The Why
On the cost of performing & the freedom of being real
This is the part that not many get to see.
Before the jewelry company wakes up, before the burners catch and the steam starts rising, I turn on music...these days it’s Lee Moses’ Bad Girl or Lola Young’s Messy on repeat…might give a glimpse to where my head’s at these days, but they’re songs with dirty grit and feeling that move through my bones like sunshine...and then I dance. Right there in the kitchen, alone, apron not even fully tied yet, knife still on the wall, the city still mostly dark outside the window. No one is there, no one needs anything from me. It’s just me and the music and the beautiful quiet of New York mornings before the city wakes up.
And then at the end of it, when the last dish is done and the burners are off, and I’ve handed over the last plate of food, I walk home...forty-sixth street all the way up to seventy-first, twenty-five blocks, music still in my ears, the city moving around me…hurried and alive and completely indifferent to whatever I’m carrying. I just exhale. I breathe and take it all in. One foot in front of the other, moving forward, not performing for anyone, not being anyone’s chef or mother or wife or content creator or brand...just a woman walking through New York, letting the city hold her for a little while.
These are two of the truest moments in my day, and everything in between is negotiated.
I spent fifteen years in marketing and design before I ever set foot in a professional kitchen...fifteen years of making things look right, sound good, land correctly for someone else’s vision, someone else’s deadline, someone else’s idea of what success looked like on the page. And I was good at it, genuinely good, promoted and trusted and asked over and over to take on more until one day I looked up and realized I had built an entire career out of being useful to other people’s dreams. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I had let myself have one of my own. And I was ready.
I don’t say that with bitterness, I truly learned everything in those years...how to read a room, how to translate chaos into something clear and beautiful, how to make a complicated thing feel simple and a simple thing feel worthy of attention. Those skills live in my hands now when I plate a dish or write an essay or sit down to design something for a client or create a label for a pantry box. None of it was wasted.
But if I’m honest, most of it was performed. That’s just where I was in my journey…still figuring out who I was so I wore mask after mask to be what people wanted or needed. I was deep in the grind of aesthetic labor…the exhausting work of managing my appearance, my tone, and my 'vibe' to fit a corporate brand. I didn’t know how tired I was by the performance of it all until I walked into a professional kitchen for the first time and performance was the last thing they needed. Nobody in that kitchen cared what I looked like or how I presented myself or whether my aesthetic was cohesive. The kitchen crew and my chefs only cared if I could move, if I could do the work, if I could taste, if I could feel the heat of a pan and respond to it before the food suffered. It was the most embodied I had felt in years...maybe ever...and I fell in love with it so fast, so hard.
The first time I cooked for strangers during the pandemic, in borrowed apartments all over while the city held its breath…I cooked in silence, in masks, and with the anonymity of someone who hadn’t earned a reputation quite yet. It was the first time I wasn’t performing…I felt completely, uncomplicatedly myself...it was just me, with my hands and the heat and whatever was in their fridge, trying to make something that would make someone feel taken care of.
There’s a moment I think about a lot...back when I was a sous chef on the rise, still early in my kitchen life, still learning how to carry authority without feeling like I was faking it, and our head chef Eyal Shani came to New York to run a culinary workshop. Chefs flew in from Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Singapore...all with pedigrees and credentials and reputations much greater than my own. And at some point, after the farmers market haul and the cooking demos, Eyal asked us all, one by one, the question...why do you cook?
They each answered with craft, with discipline, with lineage and legacy, with answers that had been ingrained in them from years of interviews, press dinners, or panels.
When my turn came, I didn’t reach for anything crafted or polished...with my limited experience and short time in professional kitchens, I nervously said the only thing on my mind…the only thing I knew for certain: I cook so people feel seen. I cook so people feel known, even just for a moment…so they belong somewhere, even if it’s only for the length of a meal.
I didn’t plan that answer. It wasn’t a brand statement or a mission I’d workshopped or a line I’d been saving for the right moment...it just came out, plain and simple, because I was still trying to figure out what I was even doing in these kitchens. When the room went quiet, I could feel the heat rise to my face, shit…was that the wrong answer?!
My answer was followed by that long silence…and then three small smirks joined by the accepting nods from the chef owners at the front of the room...Eyal, Shahar, Nir. And, from that moment forward, they knew me, they saw me & they knew my name.
I knew, then, in that moment, that’s my why…that’s why I cook. And for the first time, I felt like I belonged there, in those kitchens and in this industry.
That answer is still the spine of everything I’m building today...the Freckled Fork, my Substack, the seasonal pantry boxes…even the morning reels I started making out of boredom…the ones I keep making because there’s something special about standing alone in a kitchen, music on and silliness overflowing that feels more like me than anything else...and then there’s Between Bowls, the interview series I’m currently developing that features simple, real conversations with other female chefs and restaurateurs over bowls of cereal.
The older I get, the more important it is to know your why and to remind yourself of and reference it often as if it were a moral compass or North Star…and as I stretch and throw those proverbial noodles at the wall, I’m realizing more and more that my why is stretching and growing. Beyond just a meal I make for someone, I want people to feel seen, to feel a sense of belonging & inclusivity, also in these substacks, my posts, the interviews, and beyond. I want to do my part to lift the veil and shatter the boxes we all may be inhibited by. I want to interact, in whatever medium, from a place of say-it-like-it-is…I’m afraid of reaching down into the hard and painful parts that are too scary to say out loud…my why? I want anyone I come in contact with, IRL or virtually, to feel seen, known, and that they belong at THIS table.
That’s the table I’m trying to build…everything else is just me figuring out how.
I think about performance a lot still…especially lately…about how much of what we consume and create and hold ourselves up against is a constructed version of a life rather than the actual life itself.
I want to be careful here because this is exactly where things almost went sideways a few weeks ago when I was about to publish something WAY too judgey about content creators, especially with women, and the social media machine. I’m glad I paused in the draft…in my judgment…because the piece was misguidedly aiming outward, but in reality, I was feeling an overwhelming inward discomfort…about myself.
The ick I felt wasn’t about them; it was the recognition. I’ve been fed a particular kind of post from various content creators, and what I saw wasn’t necessarily wrong or bad…but I felt discomfort…I recognized the performance act I had, too, had participated in for most of my adult life…in different clothes, in different seasons, for different audiences, for different reasons.
And we all fall into this performance trap, male and female alike; we all perform roles we think we should or to meet expectations placed on us from the outside world, from society.
Social psychologists have recently pointed to this phenomenon called Role Congruity Strain. Research shows that we don't just perform our jobs; we perform the identity we think the world requires of us. For women, this typically looks like the empathy trap, and for men, it looks like the stoic provider. Studies show that this constant conformity to external expectations drains our cognitive and emotional resources...meaning we are literally burning out from the performance before we even begin the actual work.
I played and performed so many roles in my life…the good, content wife…the steady one…the marketing director who had it all together…the chef who didn’t crack under pressure…the single mom who showed up even when she was running on three hours of sleep…the woman who was building something beautiful and purposeful…the woman who projected an outward mask of someone who had absolutely, most definitely, had it all figured out already.
They weren’t complete fabrications…there was some truth in each of them, but none were ever quite fully…not wholly…me.
I realize the whole truth of me is the one dancing in the kitchen before anyone arrives. The whole truth walks twenty-five blocks home because she needs the air and movement and twenty minutes of no one needing her to be anything more. The whole truth comes alive every single time she feeds people.
The whole truth of me is filled with complexities and contradictions…fulfilled and exhausted in the same hour, proud and not enough in the same breath, completely certain of my purpose and utterly unsure of my footing or next steps, who completely loves being a mother and also needs space from time to time, a fiercely independent woman who also loves having a partner to share the load with, secure in myself and also anxiously attached and fearful that love will leave me if I don’t keep doing…these things, all at once, always. I’m working on finally, slowly, and reluctantly accepting that it’s okay, I’m okay and I’m not a burden or problem to solve…I’m complex, with many layers, and this is what it actually looks like to be a woman living fully inside her own life…contradictions and all.
And, the guilt…the one that surfaces for me in the quiet moments away…the small, sharp cramp I feel the second I exhale, the second I feel something that might be relief or freedom or just plain rest, and my brain immediately serves up reasons why I shouldn’t be allowed to have it...that guilt is part of it, too. It’s a lie, of course, but it’s one we’ve been taught so thoroughly from the beginning…that women’s value lives in our constant availability and ability to do it all, and to do it with a smile…that even a twenty-five block walk home with music in our ears can feel like something we have to earn or explain or apologize for.
But we have to have those moments…for our sanity, and honestly for the sanity of those around us. There’s nothing wrong with needing a moment that belongs only to us. Accepting that it’s necessary to finally be honest with ourselves and those around us about what it takes to keep showing up.
This is where the thought of Between Bowls came to be.
I didn’t just want to celebrate successful women, though God knows, I do celebrate them...but I selfishly wanted to meet them, share stories, and sit across from these amazing women who are holding all of it at once. I wanted to sit with them and ask them the real questions. Not what’s your concept or your five-year plan. I wanted to dive deeper into what this life actually costs you...what do you do on the days you drop the ball...what do you put on when nobody’s watching and you just need to feel like yourself again.
No pretense, no performance, no highlight reel…just the conversation we all should be having. There’s a release and a freedom felt when women share their struggles, when we remove our armor and show what success actually requires, what it takes, and what we give.
From the women I’ve been so lucky to talk to so far, from the chefs… the leaders…the mothers building businesses out of pure grit...we are all holding so much more complexity than we ever show. We are fulfilled and falling apart. We are confident and also desperate for someone to tell us we’re doing it right. We love our children so ferociously, and also feel guilty for the moments of rest or the feeling of relief we might feel when we have some space. We are proud of what we’ve built and terrified it’s not enough…we are showing up fully and also disappointing someone we love…and we get back up the next morning and try again. We hold all of it, all the time, simultaneously, without even a moment to resolve it all into something neat or manageable or postable.
We don’t need to be fixed or optimized or coached into a cleaner version of ourselves. We need to be witnessed...to be seen, known…even just for the length of a meal or in a conversation or over a bowl of cereal with someone who is also just trying to figure it out.
The why… it’s why I cook, why I write, it’s why I push to find more spaces and places to share the gifts I’ve been given.
It’s why…every single morning, before the city needs a single thing from me, I turn on Lee Moses or Lola Young, or Florence and the Machine, and I dance…and it’s enough.
And today, I’m finally starting to believe it.