In my many years of living as an adult in this crazy world of ours, I’ve learned that the number one thing I can do when I’m stressed or feeling like I have no control or just too anxious for my usual methods to handle is to take some time to rest and, most importantly, to spend some of that time cooking a large, elaborate meal. Growing up as part of a Catholic, Midwestern family, providing people with food was an expression of love, with more volumnous and/or more elaborate food making a statement about the depth of your care for the person (or people) getting the food you’ve made. After all, the much/elaborate food acts as a display of the time and resources you’re willing to spend on someone else’s fleeting, but still life-sustaining, experience. This hasn’t always turned out well for me, considering how much it ties into the whole “earn love through service/giving to others” thing that has fucked me up my whole life, but I’ve been able to reclaim it as an adult as a means of showing myself, in a way that hits all my senses and displays a degree of care about myself, that I can afford to spend a decent amount of money, time, and effort on something I absolutely do not need and merely want. It’s a lot like retail therapy–an assurance of your comfort and safety–but with the explicit reminder that this will only ever be a fleeting thing you’ve done for yourself. Additionally, the engagement of the senses is an excellent grounding technique, the effort of cooking an elaborate meal is involved enough that my mind can’t wander elsewhere, and I usually wind up with a bunch of good food to eat over the course of a few days.
Which is why, the day I wrote this, I set myself an alarm for eight in the morning, despite having the day off. It’s why I got myself out of bed, cleaned up enough to cook, and cooking in the kitchen within half an hour of waking up. Breakfast, coffee, iced tea for later, and then a whole lot of food preparation for a relatively simple but still time-consuming turkey breast and potatoes au gratin meal that will last me all weekend. With gravy, of course. From a packet that came with the turkey, but still tasty all the same. Nominally, this was a practice meal for the upcoming holidays, to get a better sense of how much time it and effort it would all take, and to figure out what I could do ahead of time to save time or effort during the actual holiday, but really it was just what felt good when I was making my grocery list. Well, it was my second choice, since my first choice was going to be a heavy beef stew (rather than the lighter, soupier one I usually make because it’s faster and more convenient), but I knew already that beef prices were higher than ever and that I’d probably wind up spending too much money if I didn’t go in with a backup prepared. Which I’m glad I did because a simple two pounds of beef stew meat, some of the cheapest stuff out there, was twenty-four dollars, whereas my five pound turkey breast was a mere eighteen. Even with the potatoes, onions, milk, cheese, and garlic, I’m pretty sure my whole meal came in under the price of the beef since all that other stuff is pretty cheap where I live or was stuff I’d need to buy anyway for other reasons.
It was a busy, sweaty morning full of chopping, dicing, slicing, arranging, re-arranging thanks to realizing I forgot to put salt and pepper between the layers of potatoes, and then a bunch of relaxed cleaning up afterwards while I nibbled at a little treat (green olives wrapped in the leftover bacon–from the potatoes since I’d decided to unfreeze a pack and cut it into tiny pieces to provide a tasty mix-in– which is then fried up in a pan), took a nice relaxing shower, and then did nothing for a hour while my apartment filled with the pleasant aromas of baking turkey and cheesy potatoes. It was a nice way to start my day and this food will keep me fed for the weekend as I slowly work through the leftovers at whatever odd hours I feel like eating. I mean, the end of Daylight Saving Time is going to mess up my sleep schedule no matter what I do, so trying to detach myself from the day/night cycle at least a little bit ahead of time usually helps me adjust. Even now, full from having eaten my fill already, the scent of it is still wafting up from my kitchen to my office and I’m contemplating going back for a little bit more. Aromatic food is nice. Having had the time to do all this, clean it up, and STILL have most of my day ahead of me also feel great because it really drives home how I don’t need to really worry about anything going on in my life (aside from the threat of rising facism, of course. Can’t ever stop worrying about that these days since it puts every single one of us in threat).
Who knows. Maybe all of this will be enough to convince me to go to that halloween party tonight, even though I’m really not sure I want to. I no longer have plans this evening (the original date for the wrestling match I thought would be tonight has been moved to Sunday, when I absolutely can’t go), so I’m out of reasons not to go, but that’s not the same as having a reason to go. I… haven’t really heard from that group of friends in a while, despite my attempts to reach out. One of them occasionally shares instagram posts with me and another responded to a conversation I started a few months back, but I didn’t hear from any of them around my birthday–which isn’t necessarily a huge thing, especially for someone like me who tends to minimize it, but that’s difficult to discount as I’m trying to reorient myself around relationships that don’t make me feel like I need to constantly earn people’s attention. That’s the big thing that’s come out of this family-letter-writing adventure and my therapy sessions around it: to stop trying to earn people’s love and affection and start focusing my own care and attention on the people who don’t make me feel like I need to earn theirs. Which is a surprisingly small number of people, these days, after everything from the past… well, half a decade now. I really need to make some new friends… Anyway, I’ve brought my mood down, so I’m going to go back to endlessly distracting myself from my life and hopefully make a decision about tonight that I can live with.