Setting the Table: Vol. 23
Sullivan's Island, the apps I quit & my mother's mirror
Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
I found my way to the water.
Three days in Charleston with Yas, eating our way through the city, and somewhere in all of it, I made it to Sullivan’s Island. Late afternoon, the light coming in sideways, everything smelling like salt and heat. I took off my shoes, walked down to the line where the waves still had enough weight to roll over your legs before pulling back, sat down, and stayed there.
Before we left New York, I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone. Not a break, not a detox…just gone. My screentime was embarrassing, and more than that, those apps were leaving me feeling smaller than when I arrived…mediocre…like I was always chasing something that had no intention of stopping long enough for me to catch up. I hated how it made me feel, and I decided I’d rather take a vacation from it all, not just work, but the mother-truckin’ grind…on and offline.
In Charleston I kept reaching for my phone and finding nothing to scroll. So I looked out the window; I held my husband’s hand; I stayed in the conversation, in the present moment. I noticed I was lighter; I noticed I was more myself; I noticed I couldn’t care less about what anyone else was doing, online or wherever else.
Now I’m back in Blythewood, my childhood home, for the first time in a while. Being here does what it always does: gives me back some version of myself I’d started to lose track of. Today we go see my Nanny Sis at her nursing home. Some days she knows me, and some days she doesn’t, and I’ve been thinking about walking through that door today…whether she’ll look up and something in her face will shift. I want to hug her neck. And if she doesn’t know me today, the love and recognition are still in the room anyway…because some things don’t require a name.
Let’s set the table for the weekend, turkeys…
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
In the Sound Alone from A Girl Writing The World
A poem, which I am leading with because it is short and it will set the tone for everything else this weekend. Plums ripen in the sound alone / sugar still forms / and the morning will see them ready. Things are doing their work even when you can’t see them.The Good Girl Problem from The Equitable Home
A working list for raising girls who don’t shrink to be liked…on how girls are trained, early and consistently, to be quiet, accommodating, easy, and what it costs them by the time they’re adults. With Millie transitioning out of elementary school and into whatever comes next, I read this one thinking about what I want to build into her now, before the world gets a chance to start chipping away at it.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
The Clothes We Wear
Sunday’s essay, written from my parents’ back porch in Blythewood with a neighbor’s rooster crowing somewhere in the distance.
On hand-me-down adulthood…the way we put on the adult version of ourselves like clothes that don’t quite fit at first, because they were sewn by someone else’s experience before we ever got to try them on. My parents were 19 when they had me and moved to Orlando alone, figuring it out without a map. I’ve been thinking about what they were handed, and how forty years of living in it has altered it into something that actually fits them now. I plundered through my mom’s closet (I do this every single time I come home) and stood in her mirror and saw her in my own face, my own hips. Thought about how much of what I’ve spent years trying to alter beyond recognition is still just hers, underneath all of it.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
You’re Not Overthinking. You’re Chasing Certainty. from Life Branches
The science of why not knowing is harder on your nervous system than actual bad news. Researchers at University College London found that a 50 percent chance of pain stressed people more than a 100 percent guarantee…the maybe is harder than the yes. This week, the Instagram thing has felt like this for me…the discomfort of reaching for something you thought you needed and finding it isn’t there, and being okay.Nothing You Try and Quit Is EVER a Waste from You’d Like Her
May and I had coffee a couple weeks back, and I love what she’s building. Her latest podcast episode features Dinara, who May met in Kazakhstan when she spotted a Yosemite water bottle sticker at a café and just said hi. Dinara was in the middle of dismantling everything she’d built her sense of worth on…her career, her body, her identity…figuring out who she was without any of it. What came out the other side: a film festival, a rock climbing shop, and the clarity that nothing she’d tried and quit was wasted.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
Dirt That Was Never Not Holy from A Life in Season
On peaches, half-eaten tomatoes, and why waste doesn't exist in a living garden. Jess writes about her summer garden at peak abundance: a hundred pounds of tomatoes, basil going to seed, eating a dark red tomato like an apple at sunset, and how waste is a concept that belongs to barcodes and bottom lines, not to places where life is fueled by death and everything eventually returns to soil. Lush and sensory and fully in the season. I read this one in South Carolina and felt it in a particular way. It will make you want to put your hands in some dirt.
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
The Strange Intimacy of Being Read from Echoes
Michelle writes about what it feels like to put your work into the world when you choose writing specifically because you prefer observing to performing. The distance between “this is the best thing I’ve ever written” and “this is absolute shit, and I just let strangers look at it” is, she says, often only a cup of coffee and a reread apart. She publishes anyway, because the requirement was never certainty…it was honesty. Every Thursday…and every Sunday, when I press publish, I go through this exact same loop, and it’s useful to know the loop is just the work, not a sign something is wrong.I Am Terrified from Letters from Imi
A poem…on the fear of losing your creative fire before you've done what you came here to do. "I am terrified of losing my fuel, my light, my dreamer's sight / the wonder that burned like the sun." Imi writes about sitting at a pub before noon trying to silence the beehive in her mind, about the dizziness of freedom, about what it feels like when the fire is down to its last pieces of wood. Quiet and devastating and beautiful. Read it right after Strange Intimacy, and you have the full portrait of what creative work costs.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
Making Your Own Chances Vol. 1: From Graphic Designer to Executive Chef
from The Long Game
After an impromptu phone call with a stranger who felt like a close friend after an hour of talking, Anjali wrote about me. I’m human; I’m not going to pretend I didn’t send this link to approximately everyone I know the moment I saw it…it’s one thing to tell your own story…it’s quite another to read about it through the lens of another…it somehow makes all the heartache, all the self-doubt and all the loss and all the growth…worth it.
She found me through a note I wrote about my career pivot, got on a call, and turned it into this. The whole story is here: Charlotte to New York in 2020, cold emailing every restaurant in the city with zero kitchen experience, COVID hitting the week we arrived, the six families I cooked for out of their homes, the weekend I bought bags of carrots and onions to practice my knife skills after a chef called me out in the first week, Sous Chef in six months, Executive Chef in a year, and why I stepped back when Millie started needing me present in a different way.
What she got right more than anything: she understood that it wasn’t reinvention…it was redirection. Everything I’d spent fifteen years building as a designer, a marketer, a mother, translated directly into what I needed to be in the kitchen. I just had to be willing to tell the story in a way that made sense to people who couldn’t see it yet.
I appreciate you guys, your love & support for women like Anjali, and, as always, for me as well. I couldn’t do any of it without you. And if you know someone sitting on a pivot they can’t quite figure out how to justify, send it to them.
Happy Thursday, turkeys! Going to hug Nanny Sis's neck today…more from the Carolinas soon.
xo, Jess
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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. I'll be writing to you on Sunday back in NYC, probably still riding high on that Carolina sunshine. See you there. ♥
eatng fresh tomatoes is amazing and I love your posts.
It was such a pleasure and honor writing about you Jess! Thank you for sharing it and being such a joy to chat with! Some other really wonderful reads in here as well, I appreciate you bringing all these together.