I didn’t publish last week…no Sunday long form post, no Thursday Setting the Table round-up…the first time since January that I’ve not posted…the first time I haven’t posted in 40 straight weeks.
If you’ve been following this ‘stack for more than a week or two, you know what a big deal that little run-on sentence is for me. Sunday is my sacred day…long-form day…the one I plan my whole week around, the one I Wispr-flow notes and random thoughts to all week long and then sit down to write on a Friday or Saturday so I can hit send with my morning coffee on Sundays. I have manage to have enough to say…enough to write, showing up, week after week for the past 40 weeks…through exhaustion and biopsies and meltdowns, because underneath it all…missing a week felt like I’d be letting somebody down. I know…I know the reality is that literally no one is sitting by their computer or phone, just waiting for me to post…but you guys, I’ve built up that disappointment ledge SO HIGH and I’ve been teetering on it for months now. I write because I love it, because it’s a therapeutic release and because it’s become a form of meditation…but because I’m me…I’ve also built it up to be expectations that I use to lord over myself…with a side-car of anxiety and stress to boot.
And last week…well…I just hit my limit…I just didn’t write.
Instead, on Sunday…I actually spent the entire day on my hands and knees in my own kitchen, building and installing new cabinets and an island, and then tore apart the Freckled Fork catering closet that’s been not-so-quietly making me feral for the better part of a year. I built more counter space…made more room to do the dang thing I actually do. I cleared out the clutter we’ve all been tripping over, the shit I’ve been bruising my shins on as I bang up against it...and the piles I’ve literally dodged as they come tumbling down every time we open the door. I gave us all…and particularly, myself, space to spread out…and cook.
I anticipated the guilt I would feel by neglecting my weekly substack. But you know…it never came…neither did the spiral, or the old familiar voice that says you blew it, you broke the streak, your twelve loyal readers are going to riot…unsubscribe and leave you forever. That voice…that inner critic…she usually shows up right on time…my very own inner C-U-Next-Tuesday. But last week, she didn’t even bother. Every day this week, I’ve looked at my new cabinets, my new island, covered in sawdust and satisfaction, and thought…yeah…this was totally the right call.
The words will keep…they’ll certainly come pouring out later, but last weekend…the kitchen needed me more…my hands needed to build something, giving my mind…and my anxiety…a rest.
Which, as it happens, is exactly what the woman came to talk to me about.
A couple weeks ago, my mom gifted me tickets to a little book event here in the city. It was hosted by the Lit Society and was normally an event I’d be too nervous to go to alone, worried about feeling like an imposter the whole time…but this one, I don’t know, it was full of women of every age, and something about it was calming…welcoming even…and my shoulders relaxed…and fell all the way down. (Sarah Jessica Parker was also the surprise guest speaker, two feet from me, which was its own absurd little New York moment, but that’s a story for a different day.)
At one point they walked us through this visualization…Picture yourself ten years from now, they said. What is she wearing? What does she ask you? What do you ask her?
And then I saw her, clear as anything I could see in front of me…my fifty-three-year-old self…Jess in 10 years. She had the BEST…the BIGGEST earrings…big, bold, weird-shaped funky ones, the kind I already gravitate to but she wore them like a woman who’d stopped second-guessing herself, who stopped asking permission. Asymmetrical, abstract, color-drenched clothes…patterns that had no business together, thrown together on purpose…and you guys, she was calm…she was effortless and light. It wasn’t a performative calm, it was like…actually calm…and confident…in her own skin…in her own self. She was confident in ways I’ve spent the better part of four decades trying to uncover.
I asked her the only question I had: was it worth it?
And she didn’t even hesitate…Hell yeah, it was.
And then she turned it right back around on me, the way she would, because she’s me and she knows where I keep it all…Why are you so stressed? You can do hard things. You’ve taken the risks…you’ve made the big, terrifying decisions, over and over, and they worked out. So why don’t you trust yourself? Why won’t you trust your own gut?
I didn’t have an answer…I still don’t, but that day…that moment…that visualization…that question…it pierced something inside of me.
By every reasonable measure, I’m not a woman with a trust problem.
I left a seventeen-year marriage when everything in me had been trained to stay…I walked onto a professional line with zero formal training and willed my way from line cook to Head Chef in under two years. I moved my kid to New York City in the actual height of a pandemic when everyone I loved told me not to….and even a few weeks ago, I looked at a steady paycheck and the math of my own exhaustion and I blew the whole thing up on purpose to build something that fits me better.
I DO trust myself to leap…I guess I always have. My gut hasn’t once failed to point me to the right door.
And yet…I’ve spent those entire leaps white-knuckling…second-guessing…bracing for the fall, rehearsing the disaster. I’ve lied awake running the numbers on a decision I already made and already know is right. I’ve made the brave call, and then I charge myself interest on it, every single day, until it pays off. I trust my gut just long enough to jump, and then I spend the whole way down convinced I read the gut wrong.
My future self…she’s totally right…of course she is. COURAGE has gotten me out the door every single time…but it’s the TRUST….the trust in myself and my ability to DO the thing is what I’ve had the hardest time with…and those two things are very, very different animals.
The wild part is that I already know exactly what trusting myself feels like…I do it all day long on a practical level…but I guess, only in small doses.
When I first learned to cook, I measured everything…meticulously. Leveled teaspoons, a scale, somebody else’s recipe propped open and splattered on the counter, and me, following instructions to the letter because the letter was the only thing keeping me from disaster. And then one day…the way it happens for every cook who sticks with it long enough…I stopped needing the step-by-step. Somewhere along the way, I put the measuring cups down, and started grabbing handfuls and eye-balling things like my Nanny Sis did…I started to actually measure by taste, and I started trusting my own palate to guide me.
Season to taste. It’s quite possibly the least helpful instruction in any recipe for the Type-A’s of the world…and yet…it’s the only one that actually matters. It means there’s no set number to measure by…you put your spoon in…you taste…and your own tongue tells you what it needs…more salt, more acid, more time…and you trust that. You adjust, you taste again, you keep going until it’s right, and you are the only one who gets to decide when it’s right.
The kitchen might just be the one place I don’t second-guess myself very often. I can taste a sauce and know, bone-deep, with zero anxiety, that it’s missing something and I’ll add and adjust until it’s right.
So the question my 53-year-old self was really asking is this: why can I season a sauce to taste, but not my own life? Why do I trust my tongue and not my gut, when they live in the same body?
I think I know who taught me to stop trusting it…if karma is my boyfriend…then comparison is my mother-truckin’ girlfriend. And she is the literal…worst.
I used to draw and collage constantly as a little girl…hours of it, happily…badly…mine. No photograph or booklet or shoebox in our home was safe. We laugh about it now, but the amount of memorabilia and family photos I destroyed by “being creative”...making new scrapbooks with construction paper, photos cut into random shapes and half-assed glued into place…it was out of control. Again…I’m sorry, Mom!
So, yeah, I was super creative…and then I went to school and there were girls who were…just better. I met my friend Paige in eighth grade…a real photographer, a real painter, effortlessly gifted…and I quietly set my own colored pencils down. That was Paige’s thing…I’d find something else. I handed my creativity over to a comparison I was never asked to make…and I chalked it up to being realistic…aware of my “strengths and weaknesses”.
I’ve done a version of that my whole life…and for the love…the internet made it almost a full-time job. Every time I open the socials…I’m slammed in the face watching other people in my field do the exact things I’m reaching for. Some combination of two things happen…first, and foremost…I feel smaller…basic…mediocre…and then I notice…over time, my own ideas starting to look like theirs…until I genuinely can’t tell anymore whether a thing I wanted to make is mine, or just something good I saw on a Tuesday with my algorithm. Comparison does more than make you just feel bad…it unseasons you. It trains you to reach for someone else’s measuring cups instead of your own sense of taste.
I’ve been pulling back from the apps for the past few months for exactly this reason…and last week, the universe decided I needed the lesson spelled ALL.THE.WAY.OUT….like Substack out.
The morning after the book event, I had coffee with a dear friend (met over those same socials, ironically) named Ria.
We’d connected on Instagram years ago, met in real life exactly once before, and finally got a chance to sit down together over coffee. She’s a beautiful artist…a super talented illustrator, fifty-seven and so sweet, so unapologetically quirky…a woman who has already published a gorgeous book of her drawings of NYC and is already working on book #2. And I swear to you, I sat down across from her and realized I was looking at the woman from my visualization the day before…literally the next morning.
Ria’s carefree in a way that made my chest ache a little…she eats dinner at four o’clock and she’s in bed by eight and she LOVES everything about her life. She doesn’t do the network-y public things anymore…did that when she was younger, doesn’t care now, would rather walk around the West Village in the morning and do her own thing and go home. When she gets asked who her creative inspirations are, who she looks to, she says: I don’t. I try not to look at other artists, because the second I do, my work drifts toward theirs and away from me. So I try to be my own inspiration.
I try to be my own inspiration…I almost ugly cried into my latte.
I’d spent the night before imagining that same confident woman…freckle-faced and big earrings…my 53-year-old version…and then…there she was, drinking her matcha…being exactly her. The universe doesn’t usually show its work that fast.
So I’ve been practicing…seasoning to taste, in little ways, all month.
I’m reading The Artist’s Way again, and the first tool in the creative toolbox is the morning pages…three, every day, no exceptions. And for about a week I white-knuckled those too…as I do…I turned a tool for freedom into one more bar to clear, one more streak to protect.
Until a recent morning I was bone-tired and I skipped the pages altogether…and took a glorious ten-minute nap on my couch instead. I woke up ready for my whole day just fine…it was then I realized…one page is allowed…evening pages are allowed…a dang nap instead is allowed. Take what works and leave the rest…she literally says so in the book, and it’s taken me four decades to believe I’m freakin’ allowed to do just that.
I was ten minutes late leaving for the spa on my birthday and spent the first half of the train ride convinced the delay was going to ruin it all…and the second half of the ferry ride realizing that ten minutes wouldn’t matter at all once I was in the sauna. There’s a sillier, looser version of me that comes back the second I set the pressure down…the irreverent silly goose who cracks herself up…she’s been showing up more lately, and I’ve really missed her.
Last week…I didn’t write…I built a kitchen instead…and I made myself more room to just be.
My therapist reminded me that it’s only been three years.
Three years since I turned forty and the whole thing cracked open…the divorce, my first apartment that was only mine, the knife and the line and the dream I finally stopped apologizing for.
Three years of scrubbing off layer after layer of old habits that didn’t fit the woman I was becoming. When you’re inside it, it feels like forever, like you’re treading water and getting nowhere. Say it out loud, though…three years…it made me giggle a little at the ridiculousness of it…it’s barely a breath…I’ve been a woman shedding at warp speed.
Self-trust is just the next layer I’m working on uncovering… the next thing to grow into. The best proof I have that it’s coming is that woman I saw earlier in the week…the version of me 10-years out…the one that already had it in spades, big earrings and all. She’s the one telling me across a visualized room that yes, it was worth it, so would I please, for the love, stop charging myself interest on decisions I’ve already made.
It’s time to put the measuring cups away…especially the ones that aren’t even my own. It’s time to taste as I go…to trust my own tongue to tell me what’s missing…to tell me what’s needed…I know how to adjust…to taste again…and to let myself be the only one who decides when it’s right.
Season to taste…that was always the recipe, I guess.
♥
Worth the wait!!! and no, I wasn't really waiting, (as most, l was consumed enough with my own stuff that I didn't notice the missed week, but sure am glad you're back!) What a wonderful piece full of wisdom that I learned something from! Glad to see you are being kinder and gentler with yourself! It's something I work at every day.