Persevere

A reminder to self that all will be as it should in the end.

In May 2009 I graduated from one of the top schools in the country with a Bachelors in Systems Engineering and a Masters in Finance. I moved to New York City to start a career on Wall Street. I found a great apartment, was about to embark on a lucrative career, and had zero college loans to pay off. Life was set. Then I started working…

I was doing well at my job and found the work to be at least somewhat interesting, but knew very early on that financial services wasn’t where I should—rather, could—spend the rest of my life. Eventually I found my way to food. I had always wanted to be in the culinary industry, but told myself it wasn’t a proper career choice for some reason or another. My journey started with the first post to my food blog. Then I signed up for a recreational cooking class to occupy some of my free time and see how I liked it. The next thing you know I was living in a not as nice apartment, graduating from culinary school with thousands in debt, quitting my finance job, and jumping head first into a new career/life.

Food media was (still is?) what I wanted to do with my life. I worked as an unpaid intern for a food magazine during the week and cooked at a restaurant in the East Village on the weekends. Yes, that means seven days a week for those of you keeping track. This lasted for about four months. The way it worked out in my head was that I would be able to land my dream job as an editor or working in the test kitchen for some magazine at the end of my internship, and it would be smooth sailing from there.

That’s not quite how things panned out. At the end of my internship I joined the restaurant full time while still looking for that entrance into the career of my dreams. I looked for a year. Being a line cook was the most physically (and sometimes emotionally) exhausting job I’ve ever had. I needed a break to think about something other than whether I had enough mise en place for that weekend’s brunch service. I needed time to clear my head so that I could figure out what exactly I’m doing with my life.

I quit.

I didn’t have a plan when I told my chef that I wanted to leave, but I knew that it was time for me to move on. Maybe I should try my hand at pastry? Feasibly a freelance writing career is in my future? Perhaps I’m meant to start something of my own? Or that dreadful thought that, perchance, food isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing? (This is a notion I refuse to accept, but admittedly it does creep its way into my thoughts during times of self-doubt.)

Everything happens for a reason. Things will turn out as they should when the time is right.

This is a message I have been telling—sometimes yelling—to myself a lot lately. On a whim I applied for a cook/baker position at a summer camp in the mountains. It would force me to get away from the chaos of the city for a minute to clear my head, allow me to explore a different type of cooking, and was temporary. Here I sit typing in the silence of the night air with ten days left before I return to civilization. I have no solid plan as to what I’ll be doing once I return to the comfort of my apartment, so I repeat my above mantra and off I go—one foot in front of the other.