The Boat to Nowhere
Taking back ownership of your dreams, and ignoring the opinions of others.
“Do you really want to do that to yourself?” This was my favorite high school teacher’s response when I told her I wanted to become a professional chef. She then added that women have a really hard time in a professional kitchen, and that I could be a great home cook and impress my friends, but I should look into higher paying jobs. When I told my mom I wanted to be a chef, she frowned at me and said, “cooking is such a great hobby!” Still determined, I told my parents I wanted to skip university and go to culinary school instead, they responded, “But we will pay for university! if you want to go to culinary school, you’re on your own.”
I went to college and studied art history. I had to study something, art was always something I enjoyed. At that point being a chef no longer felt like an option. I cooked for my roommates for fun and worked in restaurants, but never really came back to those dreams I had fostered as a kid. They were suffocated under this blanket of expectation. It was a weighted blanket. I resigned to think well, follow the track that you’d been told. Go to college, get a job, meet a man, have babies, work in a job you don’t hate and live happily ever after.
Through my early twenties post-college, I operated on this preconceived expectation of myself through the lense of societal pressure. Then I met a guy and I thought he would change everything. He was creative too, a brewer and owned his own craft brewery. I thought. he just got me. He encouraged me to pursue my passions, to go to culinary school because he could see this fire inside of me. I did, and I truly felt like I was on fire. We started to make plans of opening a restaurant together. He told me I should pitch recipes to magazines and start creating content for a website or social media, that I should put my food out into the world. I felt like we were going to realize our dream together, and I was leaning on him for the guidance and support to get there.
As time went on I began to spiral, void of any creative juices or even the desire to cook. I knew something felt wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. What I didn’t know then, was that when someone tells you how to realize your dreams, when you lose ownership of them to someone else’s expectations of that looks like, it can send you in the complete opposite direction.
You could be blindly chasing a dream that isn’t even your own, but what someone else feels is suited for you.
As time went on he began to grow frustrated with me, lending less support and more “you should ___”s and “why can you just ____”. One night we had a real blow out fight. I was trying to explain my spiraling, this melancholy I felt surrounding my work and realizing those passions. I just didn’t know what my dreams looked like yet, and I wanted to feel like I had someone on my side to help me find them.
That night he told me I was “on a boat to nowhere.” He told me “the most unattractive thing about me was my lack of ambition and drive to really go after my dreams.” He told me that I’d never have to worry about realizing those dreams because my parents would bail me out. He told me that I had so many skills in the kitchen, which would make me a really great housewife to someone.
I’ll never forget that conversation. I knew it was the moment our relationship broke down the middle. It was also the moment when I realized I was the only person that could realize my dreams. In my own way, on my own time. I realized when someone tells you how to realize those dreams, it becomes impossible because they’re no longer yours.
It took leaving that relationship behind and hitting absolute, self-esteem rock bottom to start picking up the pieces again. I slowly started to see my dreams again, and felt the fiery sparks of ambition start to ignite. It’s the feeling of those first couple sips of coffee in the morning, when the day starts to come into focus. I started to take back my dreams as my own.
I decided I would go after a life long goal of working for a food magazine. Through a lot of failed attempts, determination, and some strategic DMing on instagram I landed a fellowship at Food and Wine Magazine. I moved across the country to Birmingham, Alabama, where I didn’t know a soul, to live and work for a food magazine I admired immensely. I started shooting my own cooking videos and photographing my food. I built a website and reached out to other magazines to pitch recipe concepts. I was working alongside incredible food editors and photographers I only ever knew as by-lines on a magazine page. When it was time to leave Alabama, I had fully set my passion on fire again, I was more confident and determined than I ever had been.
My dreams changed, as they do continuously, and what cooking professionally now looks like to me is bigger and more multifaceted than I ever knew it could be. My dreams carried me to Los Angeles, where I now work as a food stylist, recipe developer, culinary historian and exceptional dinner party hostess.
My dreams are still changing and growing with me every day, there are times when I still feel void of creative juices or when work feels like a drag. However, I am no longer on a “boat to nowhere”. I never was. My boat was just stuck on an egotistical man-shaped sandbar and I needed to get it back in the water.
I can look at each day as an opportunity to realize more of my dreams because I took them all back as my own. The power behind being told you “should” or “shouldn’t” follow a passion is strong. It’s a discouraging power, and one that I thought broke me. Taking back ownership of what I know I’m capable of achieving has been the best part of my journey thus far. I will continue on my boat built of dreams to wherever it takes me and then even further beyond.
