a note about the grateful note

okay fine, i’ll still do it a day late after a THC soda & an anthony bourdain quote came across my feed that said “ absolute fearlessness is essential. you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself. you have to be willing to be wrong. you have to be willing to fail. if you’re not willing to do that, then you’re not going to be a very good writer.” so fuck my life here i am typing my little words into my little internet.

last summer was a rough one for me. i had gone through a pretty amicable breakup with a person i love dearly. i had a couple of short flings in the middle of just, getting chewed up and spit out by a big chef job. to this day i am realizing the ways that this job messed with my head, my confidence in my skill set & my desire to be a chef first. i gave notice, then within the next couple of shifts they were in the process of hiring someone they didn’t want me to meet so they let me walk. i was suddenly very single and very unemployed with money coming in because i was being payed out. my best friend charles had a lot going on in the background of expecting their first child. we sent these long, extravagant voice memos to each other about where we were in our minds. sometimes i was cross faded crying into my voice recording because i watched miley cyrus introduce angels like you after one of her friends had just passed. i thought about my own dying, how alone it must be to die. i remember telling charles i wanted to do as much going through life as i could with him. we professed to each other our love and belief in each other that day & a lot of days after that. we talked all day every day. we talked about the coffees we were drinking, about all of our friends we were secretly in love with, we read to each other, i took him with me in my pocket on a trip to italy, portugal and spain. i listened to a dream he had about his baby before she was born while i was walking through the coliseum in rome. we checked in with the time difference, our thing being that one of us always had to be in the dream realm.

i put him on this book that forever changed my view on the world. one tiny suggestion in the beginning of the book is to have a gratitude practice. the guys in the kitchen i was just working in showed me you could create a shared note on the iphone. at what point should i tell you that we became friends during our college years because we both wrote poetry? i’ll spare myself a lot of cringe by leaving out the details there and burying this sentence in a paragraph you’re probably not still reading. one day i read him this essay by ross gay from his book of delights. it was about love and loneliness and annihilation. we made the note. we committed to writing one note a day. we did pretty good for a while. we did good while we needed to good. i went to the grateful note any time my anxiety was on 10 or i wanted to feel actually in my body. looking back a year later through that catalog of days is so different than when we got together during the turn of the year to read all three volumes of the grateful note aloud with a dog named pepper. i gathered some of these notes i think as a way to show our work. i wanted to return to writing from a deeply internal place. there were not a lot of people in my life who i felt safe sharing my first drafts or raw unfiltered thoughts with. i think cooking is letting first drafts exist, deciding you want to rework something or put it in a blender and turn it into a sauce. there are very few ways that writing and cooking don’t talk to each other in my mind. i catch myself constantly reminding my hands to be more gentle. i think about the months root vegetables were in the dirt. i think about the hands that planted the seeds. the hands that picked the vegetables. my own hands scrubbing the dirt off. cooking, like any art form, is devotion. coming back to a draft is devotion. coming back to yourself is devotion, even if it’s late. anyways if i keep trying to edit this i’ll never just let it exist. here’s some notes we wrote in various states of emotion/devotion/emptiness/grief/bliss