It’s the first day of October and I’ve got to say...that might’ve just been the BEST birthday month in a really long while. It wasn’t all fun and games, but what it was was transformative with a capital T...Since I turned 40 a few years ago, burning down everything around me and starting a crazy, risky new chapter of life...getting divorced, moving out into my first ever solo apartment, navigating co-parenting and single motherhood AND running a NYC restaurant as Head Chef for the first time ever....yeah...it was a HUGE year to say the least. When that huge prescribed burn finally started to simmer and smolder and I was left to take inventory of what remained, it was a version of myself that I had only come to know in the deepest and darkest corners of my bones and my heart and my head...she was finally free....BUT, she still had remnants of the past...remnants and tattered clothes of her chronic people-pleasing, her living paralyzed by fear of the unknown, threads wrapped around her arms and legs....wrapped with the yarn of her childhood feeling completely invisible and misunderstood...and the twine and twigs of her early marriage where she tried to be what she thought he needed and wanted...the wrapped cords of her religion and beliefs that purity and submission and following “the rules” was the point vs. just living a life of love for her fellow human...these threads and tattered pieces of clothing had been singed and burned but weren’t quite gone just yet. So she did what she always does...she kept moving forward. Kept pressing ahead and tried to slough off the remnants. But they only started coming off slowly and as one would fall away, another wounded moment or time would surface and make its impact known.

And then last month...the last year....when I was reflecting on my 42 rotation around the sun, I realized....this year wasn’t just about existing and living with the remnants...no, this was the year I finally decided to do something about them...out of necessity or maybe even out of impatience of not wanting to stand with them one moment longer...the proverbial bruises were still there and this year...I pressed on them...hard. I pressed them to remember and figure out their origin story so that I could release them and begin to heal from them. You guys have followed along through this space here on Substack...You’ve witnessed just a fraction of the ones that have resurfaced...but this month and this year, those remnants have been shedding at a faster rate than the past 3 years and I’ve reemerged this month...not just as a 43 year old woman, but I am different...so much so...than I was just 30, 60, 90, 365 days ago...and for that I am in awe...I am filled with so much joy and gratitude.

Pull up a chair...it’s getting good this week ♥♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• Virginia Woolf's Writing Routine and a Lesson in Creative Discipline
  Harry noticed the phrase "with the regularity of a stockbroker" and decided to try it: Woolf's actual schedule, for one full day. 9:30am to noon writing, then revising, a long walk, tea, diary, reading. He'd convinced himself he was a midnight writer because he had no structure, and midnight was when the fear of wasting the whole day finally pushed him to the desk. By noon on his Woolf day, he'd written thousands of words and the afternoon still stretched out ahead of him. Woolf herself, in her diary: "How great writers write at night, I don't know. It's an age since I tried, & I find my head full of pillow stuffing." This one is SO, so good…let’s do like Virginia did.

THE UTENSILS

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

• How to Find the Goldilocks Zone of Curiosity
  Opening with a half-finished puzzle at a coffee shop: 80% done, one conspicuous gap, and despite being in a rush she sits down to finish it. Curiosity follows an inverted-U curve, and the productive zone is when the gap is visible enough to close. Mendeleev left intentional blanks in the periodic table because he knew what belonged there in theory, and scientists spent decades filling them. When something actually matters to you, the curve adjusts…you stay curious even when you know almost nothing.

• Productivity Should Be About Doing Less Work, Not More
  Matilda interviews Frances Odera Matthews, Notion consultant, who built her business around one tool and one idea: a well-designed system is the difference between having a lunch break or not. Building in Notion is like building a house: foundations and wiring first, decorating last. And after burning out, she capped how many calls she takes per day in Calendly. For all my people out there trying to pivot, side-hustle or even just juggle multiple things…I’ve heard Notion is the way to go…I’m looking into it for myself, too.

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THE VESSELS

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

• I Go All In. Then I Disappear.
  Sasha sat for a 25-hour neuropsych test at 49 and got fifty pages back. One sentence stood out: “Sasha goes all in on things and then retreats after becoming overstimulated.” She read it to her husband, who’s known her since the fifth grade. He laughed. “I could have told you that.” The piece moves from that sentence to a childhood bookstore, a father who bought her The Metamorphosis when she wanted Sweet Valley High, a mother who stapled serious-looking covers over romance novels. “I really, really love you. I’m going to hide. Please don’t take it personally. I’m probably just relearning the stitch.”

• The Avoidant Bitch I Am
  “I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” Humiliation stays in the body longer than heartbreak does, and the fear of being unwanted runs deeper than loneliness ever could. The piece is about avoidance, the kind where you stand outside your own life with one hand always hovering over the emergency exit. She pulls in the fig tree from The Bell Jar, Jo March from Little Women, a line from Call Me by Your Name. A slow emotional bankruptcy, filed over years. “You become someone who almost lived.”

• The Artist’s Way for the Reality of a Creative Mother
  I loved this one because I’ve been one of those struggling through The Artist’s Way again…I read it years ago, but this time, it’s not quite fitting like it did before. Lauren’s take pulls apart The Artist’s Way for the creative mother in 2026 who lives a life with no silence in it, no Taos adobe house at the end of a dirt road. The book tells you resistance is the problem. A cat giving birth needs darkness to labor…disturb her and it stalls…nobody calls the cat resistant.

• The Water I’m In
  It’s been a really heartbreaking and at the same time, inspiring time following Suleika’s journey battling cancer. The treatments keeping the leukemia at bay are no longer working, and she’s packing for her third bone marrow transplant. A 20-year-old man in Poland is preparing to give her his stem cells. She’s following her dogs around the house, burying her face in their necks, inhaling the corn-chip smell of their paws. “For now, this is the water I’m in.”

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Nectar, Pollen, Honey and Patience
  Will is a private chef and beekeeper in West Berkshire and this is his autumn honey harvest. He talks to the bees throughout every visit, tells them the news. An old tradition: bees are said to carry the souls of those who’ve come before us. He thinks it also helps them understand he’s no threat. My friend Lila keeps bees, too, and it’s so fascinating…I loved Will’s beautiful accounting of his journey as well. There’s also a fig, wild honey and mascarpone tart recipe for paid subscribers, pretty amazing.

• Beyond the Days Off: The Beautifully Busy Rituals of Japan’s Silver Week
  Honami is a 57-year-old Japanese homemaker writing about her culture in close, specific detail. This piece covers Silver Week in Japanese culture…seven consecutive days around the autumn equinox that, for her family, mean an incredibly busy cluster of ceremonies. Respect for the Aged Day, the harvest moon with rice dumpling offerings, Ohigan, the Buddhist practice of visiting ancestral graves on the equinox when the line between this world and the next runs thinnest. And then Ohagi: the sweet made from glutinous rice and red bean paste, named for the bush clover in autumn, that her grandmother woke at 4am to prepare by hand. “Eating those warm, incredibly delicious Ohagi first thing in the morning...remains one of the most precious memories of my childhood.”

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THE NAPKIN

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

• The Feeling We’re All Longing For Is Presence
  I really love Yas’ writing so much, she’s got a beautiful way of drawing you in as a reader and then somehow you forget they aren’t your own words…so, so relatable. She’s a week into a six-month social media break, and navigating what presence actually is and what has been systematically traded out for it: convenience, certainty, the illusion of comfort. “Humans are animals,” she writes. “We rely on the same resources (food, shelter, water, safety) as a bear does.” When those connections get automated and delivered, our nervous systems respond the way animals in a zoo do.

• Balance vs. Alignment
  Jamie Gilpin spent years in executive leadership with her Apple Watch pinging her during board meetings: are you in a workout? Her heart rate was that high…she missed her period for a year. She’s writing about two causes of burnout, and most conversations only cover one: the imbalance of workload…but the other is misalignment. What happens when you learn to position how you talk so the men in the room can hear you, when you quiet your intuition because someone asked where’s the data, when your empathy gets called a liability…it’s the mask. Such a good read.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• The Mother Sauce
  Millie has wanted a wolf cut for weeks, the one standing between her and the whole rest of her life…and I wouldn’t budge. Because I could see what was so clearly behind the obsession: the exact same spell I tried to conjure a hundred different ways when I was her age. New school in South Carolina, no friends, birthdays that went by like any other day. I found my childhood journals earlier this year and they gutted me…I'm raising her and re-raising myself at the same time. Day two of middle school she came flying out those doors with a new friend beside her…her shoulders dropped…and mine did too.♥

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

xo, Jess

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And by “wanted”, I mean “has completely obsessed over”.

If you don’t know what that is, welcome to the last month of my life. It’s a shag, layered and feathered in the front, and long/messy mullet-esque in the back…like…a cute mullet that went to art school. She found it on Pinterest this summer and has been consumed to say the least. Every waking minute, photo after photo, at all hours, she’s interrupted me for “this very important thing I have to see”…this one, Mom. No, THIS one. This is the one.

Last year, it was the obsession with red tips and highlights…then blue…with stripes. She still asks, actually, and never ceases to beg me to get the REAL thing, bleach and all, but I’m not ready for that commitment just yet…so we live in semi-permanentville for the time being. And so…that’s when attention turned to the infamous wolf cut. She has an entire mood board for her head, and she talks about it the way I used to talk about getting braces and finally having straight teeth…like this haircut is THE THING…the thing standing between her and the whole rest of her life.

I keep telling her not yet…trying my damndest to instill the timeless advice that you don’t make any drastic changes right before a big event. Certainly not the night before you start middle school, at a brand-new school where you know only a handful of people. You don’t make big, permanent changes to your hair or your body right before a big day…you just don’t. I told her to take a breath, pause the haircut discussion for the week, and then turn our attention to picking out the most fun first-day outfit. Let’s just see how the first week goes before making any drastic changes…let them see YOU.

She rolled her eyes at me like the angsty pre-teen she is and looked at me as if I personally ruined her one shot at happiness…I’m such a mean mom.

Because I know this…the thing this 11yr old doesn’t want to hear quite yet…I know exactly what she’s doing and why. I know that particular haircut isn’t just a haircut. It’s a spell…it’s the magic beans of it all…the thing she believes will finally make her “cool”…will make her belong…make her interesting enough…the thing that will convince the other kids to keep her.

I know it…all too well…because it’s the same dang spell I tried to conjure a hundred different ways throughout my childhood and adulthood. Despite my best efforts…never did my conjurings open the doors I thought I needed or wanted and quite literally never opened the way I thought they would. My puppet-mastery knew no bounds…

I’m a chef. Self-taught for the most part, I spent hours and hours “Julia & Julia’ing” myself as I fumbled my way through years of recipes. After honing my skills, more professionally, in restaurant kitchens in NYC, I spent more years developing recipes. I can taste something once and figure out what’s in it…what’s missing…and I wonder what somebody was reaching for and what maybe didn’t quite land. It’s almost as if you can look at a dish and see and taste the fear…the anxiety…the preconceived notions before the person who made it even gives any explanation.

That’s what it’s been like to watch Millie in this life phase.

I can see it…I recognize it. I don’t have to guess what she’s feeling because I see it in her face and all over…as she spirals about the new year, the new school, the longing for new friends. The haircut is a stand-in, obviously…a diversion…she’s actually spiraling about who she’ll sit with at lunch, whether she’ll make friends, whether someone will choose her. I recognize it because I cooked from this same recipe…built from the same ingredients, almost to the gram. A heaping cup of am I too much?, folded in with a full tablespoon of I’m nothing to anyone at all, a long pour of fear…fear of being alone…of being unlovable…being left out…being not enough.

I started writing my own recipe when I was little…when I moved to a small town in South Carolina, started at a new school halfway through the year to a community where I knew no one. And here she is…my girl…stirring the exact same pot, working from the same recipe.

I found my childhood journals a few months back on a trip to my childhood home in South Carolina. The ones from elementary school…middle school…high school and even ones from my early years of adulthood. I’ve mentioned them before and re-reading them wrecked me all over again.

There were birthdays in there…more than one…where I wrote my wishes for how I wanted to celebrate my big day….and then, the very next post that followed was a defeated report of expectations not being met. Posts where I wrote…in my reckless little-girl handwriting, that I hoped I’d get a party that year. And then the next entry: everyone was too busy and the party never happened.

I asked my mom about it recently and she of course felt terrible…she couldn’t even remember that happening…maybe that was the season my grandfather was dying and my dad was coming undone and both of my parents were just trying to keep the whole ship from going down. They were treading water, trying to hold it together for my sister and me. But little nine-year-old Jess didn’t know all of that…she only knew her big day went by like any other day, and she filed that away as evidence that she didn’t matter.

It was all evidence, I guess. Reinforcing the narrative that she was easy to forget…that love was something to be earned by being good enough, quiet enough, useful enough…and that if she didn’t try hard, she could just…slip through the cracks of everyone else’s hard week.

She was the little girl who spent most of her recesses on an island of one. Bucked teeth, weird freckles, living in a mobile home when everyone else lived in houses…the tag-along nobody remembered. She was the one who didn’t have a single person to call best friend until she was well into middle school. The one who eventually found her people in a church youth group and gripped them like a life raft.

She just wanted a friend…and that was…that was her recipe…she wanted to look cool, be cool…she wanted just one person to see her, choose her and keep her.

And now…here I am, looking at her again. I see her right in front of me…only this time, she has the face of my daughter. She’s the sassy eleven-year-old standing in my kitchen, insisting I look at her iPad of pinned haircuts. She’s there, wanting the exact same thing I did…showing me all the ingredients she wants to use, and every single one of them, I recognize.

Day one of middle school, I watched her walk in with the horde of terrified sixth-graders, their wide-eyes braced for the unknown. And I was there, again, at 2:50pm, to pick her up. That first day, she came out of school and her face down…wrung out and disappointed. There wasn’t a standout friend…she hadn’t found her people quite yet…nothing good to show for the scariest moment of her year. When I watched her walk out of that school, face filled with defeat…every cell in my body wanted to hug her…I wanted to promise her it would all be fine. I wanted to tell her that everyone would love her…of course they would, because she’s extraordinary, because she is the most interesting, funny, ferocious human I know.

But I’ve learned…I know better now, at least a little. I can’t promise her those things…I can’t conjure up a friend…a group…a guarantee. She has to find it herself, she has to experience these feelings to learn from them…on a timeline that is emphatically not the one I would’ve ordered for her. Watching your kid walk straight into a painful truth you can see coming from a mile away…and not being able to step in front of it or protect them from it…that might be the hardest part of this dang parenthood gig.

Parenthood feels like scaffolding for a building under construction. As the building gets built, the foundation gets poured, and brick-by-brick gets laid and cemented in place, the scaffolding is there…to support, to frame and bolster, but not to impose…giving essential structure and guidance. I can’t make the bricks for her or even place them for her…that would just be me recreating myself. She’s her own person, with her own experiences…I can share what I’ve learned, I can be there if she falls, but I can’t do it for her. My job is not to right the wrongs of my own childhood through hers.

I read a piece about the lotus plant the other day…how it looks at the cherry blossoms in April and decides that it won’t be pressured…it won’t be rushed to bloom when it’s not ready. The lotus plant blooms when its own season arrives, on its own timeline. I want that for Millie girl…I want so badly for her to just trust…trust that her season is coming, even when every other kid looks like they bloomed already. I can’t force her to trust or make her understand…she’s still working on the foundation, and can’t be rushed. Sure…she’s itching to start laying the bricks…but the cement needs time to cure, and I’m here to remind her not to rush the process.

And then…then there was day two.

The second day of school was SO different than the first. She came flying out of those same doors …but this time with a new friend beside her and she was beaming. She was visibly lighter, her shoulders had finally rested…dropped back into place. The face of a girl who knew that things might be okay this year. That feeling didn’t come from me…and no wolf cut was required. It was just her…my sweet, anxious Millie girl…with her own clock, arriving right on time…her time, not mine. I stood on the sidewalk and my shoulders…they dropped too. I saw it…the bloom…the bud beginning to open up, just a little. It started to open exactly when it was ready to, and not one second before.

And yet…going through all of this, as a bystander…it still guts me and inspires me…all at the same time. She wanted me to just fix it for her…to let her get her funky haircut…but she didn’t need me to. The foundation was allowed to cure, all on it's own.

Millie is R&D’ing her way through the same recipe I worked through. She isn’t doomed to plate the same lonely dish I did when I was a little girl. The frustrating and equally humbling part is that I can’t cook it for her…I can’t get in there and make it come out right knowing which parts may work better than others…but I can be the one who already seared and burned this thing to the bottom of the pan and lived to tell about it…there in the recipe notes, in the margins.

I held the line on the haircut. I actually love that she wants something fun and new and I know it’ll look SO cute. But the refusal itself was a small, boring act of love, the one that says I’ve got you even when you’re furious with me. I try to reflect instead of rescue…to say I see you, I see how scared you are instead of papering over it with promises I can’t keep…with promises that even funky haircuts can’t keep. My therapist suggested that I talk to her, and share some of my own stories with her…not the sanitized, filtered mom-version tied up in a neat bow. She deserves the messy truth, the chaotic re-telling of the actual ones…the island of loneliness…the downplayed birthdays…the tag-along tales. When I say “trust me, I get it…” she just rolls her eyes and calls me “old school” and tells me I don’t know anything. But…what if…what if I showed her the actual evidence…the old journals for her to read for herself. Maybe she’ll see her own reflection in my words and in the younger version of me…and she’ll see that I, too, was elbow-deep in pouring cement for my own foundation. And yet…I, too, bloomed…on my own timeline and no one else’s.

I wrote earlier that my job now is to help keep her own cage from ever getting built. And maybe that’s what this is: the same recipe, but this time, handed over with my edits scribbled in the margins…less of this, you don’t need it…more of just being yourself and trusting that friends will be drawn to the real her. I can share my notes, just sit back…trust the process…and watch her cook.

Motherhood is crazy beans…here I am, mothering my own kiddo who is so different and at the same time, SO much like I was as a child. And Millie’s adopted, so that shit is totally nurture vs. nature. And with all this therapy and self-reflection I’ve done this year, I realize that I’m not just raising her…I get to go back and raise myself, too. Every single time I get down on Millie’s level and tell her she is amazing exactly as she is…unmanaged, unedited, untethered…no new haircut required…there’s an eight-year-old somewhere in me who is also hearing it, too…healing those old original wounds. I’m setting two places at my proverbial table now…one for my own daughter and one for the younger version of me…the freckle-faced girl with bucked teeth.

She’s cooking…I’m cooking…and I’m realizing, we may be working from the same recipe. But this time, there’s a chef in the kitchen who’s made this dish before…I already know exactly where it can go wrong. I can’t cook it FOR her, but I can stand beside her while she learns…makes her own adjustments and edits.

Good lord, I know we’re in store for a WILD-ass ride for the next few years of middle school and high school in New York City. I can’t fix it or shield her from the pain, heartache and anxiety…but I can give her my notes, those ones in the margins. I can be her support and solid framing…to keep her from growing sideways. And I, too, can keep cooking…for myself…adjusting and editing…learning and healing for that other little girl at the table…the freckle-faced one.

♥

It’s officially my birthday week, and despite the lackluster lead-up this year due to the overwhelm and exhaustion...this birthday has been ABSOLUTELY fantastic so far.

Starting with a night out with my girlfriends last weekend, we had a lovely dinner at Lola’s in NoMad (side note: Chef Suzy Cupps is a dream & I was SO glad to celebrate at her spot, she’s a SC girl also & has made her mark on the NYC culinary scene for the past few years, Lola’s is her first solo venture and it’s incredible...Southern & Filipino fusion, the perfect blend of so many iconic dishes...pimento cheese, pork belly bbq, Carolina gold rice, and on and on...she even came by to wish me a happy birthday & sent little treats from the kitchen...southern hospitality at its very best…Thank you, Suzy!) and then walked a few blocks south to Baby Grand for Karaoke...I did my inner child well by belting out the likes of Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple & TLC...you know the one.

I had the most perfect lazy Sunday, venturing downtown to my facial spot in Chinatown, followed by a stop by From Lucie, the most adorable East Village Bakery that I’ve procured my birthday cake from since moving to the city in 2020. Then we met some dear friends from Charlotte that were visiting for a little sushi happy hour & walk through Lincoln Center.

My actual birthday (Tuesday) was nothing short of pure bliss...I had a sub cook for my clients so that I could have the whole day off...I started low and slow with coffee on my couch in the morning, and then Yas and I grabbed the ferry over to Governors Island to spend the day at QC spa (Birthday Hack: QC offers a special birthday entry, so basically 2 for the price of one!). We sauna’d, we steam’d, we laid around in the heated pool with the most epic views of the city....we literally just veg’d for 5 hours and it was glorious. We had a really amazing Thai dinner at ChaLong and then finished off the evening by cutting into the amazing mini cake from Lucie’s. I went to bed FULL...full of love, full of relaxation, full of joy and full of the kindest words from my friends and family that day.

I was so full that I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with my therapist yesterday. For the first time in a long time, I feel still...I feel settled and I feel satiated....not at all stagnant, though, I’m still hustling, I’m still moving forward and working my face off...but these days, it all feels in sync...it all feels like it’s moving in the same direction, in the same current, carried along by the same stream.

But don’t worry....five minutes into my therapy session and I had plenty to talk about, about 48 minutes worth, that is...but even that, it felt forward-thinking and future-focused vs. reactive to the world around me. And for the moment, I feel light.

That lifted weight, that lighter feeling...well, that just might be one of the greatest gifts I got this year. Here’s to 43, friends. Pull up a chair & join me for this week’s reads from around the stack’averse, there’s some really good ones this week!♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• there is so much i want to be, so much i want to do. so i end up doing nothing.
  "I think I've been mourning the lives I'll never get to live before I've even started living this one." Such a good piece about standing at the threshold of every door you want to walk through and choosing none of them…the paralysis of wanting too many lives at once. She finds one small opening: "maybe she is simply the girl who stops standing at the doorway of her own life...and finally chooses somewhere to go."

THE UTENSILS

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

• Worth Repeating: Are You Accumulating Career Debt?
  Steve writes about "Career Debt," the idea that staying comfortable accrues invisible interest against your future the same way financial debt does. His three categories are Comfort, Yes, and Silence…each distinct and each from actual experience rather than theory. "Bad news delivered early is just news. Bad news delivered late is terrible." Really interesting piece considering all the multitudes of women on Substack right now leaning into potential career-moves, pivots, etc. Worth the read, worth the considering.

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THE VESSELS

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

• When Did Healing Become a Performance?
  “You were hoping for a little understanding. You have been given homework.” Aaliya writes about what happens to grief when everyone around you can’t hold still with it, when “look at everything you have” becomes the answer to a question you never asked. She pulls in Rumi’s Guest House and turns it: you can let grief into the house on its own terms, the loss still a loss. “You deserved tenderness before you had anything to show for your pain.”

• The Equinox Letter
  Mia writes from Denmark, from the harvested fields behind her property, a baby wrapped in wool in the carrier on her chest and red kites sailing overhead in the northern wind. She writes about mørkning, a Danish practice of sitting together in darkening silence until the room is black and you light the one candle on the table. A way of not looking away when the dark comes, and five reflection questions to answer.

• the autumn equinox is a teacher
  Summer navigating the Fall Equinox this week through Traditional Chinese Medicine… yin, yang, the 23.5-degree wobble of Earth’s axis that gives us seasons…and what it costs a body to live in a culture that prioritizes expansion and action while treating autumn and winter as things to push through rather than inhabit. “We cannot begin to build the world we dream about if we continue operating in systems that strip us of our divine connection to Earth and her seasons that help us evolve cyclically and intentionally.”

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• why some conversations rearrange your brain
  A piece from last year, but I loved it so much, I’m throwing it in this week. Maja has a conversation with a friend who tells her people used to call him a robot, that for years he couldn’t identify his own feelings. From there she goes into Uri Hasson’s brain coupling research, the vagus nerve, polyvagal theory, and a collection of quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin, Ubuntu philosophy, Toni Morrison, Nick Cave, and David Eagleman that build into something bigger than any single one of them. Such a good read.

• Let’s Get Weird… with Emma Grede
  Lena Dunham interviews Emma Grede, co-founder of Good American, in the format I wish interviews actually were in…she asks would have Emma eyeing the nearest exit at a party. Emma’s answer: “Excuse makers. Anyone who spends ten minutes explaining why they can’t do something before they’ve spent one minute thinking about how they might.” She asks when Emma’s personal aesthetic finally became hers, and where she compares and despairs. The grandmother inheritance question made me spit my coffee out…“I hope she gets my best jewellery and I hope she wears it on a Muther fucking Tuesday.”

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THE NAPKIN

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

• A Slow Emergence into Day
  Jeff watched a bud on his kitchen cactus for weeks, stood there the night before waiting to see it open, and then went to bed. Overnight it bloomed into a flower five times the size of the bud, all wide and pink, while nobody was looking. He writes about slow mornings and the violence of how we begin our days, but the cactus is the center of the whole thing. “Perhaps flowers are shy and can only come into expression in the dark, when no one is around to see them unveil their beauty.”

• everyone is a monster to someone
  About the moment you realize someone has made you the villain in their story, painted horns on your memory, and you’ve exhausted every way to hand over context, reasons, the softest parts of your history, and none of it mattered. “The jury returned a verdict before you even took the stand.” It’s a piece about the permission to stop explaining, to let someone keep their distorted version of you, because “I cannot heal while standing in the courtroom of someone else’s judgment.”

• The Living Texture of Experience Before Interpretation
  Amoda Maa is a retreat teacher asking what’s available in the space between an experience and the story the mind wants to make of it, before it has decided what just happened. “What is here before the naming, before the comparison, before the mind rushes in to establish its familiar ground?” Slow, patient writing, worth the read.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• 43 Things I've Learned by 43
  I started it on the floor of my first solo apartment on 82nd and Columbus, two days before I turned 40, at the highest and lowest point of my life at the same time. Three years later, I finally finished it. Number 43 will tell you why it took this long.
  What would you add to the list?? ♥

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. ♥

It was the highest and the lowest point of my life. As I fumbled through our make-shift, resentment-laden custody negotiations, I only had my daughter, Millie, a couple days a week. And each time…two days felt like two hours. Hours I spent fighting an uphill battle to remind her that I was still her mother, that she was the most important thing to me, that maybe she could see I was trying to be the best version of myself for her.

I was running a successful restaurant, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was meant to. In my work life, I felt completely fulfilled…I loved working in the restaurant, long hours and all. It was challenging, it was non-stop, it was life-giving.

Turning 40 was the official beginning of the most exciting chapter of my entire life. Everything I’d been working for and wanting, it was all within reach. I felt like I was finally seeing the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

And like any good, undiagnosed woman with ADHD, I started a list…40 Things I Had Learned by 40…and well, that list sat unfinished and unpublished and unshared for the last three years.

If you’ve been keeping up with me here on the ‘stack, you know this year my birthday has looked different than years past. I’ve been so exhausted and overwhelmed that I’ve had very little motivation to get my birthday on. But I revisited this list yesterday, before I met my girlfriends for a night of dinner and birthday karaoke, and it gave me a flash of memories…of what it’s taken me to get here, all it’s taken to bring me where I am, and all I’ve learned along the way. And all the exhaustion and anxiety melted away and…I saw her.

I saw the 40 year old version of myself, the one who was literally at her lowest and highest at the same time. I saw the freedom in her face, the hopefulness and willingness to do whatever she needed to do to keep moving forward…the one who didn’t know the future, but knew to take the next best step.

So, three years later than planned…here’s the list.

43 Things I’ve Learned by 43

• It’s ok to be late, but not always.

• People change, and that’s ok.

• What worked beautifully for 16+ years might not work for you now.

• Don’t regret. Learn from the failures instead.

• Be present. Look at their face when they talk. Look people in the eyes.

• Feedback is the greatest gift, because it’s a chance to be better.

• Every single one of us wants to be seen, known, and understood.

• Always have 1-3 karaoke songs in your back pocket at any given time.

• Hurt people hurt people. Everyone is dealing with something.

• We all need grace and space to get it wrong sometimes.

• Dance. Have a signature move on the ready.

• Balance is key…in everything. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

• Rock climbing is really fun, even at 40. And yoga and stretching…both necessary.

• Hugs are healing.

• Call your parents and siblings, often. And coffee dates with your best friend are essential to life.

• Beware of the gap…the one between where you are and where you want to be.

• Be gentle with yourself. Take breaks. Work less than you think you need to.

• There’s absolutely nothing you can do to change the past.

• Two ears, one mouth. Listen more than you talk.

• Look for the light, especially in the dark. It grows brighter the more you notice it.

• Sushi is always a good idea.

• Running and walking are really good for you, even when it’s really slow.

• Dry shampoo is life changing.

• Kindness. Give it and have it, always.

• Stillness is important. Be still and silent, often.

• Don’t worry about things that probably won’t happen. Don’t get wrapped up in hypotheticals. Don’t let future plans hold you back from living in the present.

• The ocean is your reminder that the world is bigger than you.

• Boundaries are important. But boundaries are for yourself, not for others.

• If a relationship only takes, it isn’t for you.

• Sleep is your friend. 7 hours is golden.

• Flexibility and strength are the basics for life, relationships, jobs…everything.

• Community is key. Look for ways to build up the people around you.

• Never compare. There’s no one else like you, even doing the exact same job.

• Respect and trust are earned, not given just because someone’s older or more experienced.

• Facials and massages are life-giving, always.

• Travel solo at least once in your life.

• Always have a zombie apocalypse go-kit packed and ready.

• Do what you love. But don’t always turn hobbies into jobs…sometimes that turns joy into a burden.

• If it feels wrong, it usually is.

• You don’t need to stay in a situation that’s wrong for you. Know when to let go.

• Appreciate happiness when it’s there.

• Find some joy in everything you do, smile daily.

• Make time to write, so you don’t forget what happened.

That last one, number 43, is exactly why this list sat unfinished in my notes app for three years, and exactly why I’m finally hitting publish on it today, two days before I actually turn 43, instead of waiting around for the day itself.

She didn’t know any of this yet, the girl on the floor of that apartment on 82nd and Columbus. She didn’t know she’d marry Yas. She didn’t know Millie would one day come flying out of a middle school doorway with a new friend and a face full of relief. She didn’t know a Trader Joe’s reopening could genuinely make her cry in a parking lot, or that there’d be a Substack, or a Freckled Fork, or a life with this much texture in it. She didn’t see the tapestry just yet, only the threads…the different colors, threads, yarn, ribbons and twine of life’s twists and turns. She just knew to take the next best step, to do the work to weave those threads together…the picture was unclear, but the path was there for the taking. That was the whole thing…turns out that was enough.

Last night, at karaoke, my best friend since freshman year of college, Marie, my lighthouse in this city for years before I ever actually lived here, stood next to me and screamed her way through Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” like we were both teenagers again. Marie’s known me since I was 18. She’s been there through every single iteration on this list, every number, every version of myself I’ve moved up and down through to get here. Somewhere in the middle of that song, mid-scream, I thought about the girl on the floor of that apartment…about how far a next best step can actually take you, one at a time…over three years…over forty-three…and over one very determined best friend who never once let go of my hand through any of it.

So this is me, handing my 40 year old self the list she never got to finish…hugging her tightly and giving her the grace and space to know that she’s earned every single line of it…we both did.

Happy birthday to me…three years later, and somehow right on time.

It’s here…the chill in the air…it crept in so slowly and unassuming…I was walking home from work the other day and felt it against my skin…goosebumps. And just like that, summer is behind us, fading away as timely as it arrived. Between schools officially starting last week, the fashion world wrapping up this season’s lines and the sun rising a little later with each day…all things point to fall sneaking in, right around the corner. The ever-so-slight shifting of the seasons has begun and I feel this one differently than the other three. This one matters the most to me. It’s my favorite.

The leaves know exactly when it’s time to let go and they just…release. When they fall…they don’t disappear into nothingness, they break down into the ground and feed the roots that push everything back up the following spring. There’s growth and fruiting. Sure…spring and summer are the flashy sassy sisters, they’re the ones that get all the attention…all the credit. But there’s real work that happens in fall…it’s own growth and fruiting…there’s shedding and pruning and nourishing of roots…it’s the quiet reforesting of the soil that necessary to hold up what’s next. That work is just as necessary and just as real…it’s the growth underneath, the invisible work that strengthens the foundation…the underneath, so they can hold the weight of the growth that is sure to come.

This year…woof…it’s been hard. I’ve hustled…I’ve held…and I’ve hardened. That last one isn’t a negative, either…I’m actually most proud of that one…I’ve hardened…I’ve grown solid and clear on who I am and how I am…on my values and my worth and what I will and won’t accept from this one life, unapologetically…shedding so many of those people-pleaser layers of myself. I’ve learned this year how to advocate for myself, my time, and what I deserve in ways I couldn’t or wouldn’t before…and for that, I am grateful.

I’m turning 43 next Tuesday…September 22nd..and it’s not lost on me that it’s also the day of the Fall Equinox. It’s the one day where light and dark, day and night, sit in perfect balance before the world tips into the darker, quieter half. The Equinox is a harvest moment…a time to gather what grew, count what it cost, and shuffle off what no longer belongs. This year…that feels less like a metaphor and more like an actual road map.

There are things on the horizon…new and exciting and a little scary. And this weekend, this week, this birthday, this equinox…these are the moments to get still before whatever’s coming actually gets here…to nurture from within and make room for what’s next. For today’s table, I leaned into writers sitting in the same in-between, asking the big questions, shedding what no longer fits, and looking up at the sky from right where they’re standing to figure out what they’re seeing.

Pull up a chair ♥

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• Sorry but, “I’m just sharing my life” isn’t a thing anymore
  She starts with a quote she found on a podcast about the inherent contradiction at the center of the influencer economy: the person is also a corporation, selling motherhood or breakfast or whatever their niche is, while telling interviewers they’re just living their life and people happen to like watching. In a world where influencers like Nara Smith are making Capri Suns from scratch in a puffy-sleeved chiffon gown, describing it as simply “sharing her life”, Casey talks about what bubbles up after a decade making content for celebrities that you can’t un-see, and lands on the framework she uses for herself now. “I will brand my art. I will not brand myself.” Loved this one…

• On failing
  Sudeepta went to a Gong Show (a comedy format where you can be physically removed from the stage mid-performance with a giant rubber phallus, which is already incredible) and got gonged off…FAST. She wrote about it with so much honesty that it became the most useful piece about failure I’ve read in a while…where you sit back down after the stage and feel the full weight of it before you can even think about getting back up. Her five stages of humiliation are totally accurate, and I’m here for it.

THE UTENSILS

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

• How to get unstuck when no one is expecting you back
  Anjali flew back from 29 hours of international travel with a 20-month-old who refused to sleep for most of it, landed home to five loads of laundry and a small pharmacy of medications to sort through, and then had to figure out how to get herself back into her own life with no boss and no deadline waiting. Love her perspective on productive avoidance…where “unpacking” somehow turns into reorganizing your daughter’s entire closet before you’ve put a single thing away.
  

• I don’t want to own less, I want to want less
  Evelyn moved to France for grad school with two suitcases and a cat carrier, set up a 400-square-foot studio apartment, and had French classmates tell her she had a lot of stuff. I LOVE how minimalism taught her to resist buying things…it didn’t teach her to stop wanting them, and there’s a shift that came from immersion in a culture where shopping wasn’t the default answer to a Sunday afternoon. Our desires might be more environmental/societal than personal.

Share

THE VESSELS

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

• “Ask for what you need” is a terrible social system
  Spencer grew up in Romania learning an elaborate unspoken ritual around food and resources…always say no when offered something, so the host knows you’re not desperate, and the host always insists, so you know there’s actually enough, and nobody has to name the poverty out loud. I’ve been thinking through every time I walk into a social space and just extracted from it without replenishing it. “Everyone around me is starved for kindness, empathy, and socialization. But no one knows how to share.”

• Why I Don’t Use Trigger Warnings
  Natasha is a beautifully complex woman with complex PTSD & autism who grew up in the South and has had fireworks mistake themselves for gunshots in her body. She also doesn’t believe in trigger warnings, and her reasoning is careful and personal: Not an argument against care, but against outsourcing the concept of safety to a writer who can’t actually know what lives in your body. I really loved this piece.

• Constellations of Meaning
  I came to BBT through her book An Altar in the World, which I’ve been listening to on my way through my own long, fumbling reconciliation with the faith I was raised in and the wider, stranger spiritual life I’ve found since. This piece is a natural extension of that. The stars in any constellation are not actually neighbors…they only appear that way from where we’re standing on earth…and what we see up there is always a portrait of what we value and fear down here.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• Imagine being the hottest God
  Aphrodite was born from sea foam and a severed sky penis, which is genuinely the most chaotic origin story in recorded mythology, and Dylan tells it in a way that made me spit out my coffee when I read it this past week. The whole arc is there: the net Hephaestus built to catch his cheating wife, Ares hiding under the bed when he almost gets caught, the golden apple that started a ten-year war. Greek mythology is the reality tv I’m here for.

• I wrote a book. A family member threatened to sue.
  Alix found out over the summer that a family member wanted to call a family meeting about the best course of legal action against her memoir. That family member had not read her book. A truly funny and honest read if you’ve ever thought about writing anything true alongside someone else’s version of the truth. I think about this all the time when I dive into my life and past lives…and it’s bitten me in the butt at times, too. “I don’t buy into the ‘no regrets’ philosophy. Regret is a byproduct of a life well lived.”

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THE NAPKIN

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

• Somebody That I Used to Know
  The whole essay unspools…what parental estrangement actually looks like from inside, what her own years of trying to love her mother through her alcoholism cost her, what it means to insist the door is open while doing everything that keeps it closed. It’s long, it gets into the weeds of politics and faith and mother wounds, and i couldn’t stop reading.

• I asked my friends about the worst thing their mothers ever said to them
  Daniel asked his friends to share the worst thing their mother ever said and also, in the interest of fairness, the nicest thing she ever did. This list is what happens when you ask real people about their real mothers: devastating things paired with things so tender they undo the damage a little, but not completely.“A door has closed in my heart to you that will never be reopened.”...that was said to a first-grader. Totally unhinged.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Moments
  My Sunday piececame out of a hard stretch where I was going through the motions while holding my breath. The biopsy results (benign!), Millie starting middle school, my full-body exhaustion of “too much” all at once. I sat down to write and what came out wasn't a structured essay, it was a list of the moments that pulled me out of my hole…the Trader Joe's employees lined up on both sides of the doors at the grand reopening (I know how that sounds, I don't care), Millie walking out on day two next to a new friend, Sgt. Sushi curled like a cinnabun at my feet before sunrise, getting caught by Yas on the couch while he loved me quietly.
  
  And under all of it, an answer to my mom, who texts me scripture when she's worried about my spiritual standing. She's been worried for a while…same God, I told her…much bigger table.♥

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. ♥

Psalm 147:3 last week…He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. And then, a little longer one from Matthew, something about coming to God heavy laden and finding rest for your soul, His yoke easy, His burden light. Followed by, in her own words…God is in control, Jess. I pray you find peace, strength and rest in Him.

I know exactly what she’s doing…she’s worried I’ve lost my spiritual standing. She’s been worried for a while now. She’s worried that somewhere between the divorce and the second marriage and the career pivot and the Substack where I say fuck more than a good church girl probably should, I’ve drifted from the foundation she and my dad built under me in our small Baptist church in South Carolina. She sends the verses and spiritual memes on Instagram the way other moms send soup when you’re sick. It’s love, wearing the only existentially-worried-for-your-soul language she has without trying to be too overwhelming for her already overwhelmed adult daughter.

I’ve not been successful yet in convincing her…no matter how many times I’ve tried…that I haven’t drifted from God. I feel like after the roller-coaster of a life I’ve lived so far, I understand spirituality through a different, expanded lens these days. I just don’t believe S/He ONLY shows up in the ways I was taught to look for them…in the “this way is the ONLY way” evangelical-Southern-Christian kind of way…in the family prosperity gospel kind of way…the one that believes faith is a spiritual slot machine. If only I can say the right prayers, believe and be obedient to the rules…if I remain faithful in all things, I WILL get all the desires of my heart. Years of infertility, breaking your leg on your birthday, breaking your back literally just standing still, getting shingles, experiencing a failed adoption, a marriage falling apart after 17+ years, cancer diagnoses, death of loved ones…and so much more…these are the things that knock you flat down on your knees as you plead and beg for help…they are the things that happen in life that disprove that prosperity gospel, they literally break the handle off that slot machine.

I don’t experience faith as this, not that…black/white…right/wrong kind of way as it was handed to me as a girl in a pew. But my foundation hasn’t moved an inch since I was small. The God I believe in is love. Loving people for who they are…with no division, life for the good of the whole instead of the individual. The point is and was always belonging, understanding, community, not division…not rules…not the discrimination men have layered onto those rules for centuries. The point is seeing each other as equals, as humans with the same ancient need to belong, to be seen, to be known.

I’ve been chasing that same thread through every single job or position I’ve ever held. As a graphic designer in the things I made, as a marketing guru writing copy that compels, as a track coach and a mentor to teenagers at Trinity who needed someone in their corner more than they needed someone to correct them. And now, on every line I’ve ever worked…North, Malka, Shmone, Hasalon…and every home and office kitchen since. My hope, wherever I go, is that I leave people with the sense that for one moment, the light in me saw the light in them. That they had a chair at my table and were fully known while they sat in it.

My faith didn’t shrink…it’s expanded past the walls it was born in.

I no longer profess to know what I’m actually “purposed” to do with my one life, or obsess to figure it out in some grand cosmic sense. What I know instead is that life is about the moments. Moments that may seem small, unglamorous, mundane even…moments that are completely unorchestrated and that grab me by the chin to remind me that the whole thing…well, it’s all worth it. This week, in the middle of what was truly one of the more overwhelming stretches I’ve had in a while, I had plenty of these moments…and maybe, they’re a whole sermon right there.

Moments like when my biopsy results hit my phone as a text and I never in my life logged into a portal faster. Benign…I read it twice and googled the exact phrasing to make sure the word meant what I thought it meant. And then…the breath I’d been holding for an entire week, the one that had me walking around half paralyzed since the procedure, finally left my body…all at once…through my mouth, my shoulders…everywhere I’d been clenching.

…like standing outside my local Trader Joe’s at 7:30am yesterday, waiting for it to reopen after a summer-long renovation. I know how small and borderline psychotic that sounds…but the employees lined up on both sides of the doors to greet everyone walking in…there was music, and true, unfiltered joy on people’s faces at getting their beloved, slightly ridiculous grocery store back…and you guys, it nearly had me in tears on the escalator ride down to the store.

…like my daughter’s face on the second day of middle school. Day one was pretty rocky…but day two, she walked out through those doors next to a new friend, and her whole face was lit up with the relief of a kid who now knows she’s going to be okay this year…my face and my insides beamed with joy for her.

…like wearing a literal mask, hand-in-hand with Yas as we went to experience Phantom of the Opera through Masquerade this week. The gift of a date night, courtesy of the unfortunate, non-refundable purchase by my friend Tiffany after her NYC trip got cancelled. The whole night was amazing…Millie got to stretch her independence, and my best friend Marie stopped by to check on her and my mom kept her company on Facetime. And…the show, experiential in design, we followed the actors around the 3-floors of sets and rooms as they sang their hearts out and put on an incredible performance. I was moved by the music, by the art of it all, and tears filled my eyes behind my phantom mask.

…like at 6am this week, before the sun was even up, sitting down to write my pages and I found Sgt. Sushi curled so tightly at my feet he looked like a cinnabun. Not a worry in his little body, so comfortable, so happy…and I gently put my head on his tiny body for a minute just to borrow some of that peace before I had to get moving. Then I got down on the floor and wrapped myself around Sgt. Peppers, the much fatter of my two cats…who is literally built like the trash cat he is. The one who believes, with his whole heart, that he is the size of a mouse. Those two cats do more good for my nervous system than most things I’ve paid good money for.

…like when I caught Yas staring at me and smiling while we worked side by side on the couch, his feet tucked under my leg…him deep in his AI builds and me buried in Freckled Fork admin. And when I smiled back at getting caught, he says “you know the rules”, and it makes me giggle in my typical, lovingly defiant way. I like catching him love me, I’ll never stop.

…like Facetiming my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, on their own separate days this week. Catching up on life, good health news, plans for the week…easy reminders of my roots, where I come from and who’s standing behind me.

…and like last night. 12+ hours on my feet, deep into appetizers and a birthday dinner for 15 of my client’s closest friends. The moment the guest of honor stopped her own party to raise a toast of gratitude for me and my cook, Rachel, and thank us for an extraordinary evening. And after, when Rachel told me it was the most enjoyable gig she’s ever worked, because of how calm and joyful I made the whole back of house feel while we were in it.

None of these moments were large or monumental…none of them were puppet-mastered by me or even mine to orchestrate…they just showed up, exactly when they needed to. It’s moments like these that have been pulling me out of the hole this week…the hole of exhaustion and imposter syndrome and my very Virgo need for tangible answers in a season that is offering me exactly zero of them.

I’ll be 43 in two weeks, and from my four decades on this planet, I’ve come to know that it’s never really about the fame…the money (even though I’d still love enough money to be debt free…please and thank you)…the success for the sake of success. The actual dang point of this life is…community…doing life together…joy…belonging…breaking bread…unconditional love. The point is showing up for each other when there’s a need, seeing each other clearly enough to be understood, and reaching across whatever line got drawn between us to love each other the way we also want to be loved. The point is knowing everybody carries their own pain of some kind, and by choosing togetherness anyway…we will always be better at carrying it with the help of those around us.

So mom, if you’re reading this…I haven’t gone anywhere. I promise you I haven’t strayed…I’ve just started finding God in a Trader Joe’s line…and in a cat curled at my feet…and especially in your sweet, encouraging text messages. Same God…much bigger table.

It’s these moments that are what life is actually about…they make it worth living…and they’re the moments that keep me moving forward, even on the weeks I feel completely untethered and unhinged like the last. Together…apparently…is the whole point, and so…I’ll keep setting the table. I hope you’ll join me.<3

This is going out at 8:30pm instead of 10am…I know.

Millie started middle school today…new school, new friends, new everything. I arranged breakfast coverage at work so I could take her. After the last few years of battling between my job as a chef and my first job as a mother, she has had her fair share of coming second to my work. But…not today…today I chose her. She needed me, I couldn’t let her down.

She was exhausted when I picked her up this afternoon. I think she had a pretty decent day but in her disappointment, no standout friends quite yet. She was still so anxious when she got home, stressed about making friends, about whether anyone would like her, about whether she would “ever” find her people. I wanted so badly to promise her it would all be fine immediately, that everyone would love her, because obviously they would, because she’s amazing…she’s extraordinary. But I know better…now at least…I can’t promise her those things…she needs to figure it out herself, on her own timeline, which obviously isn’t the one I want for her, I want to shield her from any hurt at all or any feelings of less than…but damn...watching your kiddo experience painful truths is part of this dang job.

The other piece of news: the lump in my bump is benign, baby! She’s just a regular ol’ lump, and for now, I guess she’s a part of me. I finally can breathe after a week of holding my breath and pretty much only existing in my own head and emotions. Exhale…

So that’s why I’ve been ass-backwards for the last week, and why this is going out at 8:30pm.

For today’s table, I went back to some older pieces from writers I love around the stack’a’verse. Good writing has no timeline…it’s just good. Pull up a chair <3

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• A Guide to Emotional Hygiene for Overthinkers
  Ayushi frames overthinking not as a character flaw but as a background hum, the one that runs underneath everything whether you’re at the grocery store or lying in the dark at 2am. Emotional hygiene as inner maintenance, boring and necessary as brushing your teeth. She offers real, concrete practices for interrupting the spiral. “Not every story your brain tells you is one you need to live inside.”

• the fear of vulnerability kills expression
  Gor writes about the things people carry on public transit that nobody sees: the message you typed at 2am and deleted sentence by sentence before morning, the feeling you never quite got around to saying out loud. Watching people who have gotten so good at making fine look believable that they’ve lost the thread back to what they actually feel. There’s something both sad and quietly recognizable about this one.

• Private Milestones
  The milestones nobody sends flowers for: the first time you say no without explaining yourself, the day you wear the red lipstick to the grocery store, the afternoon you go to the cafe alone and actually enjoy it. Sally makes the case for internal mileage over visible action, for honoring the things that only you know happened. What does it mean to give yourself credit for the things nobody claps for?

• The Magic of Foxes
  Love this piece of poetry…this one is about foxes: the Japanese kitsune as divine messengers and shapeshifters, the liminal magic of the creature that moves between worlds, and three original poems that are genuinely beautiful. Just a writer who found foxes and wrote about them and now I found her and I’m sharing with you…things arrive right on time.

THE UTENSILS

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

• In order to love who you are, you must not hate the experience that shaped you.
  Rosie writes about survival as something sacred and brave, even when the choices looked wrong from the outside. Every detour was a redirect…every wrong turn was you doing the best you could with what you had. “To heal, you must hurt; to love fully, you must break open.” It’s not about rewriting history or pretending it’s fine…maybe we stop treating our own story like evidence against us.

• following the threads to: you
  Selah traces the threads that run through your whole life regardless of what form they take: the thing you always circle back to, the urge you keep redirecting into something more practical. Self-forgiveness is the key that makes all of it legible. There’s something quietly radical about reading yourself as continuous rather than broken into before-and-after chapters. Maybe it’s time to stop cutting my own story into chapters and just write the whole dang book.

• Trust the Season You’re In
  Masami writes about Doshingaku, the Japanese framework that assigns each person their own seasonal rhythm rather than a universal one. Not everyone blooms in spring or harvests in fall, and our timing is not a failure to keep up. “A lotus does not look at a cherry blossom in April and think, I am late. It simply blooms when its own season arrives.” I read this and immediately thought of every time I’ve compared my pace to someone else’s and decided I was behind…the lotus doesn’t care…it’s time to be more like the lotus.

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THE VESSELS

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

• The Art of Being on Your Own
  Hasif writes about the kind of aloneness that isn’t…loneliness…it’s actually the practice of sitting across from yourself with no performance required, no role to fill, no one to accommodate. “Staying. With yourself. Through the ache. Through the doubt.” Being genuinely present with yourself without the usual exits (the distraction, the numbing, the busyness), just the company of your own quiet…I need this.

• the part of you that was forced to grow up too fast is resisting more responsibility.
  Yas (again this week…truly love her stuff) wrote about the session where her therapist showed her that her resistance wasn’t laziness or fear, it was a part of her that had already carried too much too young and was simply refusing to do it again. The parentified child who became the responsible adult who now just wants to collapse and be held for once. Holy shit…I felt this one…so fully today.

• Collapse Awareness
  Jess watched her jersey cow Helen stretch in the Carolina heat (also HOLLA to my fellow SC girl!) and realized she’s been bracing for a collapse. Not necessarily a single moment, but more of a slow erosion, small and accumulative, and the bracing and holding breath is exhausting (for reals!). Learning to live with an open hand instead of a clenched one…“Practicing presence and peace while the world is like shifting sand.” There is something very real about the tiredness that comes from years of bracing for a thing that doesn’t quite arrive in one clean blow.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• They Priced Us Out of 3rd Spaces. Then Monetized the Loneliness.
  THIS ONE…seriously, y’all…my instagram is RIFE with posts of all these pay-to-play community opportunties…Wyn traces the dismantling of the free and low-cost third spaces that used to hold communities together: libraries, diners, barbershops, rec centers. Loneliness is getting packaged and sold back to us as friendship apps, curated dinners, membership clubs. “Somebody has to become the gatherer again.” Gather your people however you can, feed them, show up.

• Surrendering to Being Known
  Celina names the five strategies people use to keep from being fully seen (The Bear, The Turtle, The Flood, The Peacock, The Slow Burn) and then offers a sixth: The Lighthouse. Stay lit, let people find their way toward you. She pulls Michelle Obama: “Surrendering to being known isn’t giving up, it’s coming home.” Is there someone you’ve been quietly pulling away from?

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THE NAPKIN

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

• Women Leaving...
  About women who leave: relationships, jobs, identities, ways of being they were told to stay in. Grief and regret carefully separated, because you can grieve a thing you needed to leave…and you can miss what it was without wishing you were still in it. She pulls bell hooks: “Knowing when to quit is linked to knowing one’s value.” and “Staying longer does not always mean you were more committed.”

• Unlikeable
  Andrea wrote a TV pilot about divorce while going through her own. Male executives told her the female lead was “unlikeable,” and she spent weeks trying to fix Rosie: softer, more sympathetic, easier to root for before she’d done anything to earn the rooting. She eventually realized she was rewriting herself. “Women are still often asked to prove they’re good before we let them be interesting.” Be Rosie, skip the audition.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Omakase
  My piece from this past weekend, written on the fly…the weekend after my biopsy…when I couldn’t get a single word out until five minutes before I hit send. The whole thing runs on one image…me showing up to the restaurant of my own life clutching a laminated menu I wrote at home, genuinely offended when the chef does something different. The crick in my neck as the physical proof of white-knuckling a life that has zero interest in following my itinerary. And then the omakase…the best meals I’ve ever had were the ones I never ordered in the first place…I wrote this piece the morning of…unedited and totally unhinged, but might be one of my most real writing to-date.

• Some scars still speak...
  Last week I said I was going to write poems with the September prompts…and you know what…I did it! The poem is made of tired: “brittled by burden / strained by stress / dented by demands / ached by abandon / wrecked by worry / measured by mediocrity / scarred by sacrifice.” And then the turn: “some scars / still speak / and this time / their words are / tired.” Inspired by Saltwater and Sage’s September prompt and everything this month has already cost me. The words needed somewhere to go.♥

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.

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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. ♥

tired
bone tired

bones
tired by transition
brittled by burden
strained by stress
dented by demands
ached by abandon
wrecked by worry
measured by mediocrity
scarred by sacrifice

some scars
still speak

and this time
their words
are

tired

September is my new year…my real one, the one that actually means something to me more than any January ever did. Every year, I come barreling into my birthday month like a woman on a mission…armed full with all the intentions for reflection, inspiration, motivation to map out all of my goals in a fresh, new notebook with pretty ink, even a nice, scrapped-out vision board for the woman I’m about to become on my next trip around the sun. I plan coffees, dinners, self-care massages, facials, etc., and the plans for the most psychotically-Virgo-curated month where I expect to feel ALL THE THINGS by the 22nd. Here I go, every year, showing up to my own birthday with a clipboard, and a master plan choked full of expectations and a groundswell of preemptive disappointment bubbling under the surface for any that dare to be unmet.

And this year, well…it’s only 6 days into the month, but the kitchen’s already sent out something completely different from what I ordered.

Instead of inspired, I’ve been bone-tired…literally exhausted and overwhelmed that not even a nap would make a dent to remedy. I’ve had a crick in the left side of my neck since the Catskills pop-up that will NOT release, no matter how many people I pay to dig their elbows into it or the multiple attempts by my husband to massage it away. I’m foggy…I’m dragging…I literally can’t hold a single reflective thought long enough before I’m face-down asleep. I woke up this morning, and instead of putting on my normal final touches to my weekly Sunday piece, I had not written a single word before 5 minutes ago. I usually get inspired throughout the week prior, Wispr-flow my notes, and sit down to write on Friday and Saturday in preparation to hit ‘send’ on Sunday morning. I woke up today, and the exhaustion had taken over my brain, filling it with even more cloudiness, and I have sat here, vacillating between wanting to put something out there and up there in the name of consistency and discipline…versus the truth of it all being that I’m too damn tired and want to just crawl in a hole and post nothing this week. And then, just to really round out the most lame birthday tasting menu yet, I spent this past Thursday getting a biopsy I sure as hell did not order, on a body that feels more like a deceitful stranger than she’s ever had.

So yeah…not exactly the birthday month I had plated in my head.

I was thinking about all of this today and laughed because this is nothing new…I pull this same freakin’ move every single year. I walk into the restaurant of my own life, sit down with all the confidence I can muster, and hand the kitchen a menu I already wrote at home. This is what I’ll be having…inspiration, medium-rare…a generous side of transformation and motivation, a side plate of renewal and prosperity…but please, for the love…make it beautiful, make it meaningful, and dear jeebus, make sure it arrives on time, thanks, Chef.

And then…here I am…genuinely offended as the proverbial server strolls back over and announces…yeah, the chef’s doing her own thing tonight.

I am a planner down to the marrow in my 42-ish-year-old bones. I’m joyful and filled with hope at my core, always have been…but my particular brand of hope doesn’t just wait for good things to happen. These bones are wrapped with ligaments of impatience and tendons of stubbornness that refuse to just allow hope to wait for the good thing to happen; she will engineer it to ensure success, don’t you worry. From my very first paycheck at 16 years old, I’ve seen a path forward, of my own making, and mustered the gumption and the strong will to build the desired conditions and puppet-master my way to the exact feeling and circumstances I’ve decided I’m owed…by a certain date.

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On one hand, I think this is probably one of my greatest super-powers…but as we all know, our greatest strengths can also be…well, the things that take us out as well. This is the superpower I tapped into when I wanted to become a chef. It’s the power that says, without flinching…give me 10 people and a 7pm reservation, and I will orchestrate their entire night down to the last bite…the temperature of the room, the order the plates land, the precise moment someone’s shoulders finally drop, and they exhale and go Oh, I can relax here. I’m pretty dang good at building an experience that lands exactly where I want it to.

That power becomes a weakness when the puppet strings get too tight, too rigid, and usually when I try to do this orchestrating too much, to myself. I’m realizing more and more that my own life is the one kitchen I don’t actually get to run.

Every September I write the menu for the woman I’m going to be…the woman I really want to be. She’s rested, radiant, joyful, overflowing with ideas. This year is no different…I can see her…43 and finally, gloriously arriving successfully at a life where she’s rewarded…financially, professionally, and personally for all the years of hard work and sacrifice. I’ve curated and planned the vision, wound it up so tightly, gripping it so hard that my body seizes up around it all.

That crick in my neck I mentioned? Four different people have tried to release it now. A chiropractor, two massages, and some lymphatic drainage situation where a lovely woman basically tried to squeegee the sadness and exhaustion out of my lymph nodes. NOTHING has helped… nothing’s even come close to touching it. I’m starting to realize that this crick may have nothing to do with my muscles and everything to do with how hard I’ve been holding on...maybe this is the theoretical becoming the physical…maybe this is what it feels like, in the actual body, to white-knuckle a life that has zero interest in following the itinerary I so carefully wrote for it.

I read something this week that I linked in Thursday’s Setting the Table, my weekly curation of pieces from around the ‘stack-a-verse that moved me in some way…A writer named Andrea was sitting at breakfast, wrung out after a long weekend, and her friend point-blank…are you happy? That one question sent her tumbling through years of wondering whether happiness was even the right thing to be chasing. It had the same effect on me as I read through her piece and simultaneously sifted through my own mess…the suffering that comes from demanding life to look exactly like the picture in our heads…“like showing up to a restaurant with your own menu.”

It me…literally, my own worst nightmare as a Chef…I am that weird-ass, neurotic diner that marches into the restaurant of her own life, clutching a laminated menu I pre-wrote at my own kitchen table, flat-out refusing to even consider what the kitchen is actually cooking up for me that night.

The wildest part…is that of all people, I should know better. I’m the one in the actual kitchen…and I know the menu is a living thing, ripe with flexibility. It has to be because the tomatoes come in and they’re not what you pictured, so you have to scrap that dish at 4pm and build a new one…or the fish guy shows up with something more beautiful than what you ordered, and you’d be a fool not to pivot. The whole art of what we do in the kitchen is the ability to respond to what’s actually in front of us, right now, on the table. It’s NOT about what I scribbled down last Tuesday. Grace and flexibility and serendipity get extended to every single ingredient that arrives…I just never…for even a moment…allow them to extend to my own life.

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Even in my exhausted mind…in the early morning hours when I’m writing my pages (shoutout to The Artist’s Way!) I’m realizing that I’ve been confusing happiness and contentment. I don’t think I’ve ever truly understood either, and I think I’ve been conflating them for years. Happiness, the way I’ve always chased it, is conditional…the only way I can achieve happiness is to get exactly what I ordered, the month HAS to unfold the way I’ve designed it, the feelings have to clock in at the exact time I’ve arranged for them. Contentment is quieter, and so much harder. It’s the one my puppet-mastery may actually be keeping me tethered the furthest from…it’s the one where I could actually be fed…REALLY well…by a kitchen I don’t control. It probably looks like me, sitting down with whatever actually arrives and finding that it’s all okay, different or maybe even better than what I could’ve come up with…nourished, even, by the thing I never would’ve picked for myself.

I think all of this realization happened on the page…on the screen…on the literal table, this past Thursday.

The biopsy. The moment where I’m sitting there, shirtless with my right arm up above my head as the doctor harpoons the unknown mass in my chest…I certainly didn’t order it and most definitely didn’t have that little exercise on my Birthday month bingo card. The procedure was easy enough…but the waiting…the next 3-10 days feel like a lifetime of roller-coastering between the heightened inclines of “it’s just nothing” and the stomach-dropping dips of “it’s the c-word”...it’s, of course, doing a number on this already running-on-fumes shell of a woman.

There’s nothing quite like a doctor’s table to remind you exactly how little of the menu you actually control. I remember this same feeling of helplessness and realizing that my puppet strings mean nothing in the face of certain physical realities…Oh, I don’t know…ones like infertility…divorce…or literally breaking your leg on your actual birthday, thus putting a temporary halt to your kitchen dreams…etc., etc. You can plan the menus, set the intentions, and pray and manifest your face clean off…and yet, our bodies will still slide something across the pass that we never asked for and go…here, deal with this one. In this life, we don’t get to order certainty…it’s never once been on the menu. I just fall into the trap of pretending it is or was, over and over again until those hard plates of truth knock me square in the mouth.

My exhaustion and self-deprecation have reached new levels recently…so much so that all I can do is sit here…in it all. Actually sit, resisting the urge and the squirm to reach for my planner…there’s freedom in the forced sit. Because I know, in reality…the best meals in life…the few that are permanently etched in my brain…they are almost never the ones I actually ordered.

The most unforgettable dinners I’ve ever had are not the ones I planned or even picked…they were the serendipitous ones, where all my plans fell through, where the reins were handed over, and the tasting menu from the kitchen was exactly what I needed. It’s almost always the omakase…the chef’s choice. It’s the meal where I walked in with no plan at all and let someone who actually knew what they were doing take care of me…the magic is in the surrender.

Maybe that’s what this whole cluster of a year has been trying to teach me…at 43…that the entire point of this exhausted, cricked-up, gloriously un-plannable month is that it’s time for me to finally set down my precious laminated menu and let the “kitchen” actually cook? To be, for once in my Virgo life, the one who gets taken care of instead of the one white-knuckling the pass until she drops?

I don’t know if I’m even capable of truly believing that or trusting it enough to even remotely loosen my grip on the puppet strings of my life…I’m probably writing this as we speak to even try to convince myself that putting down the clipboard is necessary. At this point, it feels almost physically impossible for me…for my personality and my nervous system…my career…my family…my future. That grip? It’s the thing that’s kept me safe…it’s kept me fed…it’s kept everybody around me fed…it’s what got me to where I am today. Asking me to loosen it is asking a whole hell of a lot.

And yet…my neck fucking hurts. I’m tired in a way I’ve never quite felt, in a hole of overwhelm that feels too high to climb out of…where no amount of pushing and pivoting and hustling has managed to fix. Maybe…just maybe…that crick is trying to say the thing my calendar refuses to hear…that this year is not going to be the one I planned or hoped for…and by trying to force it into submission is only going to cost me more than I can afford to give.

I named this whole little corner of the internet The Table Between. The table between the life I had and the life I want…the table between the people that raised me and the people I want to be around, the ones who make life better and exciting…the table between the complexities and contradictions of life…the table between who I was and who I’m becoming. And this year, I’m realizing the invitation isn’t for me to do more, be more, or try harder. I think…the invitation is finally to sit the fuck down…to pull my own dang chair up to that table, and let somebody else carry the food out for once. Maybe it’s time for me to stop cooking the entire thing by myself, refusing any help along the way, and collapsing in the walk-in before I ever taste a single bite.

Omakase…chef’s choice…apparently it’s my year.

Whether I ordered it or not. <3

It’s finally September! I freakin’ love this time of year and the turning of the seasons…and well, most importantly, it’s my birthday month.

If you’ve known me for more than two minutes, you know how I am about this month. I treat my birthday as my new year, so I feel everything everyone else feels at the end of December: equal parts reflection, letting go, anxiety about what’s coming, release of the old ways that don’t work anymore, and genuine excitement to dig deeper for the new things, the better things, to fill up my mind space and body time with.

This year, though? Virgo season started a few weeks ago and instead of the usual energized, inspired, LFG-mentality, I have felt SO FREAKING TIRED. Literally. I got a crick in the left side of my neck the weekend of the Catskills pop-up and that thing has not released. I’ve gone to the chiropractor, I’ve gotten massages, I even did a lymphatic drainage massage this week to try to evict the beast…but you guys…she’s NOT budging. Which, if I’m being honest, it’s is a very real and very physical expression of the tension just in my neck but that I feel in every single area of my life right now. My mind is too exhausted to be reflective…I can’t EVEN with setting goals or doing any forward-facing thinking without falling asleep mid-thought.

I’m trying to get out of this funk. Last night I went to this workshop in Soho called the Analog Antidote: a small group, maybe six of us in the room, doing somatic movement and breathwork, a meditation, and then a watercolor exercise where we wrote down everything our inner critic was saying. Then we circled the words that actually felt okay or good, and we painted florals over all the rest…it was a really beautiful and freeing exercise. Listing out all the things my inner critic says out loud on paper? You guys, that hoe is a C-U-Next-Tuesday…Regina George level…and, I know she’s trying to protect me from getting hurt…but DAMN.

This week in therapy, I was describing this epic-level exhaustion and I realized something: I need to let go of the ultra-high expectations I put on myself (and others) to “make my birthday special.” Every year I pile on expectations to make each birthday so meaningful, so productive, so inspiring, so freeing…and then I spend the whole month puppet-mastering my way, full-grip status, to a carefree and freeing birthday. Ironic, right?

Oh yeah…and I also have to go for a boobie biopsy today.

I’ve only told about three people in my family and friend circle (and now the ‘stack-a-verse!) I’m doing what I always do: positive’ing the shit out of it. Nothing to worry about until there is…they just want to rule out anything serious…tt’s probably fine.

But in the back of my head…she’s there. The small little girl who watched her Aunt Debbie die from breast cancer when she was only 40. That little me (counting down until she turns 43 in a couple weeks) is scared shitless, feeling as if she’s on borrowed time, and just needs someone to hold her and tell her it’s okay to be scared. She KNOWS cancer doesn’t discriminate…and if for some reason this “routine” thing turns into a diagnosis of whatever, I hope it will be okay. I will find ways to be okay…and we will deal with it…together.

I did NOT have boobie biopsy on my September birthday bingo card…but here we are. So with that truth bomb, let’s go set the damn table. These are the things distracting me and keeping me above water today…pull up a chair, friends.

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The Thrift Store Is a Portal
  Alexa started the year craving joy after grief and found it in the bins and racks of secondhand stores in Paris, solo Saturdays with the company of every version of herself she’d ever been: the 10-year-old who didn’t know if she wanted to be Hilary Duff or date her, the glitter-covered 16-year-old, the 18-year-old in a sundress. She deconstructs her twenties-era rejection of all of it (a middle finger to the male gaze) and then what happened when the deconstruction stopped sparking joy. Hitting thrift stores this weekend with Millie and my own inner child, hand-in-hand.

• Dear Substack, You’re Kind of the Worst
  Jenny transferred her 16-year Wordpress blog to Substack and walked into Notes expecting a platform and found what is essentially Twitter with a writerly costume on. I resonated SO hard with this…She catalogues the three recurring note-types she can’t escape: the sycophantic opener (1.5k likes, 800 new subscribers), the “show me your people” post (nobody’s REALLY looking at the other respondents, everyone’s fishing), and the spin-the-negative-into-positive note (which self-deprecates about having 12 subscribers). She puts into words the ick I’ve been feeling lately about Substack but refusing to admit, I came here to escape the exact ick I felt on Instagram and Facebook. (And I still genuinely do not understand Notes.)
  
  THIS AND…Substack! Who’s a girl gotta sleep with around here to get a nice solid, even 200 subscribers? I’m irrationally bothered by the odd number I’m stuck at…is that negative-spun-into-a-positive enough?
  

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• Everything Eventually Becomes a Crab
  Carcinisation is the biological tendency for unrelated species to independently evolve into crabs, because the shape keeps proving itself under pressure. Annie applies this to social media (put enough creators into the same attention economy and they all start to look alike): the fitness influencer becomes a fitness-channel growth coach, the relationship writer teaches other people how to become relationship writers, the beautiful Substack becomes a place for Substack growth tips. “If we’re all teaching each other how to be successful writers, then who’s doing the writing?” She argues we can resist it, that we are writers first and writers don’t become crabs. This is what I’ve been watching happen in my own feeds lately. Let’s resist!!! Let’s WRITE.

THE UTENSILS

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

• Creativity Is Not Healing
  Maryanne draws a sharp line between two words we reach for interchangeably: healing and reclamation. Healing suggests something was broken…and reclamation names a prior wrong: something was taken. She moves through bell hooks, Maggie Nelson, Audre Lorde, and her own experience picking up a paintbrush in the middle of a perimenopausal storm, and argues that returning to creative practice isn’t therapy, it’s retrieval. “Losing touch with your creative capacity is not a personal failing or a consequence of being busy. It is what subjugation looks like when it has done its work properly.” I picked up The Artist’s Way this week, the one I bought years ago and never actually read. I’m reading it now…reclamation, not healing.

• Mutually Beneficial
  At the North Carolina Arboretum, Nedra saw a sign about butterflies: they get nectar from plants, plants get pollen carried from one to the next. A mutually beneficial relationship, the sign said. And she started wondering how much of that exists in her own relationships. She asks the uncomfortable questions: when did you last invite them somewhere? Call them without being prompted? Cook dinner instead of waiting? “We do want to have some sort of reciprocity in our relationships.” I think about this all the time with friends and family, asking myself some uncomfortable questions this week.

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THE VESSELS

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

• What Is Left Is Home
  Selah spent a week back in the Pacific Northwest hometown she’d left after years marked by a church-cult, fractured relationships, and people who had effectively disowned her. Walking into the state fair, she expected her body to tighten the way it always had in this place. Instead she found herself hugging the people she’d needed to stop hating, looking into their eyes, and seeing just…people. “Perhaps they aren’t required to be villains in my story any longer.” No dramatic breakthrough, no closure scene…just the quiet realization that what’s left, once the whole story burns away, feels like it was always there. My own childhood villains have been knocking around in my head this year…maybe they don’t need that title anymore either.

• The Disappearing Act
  Sahar is a therapist who also does the disappearing act, retreating into invisibility when the overwhelm hits a certain level. She traces it from 17, through her mom’s cancer diagnosis at 21, through motherhood and a career built around helping others, into this year: The Great Disappearance of 2026. What finally pulled her back wasn’t an epiphany…it was the people who kept calling…the ones who held the duality she couldn’t hold herself…that she wasn’t okay AND that the disappearance was hard to receive. “I know that I have disappointed people I love deeply.” Have I, too, been disappearing this year? I have.

• The Life You Didn’t Order
  Andrea sat at breakfast after an exhausting weekend and looked at her friend and asked, out of nowhere: “Are you happy?” And that question sent her spiraling through six years of thinking about what happiness actually is, and whether it’s the right goal at all. She makes the case for contentment over happiness…and the particular suffering that comes from insisting life conform to the picture you had for it, “like showing up to a restaurant with your own menu.” Maybe it’s time to surrender the picture and let what’s waiting come through. Yes yes yes to every word of this.

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• The Luxury of Not Telling Everyone Everything
  Harriet has been thinking about Dolly since she died, specifically about Carl Dean, who mowed the lawn while Dolly became one of the most recognizable women on earth and wanted nothing to do with any of it. Almost 60 years of marriage that nobody got full access to. The relationship that stayed private on purpose. “Privacy isn’t secrecy. Secrecy says, I’m hiding this from you. Privacy says: You don’t need access to this for it to be real.” A gentle, sturdy essay about keeping something for yourself: a dream, a person, a night so good the internet doesn’t get to live it with you. I published my closet piece last week, and there were lines in it about memories and dresses from my single-dating-years, and Yas was hurt, not by what I said but by how I said it. Then this article appeared from the universe like a wink…maybe not every feeling I have needs to be for public consumption. That doesn’t make me fake or a liar. It just means some things stay private…and that’s okay.

• On Sobbing Over a Tomato Salad
  Richard walked into Heirloom Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District and felt immediately, profoundly at home: the simple prix fixe, the guys in the open kitchen, the late-summer menu of tomato and corn and local fish. It was the restaurant he’d spent his twenties working in and loved and had to leave to do something more urgent during the AIDS crisis. Sitting at that bar with his Maine Root beer, he started sobbing. “One might have thought I had stumbled across an old lover for whom I was still carrying a torch, and I saw her out with her much more attractive and well-off new boyfriend. That is exactly how it felt.” Grief for a life you lived fully and had to walk away from anyway. I met Richard at the Substack event last week when he read his other work. He is a delight, and so is this piece.

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THE NAPKIN

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

• When Abandonment Moves Within Us
  Lyna writes about the fear of abandonment as a two-part thing: there’s being left, and then there’s what being left seems to say about you, that you are unlovable, not good enough to be kept. She traces how that external event becomes an internal conviction, slowly, silently, until twenty years later it looks like needing constant reassurance, reading too much into distance, tolerating too much because at least they haven’t left. “In trying so hard to avoid another abandonment, we begin to abandon ourselves.” I’ve had this one on repeat. It’s not a fear of being alone, it’s a fear of being unlovable, of being abandoned, of being left…it’s what I’ve been carrying since I was little.

• Is It Your Trauma, or Do You Just Fucking Hate What’s Happening?
  Yas writes for survivors of abuse who have become so good at self-examination that they’ve started pathologizing their own limits. You feel tense in a connection and immediately ask what’s wrong with you, instead of asking whether the connection itself is wrong. She draws the line: “just because we feel activated doesn’t mean it’s because of our trauma specifically; it can just be behaviors or situations we do not want to tolerate anymore. And we shouldn’t have to.” I have gratitude for all the trauma work I’ve been through this past year, AND yet, I don’t want to be ruled by it.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn
  Jo…relieved to let August go, the uncertainty and not-quite-settled feeling the month carried. Grateful for autumn's exhale: the first coolness in the morning air, candles lit earlier, the world given permission to slow down. "Autumn asks for nothing. It simply arrives, softens the light, cools the air, and reminds us that change can be beautiful too." She's serving up 20 September poetry prompts that I am absolutely going to join in on.

• The Statement Piece

  Last Friday, after a full week of work and after-work events and zero rest, I ended up on my bedroom floor with my entire closet and every drawer emptied onto the bed. Birthday month prep, but also an accounting. If you’ve lived a few lives, your closet is a personal archive, a museum, a time capsule where every hanger holds a different version of you: the wife clothes, the marketing-director-silently-drowning-in-infertility clothes, the workout-clothes-mom survival strategy, and eventually the liberation clothes, the strappy little things I bought when I was newly free and figuring out exactly how much of myself I wanted to show the world.

  
  “There’s a difference between dressing like you’re free and being so free you no longer have to announce it or prove it.” Three hours and two full donation bags later, what’s hanging in a closet that finally has some breathing room is just...me. The me turning 43 in a couple weeks.♥

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. ♥

It’s officially my birthday month tomorrow, but we are already well into Virgo season and on the heels of the lunar eclipse last week, my insides have been as chaotic as my outsides. I turn 43 on the 22nd, and I’m taking full advantage of what this season means to me each year…it’s my NEW YEAR! So, beyond my closet, my to-do lists and my birthday preparations (which I take VERY seriously), I also take this time to take inventory…of my life, of my whole self. September has always been my real new year, more than January ever is supposed to be…sure, I guess January is for resolutions, but September is for reckoning.

Our closets…if you’ve lived a few lives like I have…are personal archives…museums…time capsules where every hanger holds a different version of you. Every era you survived is hanging right there in cotton and denim and that one silk thing you can’t believe you had the lady balls to even buy in the first place. You want to know who someone used to be? Don’t read their journals, open their closet.

So there I was, pulling it all out to take inventory and finally do a major purge. Millie’s away at camp, which is maybe the only reason this was able to happen at all…I’ve got a quiet apartment, Yas is working away in his office and no one flopping on the bed in the middle of my piles, no eleven-year-old holding something up and asking why I ever wore it or calling it sus. She’s at the age now where she’s pressing on the edges of her own style, testing modesty and individuality and how much of herself she’s allowed to show the world. I kept thinking about her while I did this, even with her gone. So much of what’s in my piles, I didn’t actually choose for myself…I chose it for who I thought I was supposed to be at the time.

Let me back up.

I got married the first time at 22…fresh out of college, I had zero clue who I was and even less of a clue what my style was, because I didn’t have one yet. My first job out of college was as a graphic designer at a wine and liquor company’s printshop, so I dressed the part…khakis, work trousers, sensible blouses, the uniform of a girl trying to look employable and grown and adult. I was playing a character called Professional Adult Woman…and yes, I looked like a small child trying to wear my mom’s clothes.

The only thing I knew, even then, even with no style to speak of, was this…I loved the juxtaposition of vintage and modern…I loved artistic patterns, pops of color, a statement piece that walked into the room before I did. That was the one true thing that would remain throughout every version of myself, and just like any good compliant girl, I kept burying it.

Then came the “wife clothes”...the modest-Christian-woman clothes…the dressing-like-a-married-woman clothes, where you’re quietly styling yourself to look like someone’s respectable other half. Then a few years later, the marketing-director clothes, back when I was climbing the professional ladder, and also silently drowning in infertility at the same time, questioning absolutely everything about myself, my marriage and my life. I signed up for Stitch Fix in that era…let a stranger mail me clothes to try, because I trusted her instincts more than my own. And sure, they nudged me out of my comfort zone a little, but mostly I was still dressing safe…comfortable…working-girl-holding-it-together vibes.

Then we adopted Amelia, and I leaned ALL THE WAY into workout-clothes-mom. Listen…running after a toddler will do that to you…I needed to get low, crawl on the floor, climb whatever she climbed, chase that little spitfire across a playground. Leggings and sneakers weren’t a style choice, they were a survival strategy…and I still snuck in a statement piece when I could, still reached for the colorful, big earrings, but I was still…SO confused about who I was underneath all of it.

The only time the real Jess broke through was in New York.

I used to fly up to visit Marie, back when the city and I were still in our courting phase, and every single time I got off that train I felt my style unclench. In New York I could be edgy…I could be sexy, even…creative, artistic, a little dangerous. This was my shot to wear pieces that would’ve gotten me a look in Charlotte, in the version of me I was down there…but, the city gave me permission I wasn’t ready to give myself yet. I knew in my bones…if I ever had the chance to finally live in NYC, that version of myself would FINALLY be unleashed.

And then we did…we finally moved here…BUT, it was March 2020. Anybody remember what was going on in March 2020?!

The only thing I was unleashing was my various face mask couture. I was in quarantine, bound to my apartment, and about twenty pounds heavier in a body that felt completely foreign to me. I was stressed out of my mind, scared that I made a terrible mistake moving our entire lives because I wanted to become a chef, in a marriage that didn’t quite fit anymore, and we were doing everything we could to try to force it to.

I was lost, and my clothes showed it…everything I put on was a way to mask…mask the weight, mask the sadness, mask the fact that I was profoundly unhappy and couldn’t find the words to say so. Turns out…you can hide A LOT inside an oversized everything.

Around that time, that’s when I finally got a job at a restaurant and started to become a chef…and I started climbing. Real, actual climbing this time, not just toddler-chasing or scaling that professional ladder. The workout gear came back but it meant something different now…it meant strength, it meant hours on my feet doing work that felt like it was really mine, and mine alone. The weight eventually came off, too, walking miles daily throughout the city will do that to you. Slowly, in the mirror, I started to see her again…me…the one who’d been in there the whole time…the one who always liked those bold looks, those statement pieces.

And then I made the decision to separate, to divorce…to end seventeen years.

That kind of severance…the kind where your whole life splits open…no part of your world is safe…least of all, your closet. I moved into my own apartment, alone, for the first time in my entire life. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have anyone to answer to, anyone to run an outfit by, anyone whose opinion I’d absorbed so deeply I mistook it for my own. I was just me, and then every other week, Amelia, too. That emptiness, which should have been terrifying, was actually the most freeing thing I’ve ever felt.

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And I started to dress like it, too.

I played with texture, I showed more skin…I mean…there was, if I’m honest, a LOT more cleavage happening in those days. Crop tops, wide-leg pants, colors and patterns and pieces that made noise. For the first time in 40 years, I felt like me…the Jess who started dating, confident in her own body and her own skin, finally, after four decades of borrowing everyone else’s idea of who she should be or what she should look like.

That was the era stacked on my bed, in front of me the other day. I realized, in that moment, paralyzed by the piles, those were the clothes hardest to release.

Not the wife-clothes, or the mom-clothes…those went in the bag without a fight. Not the trad-mom pieces that made me feel like I was dressing a sixty-year-old in disguise. To all of those, good riddance and sayonara, bitches. The hardest ones to part ways with were the rebellion clothes, the little strappy things I bought when I was newly free and figuring out exactly how much of myself I wanted to show the world. Those were the clothes that represented my liberation…they were the costume of my great escape.

So I packed them up and sent them away to a new home, but you know what? I didn’t get rid of it all…I kept the sexy, she stays. I’m not releasing the woman, I’m just releasing the proving. There’s a difference between dressing like you’re free and being so free you no longer have to announce it or prove it.

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As I sat on my floor, taking stock of all I’ve experienced…all I grieved…all I’ve been through in my almost-43 years, I realized that’s where I actually am now. I’m in my second marriage, with a partner who has never once made me feel invisible, never with an opinion or judgement about what I “should” be wearing (except for that pair of black pants he said I looked like a server in, those I parted ways with earlier on…because honestly, they were a projection of someone I was trying to look like and not who I actually was…so he was right…don’t tell him I said that:). Nobody in this house tries to style me into a role. It’s changed what or who the clothes are for…when you’re not escaping anymore, you don’t have to dress like you’re escaping. When you’re not fighting for your freedom, you can stop wearing the uniform of the fight…you can actually get dressed for your actual life now.

Which brings me back to my girl Millie…thinking about her as we’re only a couple weeks away from a big transition for her…entering middle school.

She’s been watching me for years now…watching how I decide what to keep and what to say goodbye to. I want to model something for her that I didn’t understand until I was well into my forties…something I wish the eleven, twenty-two, or even thirty-year-old me would’ve known then. I want her to find her own style without contorting it around anyone else’s comfort. I want to be even a little feminist about it all, letting her wear what she wants. I want to also give her the wisdom gained after four decades of learning the hard way…that the short shorts that hug every inch of you, the ones that make you walk funny and chafe your thighs raw…those aren’t actually about freedom or individuality…they can’t possibly be:) Who are you performing that discomfort for? Comfort is allowed to be the point…and so is joy. I want her to always choose her own joy over impressing anyone else or trying to be anyone else other than herself.

Three hours and two full donation bags later, all the former versions of me were packed away and sealed and set by the door. I hugged a lot of it goodbye…and gave them all the goodbye they deserved…the wife who dressed for the pew…the mom who dressed for the sixty-year-old inside her…the newly-single woman in the strappy dresses who needed the whole world to see she was finally free. Thank you…I needed all of them to get to where I am now.

And what’s left, hanging in a closet that finally has some breathing room, is just…me.

The me turning 43 next month. Confident, creative, and yes, still sexy. The one who loves a statement piece and a pop of color and an asymmetrical line that doesn’t do the expected. The workout clothes for my hours in the kitchen and the sundresses for when it’s too damn hot for pants. The fall and winter layers I’m genuinely counting the days to build. The weekend dresses that are purely, only mine…the ones I wear to the farmers market and the coffee shop and dinners with my girlfriends and my favorite restaurants, the ones I wear to drop Millie at school and dance, to sit on the couch with my husband and watch our shows, to see family, to walk around this city I know and love now instead of just visit.

Every single thing I kept is for the me that’s here, the one that’s rising from all the layers that have been peeled away. The older versions I was scared to let go of…and especially the future versions I once thought I was supposed to become.

Where I landed, on the floor, surrounded by two decades of costumes…I’m not going to predestine the me I should be in the future, either. I want to let the future stay a blank slate…to let the Jessica of 45, of 50, of 60 decide for her own god-damn self who she wants to be and what she wants to wear when she gets there. Who am I to hang clothes in a closet for a woman I haven’t met yet?

That girl needs freedom…let’s give it to her.

The weekend…whoa baby, where to even start!?

Friday night: pop-up at the Starlite Motel with the Catskills Cocktail Club. I totally sold out of food…possibly way too early, but entirely a great problem to have. Millie “helped”…in her own way, on her own terms, which for an 11-year-old angsty tween is probably appropriate, and I guess I have to take what I can get.

Saturday morning I woke up with the sun and drove an hour north to Andes to help my girl Nicole at Cafe Mutsi. She really needed hands on the coffee bar, so there I was, slinging flat whites and lattes all morning. I will NOT be adding barista to my resume anytime soon… because well, I spent most of the day in open battle with the milk-to-froth ratio situation. But there was one woman who told me it was the best flat white she had ever had, and I cashed that in for life and called it a day. ♥

Then I picked Millie up from the Starlite and drove back up the mountain to Dear Native Grapes for a friend’s birthday celebration. Millie was there to help me (*cough redeem herself from the night before cough*). We served Mutsi’s greatest hits and then, on the dark mountain drive home, we told each other ghost stories to stay awake. And, when we really needed it, we blasted 90’s femme rock & Lola Young & Florence and the Machine & Robyn, singing at the tops of our lungs until we pulled into our hotel.

The next morning, Yas and I dropped Millie at Frost Valley for her last week of summer camp. She all but pushed us out the door. Have fun in your yurt, kiddo :)

I’m exhausted just writing all that out, which is probably why my body and mind have been running on fumes ever since…and did I take it easy this week to recover? EFF NO, I’m a crazy-ass Virgo. Insidious at 11pm on Monday (so good!). Drinks with dear friends from Charlotte (hello, Stonemans!). A live reading of this piece at the Spill Your Ink Substack writers event on Tuesday (I also made snacks, because of course I did!) A co-parenting schedule meeting with Jay. Therapy. Drinks with my best friends who are finally back in the city after their summer vacations. And tonight: a NUSHU event.

I might get to sleep tomorrow. Maybe :)

You can gauge my mental status by the links I serve up each week, and this one is wide-ranging. This is usually the moment my mom calls to do a wellness check. Yes, ma, I’m okay…just gearing up for VIRGO SEASON, in all of the ways. Love how all-over-the-place this issue is…kind of like yours truly <3

Pull up a chair, turkeys!

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

• The internet has made writers obsessed with becoming writers instead of writing There’s Lina, sitting in a Hamburg café with her ridiculously expensive leather notebook, her equally expensive pen, and her AirPods playing the "writer aesthetic playlist”…she's performing being a writer more than actually writing. She maps out the aestheticization of all of it and asks whether spending more time feeling like a writer than doing the work has quietly become the actual point. "The problem isn't the aesthetic. The problem begins where the aesthetic replaces the activity. Where you spend more time feeling like a writer than actually writing." YES, ma’am.

• everything slides down so easy in august
  Emily wakes up every summer morning and says "thank you thank you thank you thank you" out loud, to no one and everyone: for the mosquitoes that bite her leg while she sits in the sun, for the oysters that slide down like they were harvested to be hers, for laundromat baptisms, for tiny spoons of ice cream accepted with the ceremony of a child at communion. She writes about what summer does to her creativity and what fall quietly takes back. "I learn every year that I cannot improve myself into becoming the person I actually want to be, and every time I am on the pilates reformer I forget and tell myself this existential dread is worth it."

THE UTENSILS

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

• 10 tactics for when action is the answer to re-enchanting the self
  Michelle emerges from six hours of reading other people's live wires, mentally bloated with inspiration, and then does nothing. She calls the gap between idea and making "ether to matter": an idea in your head is vaporous, and most of its actual formation only happens in the making. The tactics she gives are not gospel, just a pile of options…Reframe discipline as devotion…Subtract before you add. "Your brain will chase a game long past the point where it will chase an obligation, and it is remarkably easy to trick. I have never once beaten my own resistance with reasoning, and I have beaten it dozens of times with a kitchen timer."

• Dolly Parton's "Down From Dover" Will Make You a Better Writer
  RIP, legend. Kaitlyn takes "Down From Dover," a Dolly Parton song about a girl who waits through an entire pregnancy for her lover to come back, and he doesn't, and she uses it as a masterclass in what writers owe their characters and their readers. "Nameless cities and amorphous streets may flatter a reader's intellect but it doesn't do much to move anyone, one way or the other. And you are in this profession to move people, whether you are brave enough to admit it or not." Kaitlyn writes about it beautifully, a craft essay that works on you slowly.

• Find Your Ikigai
  Ifeoluway asks: what makes you want to get up tomorrow? Then works through an answer, drawing on the likes of Viktor Frankl, Harold Kushner, David Goggins, Murakami, Fred Rogers, etc… A map of how people have moved through their worst seasons by finding something to move toward. "Meaning doesn't always mean finding a reason for what happened. It can mean deciding what you will do with what happened." "You don't have to finish. You just have to begin. Once you start, you may discover that continuing is a little easier."

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THE VESSELS

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

• a meditation on the changing of the seasons
  Corinne started a new job, which meant letting go of people she loved working with and a version of her life that worked really well. "I think you can be deeply grateful for one season and still be ready, or at least willing, to see what comes next." She gives nine warm, practical ways to step into a new season without forcing yourself to be ready for it, threaded through with "Frank Sinatra autumn" energy and her own Landslide-in-the-car moment. With Fall Equinox around the corner… "You don't have to be ready for the next season. You just have to be willing to step into it."

• the selves we become in other people's light
  "I think a person is a bit like a room, rather than a fixed thing." She builds the whole essay on that: a room doesn't change because the furniture moved, it changes because morning reaches it differently than evening does. The people in our lives don't change us so much as illuminate the parts of us that were already there. Some bring out gentleness…some bring out cruelty we didn't know we were capable of. "If someone believes you are intelligent, you will begin to risk intelligent ideas. If someone treats your vulnerability like an inconvenience, you will learn to hide it; and yet, if someone treats it as sacred, you will never hide it again."

• Being True to Something that Calls to You
  Joan quotes neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist on faith: not certainty, not evidence, but "being true to something that calls to you." They write about Zen, about zazen and sesshin, and then brings in Damien Echols on what discipline actually is: "Freedom is being able to decide what matters more: what feels good for the next five minutes, or the person you are trying to become over the next five years." They didn't think she had a mission…then they realized they did. "Entering into silence is a way of listening for what is calling. It may not be logical or reasonable. It may not make sense."

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

• What Are Your Wardrobe Blindspots? (Vol. 2)
  Angie’s framework is Depth vs. Breadth. Depth: you keep buying the same thing in different colors (the high-neck tank, four of them). Breadth: variety across categories, not just within one. She walks through real client closets and the recurring patterns she sees, including a client who kept buying pieces that looked beautiful in the store, that made perfect sense individually, that she never wore, because they reflected her surroundings (what the women at her children's school were wearing, what the stores near her carried) instead of herself. "I don't really care how much you own as long as you have a point-of-view around those pieces and a reason for being." I’m gearing up for my annual closet clean-out this weekend, so this was very timely!

• Calm Down, It's Only Monday
  Ali opens with"I've been writing a lot of poems lately, which is never a sign of chill mental health" and I nearly spit out my morning coffee laughing. The park near her apartment was closed that morning because a mountain lion had killed a deer, so she went to breakfast…added blueberries to her pancakes…the lesbians downstairs lost their dog…she had a dream where she pulled a piece of ginger out of her arm, then a tiny kitchen sponge, and no one around her seemed to care…then she walked into a bodega that sold roasted potatoes for $1.99 and that fixed everything. Mountain lions and roasted potatoes and dead deer…pure poetry. More writing like this, please:)

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THE NAPKIN

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

• In The Shower
  Love Michelle’s writing and this piece is no different…she took a shower inside stolen time. "Privacy has a sound. Small, plain. Sometimes only a click. This morning, the water felt like mercy." She writes about ugly crying in the shower, where the noise covers it, and no one needs advice. She writes about grief for her father, how under hot water with eyes closed he can feel almost near, not alive, not here, but down the hall in some old ordinary way. She nudges the heat higher until her skin goes red and the freckles merge. "Heat says, 'here you go, Michelle, this is your body, still yours babe, still able to feel something besides duty.'" She opens the door when the house makes a sound…so is she.

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

• My Daughter Doesn't Trust Me
  I read this one out loud this past Tuesday night at the Spill Your Ink Substack writers event. Equally terrifying and beautifully humbling, exciting even. If you haven't read it yet: it's the one about Millie, her life’s chaos (brought on by yours truly) and the years she has spent resenting what all of it meant. She helped me at the events this weekend…I think we may be turning a corner…I hope :) ♥

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. ♥

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!
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. ♥

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

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. ♥

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.

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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 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.