Setting the Table: Vol. 3-0

Top reads & picks from around the ‘stack-a-verse, pull up a chair <3

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.

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??

---

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.

---

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 Tina Lance (& 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

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. ♥