Omakase

I’ll leave it up to you...

I had a whole plan for this month…I always do.

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.

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.

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