ranch salad + a vote of confidence

Perhaps I’m betraying my own dweebish late bloomer identity by saying this, but back in high school, the thing I wanted more than anything else was to “be healthy.” The problem, I knew, was that to “be healthy” one must eat vegetables, which I affirmatively did not. And vegetables, if you aren’t raised eating them, aren’t so tasty at first. So I started with this salad. More heart attack than healthy, but amazingly for once I wasn’t overthinking it. I started with the question of “what would make this green stuff more bearable,” proceeded with confidence, and it worked! Now I stan a vegetable like none other, and in general, I’m pretty healthy. I exercise regularly, make the majority of my own food, and have substantially improved my relationship with food (and consequently, my relationship with my own body) over the last twenty years. With the idea in mind of exploring this journey, I had originally planned to share this salad as part of a series about the food from my childhood, a deeper look into my humble (read: processed) beginnings and how my profound need to feed myself has forced me to evolve. But every time I sat down to write, something funny happened - the truth came out. And the truth in this instance is um...shall we say...less than savory?  

Elizabeth Wurtzel, OG memoirist and Prozac Nation author who recently passed away, used to say “if you want to make it as a writer you have to be willing to kill your mother.” As in, sometimes you have to be willing to hurt feelings in the name of telling the story honestly. When I read that it made sense for other writers, but for me? No way! I feel like shit when I hurt other people’s feelings. Plus, I put so much thought and energy into what I publish here, why would I want all of that effort to knowingly bring someone else down? “I want my writing to be uplifting,” I say “something I’d want to read now, or better yet something my younger self needed to read” I suggest, knowing full well that I’ve landed squarely on the catch. All of my favorite books are truthful accounts of personal struggle. Humans want to read about the human condition. 

One of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway, knew this all too well, famously stating that a writer’s job was to “write hard and clear about what hurts.” Something he admitted to avoiding for many years before he got around to doing it, because: IT’S HARD! (All this according to his own recounting in A Moveable Feast.) How hard could it really be, though? Well do you remember that book half of us read in high school, The Sun Also Rises? It’s the one about his experience living in Paris as a jaunty, drunken ex-pat of the Lost Generation. If you read it, you may remember that the main character, Jake Barnes, can’t get it up due to a war injury. Jake’s infinite grief on account of his impotence and the havoc it wreaks upon his sex life and personal identity is the central theme of the book. What you may not remember is Jake’s impotence was Hemingway’s personification of how he felt trying to live his best ex-pat life while still being tethered to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their son. I mean, can you imagine being personified by a limp dick in your husband’s debut novel? Can you imagine personifying your wife that way? Ernest fucking Hemingway was willing to murder. 

While I’m well aware that there will only ever be one Hemingway, I also know I have it in me to write honestly and thoughtfully about what hurts. And as it turns out, this food writing stuff isn’t nearly as far removed from those painful parts as I had first imagined it would be. “Well of course it’s not, Meghan” you might be saying, but honest-to-goodness, I started writing about food to avoid outright sharing my business on the internet. The problem here is, if you couldn’t tell already, I am very much an empath. The mere knowledge that someone else is in pain has the power to completely undo me if I let it, and I only recently have improved at not letting it. There is so much to say about being an empath in general, but the point here is that it stands in the way of my ability to follow through with a creative vision, and renders me wholly unfit to do something as bold as personifying my internal struggle with a loved one as a limp wang. 

For instance, as part of the food of my childhood series, I had planned to write about the time at Wednesday youth group we ate Frito pie and listened to a peer lecture on saving “the sacrement of sex” for marriage from two members of the youth group who were most certainly boning at the time. They turned up pregnant months later. Pretty funny, I think, no issues there. I’m off to a good start. But in reality, the more pertinent stories - like how I was brought up on fast food and junk food, while constantly being threatened by my only parent that I would “get fat” one day, even though I remained quite noticeably underweight due to malnutrition - well, those stories are not as funny. In this way, honesty about salad has to do with a whole lot more than just salad, mostly in ways that are still unclear to me. “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings” says W.H. Auden, and I believe him. Above all else, I want to make something I’m proud of in 2020 and beyond. 

So in the interest of working with what I’ve got, I’d like to offer you what I can give right now at this very moment, and that is a vote of confidence. Whether your current struggle is about making ends meet, soul-searching for your calling, or sorting through your childhood trauma; whether it’s doing the under-acknowledged work of raising a family or the awkward work of making friends as an adult, changing your habits or bringing change to your community, I want you to know that I believe in you. I have faith in your ability to succeed on your own terms. I’m working for it right alongside you, and I know we both can make it happen. Inch by inch. Day by day. I know the road sometimes feels desperately long ahead, but it’s going to be worth it. We can do hard things, I know we can. We can chase our dreams, we can face hard truths, we can learn to love ourselves and our veggies. And when all else fails, we will cover that bitch in ranch and get it down the gullet.