A Seat At My Table
When I was eight years old, I found my love for cooking. There were a lot of things in my life that I felt average at, like school and sports, but cooking wasn’t one of those. I remember tossing on my bright red chef-in-training apron, tying back my wild ringlet curls, and picking up my yellow nylon kids knife to begin slicing shallots. The time that I spent with my father in the kitchen starting in 2008 was priceless. He wasn’t a home cook to me, but rather a hero, and he referred to me as his “sous chef” which filled me with immense pride. That same year I started taking a hip hop class at a local dance studio, and a few months later the owner of the studio asked my mother to put me in a ballet class so that I could be considered for the competition team. I felt a glow in my heart when I performed in the dance competitions, similar to how I felt when cooking. I wasn’t very good at ballet, and I certainly didn’t look like a lean ballerina, but I had the spunk, drive, and determination to keep up with the other girls and have fun while doing it.
From Monday to Friday, as competition season began to ramp up, I started spending hours on end at the studio. On the weekends I went to the farmers market with my dad, and when we arrived back home he quizzed me on how I’d prepare the ingredients into one harmonious meal, almost like a contestant on Chopped. That was my safe haven. I’d drift into a wonderland of joy, listening to Fleetwood Mac playing throughout the room, smelling sweet onions caramelized into a golden jam, and zoning out to sounds of cherry tomatoes bursting on the stovetop.
When I was fifteen years old, I lost my love for cooking. My passion for dance continued and I joined the team at my high school. While I was a strong dancer, I wasn’t the smallest girl in the room, which was really what mattered the most to everyone. I was always able to keep up. In fact, I didn’t just keep up, I excelled. I was consistently in the front row. But my dancing ability was overshadowed by the fact that I didn’t have any extra room in my uniform, and that when every girl around me would take off their shirt to dance in their sports bra in the 90-degree rehearsal room, I felt like I couldn’t. My mother was, and still is, my best friend and my support system. She’d sit in the car with me after check-ups and console me while I cried about the number on the scale, wondering why if I ate healthily and danced all the time I still wasn’t as small as the other girls.
In December of my freshman year of high school, I decided to go on a “cleanse” – which was really a subtle term for a harsh diet. A cleanse is the opposite of the creative cooking that I had come to know and love: it’s controlled and pre-planned, not colorful and experimental. I followed the cleanse to a tee, drinking the artificial strawberry shakes for breakfast, eating a bland nutty bar at lunchtime, and scarfing down the low-carb, no-fun meals for dinner. I sat on the cold floor of the dance studio eyeing the skinny teenagers inhaling servings upon servings of Doritos and donuts, while I munched on a ziplock bag of baby carrots with portioned out peanut butter, somehow still embarrassed about the fact that I was eating. Food was once comfort, but at that point it was a sin.
When I turned 20 years old, I found myself. At the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic hit, my parents noticed an inflamed bump on the top of my back. I didn’t think much of it, since I had pulled a muscle in my neck on vacation a few weeks earlier, but they felt it would be safe to have my doctor take a look. Two days later, my world flipped upside down. The doctor told me the bump was weight gain related, and that this constant cycle of weight fluctuation needed to stop. I spent the afternoon silent and alone in my bedroom, refusing to speak to my parents, feeling ashamed and angry. After what felt like several weeks packed into one solemn day, I put on my big girl pants and decided to make a change. I had so many years of going back and forth between painful fad diets and indulgent elaborate foods in my regimen, what I needed to learn was balance. You don’t have to deprive yourself of cupcakes the whole year to then devour ten on your birthday. You can actually have a cupcake once in a while simply because you want one. In high school they don’t teach you that the least interesting thing about you is your weight. I wish that they did. I think back to this year as the start of my self-love era. Learning to love the things I do, in the way I do them so I can become my best self. This meant embracing my undeniable love of cooking, teaching myself to exercise to feel strong rather than skinny, and implementing wellness practices into my life, like therapy. This holy grail turned into my special formula that allowed me to grasp my sense of self worth. I lost thirty pounds from this revelation, but more importantly I gained a better version of myself.
It became clear to me after so many years of resenting being in the kitchen with my dad why I felt the way that I did. The association with food and my body tore me apart for such a long time, and it took a breaking point for me to discover that food was really what kept me in one piece. Today, the most interesting thing about me is my love for cooking. I often mourn the girl I once knew: the girl that would make excuses to not eat the piece of cake on her friend's birthday because she thought she didn’t deserve it, to then go home and binge on three bowls of cereal to make up for the feeling of loss. That girl would be jealous of the version of me today. The girl who hosts dinner parties for her loved ones because she knows that home-cooked soul food brings people together. The girl who runs a health and wellness, sustainable food blog that informs people how to cook ethically, healthfully, and often. The girl whose career will be anchored around sharing heartfelt stories surrounding food. Learning to thrive in the places that once made you feel like you had to shrink is the beauty of progress. So, I’ll be taking up space with a whisk in my hand and an apron tied around me, grateful for the safe home I’ve created within the kitchen. Here’s to learning to love, the meaningful stories we collect along the way, and offering you a seat at my table.
