Setting the Table: Vol. 27

stiff bones, swirling storms & food that tastes like the chaos you come from...

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.

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

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

(MRI gown chic…)

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

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

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

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

---

THE GRAZING PLATE

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

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

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

---

THE UTENSILS

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

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

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

---

THE VESSELS

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

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

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

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

---

THE GLASSWARE

(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)

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

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

---

THE NAPKIN

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

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

---

THE DESSERT PLATE

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

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

---

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

xo, Jess

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

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. ♥