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.
This is going out at 8:30pm instead of 10am…I know.
Millie started middle school today…new school, new friends, new everything. I arranged breakfast coverage at work so I could take her. After the last few years of battling between my job as a chef and my first job as a mother, she has had her fair share of coming second to my work. But…not today…today I chose her. She needed me, I couldn’t let her down.
She was exhausted when I picked her up this afternoon. I think she had a pretty decent day but in her disappointment, no standout friends quite yet. She was still so anxious when she got home, stressed about making friends, about whether anyone would like her, about whether she would “ever” find her people. I wanted so badly to promise her it would all be fine immediately, that everyone would love her, because obviously they would, because she’s amazing…she’s extraordinary. But I know better…now at least…I can’t promise her those things…she needs to figure it out herself, on her own timeline, which obviously isn’t the one I want for her, I want to shield her from any hurt at all or any feelings of less than…but damn...watching your kiddo experience painful truths is part of this dang job.
The other piece of news: the lump in my bump is benign, baby! She’s just a regular ol’ lump, and for now, I guess she’s a part of me. I finally can breathe after a week of holding my breath and pretty much only existing in my own head and emotions. Exhale…
So that’s why I’ve been ass-backwards for the last week, and why this is going out at 8:30pm.
For today’s table, I went back to some older pieces from writers I love around the stack’a’verse. Good writing has no timeline…it’s just good. Pull up a chair <3
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
A Guide to Emotional Hygiene for Overthinkers
Ayushi frames overthinking not as a character flaw but as a background hum, the one that runs underneath everything whether you’re at the grocery store or lying in the dark at 2am. Emotional hygiene as inner maintenance, boring and necessary as brushing your teeth. She offers real, concrete practices for interrupting the spiral. “Not every story your brain tells you is one you need to live inside.”the fear of vulnerability kills expression
Gor writes about the things people carry on public transit that nobody sees: the message you typed at 2am and deleted sentence by sentence before morning, the feeling you never quite got around to saying out loud. Watching people who have gotten so good at making fine look believable that they’ve lost the thread back to what they actually feel. There’s something both sad and quietly recognizable about this one.Private Milestones
The milestones nobody sends flowers for: the first time you say no without explaining yourself, the day you wear the red lipstick to the grocery store, the afternoon you go to the cafe alone and actually enjoy it. Sally makes the case for internal mileage over visible action, for honoring the things that only you know happened. What does it mean to give yourself credit for the things nobody claps for?The Magic of Foxes
Love this piece of poetry…this one is about foxes: the Japanese kitsune as divine messengers and shapeshifters, the liminal magic of the creature that moves between worlds, and three original poems that are genuinely beautiful. Just a writer who found foxes and wrote about them and now I found her and I’m sharing with you…things arrive right on time.
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
In order to love who you are, you must not hate the experience that shaped you.
Rosie writes about survival as something sacred and brave, even when the choices looked wrong from the outside. Every detour was a redirect…every wrong turn was you doing the best you could with what you had. “To heal, you must hurt; to love fully, you must break open.” It’s not about rewriting history or pretending it’s fine…maybe we stop treating our own story like evidence against us.following the threads to: you
Selah traces the threads that run through your whole life regardless of what form they take: the thing you always circle back to, the urge you keep redirecting into something more practical. Self-forgiveness is the key that makes all of it legible. There’s something quietly radical about reading yourself as continuous rather than broken into before-and-after chapters. Maybe it’s time to stop cutting my own story into chapters and just write the whole dang book.Trust the Season You’re In
Masami writes about Doshingaku, the Japanese framework that assigns each person their own seasonal rhythm rather than a universal one. Not everyone blooms in spring or harvests in fall, and our timing is not a failure to keep up. “A lotus does not look at a cherry blossom in April and think, I am late. It simply blooms when its own season arrives.” I read this and immediately thought of every time I’ve compared my pace to someone else’s and decided I was behind…the lotus doesn’t care…it’s time to be more like the lotus.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
The Art of Being on Your Own
Hasif writes about the kind of aloneness that isn’t…loneliness…it’s actually the practice of sitting across from yourself with no performance required, no role to fill, no one to accommodate. “Staying. With yourself. Through the ache. Through the doubt.” Being genuinely present with yourself without the usual exits (the distraction, the numbing, the busyness), just the company of your own quiet…I need this.the part of you that was forced to grow up too fast is resisting more responsibility.
Yas (again this week…truly love her stuff) wrote about the session where her therapist showed her that her resistance wasn’t laziness or fear, it was a part of her that had already carried too much too young and was simply refusing to do it again. The parentified child who became the responsible adult who now just wants to collapse and be held for once. Holy shit…I felt this one…so fully today.Collapse Awareness
Jess watched her jersey cow Helen stretch in the Carolina heat (also HOLLA to my fellow SC girl!) and realized she’s been bracing for a collapse. Not necessarily a single moment, but more of a slow erosion, small and accumulative, and the bracing and holding breath is exhausting (for reals!). Learning to live with an open hand instead of a clenched one…“Practicing presence and peace while the world is like shifting sand.” There is something very real about the tiredness that comes from years of bracing for a thing that doesn’t quite arrive in one clean blow.
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
They Priced Us Out of 3rd Spaces. Then Monetized the Loneliness.
THIS ONE…seriously, y’all…my instagram is RIFE with posts of all these pay-to-play community opportunties…Wyn traces the dismantling of the free and low-cost third spaces that used to hold communities together: libraries, diners, barbershops, rec centers. Loneliness is getting packaged and sold back to us as friendship apps, curated dinners, membership clubs. “Somebody has to become the gatherer again.” Gather your people however you can, feed them, show up.Surrendering to Being Known
Celina names the five strategies people use to keep from being fully seen (The Bear, The Turtle, The Flood, The Peacock, The Slow Burn) and then offers a sixth: The Lighthouse. Stay lit, let people find their way toward you. She pulls Michelle Obama: “Surrendering to being known isn’t giving up, it’s coming home.” Is there someone you’ve been quietly pulling away from?
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
Women Leaving...
About women who leave: relationships, jobs, identities, ways of being they were told to stay in. Grief and regret carefully separated, because you can grieve a thing you needed to leave…and you can miss what it was without wishing you were still in it. She pulls bell hooks: “Knowing when to quit is linked to knowing one’s value.” and “Staying longer does not always mean you were more committed.”Unlikeable
Andrea wrote a TV pilot about divorce while going through her own. Male executives told her the female lead was “unlikeable,” and she spent weeks trying to fix Rosie: softer, more sympathetic, easier to root for before she’d done anything to earn the rooting. She eventually realized she was rewriting herself. “Women are still often asked to prove they’re good before we let them be interesting.” Be Rosie, skip the audition.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
Omakase
My piece from this past weekend, written on the fly…the weekend after my biopsy…when I couldn’t get a single word out until five minutes before I hit send. The whole thing runs on one image…me showing up to the restaurant of my own life clutching a laminated menu I wrote at home, genuinely offended when the chef does something different. The crick in my neck as the physical proof of white-knuckling a life that has zero interest in following my itinerary. And then the omakase…the best meals I’ve ever had were the ones I never ordered in the first place…I wrote this piece the morning of…unedited and totally unhinged, but might be one of my most real writing to-date.Some scars still speak...
Last week I said I was going to write poems with the September prompts…and you know what…I did it! The poem is made of tired: “brittled by burden / strained by stress / dented by demands / ached by abandon / wrecked by worry / measured by mediocrity / scarred by sacrifice.” And then the turn: “some scars / still speak / and this time / their words are / tired.” Inspired by Saltwater and Sage’s September prompt and everything this month has already cost me. The words needed somewhere to go.♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…
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Congrats on the excellent news! ❤️