From keyboard to stove

As I recently wrote a story about fear, I didn’t expect I will face it in its horrific form in almost no time. What caused me feeling so anxcious that I almost felt like an adolescent trying to tell a girl she’s pretty? Well, I changed my job. I took a break from copywriting and skipped to cooking.

I always say there’s no big deal about leaving jobs. While one chapter comes to an end, the other one is about to be written. But now I was really terrified as I feel great responsibility towards the future because me and my girlfriend have some plans together. We want to get married. And the wedding isn’t actually anything I could ever imagine affording. Not that I would never wish to marry a woman. The problem was more tangible — it was lack of money.

In the past few years I learned to manage the numbers well althought I never was strong at math. But now I counted and the result was very obvious: I can’t afford the wedding. I felt desperate but naturaly I started to look for some ways how to get money and I found on Facebook that head of my favourite restaurant is looking for a cook. That got my attention. I always loved cooking if I don’t count the 4 year hiatus at school, where we had compulsory practice in the kitchen which sucked all of my passion away. This memory was still quite fresh but I decided there’s nothing to lose if I at least try to react.

Day after I got a phone call for a meeting with the owner. He always looked like a kind guy and now when I met him personally none of my impressions changed. We arranged an exam for Monday, shook hands and I walked away, full of thoughts. They were still doubtful.

But that was about to change. As Monday drawn closer, the old fear started to crawl back. I never told anyone how horrible I felt everytime at my practice. Working in gastronomy is most of the time a complete stress. You hardly have a chance to stop and have a meal. Plus anytime somebody raises his voice, you start to feel like a piece of shit no matter what. I was pooping in my pants. I was trying to look calm, but my girlfriend saw it in my eyes when I was in my bed at 9 p.m. unable to fall asleep.

“I’m just freaking out,” was my answer to her question about what is going on. She layed down next to me and I told her everything. About my old fears, about the money struggle, about everything. When I finished, she was just lying there, staring at me for a minute and then saying: “Go for it. Everything is going to be alright, believe me.”

And as she told me, the next day it was. All the employees were acting really kind to me. So kind I didn’t experience for a really long time (and I gotta admit that I went through many workplaces). I was naturally struggling with the cooking itself but as I’m a keen cook at home, it didn’t took me long to go through the basics quite smoothly.

Now it’s my day 12 at the restaurant and I gotta say I never ever felt so happy and so much alive. My joy for work burns like a fire even when I work almost 15 hours a day. There are naturaly harder times when i feel a bit tired but everytime that happens, I just visualise the goal me and my girlfriend want to achieve. And when I do so, I can almost feel the new energy pumping in my veins and throwing me back in the game. Some people may wonder whether I feel ashamed of lowering down from a copywriter to an ordinary cook. But I don’t. I’m actually proud that I finally got a job which makes me so happy to be involved with and what’s even more charming is a simple fact that it all came out just because I decided to step out of my comfort zone a conquer my fear of humiliation, stress and making mistakes.