It’s been an absolutely crazy couple of months. Hell, it’s been a crazy year! I’m sitting at home now, a year since I was last here for more than 36 hours, and it is so satisfying to look back and see how much has happened. There were definitely a few intense and stressful situations, but I’m so lucky to have had so much go right and open doors for a follow up adventure. Now, I am grateful to be home with so many people I love while I plan out the next few months and work on making my move to London a reality.
I guess I should probably clear up what I’ve been up to the last couple of months, it all happened so fast I never really made the time to talk about what I was doing in any detail. While I was up in Sonoma my sister’s friend Ian, a fellow CIA Culinary Science alum, called me up and asked me to be his assistant in the Ment’or BKB Young Chef Competition that he applied for and was accepted to. I had heard of the competition and had seen some friends go through it, but it was never something I thought to do on my own. I was really excited for the opportunity and the circumstances that brought it to me, and it was that same excitement that finally came back to me after a very busy month of working and training as we packed up the car with all of our equipment, ingredients, garnish plants (of course), and hit the road to go change our lives.
Ment’or BKB is a non-profit organization that supports Team USA’s efforts at The Bocuse D’Or, an international cooking competition that takes place in Lyon every two years. Ian is based in Los Angeles, so once I finished up in NorCal I moved down there to get together and start training for the competition. The competition took place in Las Vegas, we ended up with the first of the staggered start times, and everything else is a focused, anxious, excited, exhausted blur. My leg was aggressively shaking while waiting for the results, and I still couldn’t get it to stop when trying to take pictures after the announcement. For being an environment I had never previously been interested in seeking out, I was and continue to be blown away by the amount of support we received, before and after the results came in. Even though I’ve been looking to use all that I’ve learned as a cook to explore other industry-related career paths moving forward, I am so grateful to have the support of this foundation and all the leaders of this portion of the industry as I go on to try new things. I am unbelievably excited that we are being rewarded with the opportunity to experience the Bocuse D’Or with Team USA this coming January, even if I still can’t quite wrap my mind around that fact.
Heading back to LA after the competition, so many things from my travels finally fell into their places. I realized this as I walked out of a cool wine store with some fun bottles and saw the sunset down the street, just after catching up with some family members and right in the middle of the jam-packed few days I had in LA before coming back home. In that moment, things felt right. After just six weeks in the city I had become comfortable exploring it and had built some sort of a life there, the challenge of doing so being one of the things that stressed me out as I packed up and left the life I had built just as quickly in Sonoma. I was doing one of my favorite things again: buying fun, unusual drinks to share with people over a meal. I had felt a huge weight come off of my shoulders knowing that any cooking I would be doing in the near future would be for fun and to feed people I love instead of the rich people of Santa Monica. After all that I have done and everyone I have been able to talk to in the last couple of years, I finally started to see a career path for myself. As with most things in my life, it is probably a strange combination of things that I will have to fight to make work, but I would have it no other way. It’s still a blurry idea, but it is something that I can see myself fitting into instead something I would be forcing myself to feel like I fit into it because it is a more expected or conventional path.
Right now, there are a lot of ideas running through my mind. The questions I’m asking aren’t if something can be done, but how, when, and why the hell not. Whatever is going on in the world right now, whether it is generational or cultural, it feels good to be entering it with plenty of examples that break the norm and still make things happen, small and large scale. As long as I can remember, my dad has kept a piece of paper taped up at his desk that says “If not now, when?”. As much as I love that people are now talking about making changes, in this industry as well as others, I am beyond excited to get myself involved with people actually making those changes happen and showing that they can be done.
Another powerful realization that has come to me is that my voice has power. Not that everyone is listening to what I am saying, or that I have a very large platform (props to all you family and friends that actually read these ramblings),but the knowledge that my experiences or what I have to say may matter to someone in some way is exciting to me. And since talking usually means that another person is involved (though I do talk to myself A LOT), I get the opportunity to pick up new perspectives and learn from different experiences with every person I meet, that can then influence me and how I decide to move forward. I’m not afraid to talk about difficult, risque, or awkward topics, and if everyone else is going to tip toe around a topic I have no problem being the one to break out the unpopular opinion that really gets a conversation going, in agreement or disagreement. How else will we move forward if we don’t get things out in the open? On top of that, every dollar I spend is just as important to me as every vote I cast in an election. I’m not where I want to be in terms of spending my money responsibly and supporting good businesses, but I’m happy to know that I can be a part of positive change with just a few adjustments to my normal life.
Back when I first started this blog, I wondered how long I would keep the name of “the forever stage”. This was also when I thought four months was plenty of time to find a place to settle for a while and a job to dive into. Now that that silly thought is out of the way, I’m excited to keep the name as I continue to try out new things and explore more pockets of this industry. I frequently tear up a little bit both when I look back at the amazing experiences I have had and when I think about everything that still lies ahead of me. These happy tears are a reminder that I’m doing what’s right for me, and that I’m lucky to be supported in doing so by the people in my life, new and old.
Some writing on a rock on a hike in LA told me to “dare to struggle”. I took a picture but it was dark out and very blurry so you can imagine what that looked like. Regardless, I liked the message. Two people that I love watching right now are Robert Egger and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are both struggling to achieve what they want, though that is because they have picked hard paths to walk for the benefit of others. They inspire me to refine my thoughts into something to struggle for, and to attack whatever that something may be with tenacity, understanding, passion, and logic. I haven’t decided if I like Egger’s tagline/website (fuckingshitup.net) or AOC’s more politically correct #GoodTrouble more, but both motivate me to get ready to make some waves of my own. Here’s to the struggle.
P.S. more to come soon even as things settle down for a minute, there are plenty of half-written thoughts built up that I’ll work on turning into real sentences at some point! I might even talk about myself less, but no promises.
