As I was on the train heading back to Chicago from a nice Thanksgiving with friends in Ann Arbor, Michgan, I had a thought about how childhood experiences can mold us if we allow them.  
For some folks, hanging onto a childhood memory can be sweet and comforting.  There are fond memories in one's life where you want to remember those moments, cherish and treasure them, hoping to one day even replicate them with your own children or friends.


Like I've mentioned before, my mother and I - for our many differences and strong personalities - always found common ground in the kitchen.  For hours we would make these incredibly complex Vietnamese dishes and in those hours we weren't at odds; we were a fluid, cohesive team with a mission to make a truly delightful meal.  In my whirlwind childhood, but for those moments in the kitchen, there was peace.


Today, after all these years of discovering my love and talent for cooking, I can pinpoint it back to a time in my life to the very core of why.  I suppose that's why I've started two dinner clubs in Dallas and Chicago, and why I find myself on a lonely night, or after a tough day at work, being called into the kitchen.  Sure, I go there because I need to feed myself and to stir up my culinary creativity, but more importantly it's to connect with one of the few fond childhood memories I remember.


Perhaps it's this time of year that I become introspective.  Maybe it's the fact that living in a new city has left me to my own devices.  Or, because around the holidays people are more nostalgic.  Whatever the reason, I'm grateful to have had even this one special memory from my childhood that I can appreciate for what it is.  I'm thankful that despite the differences my mother and I have, we still share a deep love of cooking and eating.  It doesn't matter that it's just a couple things we can agree on; the fact that we can come come together is good enough for me.


Happy holidays, y'all.  

Thought I'd share this quote as it is so eloquent and articulate:
“The pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. ”

— Edgar Allan Poe

"I am nobody but myself..."

At the urging of a good friend who knows me a little too well, I am hesitantly rededicating myself to writing again because "you have a way with the written word and tapping into your reality" she says; along with "a head full of ridiculous ideas and life full of idiotic moments at my expense" I added.

Here I am.  Fast forward four years, three jobs, a fairy-tale marriage in theory and a devastating divorce in reality, a sudden death of a good friend followed by the birth of my sweet nephew, the rebirth of a mother-daughter relationship, few triathlons, couple half marathons, and a marathon.  I've learned a lot since the last blog entry back in 2007 - like don't take a dare to run a marathon unless you're crazy.  Some lessons are more notable than others, some are random and sporadic like my thoughts, and apparently my blog entries too.

There's a quote by Ralph Ellison that succinctly sums up the biggest lesson learned which is to be true to yourself: "All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.  I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.  I was naive.  I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.  It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself."

Ralph Ellison's quote resonated mostly to a marriage that I desperately tried to hold onto.  It was a union that I thought I wanted, and was maintaining because it was, and at that moment seemed to be 'the right thing to do'.  I molded myself into the perfect trophy wife -- but that was the thing.  The fact that I even had to mold myself into another person to make someone else feel better was an indicator that things were very wrong.

"I am nobody by myself."

Though that lesson was largely learned coming out of a marriage, I realize even now that life is always a series of revelations about yourself and the relationships harvested around you.  At times it's harder to identify what the truth actually is because of the self-imposed distractions we put in our lives but it's there.  Strip away the jobs and BS titles, the materialistic metal of armor, the inflated ego and be the pure, genuine true you.  For a person like me that thrives on labels, to belong to a carefully selected category, to be settled, wanted, part of -- it's a very unsettling place to remove those layers and stand still, quiet, alone.  As unsettling as it may feel in the short-term, it's 100% necessary in the long-term.  Because to carry on in a way that is the easier softer way is to cheat yourself and those around you with knowing the real you. 

"I am nobody by myself."

A couple months ago when I was talking with my mom, I posed the question, "mother, I know you don't want to worry about me, and there are times when I feed you stories that you want to hear because it's easier for the both of us to digest.  BUT, how about I try telling you the actual story and you get to know your daughter and have a real relationship with her?"  As nerve-wracking as that was to put that out there, at the end of the day, my mom respected that.  Why?  Because we both agreed to have a better relationship with one another and honesty (regardless of how the other party might take it) is the best policy.

Regardless of how much you try to make something work because you're afraid of failing, hurting someone's feelings, or simply because it seems like the harder thing to do, it will not work if the motivation isn't right.  There are times when the human spirit is no match for what the universe has in store for you.  At the end of the day, when you're staring at yourself in the mirror with a heavy heart and answering to the big guy upstairs, you've got to answer to you alone.  And the truth - at times - is a bitter pill to swallow.  But, like with any medicine you take, you trust it'll heal whatever ails you.  Alas, given the serious life-altering, game-changing moments that's occurred the past four years, the truth seems to have cured me in many more ways than one.