One step forward, one step forward, one step forward,

You can't brute force your way into a better life. APPARENTLY.

If you wanted, you could call me impatient, and maybe even a little impulsive. I like fast, and I like momentum. I don’t like to take my time and I do NOT like to wait. I am that freak who will go around slow walkers and shoot them a dirty look over my shoulder. Sitting in traffic legit makes me turn evil, which explains why every time I visit Los Angeles I leave a worse person.

Good things might come to those who wait, but I’ve always felt that good things come to those who are smart enough to figure out shortcuts, too. Because waiting, no matter how you frame it, is not an action. Treading water is just drowning, slowly. The worst thing you can be told, in my book, is that the ONLY thing you can do is wait.

And when I was waiting for a transplant, it wasn’t so bad in the beginning. I felt normal, and they told me it would be roughly two years. Considering how hard I was avoiding even thinking about a kidney transplant at that point, this was just fine with me. That was in 2013. Famously, I wasn’t actually transplanted until 2024.

See eventually, it turned into waiting. It turned into endlessly treading water.

Hurry up and do this test so you can wait a little longer. Hurry up and jump over this roadblock so you can get right back into the water.

I knew a boat was coming, at some point, I just didn’t know when. And no one could tell me. So the only thing I could do was wait.

I treaded. And treaded. And treaded. And god, I resented it. There was this constant itch under my skin, like I needed to escape the city to rip my skin off and howl at the moon. As the time dragged on and I got sicker, I had to retreat into my own fantasies to feel anything at all from the suffocating boredom of my apartment. The thing that got me through the worst of it was the image I had of me, after.

After the transplant, I thought, the countdown to my real life would start. I’d take a few days there, a week or two recovering at home, and then it would be off to the races. I had this vision in my head of me running wild in a field, arms outstretched, like Taylor Swift in ‘But Daddy I Love Him’. Three, two, one, and off I’d go.

My doctors threw a small wrench in this fantasy when they told me I’d actually need to quarantine for three months after the surgery. Well, no big deal. Even better, actually. It was the perfect chrysalis. I would go into the goo for three months and emerge as the girl I’d always wanted to be. I’d start a workout regimen with my newfound energy, make the most of every day, and live in a spotless apartment. Because surely the only reason I’d never been a pink pilates princess who wakes up at 5am and eats complicated salads was because of kidney failure.

Right?

Of course right! I recovered from a major surgery instantly, immediately started hitting the fuckin gym, and now I’m completely perfect and didn’t have to learn anything at all. Yay! Essay over!

Kidding, obviously. This did not happen. Not even kind of, not a little bit, not at all. My grand expectations were naturally smashed into pieces. I forgot about the part of surgery where you have to actually recover, not to mention adjusting to meds and also having an internal organ randomly in your abdomen where it lowkey does NOT belong.

A few essays back I mentioned that waking up post transplant felt like returning to a house you’d abandoned. I actually got really into watching a series on Youtube where this Canadian couple was self-renovating this gorgeous abandoned mid-century home out in the forest, which does sound like the setup for a great horror movie. Before they could start the fun stuff like picking out furniture or paint samples they had to clear out all the old decaying furniture and trash and debris that had accumulated. That was me.

Before surgery and even a few months after, I thought I would only have to slap on some new paint and switch out the couch. Nope! I had years of junk and old patterns and unhelpful beliefs to clear out first. But like I said, I’m a bit of a corner-cutter, so most of the first things I tried to make my life better did not stick. One thing did, though, and it was the one thing I never thought would.

So, I’m in quarantine post-surgery. I could talk for hours about how it felt to be alone in the house watching everyone else hang out and do stuff without me (my friends went on a trip together and I genuinely almost bombed the city they were in), but we can talk about that later. What’s important to know is that for three months after surgery I wasn’t allowed to order takeout or really eat any food that wasn’t prepared at home, to avoid the risk of food poisoning.

Kind of a reasonable request, except for the fact that I could not cook. Truly, could not. Believed from the bottom of my heart that it just wasn’t something I could do. My pre-transplant diet was doordash and peanut butter and jelly. Give me a recipe and I’d find a way to mess it up. When people would say they enjoyed cooking or that it was relaxing for them, I just assumed they were wired that way, or maybe that they’d gotten some kind of cooking-induced Stockholm syndrome.

Cooking was stressful for me, maybe even a little scary. Raw chicken is a salmonella factory. The stove is hot you guys! You can burn yourself on splashing oil or a careless grab of a pot lid. And what if you put ingredients in at the wrong time, or leave it on a burner too long? Now it’s ruined, and it tastes bad, and you could’ve just ordered takeout and saved yourself the trouble.

Funny enough, I actually watch a lot of cooking shows and have my entire life. But the people on those shows are chefs. To me, they had that innate thing that just made them good at cooking. That was not me. As a rule, I don’t really do things that I’m not naturally and immediately good at, which is of course a perfect attitude to have. And I’d fucked up enough recipes that cooking seemed like something I would just never, ever do.

Unfortunately, I had no choice. Completely out of my hands. Cook or starve, baby.

Some of you may remember my disastrous first try. I was live posting through it on my instagram stories. I tried to make grilled cheese and tomato soup, with ingredients provided by a Blue Apron box. It started rough. I was nearly in tears trying to figure out how to cut an onion. I’m sorry, but it isn’t intuitive! And I was deeply confused by the instruction ‘Halve and chop an onion’, because to me that implied you only used HALF the onion. Not so!

As a side note, if you work for Blue Apron or Hello Chef or wherever else, you really need to be employing people with a technical writing background when making your recipes. You need to be reading through it and going “What would the dumbest person on the planet do if faced with these instructions?”.

I added all the ingredients to the pot and I actually felt pretty proud of myself, because it looked and smelled like tomato soup! Maybe this cooking thing isn’t so hard, after all. I sat down to taste my triumphant meal, camera pointed directly at my face, ready to brag about my success.

Jesus fucking christ!

I don’t know what happened, but the soup tasted like vinegar. Before you ask, no, vinegar was not an ingredient in the soup. And the irony of finally being able to taste food again but only being allowed to eat my own disgusting creations was not lost on me. I felt like I was staring down the barrel of the worst few months of my life. Because in my mind, this was the peak. The best I could ever do was my very first attempt. You either had it, or you didn’t. And clearly, I didn’t.

Normally, this is where I’d call it. Fun experiment, got a laugh out of it, but it’s obviously not for me. But that was not an option. And without even knowing it, I had taken my first step on the road to learning to cook. Because what I didn’t know then that I do know now is that the first step to learning anything new is failing at it.

I failed, and I failed spectacularly. Barely edible creation after barely edible creation. I was eating things for weeks that I wouldn’t have fed to a dog. I watched seven different youtube chefs explain how to dice an onion. I tried ‘easy recipes’ over and over, and I failed at them.

I’d just about given up, and was back to eating pasta and frozen chicken tikka masala every day, when I watched a video that Binging With Babish did. I don’t even remember what it was about, but at the end he started making bread and he said if you’re ever in a rut and want to feel like you’re making progress, try making bread. Make anything with your hands, but his suggestion was bread. And for whatever reason, I thought… I could try to make some bread.

So I found an easy recipe for overnight focaccia, the kind you let rise in the fridge for 24 hours before baking. No kneading, just mixing. So I mixed, and I left it in the fridge, I waited, and the next day I baked it. I followed the instructions and, wait, holy shit. I think I made bread. Yes, I made bread! Holy shit! I did it!

I don’t know why or how, but Andrew Babish was correct. The act of making that loaf of mid focaccia changed everything. For some reason, that one success brought out my stubborn side, and I decided then and there that I was going to learn to cook.

Every day, every week, I got a little better. One step forward, and one step forward, and one step forward. I learned you could just throw raw chicken in a crockpot without even touching it and it would turn out well, so I started getting over my crippling fear of salmonella. I made chili and began a new lifelong devotion to beans. I started eating tomatoes after deciding at the age of six that they were nasty– they’re not! They can be delicious! I started cooking with ground turkey, which used to scare me because it looks like brains.

It was not fast. It was not an overnight success. I made many, many mistakes and still do. But a year has gone by since that loaf of bread, and you guys, I can kind of cook now! I wouldn’t call myself a good cook, but that doesn’t matter. I almost never order takeout anymore, because I have the skills available to make something better. My life is better because I took the time to actually learn something new. And yeah, I was forced to learn to do it at gunpoint, but I could’ve given up once those three months passed, and I’m so glad I didn’t. The kitchen in my abandoned house is suddenly clean and inviting and a center of calm in my life. And once you see what one room can look like finished, it’s hard to ignore the rest of it.

I used the word devotion earlier to talk about beans, and while I stand by that (this bean pasta recipe changed my life) I want to talk about the concept of devotion a little bit. Learning to cook was an act of devotion, because learning to take care of yourself is an act of devotion. You’re worshiping at the altar of your own well-being.

And it’s deeply unglamorous work, no matter how much pretty girls on Tik Tok romanticize it. I used to be constantly disappointed in myself because I just didn’t have the energy to take care of myself the way I wanted to. And then I’d watch these gorgeous women in Alo sets talking about their perfect morning routines and just feel like there was something wrong with me because taking care of myself felt HARD.

I believed, incorrectly, that even on my best day there was still something wrong with me, something missing, that meant I couldn’t be That Girl. Some girls have the gene that makes them stick to habits, you see. And I was fighting demons and my own body just to pick up the clothes on my bedroom floor. And god, I wanted so bad to be better.

So I would try a million quick fixes. Or worse, try to change it all at once. I’d create an elaborate cleaning schedule, work schedule, everything schedule. And inevitably I’d miss a day, or something would come up, or I’d be too exhausted, and I’d stop. And then I’d beat myself up for not sticking to it, and the shame would come in even stronger, and this would go on and on and on for years.

I think the fact that in many ways I was actually stuck and unable to move forward with my life made it that much worse. Okay, so I can’t control when this gigantic, scary, ultimately life-changing event will occur. But I can brute force my way into being more organized, right? I still have free will in some areas of my life and I am going to use and abuse it.

And it doesn’t work! There is one thing that actually works, and it’s my worst fucking nightmare. Do you know how annoyed I was when I realized, after a year of learning to cook, that I had been setting small goals and having small successes and gaining confidence exactly the way every single fucking self-help book says? How irritating it is to learn that those smug bastards who write things like You Are A Badass or Atomic Habits are actually right?

God, I hate it! I resent it! But it’s true! You cannot brute force your way into a better life. If you want it, you have to take a small step in the right direction before you can learn to sprint. So I’m irritated, but I’m doing it. Very, very slowly.

And of course I wanted it all to be better right away. Who wouldn’t? Starting over never feels good. You think it’ll feel like starting a new Animal Crossing island, all fresh and clean and ready to create whatever you want, but it’s not. It’s like coming back to Animal Crossing after two years away and going oh fuck, this is my island. If I want it to look better, I’d better start weeding. I’d better decide which of the weird objects I’ve placed haphazardly around are worth keeping.

It’s exhausting! In real life, not in Animal Crossing. It’s actually fine to go back to your Island. Your villagers miss you.

We are always starting over in life, so I’m sure I’ll have to do all this work again someday. But the next time I start over, I’ll start over with my failures and my successes, the vinegar soup and the fresh focaccias. And I’ll start over knowing that the only way forward is one slow, small step at a time.

All of which to say, if you want to start changing your life, maybe try baking a loaf of bread first. And then send me all the incredible things you do after that.

(And maybe some bean recipes, if you have them!)