Julie & Julia & me.
Everyone knows about the midlife crisis: you turn sixty, buy a sports car, and dye your hair. But it feels like no one talks about the quarter-life crisis, even if we all have heard of the horrors of turning thirty. From the song 30/90 on tick, tick… BOOM! to that episode on Friends where they all turn thirty, movies and shows alike have made us feel like leaving our twenties behind means the end of life as we know it. At least, that’s how it feels to me. At twenty-six, I’ve recently started wondering: what am I doing with my life? Is there something more fulfilling I could do with my time?
Some answers came to me the other day as I watched Julie & Julia, directed by the incredible Nora Ephron.
Julie & Julia is a 2009 biographical comedy-drama film that contrasts the life of chef Julia Child in the early years of her career with the life of Julie Powell, a young woman with an unpleasant job who starts a blog documenting her year cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Throughout the movie, there are flashbacks to Julia’s life in Paris in the 50s and her struggles while searching for her purpose, and we see complementing scenes of Julie’s life as a failed novelist and chronic quitter. Virtually, they are two people with nothing in common except for one crucial detail: both Julie and Julia found their purpose in cooking.
A particular scene stuck with me: Julie sits for dinner with her husband, and after deciding she wants to write a blog, she starts pondering what said blog should be about. They share a deliciously-looking bruschetta Julie made herself. “You should write about cooking,” — her husband suggests, to which Julie replies, “I’m not Julia Child.” This is when Christopher Messina delivers one of my favorite lines of the movie: Julia Child wasn’t’ always Julia Child. I think it’s very cleverly presented how the answer to Julie’s questions was (literally) right under her nose the whole time. She loved cooking, and she was a writer, so why not write about cooking?
Then it hit me: What if the answer to finding fulfillment is in the things that bring us joy? Is it really as easy as that? Well, according to the movie, it’s not. Julia had to work for almost a decade before she could publish her first book, while Julie put her relationship with her husband in jeopardy. But despite it all, they moved forward, chasing their passion.
Some people’s passion might be singing and dancing; for others, it might be sports or video games. For Julie, Julia, and me, it’s cooking. There’s something magical about creating something with your own hands that will bring nourishment and delight to those who try it. Like Julie, I find comfort and peace in my tiny apartment kitchen, making dinner for my family and me. So, why not make the most out of the things that bring me joy? I’ve decided to start a food blog, write about the things that are important to me, and in Julie’s words, send my thoughts into a giant void. I don’t know what I will find out there, but I’m excited to find out.
