain doors are just not going to open the same way again.

• I Thought I Had Done the Work
  Dr. Heather England is a therapist writing from inside the patient’s seat, which is a lovely, vulnerable spot to be in. I love her perspective on the other side of parenthood…about the shock of realizing that the wound you thought you’d treated was not actually the wound, that the coping strategy you mistook for your personality is still running the show…still showing up as the laughing emoji you send when you want someone to know you’re not upset, still shaping the friendships you form and the ones you back away from before they get too close. The childhood pattern she thought she’d outgrown showed up in something that happened this year, and she had to start over.

• This Is What Becoming Looks Like from the Inside
  Jenae on the gap between who you are becoming and who you appear to be in the meantime… which is a gap nobody prepares you for and rarely talks about in the thick of it. I, too, have found myself walking around the city with my AirPods in but nothing coming through. She talks about the double life of being genuinely in process while presenting as generally fine…about ending up back on her parents’ couch and realizing that wasn’t regression, it was a seam…the place where one version hands off to the next. Yes, girl…MFing YES.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• if you don’t spend enough time getting to know yourself, you’ll end up absorbing everyone else’s definition of you
  Rosie writes in the register of someone who has recently returned from a long absence from herself…if there’s a vacancy where your self-knowledge is supposed to be, someone else’s version of you will move in. Not through force…through vacancy. The work, getting actually acquainted with your own preferences, rhythms, what you reach for when no one is watching, and nothing is required, is slower and stranger than it sounds when you say it quickly. She doesn’t rush it…neither should you (I mean…me).

• Before I Forget: I Think We’re Never Meant to Do This Much
  LOVE this piece from Hailey…this list…I saw myself in the whole thing and in so many lines… She’s writing an inventory of what we’ve collectively agreed to normalize, and asking whether we ever actually agreed or just inherited it. I think about this ALL the time…especially right now when I feel the weight of everything I’m holding…which of these things were handed to me…which did I pick up on my own…which I can put down because no one asked me to hold them in the first place.

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• everything you thought was drowning you was teaching you how to swim
  This one is long…but SO good. From inside the heat and the ceiling fans and the mangoes ripening too fast on the counter, and it spirals slowly through nostalgia and grief and what resilience actually looks like from the inside. "Brushing your teeth after your heart is broken. Answering texts when you're sad. Doing the dishes while grieving. Continuing." She writes about childhood boredom as proof that time once belonged to you, about what adulthood steals first: not innocence, not joy, but the feeling that there is no urgency. And the line she ends on is the one lingering still: "The water was never trying to kill me. The water was teaching me."

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Writer’s block & another lap around the spiral of receiving vs striving
  Lisa Marie sat down with writer's block and turned it into a poem, which is honestly where I found myself a couple weeks ago when I put out my first poem since high school…sometimes it's the only way to make sense of the jumbled words in our heads. A stream of consciousness about what happens when you write what you feel like writing instead of what your strategy says you're supposed to write. The image she lands on: a woman reaching and reaching for apples from other people's trees, not realizing she is the tree. "She began to grow roots, to become planted firmly. She did so by grounding in, not by reaching and striving."

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3

xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

Hot coals on the side…branches laid underneath us…the sha-woman and me, and the door sealed behind us somewhere between one life and another. She began to pour water on the coals, slowly at first. The steam rose and enveloped; the thick heat pressed down on everything…my chest, my face, my hands, the soft places behind my knees. I didn’t know heat could feel like that…not hot-shower heat or even midsummer-NYC heat…this was a heat that reached inside of you and sat there, melting it all away.

She started to pray. I didn’t understand the words…they were in Zapotec, her indigenous language…but I felt each of them as they settled in my bones and warmed me from within. She prayed the old stuff out…the patterns, the ways of holding too tightly, the weight of grief I’d been carrying for so long. She beat our bodies with the branches…not hard…more like shaking loose…and the sweat came in waves. My eyes burned. My body poured everything it had been holding out through my skin. She scrubbed us with a pumice stone…the dead skin, flecks of the cages we had built around us; she scraped it all away. My skin felt raw and new and tender underneath. And then she cooled the coals, rinsed us clean, and we crawled out into the night air of Teotitlán del Valle…covered in blankets, beanies pulled over our wet heads…our bodies trying to remember what temperature meant.

I felt lighter…I felt freer. I also felt SO very nauseous…I thought I might collapse.

They helped me to the ground outside. I lay there in the cool Oaxacan night, a blanket over my shoulders, my body still catching up to what had just happened…lightheaded, my stomach rolled, and I felt so sick…so undone. I felt an uneasiness like my body was processing something too big to absorb easily or cleanly. The air eventually came back into my lungs…the cool, fresh, smoke-and-earth air of that village at night…and my stomach settled slowly, and in its place came the most complete sense of renewal I have ever felt.

I was made new in that cave…something cleared out of me that had been taking up space I needed back.

I had come to Oaxaca in pieces.

Newly divorced, I had just stepped down from the restaurant to navigate single motherhood with my daughter, and I took what seemed like a perfectly serendipitous opportunity…culinary director and head chef at a trio of West Village cafés…a beautiful title, a role I said yes to because of the single mother and business owner who invited me in. It looked, from the outside, like the next right move. And at first, it was…it really was…daytime hours, done at 5pm, some of the coolest co-workers, beautiful souls and cafes I could create menus for…even debuting my signature grits bowl for the West Village community. I loved it…that is, until it turned out to be one of the most toxic work environments I had ever stepped into. A female-owned space that should have felt like home, and instead felt like a slow disappearing. Every week, I was a little less myself as more and more was asked of me without compensation for the extra work. Every month, I was a little more uncertain whether the chef I had been even existed anymore.

And that uncertainty underneath it all…was the guilt about the restaurant. I had left because Millie needed me…that was the truth…it was the only reason I needed, and I knew it. But professionally, it felt like a mistake I was still paying for…like I had handed something back that I wasn’t sure I could get again.

Lauren has known me long enough (since high school!) and had watched me long enough to know exactly what I needed. What I needed…was to move. Something deep inside me has always known how to survive through motion…even when I can’t feel or see that version of myself. I trusted her before I remembered the woman inside there…in my bones. We went to Oaxaca together, led Andrea and Baby D of the Wahe Crew in the mountains, through the markets, and in the studio. I crawled into that cave and let it burn everything off.

What came out was more elemental…more raw than answers or clarity…my own body…finally quiet…finally breathing…finally mine.

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That was a few years ago. Life has taken so many directions since…and somehow I find myself wading through a version of it again.

The “but” I said to Ruth Reichl a few weeks ago…how my chest tightens when conversations get hard…how my throat goes dry before I can even find the words I need. My therapist keeps asking me where I feel these feelings in my body, and the truth is: everywhere…all the time…like I’m holding on to something too tightly…and for too long…and somehow I’ve already forgotten what it feels like to just breathe normally.

I know this place…I’ve been here before.

My friend KG was in town from Hong Kong this weekend…she’s known me for something like 15+ years now. She follows and reads my Substack, she comes back home to visit a couple of times a year, and she has watched me move through a LOT…life transitions, multiple versions of myself. She listened to me describe all of it…the “but,” the uncertainty, the old patterns that show up in the body before they show up in words…and she said something I wasn’t quite ready for.

She said: in all the years she’s known me, she never knew fear to actually hold me back. She said that I leaned into those changes, into any shifts, into the things that were different or scary or unknown. She said it was one of my greatest strengths…this willingness to keep moving, to say yes before I know what I’m saying yes to, to walk into a room and figure out where I belong from there.

She said it, and I tried to find myself in it…to recognize the woman she was describing. I don’t see that same woman right now, in this season of apologizing and bracing…as I walk through life, still scanning faces for something I should already know.

And yet…there on my couch, talking with my friend, I remembered Oaxaca. I remembered the cave and remembered the smell of the heavy steam and smoke. I realized…sitting there…that I didn’t go into that cave when things were good…I went because I was broken and I was lost. I went into that cave because I didn’t know what kind of chef I was anymore or even what kind of woman, for that matter…I had left one life without knowing if the next one was actually there, waiting for me.

Maybe that’s it…maybe we aren’t meant to go into the cave after we’ve got it all figured out. Maybe we crawl into the cave just as we are…because the truth is…sometimes the body gets there first, and the mind just has to follow.

Once again, I need to crawl into the cave…only this time, it’ll be a flowing freshwater stream in the Catskills…where I need to sit and soak and let the waters pull away all that I no longer need. The mountains are calling, and my girl Lauren and I are showing up, and we are inviting others to join…just like we did in Oaxaca.

September 10-13th…the same Wahe Crew to lead us…but this time in Andes, New York. A special mountain town, where Yas and I got married just last fall…where my friend Nicole pours her heart out at Café Mutsi on Main Street…where the mountains hold a quiet that the city forgets is possible. The Virgo new moon, the fall equinox, right around my birthday. Four days of yoga and fire ceremony and sound bath and shared meals. I’ll be in the kitchen, cooking what the land puts up in September, feeding people the way I know how.

We didn’t plan it as an echo of Oaxaca, but we just knew it was time.

I’ll be cooking there, setting the table for women who are maybe in the same place I was in that cave…the same place I am now…burning and pouring sweat and wondering if the air will come back. And it will…it always does.

But first…you have to be willing to crawl in.

My friend KG’s words she shared, stirred my soul. I believe her…and in that version of me she sees, even if I can’t feel it or see her from here. The woman who went to Oaxaca, the one who was broken open and came back new…that’s the same woman who wrote her first poem in the middle of the hardest week and let her hands do it before her brain could stop her. It’s the same woman who said yes to hosting a retreat without waiting to feel ready…she’s the same woman who can’t see herself right now because she’s still in the cave.

The cool air is coming, and I’m already crawling toward it.

From Before
(another one, from this woman jumping into poetry for the first time…prompted by the lovely 's prompt “depths beneath my silence”)

on the outside
in my words
my actions
my face
I am a woman who moves
who does
who can

beneath her
something else
holds the throat
tightens the chest
white-knuckled
reaching deep
and wide

it keeps her hidden
and small
and quiet
a cold silence
cooling from the depths

until
the little one
there in the corner
bare feet on wet stone
fans the embers
the ones that sparked
from before

the flames grow
warming from beneath
pulling the silence
to the surface
looking for a place
to seep out
making way

a prescribed burn

I’ve got to be honest here…some weeks just land differently.

This one and last have been so heavy. I’m holding it close, but it seems like conflict has found its way in more than one corner of my life, and none of it is really resolved. I’ve pushed forward, going to work and doing a version of life that feels like treading water…wading around with the weight of it all held so tightly between my chest and my shoulders. The tightness feels familiar…in the ways we tend to hold things too long, and the holding starts to become the shape of your body.

I had a much-needed therapy session yesterday…I didn’t leave the conversation with peace or even solutions…I came away with a question even bigger than solutions… what are you holding that you don’t need anymore? Where is it in your body right now? My therapist asked me to try to locate the tension physically, in my hands, in my shoulders, in my chest…and to find a way to release it. I’ve been pressing my palms together…squeeze and release….squeeze and release…ever since. Still working on it this morning.

I wrote about the “but” I handed Ruth Reichl at a book event on Sunday…the apology that came out of me before she’d even had a chance to respond to who I was. I thought it was a career thing…and I guess on the surface, it is. But as I cried my way through therapy yesterday…I began to realize the “but” has been following me around a lot longer than my job title. I’ve been saying it for my emotions, my needs, my disappointments, the parts of me that take up more space than is convenient. I’ve been the one holding everything together for everyone else around me while, on the inside, I have been absolutely cracking…and apologizing for that too, actually. As if the unraveling going on inside of me is something I owe an explanation for.

I called my mom last night. I’m 42, and she still picks up every time and says exactly what needs to be said. She reminded me…in her gentle, steady way…that the connection I’m reaching for, in other people, in this writing, in every room I walk into hoping to feel like I belong somewhere…I’ve been giving it away for years without saving any for myself.

Maybe that’s what this week actually is…maybe I’m finally having a reckoning with how I’ve moved through the world…the apologizing, the defending, the constant reshaping of myself into whatever version seems easiest to love. I think it might be time to stop. To just be, without the apology…to reach in as hard as I reach out. Because I work so hard to give that sense of belonging to everyone around me…and the one who needs it most, the one I’ve been denying it to the longest…is me.

Most of the time, I choose joy. This week, sadness and uncertainty wanted a seat as well, so I pulled up a chair for them too.

I didn’t find these reads this week…they literally found me, one at a time, while I’ve been in the middle of all of it…somehow they already knew.

Let’s set the table, friends. ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• when people have already decided who you are from good damage
  writes about something I've been in the thick of this week: the difference between being disagreed with, which is survivable, and being in a conversation with someone who has already decided what kind of person you are and is only collecting evidence to confirm it. She writes about the difference between agreement and understanding, and about knowing when explaining yourself stops being communication and starts being a way of abandoning yourself. That distinction is still ruminating in my insides today.

• learning to be okay with being seen wrong from perfume & letters
  "Growth often looks like betrayal to people who benefited from the old version of you." That sentence has been open in my browser tab since I first read it this week. writes about the version of you that lives in other people's minds…incomplete, frozen, built from the fragments they were given and the story those fragments needed to make. She makes the case for something that costs more than it sounds: accepting that you will never be fully understood by everyone, and that constantly defending yourself against misunderstanding is one of the most expensive ways to spend your energy. There's something on the other side of that acceptance that looks a lot like freedom…looks like I, too, am working my way toward it.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

No Asterisk…Sunday’s essay. On the word that held a grief I didn’t know was there…on the apology I handed Ruth Reichl before she’d had a chance to respond to who I actually was…on the scarcity heirloom, passed quietly through generations of women who learned to claim less in advance and leave themselves a way out. On what I wish I’d said. And on the introduction that I owe to myself.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Why the Pressure to Be "Good" Often Costs Us Connection from Kindred Mothering
  is a therapist and one of my favorite writers I’ve found on Substack. She writes like someone who spent a long time watching people miss the thing they actually need…by trying too hard to do it perfectly. This piece is about how the pressure to be the good daughter, the good friend, the good mother…to show up right, to know what to say, to not make it awkward…so often becomes a measure of our worth rather than an expression of our love. For recovering people-pleasers, which is what I am…this piece pulls on a thread that runs underneath almost everything I'm sorting through this week.

• Okay, But Not Okay from Sparkplug Letters
  is a kindred sassafras and I connected with her and her writing right off the bat. She wrote this piece while she was in the middle of it, and published it after she'd come up for air, and that's exactly what makes it work. It's intentionally unpolished…a free-fall of words that happens when "I'm okay" and "I'm not okay" are both true at the same time and equally exhausting to maintain. "The truest thing we write is not the thing we carefully explain. It is the thing that escapes before we have time to cross-examine ourselves for writing it." This week I'm trying to let some things escape before I get the chance to tidy them up.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Space Between Independence and Being Held from Almost That Girl Diaries
  writes about the ache of being a woman who loves her independence, who has built a real life on her own terms, who genuinely doesn’t need to be rescued…and who still…sometimes…just wants someone to handle things for a minute…the relief of it, not the rescue. She makes a distinction I haven’t seen quite this clearly before: the fantasy of someone “taking over” is often less about dependence and more about collapse…the fantasy that, just for a moment, you would not have to think or decide or manage or anticipate. You could simply be looked after. She also writes: “Healthy love does not erase your agency. It expands your capacity to rest inside it.” For anyone bone-tired from being the one who holds everything…this is nourishment.

• The Peace You Pay For from
  Such good stuff from Mari that I had to include two this week…a double dose for me and for you…“The peace is real, but it is purchased with pieces of your identity.” Mari writes about a relationship, and I recognized the pattern in so many hidden corners of my own life. The slow, gradual, I-didn’t-notice-it-while-it-was-happening way that self-erasure sneaks in…not as one dramatic decision but as a hundred small adjustments in tone, in preference, in what you say and don’t say to keep things from cracking….it’s not whether you can keep the peace, but what the peace costs. Ooooffff. Yes…

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• Jung’s Warning: When You Finally Put Yourself First, Life Will Begin to “Fall Apart” from Light of Mindfulness
  When you finally start telling the truth about what you actually need, the structures built around your accommodation start to shake. Relationships shift, old roles die, and people say you’ve changed; you’ve become difficult, become selfish. You think you’re regressing. You’re not. Jung called this individuation…the process of becoming your actual self instead of the self you’ve constructed to keep everyone comfortable…and he said it was destabilizing by design. breaks this down into something I really needed this week: not things falling apart, but the architecture built on a false version of you starting to correct itself.

• The 7 Questions Viktor Frankl Believed Could Save You from Wasting Your Life from
  Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps and came out not with a theory about happiness, but about meaning…about how meaning isn’t something you stumble into; it’s something you choose, through the questions you’re willing to sit with long enough to actually answer. There are seven of them here…I had to stop at the first for the better part of this week before moving on…if nothing changed tomorrow, would you want to keep living this exact life? Not the dramatic version of that question…the quiet one.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Between the Waves from Fragments of my Mind
  wrote this poem for a prompt she created herself: the tides of grief and grace.

  I no longer fight the currents — I let them shape me; let them teach me that healing is not the absence of grief, but learning how to float between the waves.

  I read it three times in a row the night I found it…and then…in a completely NOT me moment, I decided to write a poem in response to her prompt…I’ve never actually written a poem that wasn’t assigned in a high school english class…it’s the first time I’ve done this, responding to someone else’s writing with something of my own…and this week, with all that’s going on…my hands took over and wrote this…my first poem:

Sun-Dust

the sun with its rays
pressing
its burning kiss
etching its marks
on my cheeks
my nose
my arms

leaving behind constellations
of memories
wounds
refusing to be
forgotten

joys
heartache
doubt
longing
uncertainty
knowing
marks I earned

A scattering of sun-dust
its light freckling me
from the inside
out

This light
that shaped & marked me
isn’t buried beneath the skin
It finds its way back out
shining through every mark
a thousand pinpricks
tiny windows
for anyone
to find me
lit from within

Happy Thursday, turkeys! Ooooff…it’s been a week, hope yours is better!
More soon. xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

the sun with its rays

pressing

its burning kiss

etching its marks

on my cheeks

my nose

my arms

leaving behind constellations

of memories

wounds

refusing to be

forgotten

joys

heartache

doubt

longing

uncertainty

knowing

marks I earned

A scattering of sun-dust

its light freckling me

from the inside

out

This light

that shaped & marked me

isn’t buried beneath the skin

It finds its way back out

shining through every mark

a thousand pinpricks

tiny windows

for anyone

to find me

lit from within

Last Thursday, at a book event with Kitchen Arts & Letters (a New York institution in the independent bookstore world), I attended an intimate panel conversation with some of the most respected voices in food. I got there to find almost every seat filled, except a few scattered ones right smack in the middle of the front row. I took the one by the aisle, center-stage, with two women buzzing with excitement to my right. They were dressed in that sassy, creative, easy, expressive style that older New York women seem to come by so naturally, as if they’ve always known exactly who they are. I looked around the room silently, and I watched these ladies beside me gab and giggle on. I noticed they had wine, got up to grab myself one, sat back down, and then after another beat…I braved up, leaned over, and asked if they had been to events like this before.

Ten minutes later, one of them had my phone number and a loose plan to grab dinner soon. She lives one street over from me on the Upper West Side…who knows, I’ve probably walked past her a hundred times.

This is the version of me I’m most proud of…the one that’s open, present, unguarded enough to talk to literally anyone, finding some common ground along the way. I love this woman who puts her phone away and smiles at people and means it. She showed up at that moment…and then the panel ended.

I walked up to , which felt as surreal as it sounds. Ruth Reichl, whose memoir Comfort Me with Apples walked me through my thirties and felt like someone had finally dared me to dream bigger than what I thought I was capable of…who understood the hunger inside of me…the hunger not just for food but for a life organized around it, the hunger to step out from whatever was expected and into whatever was true. I shook her hand, and I shook moderator Julia Moskin’s (of the NY Times) hand. I said thank you, this was wonderful, so glad to meet you to both of them. And then I turned back to Ruth and told her how much of a fan of her writing I am, that it had genuinely changed something in me, and had given me permission. She asked what I was doing now.

And I heard myself say: I’m a private chef. And then, immediately…before she could even respond…before she had a chance to form a single thought about what that meant…I started explaining, excusing. Oh, I was a restaurant chef for a few years, but I had to step back because my daughter hated the hours, so for now I’m doing private work until she’s a little older, and then hopefully I’ll get back to that side of things.

That was the sentence I handed to Ruth Reichl.

Draped embarrassingly in justification and temporariness…quietly apologetic “for now” and “until” and “hopefully.” I scanned her face while I said it, looking for…I don’t know what exactly…validation, maybe? Or at the very least, the absence of disappointment. I walked away feeling deflated in a way I didn’t quite understand at the moment, and I haven’t been able to shake that feeling since.

My therapist asked me recently if I felt like I was being my authentic self when I walk into rooms like that one. I answered immediately…yes, absolutely, explaining that, actually, more than in most contexts, because when no one knows me or has any preconceptions about who I am, I get to just be the version of myself I actually want to be.

And yet…I kept talking, and I started to unravel in mere moments.

Because the truth is…I realized…I don’t actually walk into those rooms as myself. I walk in as a version of myself I’ve already decided is most likely to be received well. I read the room first…assess the energy, the crowd, the vibe. I decide what parts to put out there and what to tuck away. I decide which version of Jess is most likely to be accepted, most liked, most…safe.

I perform…I present that version for however long the event lasts, and then I walk out…tired in ways I used to chalk up to introversion or a long work week, but in reality…it’s actually the exhaustion of holding a shape that isn’t quite yours for two hours straight.

Almost every time, I leave these events underwhelmed…a little disappointed. I used to think it was them…and yet…more recently, I’m realizing it’s actually me…it’s that the real meal didn’t show up.

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When I look at my life and think about who I am…I start running through the list: chef, mother, wife, eldest daughter, sister, writer, creative. But my therapist asked me to strip away all the roles and things that I DO…what’s left? And that’s the part I’m struggling to put into words…I’m not entirely sure who it is on the other side of that list.

What do I know to be true…who am I?

I know she has big, expressive earrings that are non-negotiable…literally the closest thing she has to a signature. I know she can spend three hours at a farmers market and feel like no time has passed, or at a thrift store chasing the thrill of the find…a perfect peach, a vintage treasure outfit, a jar of something unusual she doesn’t have a plan for yet. These are some of the small, steady joys of her life.

Wait…she is me.

And me…well, I love sushi more than anyone should. I love the restraint of it, and love how much precision it takes to make something look that effortless. I love scary movies and have a soft spot for 80’s & 90’s cult classics. I have a long-standing relationship with Schitt’s Creek and FRIENDS…and truly crave those long one-on-one conversations that go past midnight and dream and scheme. I love to climb, to push my body beyond what I think’s possible…and to walk around the city with no plan, popping into stores and cafes and shops that draw me in. I love the ocean, its terrifying vastness and the way it holds and moves and shapes…the waves that can wash over my legs and feet, leeching the parts no longer needed. I love to travel and explore…from a yoga retreat in Oaxaca where I crawled into a hot cave…naked for a rebirth Temazcal ceremony or to San Francisco for a photography workshop, both times understanding what it felt like to be entirely and completely myself…and loving every moment. I have an absolute obsession with notebooks and stationery…the physical weight of a good one in my hands, the right pen that spills the perfect amount of ink to effortlessly glide across the page, the satisfaction of clicking a mechanical pencil. Even in the world of tech, I remain a steadfast handwritten girl. I loved to make collages as a kid and still feel the pull of it when I see a stack of magazines or even when I push and pull a mound of clay between my fingers on a pottery wheel, something I’ve only done once but want to do more.

That girl…that woman…she’s in there…she’s been in there the whole time.

But that’s not who I introduced to Ruth Reichl last week.

I’ve been stuck on that “but” after I said I was a private chef…for days now.

The pause before the apology, the way I backed up before Ruth even had a chance to respond. I’m a private chef…but…

That singular word carried SO much weight in that moment. It harbored so much grief and shame I didn’t know was there…lurking underneath. I realize I do this constantly…any time someone asks what restaurant I’m cooking for, I can feel it before it even starts. In that shortness of breath, I feel my face get hot, my chest tighten and I try my best to convince my own heart and my mind…and the person in front of me…that stepping down as Head Chef of the restaurant wasn’t a step backwards, but it was a step I HAD to take to repair what was broken with my daughter after the divorce. I know the brutal reality was that I literally couldn’t afford not to step away at that time…emotionally, physically or financially.

And yet…even knowing that reality…living through that really hard time in my life, when I said that BUT…the one I said to myself and to Ruth…I am still very much so… embarrassed and ashamed that I had to leave, that somehow being a private chef feels like a step back, a demotion…like it wasn’t a real…or the job isn’t as hard or as challenging or as prestigious or as badass as being a restaurant chef. It’s in that moment, in those feelings, that I diminish the journey I went through…all the hardships, lonely and isolating moments, all the tears and the heartache, the losses and the abandonment, all the strength I found to pull myself up and out…to a better place, to a better…no, wait…to the most authentic and real version of me I had ever allowed to just BE.

I think I know where it comes from…I’ve watched women throughout my whole life talk about what they were good at in ways that made it sound like less than it was. I’m just a… For now I’m…I was supposed to, but…Hedging in advance, making room for someone to disagree by disagreeing first…don’t say the thing too loud, leave yourself a way out, take up space but not too much.

It’s the scarcity heirloom…the belief, passed quietly between generations like a good recipe, that there’s only so much room, so much permission, so much approval in circulation at any given time, and if you claim too much of it, it might get taken back. So you learn to claim less…pre-emptively…putting the asterisk…the disclaimer in that no one asked for.

I’ve been doing private chef work for almost two years, and I still describe it as a detour. Like a thing I’m “in between.” Like the real version of my career is still out there waiting for me to earn my way back to it…as if what I’m doing every morning at 7 am isn’t already exactly as real as it gets. I plan and source and prep and execute breakfast and lunch for 25 people each day…people who trust me with their nutrition, their family meals, the things that carry them through a given week. That IS the work. Private cheffing is exacting, intimate, demanding work that calls on everything I know. I didn’t default to it or take a step back…I’m cooking more creatively, more honestly, more intuitively than I ever did before…at home, in the restaurant or wherever I was…I am proud of the work I do. And yet, I’ve never introduced myself like that.

Women (including me) in my orbit use these disclaimers and excuses all the time…we find ways to make ourselves sound less impactful or less important. But these women are truly brilliant and generous and capable of more than they would admit, and yet…they move through rooms the way they’ve been told, in a hundred small ways over a long lifetime, that certainty is unbecoming. I’ve taken that mindset on my own…without even realizing it.

I don’t want to pass that down to Millie…I think about her watching me qualify myself out of my own story at dinner parties, watching me scan faces for something I should already know mid-sentence. I don’t want her to see me hand my confidence to the room for safekeeping before I’ve finished the thought. What’s she learning from those behaviors? That capability needs a disclaimer? That you lead with the apology so no one can be disappointed later? That if you hold the thing loosely enough, no one could ever accuse you of being too sure?

Ruth Reichl wrote about hunger and about the life you build when you stop apologizing for what you want. She told stories about stepping out from whatever is expected and into whatever is true. I read this in my thirties, and it cracked something open in me. Reading her, I felt like someone had handed me permission…and I took that permission…I stood in front of her and apologized for how I had used it.

The woman who walked into that room last week and took the middle seat in the front row…that was me. The one who started talking to the strangers beside her and ended up with a new friend and a phone number before the panel even began…the one that was open, present, curious, unguarded…that was me. She’s the one I want to and should have kept introducing. The woman who doesn’t have to read the room and decide how much of herself it’s safe to bring.

I don’t know if this is a scarcity problem or a worthiness problem or an inheritance that comes from being an eldest daughter watching the women she loves make themselves smaller first. Probably a combination of all three, threaded through each other in ways I’m still trying to unravel. What I know is that the “but” came along from somewhere…I wasn’t born with it.

Whenever it shows up, it doesn’t really matter at this point…what matters is that I realize I’ve been carrying it like armor…like a requirement. I don’t know exactly what I said to Ruth Reichl when I was scanning her face for the validation that I shouldn’t need…But I know what I wish I’d said…

I’m a chef here in New York, and I’m so glad to finally meet you. Thank you for sharing your story; it inspired me in more ways than I can say.

Just the thing, said cleanly, without the detour and the asterisk and the apology for having found what I do. She wrote the book…she’s written SO many books…and I’ve read them. I am where I am because of them and others…in this city, in this life, at this table.

That counts for something.

I think she would’ve been glad to know it…and to know me.

I landed back in New York last weekend with a slight tan…a thousand more freckles…a full heart…and ZERO desire to open my laptop or scroll on my phone.

That’s some straight-up vacation math, isn’t it?! You spend the whole trip slowly unwinding, finding your way back to yourself, and then just on the other side of the door…real life is standing there waiting for you to return, arms crossed, to-do lists ready, loaded schedule be-damned. Yas and I were just talking about how we could possibly hold onto the pace of the last week…the slower mornings, the hours that weren’t assigned, actual moments for rest and breathing. How can we weave it back into our reality…before all those good vibes just evaporate into the hustle of the work week?

Summer always brings such a wave of inspiration for me…everything moves differently in the sun, in the warmth…I get hyper-motivated to try new things, to learn something new. Before I knew it, I was googling drop-in dance classes, pottery wheel sessions (my pottery session from last summer pictured above). I want to do something with my hands that isn’t cooking and something with my body that isn’t running from one appointment to the next. I want to be a newb at something again…something that has nothing to do with work.

Like tonight, I am going to a writing event at Kitchen Arts & Letters here in NYC to hear from one of my favorites, Ruth Reichl, and others. Going by myself, a little fly-on-the-wall moment…and the kind of event that past-Jess wouldn’t dare go to alone…but, this…this will be fun and out of that comfort zone that feels a little too small these days. Do you ever feel that way too? What are some fun new things you’ve tried?

Last night I realized…I’ve officially surpassed 50…5-0…published posts on The Table Between since January.

Fifty times I’ve sat down and decided to do the damn thing, Thursdays and Sundays. I write because the alternative is carrying it all around in my closed fist…a ticking time bomb of emotions…the pent-up feelings, the observations, the tightness in my chest, the big feelings and emotions that this recovering people-pleaser would otherwise just bury down deep inside and keep hidden. Writing…well, it’s how I open my hand…it’s been more therapeutic than I could’ve ever imagined, and I’ve met SO many amazing people and writers along the way. Substack has truly been a game-changer for me.

And yet…it can also feel profoundly isolating on this side of the screen. I hit publish, and sometimes the silence that follows is just enough to send me into a tailspin of self-doubt and wondering if any of it even matters. And then…someone responds, someone leaves a comment or restacks, or “hearts” the post, or sends a note that they forwarded it to their sister…and it turns out the table…my table…actually has guests. Every single moment of engagement…I mean it when I say it’s the salve for whatever is still healing inside me…every single time.

Thank you for being here, for pulling up a chair… 50 times at this table.
The best part? I’m just getting started.
Let’s set the table, friends ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• low-effort things that are actually good for your nervous system from Ayushi Thakkar —
  “sometimes, the nervous system needs the lights lowered and everyone to stop asking questions for twenty minutes.” This was a perfect read for me on my re-entry back to the work grind after vacation last week. A great list of low-lift things that actually do something for your brain when everything feels a little louder than it should. This is where I’d start the weekend.

• Why Don’t European Women Hate Their Bodies? from Rachel in Italia —
  Rachel Signer is a writer living in Italy, and this one started with what she noticed on European beaches: women playing badminton topless with all their bits moving around and zero fucks to be given or apologies to be made. She goes on to ask the bigger question of how we can raise daughters…in America…to avoid spending their twenties at war with their own reflection. With Millie heading into middle school in the fall, I’m thinking a lot about what I want to model for her before the world gets a chance to start chipping away at it.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Steady Table —
While we were home in Blythewood, I got to see my Nanny Sis. She actually looked a lot better than I’d expected…she just laid in her hospital bed, quietly, her eyes moving slowly around the room…looking…searching the faces staring back at her for any remembrance, present but somewhere just past the reach of words. I think there were flashes where she did, in fact, recognize us. She would tear up, and there was a glimmer of familiarity. When it was time to leave, I looked her in the eyes and said: “I love you so much.” She looked at me, and the glimmer appeared again. She found her words and said I love you, too. In that moment…she knew me.

This piece is about the table that holds…what it means to feed someone when language has left the room, the act of cooking as the thing that has steadied me when everything else shifted beneath, and why I keep setting this table every single week.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Toothpaste & Tears: Grief Before My Eyes Open from mind on the loose —
  Tina Lance quit her job as a CPA in New York, traveled solo through India for a year, became a professional acrobat, and now lives in Italy. (so badass…) This piece is a single morning in her apartment…the thrashing around before her eyes open, the specific weight of whatever she’s carrying that day, crying while brushing her teeth with the windows letting in the Northern Italian light. “Nothing is really wrong. But also nothing is right.” She writes about the emotional freedom of living alone with your own feelings, no one there to interrupt them or ask you to explain yourself. I found her on Substack recently, and her words pulled me in.

• The Fading Line from Rhythm’s —
  On the slow erosion of how you’re seen by someone you trusted, and the strange quiet beauty that survives the fall. Hina Gondal is so talented and writes with real tenderness about losing your worth in the eyes of someone close and what comes after.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Is It Too Late to Try Something Different? from You’d Like Her —
May is amazing and just happens to be someone I’ve met in person…I love how her brain works. This episode is about work exchanges…the totally under-discussed world of traveling and living there for free in exchange for your skills…at any age, at any point in your career. She cold-called her way into living at a yoga retreat in exchange for building their marketing strategy…lived in France for free…and even worked on a farm. She’s gathered all the helpful links and resources in one place. Coming home from vacation, wanting to try new things, this one felt like a green light to dream a little bigger, you know?

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THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• If No One Is Coming to Save You, No One Is Coming to Stop You Either from The Secret Life of Leyla —
  On responsibility, fear, and the freedom of realizing permission was never required. Whew…I read this one a few times…The same logic that means no one’s coming to save you is the logic that means nothing is actually stopping you either. Read this one when moments feel heavy or you feel stuck.

• The Roles We Write for People from Kodit ja vuoret —
  A quiet, ruminative piece about the roles we cast for the people in our peripheral lives…the stories we build around them and what those stories say more about us than about them. I found this one through the recommendation feed, and it really resonated with me and the expectations I sometimes put on those around me (and they have zero idea I’m holding them to those or that I’m being disappointed by those hidden expectations not being met). Such a good read.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

• Why men don’t like women’s writing from Baba Was A Witch —
  So many interesting takes in this one piece…did you know that among the top 10 bestselling female authors, 81% of readers are women and only 19% are men? For the top 10 bestselling male authors, it’s nearly 50/50. Women read across the gender line. Men, statistically, do not. Linda traces that same bias into who rises on Substack…a piece that makes the invisible structure visible…read it alongside the Celeste Davis piece below.

• Why Harry Styles Can Wear a Dress, Why Everyone Thinks Mormon Men Are Gay, and Why Male Actors Are So Needy from Matriarchal Blessing —
  Celeste Davis makes the case that masculinity works like a credit score…constantly recalculated, publicly assessed, something that can be earned and lost. Like, how can Harry Styles wear sequins, and a 14-year-old in rural Iowa can’t do the same thing without it costing him something huge? Really interesting piece…the most fun I’ve had reading this week.

Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More soon. xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥

I landed on grilled BBQ chicken thighs, roasted potatoes and peppers, vinegar-pickled tomatoes with cucumbers and onion, and a salad. Nothing that required a written plan or a special run to the store. Bit by bit, it all came together: first, I brined the chicken in pickle juice I found in the back of the fridge…then tossed potatoes with peppers, herbs, and red wine vinegar, and then quick-pickled the tomatoes and cucumbers while everything else came together. Somewhere between shooing the kids away from “just a little snack” and helping Yas and Matt find the right Aperol balance in their mixed drinks, between turning and basting the chicken, tasting and salting, I stopped and exhaled…long and slow…and I smiled. My childhood home was loud with music and the cousins playing in the pool, but the kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was mine.

I was exactly where I was supposed to be…I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted to do.

That morning, before the pool shenanigans began, we took the kids to visit Nanny Sis in hospice. I sat with her, rubbed her face, and looked into her eyes…trying to find her as she was trying to find her own recognition of me. As we sat there, visiting and feeding her hospital food for lunch, I remembered her own table back when I was a kid. I remember how each Sunday morning after church, we would gather around her table in Ridgeway, SC.

Her handmade biscuits…the ones none of us can quite replicate…those glorious biscuits fresh out of the oven, carefully placed in a basket with a towel over to keep them warm…they drew us all into this space. People found their way to the table from wherever they were, chairs pulled in from all the other rooms. Nanny would set out butter and a plate of sliced tomatoes from the garden…and that was the whole meal…and it was always enough. As a kid, I didn’t understand what she was doing or why it worked the way it did. I didn’t yet understand how whatever went on outside of that kitchen stopped mattering the moment she put food on the table.

After sitting with her a while in her hospital bed, the grandkids gathered around while Nanny looked on silently, searching for that glimmer of knowing. I combed her hair with my hands as we were about to leave and I said, “Nanny…I love you so much.” And it was that moment she did something that surprised us all; she found her voice, her words…and managed to say “I love you” back to me. Tears welled in my eyes, and the light in her finally saw and knew the light in me. That knowing…it’s her legacy, it’s the foundation for everything my family does, it’s what I live for, and it’s what I hope to always give.

That same feeling of knowing…of recognition is one I’ve also felt making lentils for no one on a Tuesday in the city…or at a cutting board in my client’s kitchen at seven in the morning, before the first jeweler arrived…or in the family’s apartment on the Upper East Side, prepping their week of plant-based meals…and also in my head chef spot at expo in the restaurant, prepping for 150 tickets about to fly. The location doesn’t change the feeling. The act of preparing something for someone to receive…to meet their needs…it feels the same, every time.

I have served some of the most elaborate meals of my life...whole fish grilled over delicate potatoes with a truffled pea purée, slow braises of ossobuco with the market’s best vegetables that needed most of the day to settle, soft and low. And I have set tables with mismatched plates, a fresh baguette still warm in the paper bag, a dish of butter softened with Maldon salt scattered on top, a half-eaten jar of jam from the back of the fridge (à la Nanny Sis but with my own twist). And you know what…that second table moves a room as completely as any of the first, maybe more.

Something shifts when people are fed...fed well, simply and with intention. The air moves differently…their shoulders come down…the version of them who arrived, perhaps guarded or rushed or somewhere else entirely, starts to ease its grip, and underneath it, the person who was always there…is just...there.

I have watched this phenomenon happen at long dinner tables and around kitchen counters and on picnic blankets in the park and in living rooms with improvised seating where no one planned to stay as long as they did. I have felt it from the other side of the counter every single time. What I’m finally able to see but never fully able to explain is why it works…without exception. The food may change, the setting shifts, the people move...and yet…still and always…something greater than ourselves opens up.

Joy Harjo wrote that the world begins at a kitchen table; it’s there that children are given their first instructions on what it means to be human; it’s there wars have started and ended; it’s there we have given birth and prepared our dead; it’s there we sing and grieve and give thanks. And it's there we've always understood, maybe before we had words for it, that the kitchen table isn’t just a piece of furniture.

It’s the oldest and most reliable gathering place we have, the space that has always known how to hold whatever we bring to it.

My posts over the past month have been all about looking inward...about learning to listen to our body, to feed it what it’s actually asking for, to recognize what a nervous system in alarm mode feels like and to know what it really takes to bring it back to something like rest. Rest as a verb. All of those things are necessary, and I believe in them completely…but they were never meant to be the whole story.

There’s a thing they tell you on airplanes, so familiar that most of us have stopped even really hearing it. I mean, my AirPods are on before I even get on the plane, so I watch the airline attendant pantomime buckling a seat belt, but all I hear is Amy Winehouse belting back to black.

Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.

This morning as I’m writing this, it hit me…this means more than just keeping yourself alive.

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All the inward work, all the careful tending to our own nervous systems and hunger and rest…to our hearts and our minds, it’s all necessary and in service of this. “Secure the oxygen” prepares us to sit across from someone and actually BE there with them, settled enough in ourselves to let someone else’s experience have somewhere to land.

There is a Bantu philosophy from Southern Africa called Ubuntu, and its central idea translates roughly as this:

umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
a person is a person through other persons

Ubuntu holds that your fullest self, your complete humanity, is not something you can find alone or in solitude, but it’s through your relationships with others. That identity itself isn’t a private achievement but a relational one…one that’s built in the spaces between people…in the practice of looking at someone and being looked back at, in the act of being known.

I am because we are.

The Latin root of the word companion carries the same truth in a different tongue. *Com* means together, *panis* means bread. A companion is literally someone you break bread with...someone you eat alongside…the concept of moving through life beside another person…made inseparable from the act of sharing a meal.

What I didn’t quite expect when I became a professional chef was what feeding people would do to me. I knew I would fall in love with the food, the craft, the seasons, the beautiful challenge of technique. And for sure, I did fall…madly in love with all of it. But what I didn’t see coming was how feeding people would settle something in my chest that almost nothing else ever would. The way I feel more certain of my purpose and more like myself when I am giving something through food…it’s unlike any other certainty I’ve ever felt.

What happens when we gather around the table, I can only describe as the light in me seeing the light in them...when someone takes that first bite and goes quiet for half a second, when a room of strangers gets loud with laughter around the second course, when someone pulls me aside at the end of the night and says they haven’t eaten like that in years. They almost never mean just the food…they are really talking about the feeling…the one of being held, the feeling of being truly seen and cared for.

I met up with last month for coffee, and we spent most of the afternoon chatting. Having never met before, we settled in like lifelong friends, talking about our lives, our paths, and how we are still figuring it all out, and I felt it then, too. That same feeling of recognition you feel when someone describes their life, and you realize you’re hearing your own story in a slightly different arrangement. You recognize the fear of building something not fully baked yet, the leap from what’s safe to something more true, and the uncertainty of how any of it will land and of choosing to go for it anyway. She knew it, I knew it, and it was in that shared knowing where we both were able to exhale in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee.

The comparison game can’t survive this feeling…it’s a creature that keeps us living in isolation, behind our screens…it needs closed doors and it feeds on the quiet, endless scroll to keep itself alive. But it’s in those moments…when you’re actually sitting across from a real human who’s in the middle of the same alive thing you are…it’s there that the gap between your life and everyone else’s curated version of their own collapses into something finally clear…finally honest. We’re not as alone as isolation tries to convince us, and we’re all considerably more capable than we tend to believe.

I didn’t know this was the “why” of The Freckled Fork when I started it…I was literally and physically trying to piece together my “chef” path after choosing to leave the restaurant for my daughter. But, what I’ve come to realize is that this has always been my path, long before it ever became a reality. A path that began at my Nanny Sis’ table in South Carolina. A path that meandered and forked (pun most definitely intended) through marriage, infertility, adoption, divorce, and the prescribed burn of the walls I had built up to keep myself small.

This path was never a business model or a content strategy but a practice. This path was to build a table that holds…a steady place where people can come a little frayed and as they are…a place of joy that sends them off a little more whole because they were fed well…they were seen…they were heard more clearly. They were reminded, somewhere over a simple plate of good food, that they’re in the company of others doing the same hard and hopeful and uncertain thing.

Derek Walcott ended his poem “Love After Love” with four words that have become a guiding light for me:

Feast on your Life.

His words are about returning to yourself, to the stranger you ignored in the business of living…and that the way back is through the table, through the offering of wine and bread, through the act of sitting down and staying.

It feels like the most honest description of what I am trying to create in this world…in this space…in my little corner of the Upper West Side in New York City.

Come as you are…here is something I made with my hands for you. Because you chose to come here, and it mattered that you would be fed. Here is a room where your story is welcome and the person across from you has one, too…and the gap between you both is smaller than anything we’ve been led to believe.

I’ll keep setting that table, I’ll keep inviting people to sit, and I’ll keep feeding them until I run out of days to do so.

I am because we are.

And the table is where we see it…where we remember it…where we know it…and each other.

I found my way to the water.

Three days in Charleston with Yas, eating our way through the city, and somewhere in all of it, I made it to Sullivan’s Island. Late afternoon, the light coming in sideways, everything smelling like salt and heat. I took off my shoes, walked down to the line where the waves still had enough weight to roll over your legs before pulling back, sat down, and stayed there.

Before we left New York, I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone. Not a break, not a detox…just gone. My screentime was embarrassing, and more than that, those apps were leaving me feeling smaller than when I arrived…mediocre…like I was always chasing something that had no intention of stopping long enough for me to catch up. I hated how it made me feel, and I decided I’d rather take a vacation from it all, not just work, but the mother-truckin’ grind…on and offline.

In Charleston I kept reaching for my phone and finding nothing to scroll. So I looked out the window; I held my husband’s hand; I stayed in the conversation, in the present moment. I noticed I was lighter; I noticed I was more myself; I noticed I couldn’t care less about what anyone else was doing, online or wherever else.

Now I’m back in Blythewood, my childhood home, for the first time in a while. Being here does what it always does: gives me back some version of myself I’d started to lose track of. Today we go see my Nanny Sis at her nursing home. Some days she knows me, and some days she doesn’t, and I’ve been thinking about walking through that door today…whether she’ll look up and something in her face will shift. I want to hug her neck. And if she doesn’t know me today, the love and recognition are still in the room anyway…because some things don’t require a name.

Let’s set the table for the weekend, turkeys…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• In the Sound Alone from A Girl Writing The World
  A poem, which I am leading with because it is short and it will set the tone for everything else this weekend. Plums ripen in the sound alone / sugar still forms / and the morning will see them ready. Things are doing their work even when you can’t see them.

• The Good Girl Problem from The Equitable Home
  A working list for raising girls who don’t shrink to be liked…on how girls are trained, early and consistently, to be quiet, accommodating, easy, and what it costs them by the time they’re adults. With Millie transitioning out of elementary school and into whatever comes next, I read this one thinking about what I want to build into her now, before the world gets a chance to start chipping away at it.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

The Clothes We Wear
Sunday’s essay, written from my parents’ back porch in Blythewood with a neighbor’s rooster crowing somewhere in the distance.

On hand-me-down adulthood…the way we put on the adult version of ourselves like clothes that don’t quite fit at first, because they were sewn by someone else’s experience before we ever got to try them on. My parents were 19 when they had me and moved to Orlando alone, figuring it out without a map. I’ve been thinking about what they were handed, and how forty years of living in it has altered it into something that actually fits them now. I plundered through my mom’s closet (I do this every single time I come home) and stood in her mirror and saw her in my own face, my own hips. Thought about how much of what I’ve spent years trying to alter beyond recognition is still just hers, underneath all of it.

Read it here →

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THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• You’re Not Overthinking. You’re Chasing Certainty. from Life Branches
  The science of why not knowing is harder on your nervous system than actual bad news. Researchers at University College London found that a 50 percent chance of pain stressed people more than a 100 percent guarantee…the maybe is harder than the yes. This week, the Instagram thing has felt like this for me…the discomfort of reaching for something you thought you needed and finding it isn’t there, and being okay.

• Nothing You Try and Quit Is EVER a Waste from You’d Like Her
  May and I had coffee a couple weeks back, and I love what she’s building. Her latest podcast episode features Dinara, who May met in Kazakhstan when she spotted a Yosemite water bottle sticker at a café and just said hi. Dinara was in the middle of dismantling everything she’d built her sense of worth on…her career, her body, her identity…figuring out who she was without any of it. What came out the other side: a film festival, a rock climbing shop, and the clarity that nothing she’d tried and quit was wasted.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Dirt That Was Never Not Holy from A Life in Season
On peaches, half-eaten tomatoes, and why waste doesn't exist in a living garden. Jess writes about her summer garden at peak abundance: a hundred pounds of tomatoes, basil going to seed, eating a dark red tomato like an apple at sunset, and how waste is a concept that belongs to barcodes and bottom lines, not to places where life is fueled by death and everything eventually returns to soil. Lush and sensory and fully in the season. I read this one in South Carolina and felt it in a particular way. It will make you want to put your hands in some dirt.

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

• The Strange Intimacy of Being Read from Echoes
  Michelle writes about what it feels like to put your work into the world when you choose writing specifically because you prefer observing to performing. The distance between “this is the best thing I’ve ever written” and “this is absolute shit, and I just let strangers look at it” is, she says, often only a cup of coffee and a reread apart. She publishes anyway, because the requirement was never certainty…it was honesty. Every Thursday…and every Sunday, when I press publish, I go through this exact same loop, and it’s useful to know the loop is just the work, not a sign something is wrong.

• I Am Terrified from Letters from Imi
  A poem…on the fear of losing your creative fire before you've done what you came here to do. "I am terrified of losing my fuel, my light, my dreamer's sight / the wonder that burned like the sun." Imi writes about sitting at a pub before noon trying to silence the beehive in her mind, about the dizziness of freedom, about what it feels like when the fire is down to its last pieces of wood. Quiet and devastating and beautiful. Read it right after Strange Intimacy, and you have the full portrait of what creative work costs.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

Making Your Own Chances Vol. 1: From Graphic Designer to Executive Chef
from The Long Game
After an impromptu phone call with a stranger who felt like a close friend after an hour of talking, Anjali wrote about me. I’m human; I’m not going to pretend I didn’t send this link to approximately everyone I know the moment I saw it…it’s one thing to tell your own story…it’s quite another to read about it through the lens of another…it somehow makes all the heartache, all the self-doubt and all the loss and all the growth…worth it.

She found me through a note I wrote about my career pivot, got on a call, and turned it into this. The whole story is here: Charlotte to New York in 2020, cold emailing every restaurant in the city with zero kitchen experience, COVID hitting the week we arrived, the six families I cooked for out of their homes, the weekend I bought bags of carrots and onions to practice my knife skills after a chef called me out in the first week, Sous Chef in six months, Executive Chef in a year, and why I stepped back when Millie started needing me present in a different way.

What she got right more than anything: she understood that it wasn’t reinvention…it was redirection. Everything I’d spent fifteen years building as a designer, a marketer, a mother, translated directly into what I needed to be in the kitchen. I just had to be willing to tell the story in a way that made sense to people who couldn’t see it yet.

I appreciate you guys, your love & support for women like Anjali, and, as always, for me as well. I couldn’t do any of it without you. And if you know someone sitting on a pivot they can’t quite figure out how to justify, send it to them.

Happy Thursday, turkeys! Going to hug Nanny Sis's neck today…more from the Carolinas soon.

xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. I'll be writing to you on Sunday back in NYC, probably still riding high on that Carolina sunshine. See you there. ♥

My parents still live in my childhood home in Blythewood, SC, although it looks drastically different from when I lived here. “Upgraded” is a major understatement, for sure. Before this home, we were a bit nomadic as my dad’s naval career had us living in Orlando, FL (where I was born), Saratoga Springs, NY, Charleston, SC (where my sister was born), all in the first five years of my life. We then finally settled in Blythewood when my dad left the Navy, and I entered first grade in the middle of the school year. Still unsure of where we wanted to settle in this small, rural town just northeast of the state’s capital, Columbia, we spent our first few years in a mobile home. Which, at the time, I honestly thought was pretty cool…it was my home, the only home I had any memory of, and the fact that we were able to move it from Charleston to Blythewood was pretty amazing in my six-year-old mind. It was only later at school that I learned that living in a trailer somehow meant I was poor…less than…with absolutely no trajectory to popularity in sight.

My brother and sister talk a lot about how we each had such different childhoods, such different parents, despite the fact that they are the same two people. The versions of Sam and Myra I experienced were the hard-working young teenagers just entering adulthood for the first time, and then, also, figuring out how to do it with a newborn. At the age of 19, after graduating from high school, my mom started college, and my dad entered the Navy, and then on the heels of those big decisive moves, they found out they were pregnant with me. They got married and moved to Orlando, so big and so different and so far away from their family and friends in Ridgeway & Winnsboro, SC. They were alone, figuring it all out, doing the best they could with what they had…and also, raising a baby, while they themselves probably felt very much still like kids.

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Sometimes I think about what they might’ve felt in those early days. I’ve listened to their stories and those big, big feelings they’ve shared, and I very much recognize that same anxiety…the fear and stress of being adults for the very first time without fully knowing what that meant. Trying to prove their own success at adulthood to their families and friends, who probably thought they were nuts to pick up and move so far away from the safety and security of “home”.

There’s always this need to prove ourselves, right? Once you officially crossover from being a student in school (whether it stops at high school or college), there’s this transition, this moment…where you’re officially an adult…but really in title only…not quite in actuality. It’s almost as if we put on the adult versions of ourselves like clothes. But at first, they don’t quite fit, do they? Like most hand-me-downs, they’re too big, too bulky, and then there’s that voice in the background that says, “you’ll just have to grow into it”.

I’ve been thinking about those “clothes” we put on…how much the version of adulthood we grow up thinking about, aspiring to…was actually predestined by the hand-me-downs we were given…how they were shaped and sewn together by our parents and their experiences with their own adulthood (which, consequently, were also given and shaped by their parents before them and so on…). I think about the “fit” of those clothes and how each of us goes through life, growing and trying to fill them in. But it’s interesting, each of us experiences a moment (or multiple moments) where we realize some of those pieces and parts will never quite fit. Just like our personalities, our goals, our dreams, our decisions take on a different path, a different shape from our parents before us, we, too, find ourselves deciding which pieces to keep and fill in, and which parts demand alterations, a gentle rip of the seams. What started as a dress might end up looking like overalls (am I taking this clothing analogy too far? Probably so, but you get it, right?).

I’m sitting here this morning on a balmy June morning…on my parents’ back porch overlooking their pool…that sits behind their amazing two-story home on around four acres of land covered by trees…with the distant crow of a neighbor’s rooster a mile away…all of this is truly theirs. This place is a space that both my dad and my mom have spilled blood, sweat, and tears for over the years. Maybe they’ve finally grown into their adult bodysuits they first put on when they were 19. I wonder if they feel proud or like they finally “got it”.

Honestly, you wouldn’t think so, the way my dad constantly tinkers and “to-dos” around the house and yard…there’s always something to fix, something to repair, something to replace. And my mom? She’s changed the interior so many times, I can barely remember all the colors of the walls in each iteration. The kitchen I grew up with is no longer here, and in its place is a fully remodeled one that beautifully opens and extends through to the living room, which is now on the same floor level (there used to be a step down into the living room, and they literally raised the entire floor of that level to be even). There are now hardwoods where there was wall-to-wall emerald green carpet, and the garage is now an entire other room of the house, affectionately referred to as the “west wing” of the home.

All that to say…it’s a far, far cry and a major glow up from the mobile home we started in…and maybe, just maybe, their clothes finally fit them.

On this side of our story, I, in my 40’s and my parents in their early 60’s, I kind of love the fact that we feel so close in age. I feel a camaraderie and a kinship and a friendship with them that’s uniquely mine and different from the relationships they have with my siblings.

.Just yesterday, I was plundering in my mom’s clothes (I do this every single time I come home…in her clothes) and I put on a pair of her pants and a sweater (also because my mom keeps it a frigid 60-degrees in their house, hello ‘pause <3). But as I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought about those clothes. How hers have never really fit all the way, but just barely. My mom and I are SO similar, yet so different. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw my mom, I saw her in my eyes, in my smile, in my Boulware-wide hips. Her clothes have always fit me…sort of…but I’ve always required a little extra alteration…to make them my own, just to make them fit.

My parents never wanted or asked us kids, to follow in their footsteps. In fact, they were pretty adamant about each of us developing the critical thinking skills, integrity, and discernment necessary to forge our own paths. I think there’s a misconception that happens as we aim to go our own way, that it means we don’t appreciate or value the ways our parents chose to go. There’s an exchange of judgment and criticism that takes place when “different” somehow gets translated as “better than”. I know I’ve been guilty of it. I remember when we first adopted Amelia, and my sister had her son Levi at the same time…both of us, daughters now mothers, and we had our own ideas of the kind of parents we wanted to be. The ripping of those seams, the alterations and changes we were making to that part of the “outfits” were not very gentle, or gracious…they were quite literally dripping with judgment. We were going to talk to our kids differently, discipline them differently, dress them differently, etc.

Depending on our childhood experiences and how we relate to our parents, we seem to develop this sense of “oh, when I’m an adult/parent I’m not going to do it like them” as we lay responsibility and blame, even. As I’ve become a mother and have lived and experienced the world in my own ways, I’ve realized my own impact on Amelia throughout each stage of her 11-yr life so far…for good or bad…and I know the weight of my continued impact as she journeys through preteen, teenagerdom, and beyond. In realizing my own impact, I’ve come to have more and more grace for my parents and the decisions they made…unraveling the judgment I once held for those decisions and repairing that “sleeve”.

My version of these adulthood “clothes” sometimes seems as if they are so altered beyond recognition…post marriage (x2)...post divorce…post moving hundreds of miles away from SC to NYC…post career change…post political and religious shifts, etc. My version of adulthood…of womanhood…was handed down from my mom, and despite SO many of my attempts to alter or change and “be different” than her growing up, I realize now that she is and was my foundation. It’s in these moments…When I come home and spend time with them, even physically putting on my mom’s clothes that I recognize and realize the OG is still there underneath. I see the version of adulthood they wear and the one that I now wear; I see more similarities than differences (despite my best efforts 🙂). Seeing those similarities reminds me of where I’ve come from, what I’ve come through, and how grateful and how proud I am to wear these clothes.

Millie graduated from 5th grade on Tuesday.

She’s been a mess ever since, in all the ways…good and bad. One minute she’s crying about leaving the school that’s been her home since kindergarten, and the next she’s pouring water on Yas and trying to steal Emily’s tea and kicking her dad out of absolutely nowhere. Sad to feral in about 30-sec flat. I have nothing but compassion for her because I know…I can see exactly what’s happening: she is literally filled to the brim, overflowing with feelings and hormones she doesn’t know how to name, how to claim, or how to deal with…and the only thing I know how to do is hold her until she’s ready for the next wave. She knows all the right things to say to rationalize away what she’s feeling. But as those of us who may be older and somewhat experienced understand…the “knowing” doesn’t necessarily help you feel it any differently. So I told her to just let the feelings happen, and I’ll hold her until she’s ready for the next one.

I have managed to schedule 4 appointments, a lunch, a coffee with a friend, a catering drop-off to LES Printshop for their gallery show this weekend (if you’re in NYC, go by, it’s a good one), and a handful of pantry box deliveries (have you pre-ordered yours yet?!)…all before an 8:45pm flight to South Carolina on Friday night. This is Messica at her best. :)

I’ve been talking a lot with Yas and with friends lately about rest…the need for it, the resistance to it, what gets in the way. I’ll be honest: I am not good at it…in fact, I’m pretty terrible at it…as the Type A, people-pleasing Virgo that I am. Rest makes me anxious because the to-do list is still there, staring at me, watching me delay the inevitable, every item just sitting there with its arms crossed, waiting, judging me for being “lazy”. Getting out of town is one of the only real ways I know how to actually stop…putting myself in situations where my body has literally no other choice but to surrender to the fact that I am somewhere else, and the list can’t come with me.

So…we are going south…Blythewood, Charleston, Charlotte…my childhood home, my people. Being with the people who made me always gives me back some version of myself I tend to lose track of when I’m away. For better or for worse. Then I’ll spend a few days in Charleston with Yas, eating our way through the city…and while we’re there, I’m going to find my way to the water’s edge at Isle of Palms or Sullivan’s or Folly Beach. I am going to sit down right at the line where the waves are still strong enough to roll over your legs with some weight before they pull back to the sea…and I am going to stay there a long time.

The ocean is my place. Beautiful, vast, and terrifying all at the same time, it’s where I go to remember my place in this BIG world…reminding me of a space and place greater than myself. It helps give me perspective; it’s where I feel like myself again. I’ll have more to say about that once I’m actually there.

Until then: let’s set the table for the weekend, turkeys…

THE GRAZING PLATE

(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)

• Well Crafted: June Edition No. 1 from Life Well Crafted
  A summer round-up with three things that caught my eye: hosting in small spaces, a summer fish sweater that I HAVE to have, and the gift of asking for help (I’m terrible at this…). I totally recommend this whole little thing as a Thursday morning warmup.

• Strawberry Ceremony from Good Food Jobs
  Literally the first I’ve ever heard of Ken’ niiohontésha…the Haudenosaunee thanksgiving ceremony for the first strawberries of the season…but I’m in love already. It’s the ongoing reclamation of ancestral land at Kana’tsiohare:ke. Strawberries are peaking proudly this month, and I’ve been making jam, eating them straight out of the pint container at the market, putting them in a bowl with some whipped cream for a late-night snack. Reading this…man, I love learning more about where these fruits come from, who has always known what they are, and what it means to give thanks for them with that kind of intention. Such a good read.

THE UTENSILS

(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)

What Our Grandmothers Already Knew
On what our ancestors carried in their hands, and what we owe to ourselves and to the people who come after us. With Millie's graduation this week, with the transition she's in, with the tenderness of watching her become the next version of herself, I recognize it all because someone before me knew it first…the good stuff that gets passed down without a single word said out loud. Women carry these things and more…in our bodies and our kitchens and our hands across generations…what does it look like to actually honor that instead of outrunning it?

Order Your Pantry Box!

THE VESSELS

(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)

• Turns Out My Hyper-Fixation with Self-Improvement Was Just Another Strategy to Avoid My Anger from Heart Led Creates
  If you read last week’s Vessels piece from yas on people pleasing as repressed anger, here’s the next layer. The self-improvement addiction…the constant optimizing, the fixing, the endless work on yourself…can be its own form of avoidance. A way to stay productive-feeling while never actually getting to the thing underneath. The trap is that it looks like growth from the outside…it looks like you’re doing the work…and sometimes you are…and sometimes, you’re just running a cleaner-looking loop.

• It Felt Like Desire. That Was the Problem. from Living Between Worlds
  On wanting and wanting to want. The distinction between those two things is nuanced, for sure. There’s wanting something, and there’s the performance of wanting it because the idea of yourself wanting it feels right, feels like the person you’re trying to become or feels that the person you even used to be. They feel identical from the inside until they don’t…this piece asks some real questions…and has me doing the same.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

Low-Effort Ways to Make This a Summer You'll Cherish from Midnight Crumbs
"Every summer I tell myself I want more memories and fewer screenshots. Some years I do better than others." This piece is the practical, gentle answer to that exact problem…low-lift things that actually shift how a summer feels in the living of it, not just in retrospect. I'm reading it right before I get on a plane to South Carolina and it couldn’t be a more perfect time…less planning, more presence. Fewer screenshots of the thing, more just being in it. I literally only have two things planned/set for Charleston…1 dinner reservation and my own personal appointment with the ocean…that’s it…the rest of the trip? Leaving it up to chance <3

THE NAPKIN

(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)

So You Deleted Social Media…Now What? from Returning to Beauty
I consider doing this on a daily basis…Instagram literally makes me feel more inadequate and less creative, less cool, on a daily basis…why do I do this to myself?! This piece dives into what actually happens to the space when you step off…not a detox-triumphant piece, just an honest account of the strange discomfort and the slow reorientation. The 864 hours detail is the one that hit me square in the chest…I can’t even bring myself to look at my screentime, I’m already ashamed. What could I actually do with all the time I’d get back? I've been thinking about this all week in the context of rest, of what it means to really stop, of the way I reach for my phone the second I'm not doing something purposeful. UGH.

THE DESSERT PLATE

(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)

Borrowed Courage from House of Flowers by Emory Hall
On the people who believe in us before we believe in ourselves. I'm ending here this week because in less than 24 hours, I’ll get on a plane to go be with some of those people. The ones who know where you came from…the ones who held the belief for you when you couldn't hold it for yourself…who handed it back to you like a thing they'd been keeping safe. Emory writes about borrowed courage with so much warmth that I read it twice and wanted to share it out immediately.

Happy Thursday, turkeys! See you from the other side of the Carolinas.

xo, Jess

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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. I'll be writing to you on Sunday from somewhere warm, probably covered in sand. See you there. ♥