It's been a year, and it hasn't

The calendar on the wall is replaced, and I've marked another birthday. My husband and I stirred from bed long enough to whisper "Happy New Year," to one another when San Antonio's midnight fireworks began – and there were a lot of them, for a long time. The year has turned, my age has advanced, and neither of those are the anniversary most occupying my mind.

Eight months of culinary school rest behind me. That's all, and yet learning what it means to be a chef has been so immense, such a freight train through who I was, that I can hardly square the impact with the time. My kitchen has never been so clean. My fridge has never been so full of ingredients. There isn't a bag of greasy potato chips lurking in the pantry (even though I very much wish there were, sometimes); my eating habits have changed drastically. I need to go shopping for pants that actually fit and aren't falling off.

On New Year's Eve, we went out to Nicōsi. I carry a notebook everywhere these days, and it got a bit of laughter there, but my favourite interaction came later. One of my fellow diners approached, asked if I'm a writer or a blogger or whatnot, and I directed her here, and I thought, how disappointing that I've posted nothing new in months, when I have so much to share.

Sometime in August, as finals for my first semester of culinary school loomed, I realized: I was giving 80% of my effort to school, when I owed myself 110%. It was too late, by then, to course correct; I studied as hard as I could for my exams, didn't represent myself all too well on them, and walked out of school with my chin held high anyway because I'd completed the hardest thing I'd ever done, and the future held nothing but opportunity. I would be better. I thought about how much I'd learned, thought about how much I'd grown as a person; I felt wildly proud.

"Gotta stay humble," I cautioned myself, a pleasant little refrain I linked to harmless things – dropping my phone in the pool, somehow burning a braise, dropping my husband's phone in the pool. I knew I would approach my second semester with hunger and drive: I wanted something, now. I wanted (I want!) to be a chef.

A couple weeks later, carried by my ego, I messed up. I messed up badly. I did something wildly unprofessional. It was no one else's fault, it was something where I even thought 'should I do this?' before I did anyway, and the repercussions will surely bite me in the ass in the future. I told myself a story that wasn't true, which isn't a sin in and of itself, but I pushed my delusion on someone else with all the sneering self-certainty I could possibly have mustered, and that's abhorrent and shameful.

So I shut up.

I stopped writing. I put my head down, clenched my jaw, and turned my entire focus towards succeeding in the coming semester. I stopped calling myself a writer even though I missed it, I dreamed about writing, but the idea of putting down words for anyone else to read terrified me. Was I being fair? Objective? Did it matter? Did I want an audience? Was I responsible enough for an audience?

I lost my confidence. Some of that confidence was unearned, sure, but some of it was legitimate. And that left me stumbling when I walked back into the classroom.

I was so needy. Obnoxiously needy, and smug. My friends tried to tell me; one of them said, "I get it, I can be a brat sometimes too," when I grumbled about something, and another said, "Don't start with that, because I won't be nice to you about it," when I cracked a joke at their expense. The same one asked, "Do you hear yourself?" after I said something about deserving a pat on the back, and that's when I actually finally did. Months too late, sure, but I heard myself, and felt the type of shame one can only feel in retrospect.

The thing is, I had a triumphant second semester. My first choice externship site accepted me. I won $500 in a school-wide taco contest judged by some icons of the San Antonio culinary scene. I improvised a dirty rice one day and heard one of my chef-instructors tell another it was delicious. I got a job making milk bread a couple times a month. My grades went up steadily. I made friends! I had every affirmation possible that I was on the right path, but something fundamental to my sense of self had broken. It made me fucking obnoxious.

With three weeks left of school, I severed a nerve in my right index finger, right on the knuckle, cutting myself so deeply with a blade I'd just spent fifteen minutes sharpening that I didn't even feel the wound before I saw the blood pouring out of it. And my first thought was "I won't be able to hold a knife" followed immediately by "for how long?"

So I joked about it. "If this doesn't get better, I'll have to learn to use my left hand," I told my husband, all graveyard humor and grit, as if I weren't trembling every time I tried to curl that finger and a sickening burst of pain stabbed down through my wrist while the knuckle remained stiff and unresponsive. But the fear – I had ended my culinary career before it even began, I had found the thing I loved and now I could never do it as well again – wove itself deep.

I haven't ever felt like I had a career to lose before. And it hasn't even been a year.

So now I'm relearning how to use a knife. That's okay. I'm determined. I'll do it (I have to). What's hard is knowing there are all kinds of self-inflicted pain coming: this is what "gotta stay humble" means to me. It means being hungry enough for something that I fall asleep thinking about what I've learned from failure, not how failure feels. It means waking up and refusing the temptation of old habits in favor of the lessons and potential of the day ahead.

I have a plan. I have goals. For the first time in my life, if someone asks me where I want to be in five years, I have an answer. And that is, very simply, because I forced myself to be uncomfortable, to go to the Culinary Institute of America, to get off my ass and away from the computer, to engage with the real world and actual physical human beings. It's been awkward. I have twenty years of only talking to people through a screen to atone for; I don't know how to be professional, and I barely know how to have a conversation. But I'm trying to look at every new experience, every faux pas, through the lens of "this is just the latest unfamiliar thing I'm learning how to navigate." It helps. The growth is worth the embarassment.

And I'm ready to see what triumphs and humilities this year holds.