Bailing the Ship, Kicking off Ego Pirates

I love water sports. Unfortunately, my ego has gotten in the way of spending much time on the water lately. My never-ending battle to keep my life-ship afloat seems to keep me from floating a boat and sticking my paddle in the water. Ironically , if I actually spent more time literally floating on water in a real boat, it might make my figurative life-ship a bit more buoyant. Is that the proper use of ironically, literally and figurative? I think so.

I digress. The problem I am getting at is that somehow my ego got so busy making myself feel and seem busy and useful, I forgot to bail that figurative life-ship and keep myself buoyant.

I started out 2018 all pumped up on ego and ready to conquer my demons. I got all buzz-worded up with my goals and plans and outlines. I bought myself a fancy new planner that promises to make my life greater, more creative and all around amazing. I drew out one of those vision board, bubble maps thingies that puts what dreamy thing I want to complete in the middle. I added arrows and lines pointing and connecting all the tasks and checklists together until I had a page of spaghetti that clearly showed me how to make dreamy thing a real thing. I did the Whole 30 starting January 1st.

I wrote a business plan. A plan to convert what I do as a gigger to what I do as a real brick-and-mortar business. I created work schedules and a fancy cash-flow sheet complete with formulas to model different scenarios.

Meanwhile, I also signed up for this two-week class on cheese making in Vermont because late last year someone wanted to hire me to start a restaurant-based cheesemaking program. I signed up for a 6-month Ayurveda Training program because I had credit left over from a previous training I didn’t do. I signed up for a new gym with a 10-month contract. I signed up for a writing class. I signed up to work on a friend’s visual-audio-performance-food-art project (that bread is the beautiful product of that). I signed up to do private classes and private cooking birthday parties. I signed up for teaching more and more cooking classes all the way through the middle of the year. I signed up for teaching things I never taught before and I had no business teaching.

My ego had me doing things to do things because things needed to be done.

I stewed on my business plan. Something about it made me uncomfortable. The discomfort may have been the business plan or it may have been from the late January #Whole30FoodPoisioning I gave myself via a boiled egg that sat too long at room temperature. That cleared up in time for me to head to Vermont to realize I was certainly out of time in my schedule to actually make any cheese. I developed achy, painful heels and my knee started acting up again from bad posture while standing on my feet during too many classes and some other bad habits I developed in my 42 years on this planet.

I started physical therapy and the business plan still made me feel uncomfortable. I bought some cool plantar faciitis shoes still determined to march forward with determination and raw, brute force of will.

Then, in mid-February, I had a disastrous week.

My ego signed me up to teach a weeklong cooking camp for kids. It was my third time at this rodeo. While others took Monday off, I prepped. I gave up the heady lessons on ‘science of cooking’ and resigned myself to 4 days cycling through make-a-mess-clean-a-mess. In my egotistical sign up frenzy, I somehow signed up to teach two evening classes that same week. After testing my new shoes at home and during a few kids classes, I decided to wear them to an evening teaching Knife Skills. They were decidedly not anti-slip. Imagine a One Stooges show in a kitchen, with knives. Needless to say, my multiple, spectacular falls that evening erased all progress from physical therapy.

Come Friday evening, weary from kid teaching all week, I limped into my last class of the week to be greeting by that ‘What do you do for a living ?‘ question (see my last post for a recap).

My friend Rose would tell me it was a lesson from the greater universe. I will tell you, it was a lesson from my alter-ego, sub-conscience telling me “Just STOP!”

Sitting around, annoyed with my own self-destruction and even more annoyed with my own self-pity and wanting to stop my spiraling ego from eating me up, something clicked. I did not like what I was doing. I do not like what I am doing. I…DO… NOT… LIKE… WHAT… I… AM… DOING!

Somewhere, about five years ago, I got interrupted. (Ha, the explanation for the title of that movie with Angelina and Winona just clicked for me, real time, writing this.)

My mom got sick nearly five years ago. I know, I know, “Kimi, you keep dredging up her sickness and her death and your grief and all and shit. Just get on with yourself already and stop blaming your mom for the mess of your life. It is of your own making, girl.” That’s my ego talking in my own head. This last month is me finally telling my ego to shut the fuck up.

Five years ago, I quit my job and started culinary school. I didn’t know where that was going to go, but teaching cooking classes was not my original motivation. A voice from my past (or the universe if you must, Rose) has also popped up lately under the guise of Facebook Memories to remind me of this fact. I wanted to be a farmer. I was a food activist. I liked making things.

I also voluntarily drudged up my past. In my own words to the Gastronomy Program Coordinator at Boston University

“. . . I realized I didn’t want to prepare and serve food I really wanted to pursue food advocacy and sustainability. . . things I am passionate about – cooking, food systems, sustainability, food access, self sufficiency, local economies, seed-to-seed and environment . . . [I am] better suited for food advocacy than chefdom. . . I am very interested in food access for all which includes growing and preparing food as well as educating people about food and food policy. My passion is for helping individuals to make and affect choices and policy around food at a grass-root level.”

I started in the Culinary Program. I worked part-time for an organization coordinating workshops. I taught a few urban homesteading classes. I taught a few classes at a farm. My ego did what it does. It saw how these workshops could be better. It saw how the organizations could do better. It said, “You are good at this. You can do this better.” I lined up the dominoes and my ego started knocking them down.

Then, my mom got sick and I just kept doing what I was doing. Taking it to the next level . . . for the next five years.

I joined other organizations. Ego said, “You can do better.” I helped someone else start their little brick-and-mortar cooking school. Ego said, “You can do better.” I created hundreds of classes, from scratch and contracted myself out to other places. Ego said, “You can do better.”

Indeed, I can do better, but that is not the point. My ego gets ‘being good at something’ and ‘enjoying something’ confused. “Hello, My Ego. I did not leave engineering because I wanted to kill myself doing things I did not like better than they were already being done. That is exactly why I left engineering in the first place.”

I wrote a business plan. I looked at it. I played with my formulas and scenarios. I looked at it with blurry vision. I looked at it with crisp vision. I imagined where it would grow. I considered how to sustain it. I played out my daily routine. My ego said, “This is what’s next.” My gut said “This is not food poisoning.” The brick-and-mortar was what the last several years were supposed to culminate as. It was the last domino to fall.

Click. . . I do not like what I am doing.

So, I started this on a boat metaphor. I came here via a on a domino metaphor. And now, via this obvious statement, I gracefully return to the boat metaphor.

I let my ego fill my life-ship with a bunch of shit I didn’t need. In the haze of sickness and grief, I did not stop my ego from trying to sink my life-ship. It just kept signing up for stuff, grasping at false lifeboats, inviting the water on-board.

Then, as I sat on my ass on a kitchen floor with 12 students holding sharp knives staring at me while I cursed the universe and myself for buying such shitty shoes and willingly signing up for this torture, I marched my stupid fucking pirate ego to the end of the fucking plank and kicked it off.

Splash.

And now, as gracefully as I can manage, I am throwing overboard all the shit I didn’t need.

With grace, I bid you happy cooking.