The Comfort, and the Collapse

content warning: this post contains description of domestic violence

The week before I started culinary school, I wanted to quit. I felt like I ‘had it all’, already – the rhythm of my days was set. Sleeping in late, lounging in the pool, playing video games with friends, cooking whatever whenever and ordering in if I didn’t feel like being in the kitchen, cuddling with my husband on the couch for hours after dinner and being here when he worked from home: I felt deliriously, absurdly happy day-to-day.

I did not want to lose that.

There’s very little of my life when I’ve been genuinely happy; I don’t believe this is unique. I had a satisfying enough childhood, which I think back on with a weary it made me who I am and things could have been so much worse. It set me up for my abysmally selfish teenage years, where I tried my best to throw my future off-track and succeeded at hollowing myself out for longer than I could’ve imagined – decades. Decades. In so many ways, I look back at those years and wonder why no one tried harder to help me, wonder how I put out so many distress signals and still managed to scrape and bruise and bloody myself so badly. I wrote beautiful narratives full of lies for my English class, so the teacher would take interest and make my self-inflicted melodrama remarkable. I shied away from my classmates and their stable families and their money, thrust myself into vague attempts at being a part of something – student council, yearbook club, our choral group – without commitment, and thus without success. I had friends, but not close enough to remember their names.

I dropped out of high school and fled across state lines to a man who hated me. He was seven years older than me, and not a good person. I was a child. If he treasured me at all, it was only because I surrendered everything to him: my meager paychecks from the donut shop and then the big box outlet, my relationship with my younger siblings and, subsequently, the childhoods they would’ve had if I’d known how to love people; ultimately, I even ​surrendered ​​my will to live. I had gotten myself into a situation so dire I didn't know how to escape it, and his cowardly parents bore silent witness, the only acknowledgement of their adult son abusing a teen girl in their basement vague irritation that we made so much noise when we fought. Or, at least, when we began fighting. It always ended very quietly, with my silence and his rage. I can’t recall ever once fighting back when he crushed my throat in his hands, and his fat, ugly face dominated the center of my darkening vision as I reminded myself that I deserved this.

Look at the wreckage I'd made of my life, after all.

So when April 2025 rolled around, and I stared at the last week of the life I’d built from the rubble I kept accumulating beneath my feet, and I knew that next Tuesday morning I’d take the first physical steps to change myself – not who I loved, not where I lived, but who I am – I collapsed. Should I be ashamed of that? I’m not; there’s a sort of weakness that transforms into conviction, I know, and if I were to feel shame it would have to be in the fact that I have always needed to fall so low to understand that. I sobbed. I laid in bed and stared at the walls. I ignored the school website, the welcoming emails, avoided even learning the names of my chef-instructors; I didn’t pull the tags off my new business professional clothes, I didn’t research my commute, and I never considered I could be growing my identity, not changing it.

I made the type of plans you make when you’re insecure: what if my classmates hate me? What if they make fun of me? I should just stay quiet, keep my head down, stand separate from them and let them enjoy their education. They’ll all be so young, I thought, just kids who somehow know what they want to do with their lives, kids who are getting a twenty-year head start on me. What do I think I’m doing?

I cried, and cried, and cried. I told my sister I didn’t want to go through with culinary school. My mom. My friends. All of them were gently sympathetic, and all of them gave me allowance to back out, however grudging.

But I couldn’t tell my son. Of all the people I wasn’t afraid to let down – all the people who had seen me skitter away from a hobby or commitment or marriage, who righteously saw loving me as giving me permission to fail – he isn't one of them. He cannot ever be one of them.

I crumbled into my husband’s arms, pressed my ear to his chest, listened to his heartbeat beneath the splotch limned on his shirt by my tears, and told him: I am so happy. I don’t want to lose this.

And he said: You’re adding something to your life, not taking anything away.

So on Tuesday morning I woke up at 530am, and at 635am I punched in the gate code for student parking I’d memorized from an orientation email, and at 645am I stood in the first classroom of the rest of my life. My cohort is as many adults on their second career as younger people on their first, over a dozen of us making the same choice to stay curious, to keep learning, to pursue something we’re passionate about, and I take immense joy in that. I’m naturally a shy person, and for longer than I care to admit, I felt unsure about myself among them. I struggled, deeply, and still do, with the academic portion of school; I don’t remember how to study, if I ever knew.

Within weeks of school starting, I’d planted a garden. Within a month, I’d begun writing again. Within two, I joined a local mutual aid organization and began cooking for them. On the Fourth of July this year, I stood in the rain and humidity and sweated through my clothes with my husband at my side, our lower legs bitten raw and furiously itchy from the gutter ants that swarmed us by the dozens as we set up, and we handed out fresh fruit and homemade baked goods to people in our community who have been abandoned by those of us who sit at home and revel in our comfort and happiness. A woman asked for a sprinkle-topped cookie and I heard my son, my childhood self, her childhood self, in her gleeful, “I love sprinkles!”

I thought of her every time I scratched one of those bug bites.

The version of myself I thought was happiest and kindest, the one who had built her comfort zone so carefully and feared leaving it, wouldn’t have voluntarily disturbed her peace, that day or any other. She would have posted about the organization, sure; she would’ve even donated money, and she would’ve thought about volunteering sometime, maybe, if it happened to fit neatly in with her schedule, but she would have felt like the community was doing just fine without her. Simply put, she was not living her ideals, and she was lying to herself.

I am more myself now than I was in April. I am happier, but not just that: I’m content. I see the misery and hatred attempting to infiltrate every aspect of American life and I refuse it; there is no person, no political party, no law nor rule nor ‘executive order’ that can make me give up. None of those things are able to change who I am and what I care about. That’s the actual fight, caring. Not the facade of it. The battle begins when you abandon your excuses and fears, and care enough to be uncomfortable. Fortunately, so does personal growth.

There's nothing about being alone, or solitary, or withdrawn, to be proud of. The idea that we are first and foremost individuals who must watch our backs because no one else cares about us is a societal wound. We keep digging our filthy fingers into it, greedy for the pain, the justification for our selfishness, ignorant of or maybe just ignoring the fact that we're inviting infection to take root. It is so easy to be comfortable, and say you care, and nonetheless take no action to display solidarity. Doing so is at least as evil as inaction, and perhaps even moreso, because we know better. We know we can make a difference, but it's so frightening to think that in our discomfort, we might be losing something we love – whereas it's just terribly tragic for a stranger to have lost something they loved.

Without my husband and my son, I would never have set foot on campus. I would’ve scurried away from the Culinary Institute of America the moment I encountered difficulty in acquiring my transcript (I did, eventually, graduate high school). I would have stayed home and been a happy housewife, grateful for how simple and undemanding my days had become. There would be no crying in the kitchen after egg day, but there'd be no pride bursting in my chest after braising day. There'd be no fumbling through quizzes and homework assignments and late nights working on a presentation I procrastinated, but there'd be no turning food waste from class into meals for the unhoused, either. I wouldn't have a collection of pictures of the sun rising over the San Antonio River every Tuesday morning. I wouldn't be writing.

I thought I'd crawled out from enough collapses not to need to challenge myself ever again. After the decades of pursuing the single thing I hold dearest in life, the motivation for my every act, my every breath – love – I thought it surrounded me. And it did.

It surrounds me still.

"Life begins at the end of your comfort zone." – Chef José Andrés