My Sustenance
Love & Loving Friendships
This is the Real Food I’ve Been Missing Out On
We measure sustenance by its source of strength and nourishment providing the backbone of existence be it tangibly in the form of food or drink or those harder to measure entities such as love. I gave my blog this name for one very important reason. Although it’s about food, it’s really about something greater- that is, feeding my soul. The blog has always been designed to showcase food and culture and its very “exciting” and ever changing, evolving role in life. It acts as an outlet for me to share what’s going on inside of me, as a means of understanding myself and my placement in this world a little better. Food and its culture have been so deeply rooted in me both personally and professionally since childhood- despite my absent awareness of that fact at the time. My blog has given me the ability to equate food with life in a greater capacity which, I believe, applies to us all.
Food is ultimately life. This month houses my birthday, April 10th, and I turned 38 years old. I’m closer to the present, closer to the future, than ever before. This month’s blog reflects this birthday timing and takes a deeper look at me and my life than ever before. It exposes many parts of my personality and feelings that breach the food blog norm. I find that it’s all relevant, though, in that this is ultimately where my love of food and food culture comes from- how different people experience life in their different ways all, with the same make-up- of hunger, thirst, humor, insecurity, fear, fearlessness, and, above all, the need to love and be loved and have loving relationships in our lives.
I’ve hit a point in life where time bucked heads with some heavy issues, forcing me to make some major life changing decisions. It’s funny because, despite the fact that life has given me a lot of crazy challenges in the last 6 months, I don’t feel too crazed by any of it, at least not anymore. Certainly there were moments when fear took over me, but in the end I realized it was just life asking me to take a step back, evaluate where I have been and what I have done and what I have learned from all of it thus far. It then asked me what I have enjoyed so far versus what I have disliked. Mostly it asked me to take a deep look at what I disliked and what was the real truth of it all, which way is really ahead for me. What I found was a clear direction for my future. I knew I had to make a decision that wouldn’t make others so happy and, although that weighed heavily on me for some time, I chose to move forward with more precision and energy than before, more clarity, passion, and ultimately with more clarity regarding who I was and who I’d like to be. Plenty of challenges arise from this, one being the people around you. Not everyone you know is always on board with the same ideas that drive you. The choice is one I hadn’t realized is quite simple. Feed yourself the sustenance you need to thrive, move forward to attain a deeper, more fulfilling life, and within it, happiness. That kind of sustenance is not often the kind that others want to feed you. As a 38 year old woman I realized that I knew how to feed myself. I simply let life bring me down paths that were not geared toward my final direction. In food terms you could say I ate a bunch of junk for far too long and despite my healthy diet, my body and mind bore the brunt of this. Now I strongly believe that every moment before this one was valuable, but that does not mean I didn’t make mistakes or poor judgments. I think it simply means that I took the harder route to learn my lessons, which is pretty typical for me.
I think the main point of this month’s blog is that I know one thing; I need to fuel and fulfill my life with real sustenance. That not only means that I have to make professional choices that are strictly and innately about my heart & soul passions but that my personal life must be at the epicenter of my “food source” or sustenance. Love & loving friendships have not been rare for me, but they have been complicated. Like everyone else I carry “baggage” from childhood that I am still learning how to sort out and repack and unpack! What’s important to note is that getting so caught up in work and what you think has meaning is just another way to forget about yourself inside. With that said, in chimes that old adage that you can’t love someone until you love yourself, and there’s a reason it still comes up throughout the history of mankind. It is true for maintaining love and loving friendships, but where I have seen this adage challenged is through children. We will talk more about that in my kids in the kitchen section. But inevitably for the last 6 to 8 years I have focused so much on my company and what others needed form me in regards to my company that I neglected the work I needed to do within myself for my personal relationships. The result I believe was a very professional centric way of relating to people that was unbalanced and opposed to a kind, loving way of a more intimate style of relating. What does that mean?
In a nutshell, I was “behind the crowd” in all of my relationships, having a hard time relating to others on an intimate basis. My personal relationships were never as important as the customer or the vendor. I justified that by telling myself about how the little farmer so far away needed me to make a subsistence living. The truth of it all was that I was no sustainable solution for the farmer if I neglected myself. Friendships were strained by quite a bit of new “issues” I was facing- everything from friends wanting to borrow money to friends not understanding my level of stress and ultimately friends not truly understanding the world I was involved with work wise. It made it difficult way to relate with anyone on top of being so absorbed with my own thing with very little time to devote to others. I wasn’t the best friend I could have been to a lot of people. I may have been a good friend to Ger-Nis but at a cost, for sure. Many of the relationships that I neglected were ones that required more from me than I could give, and I often thought it was unfair to ask more from me, on some occasions annoying. I wanted others to be there for me as I was for them, but no one really understood my new world. Most the friends I had were still going out every night having a good time while I was making million dollar deals and having to teach myself EVERYTHING about business on a grand scale for the first time. I also made the big mistake of hiring many of my friends, thinking this would be a way in which I could connect with them. As it turns out, it made things worse for most of them. The real and strong friendships I had were indeed able to withstand this pressure, but there were some that were just lost for good, including the loss of a 17 year friendship that was quite devastating along with another that also hurt a great deal. In retrospect I was going through so many changes both personally and professionally that I couldn’t keep my head on straight long enough nor get it together fast enough to salvage many relationships. I sit today, knowing I could have behaved differently and perhaps then the failed friendships would still exist or perhaps they would not, but I know that had I chosen to feed myself sustenance, nourishing important personal relationships instead of thinking my journey work wise was all important. I probably would have been happier on my journey. Again, no regrets. I see it for the lessons that I’ve learned, and it is never too late to learn lessons!
Not only were regular friendships hard for me to hold on to but keeping an intimate love relationship was also hard, let alone meeting others that could match my mind, speed, and energy, let alone creative spirit needs. This is perhaps the most troubling part of lost love and loving friendships problems I have had. I’m a lady of very distinct opposites when it comes to love and work. Work wise I’m strong, aggressive, clear, determined, and confident. When it comes to love (and of course when it comes to scaling hills for love, getting stuck in deadbeat valley doesn’t really help matters but is inevitable) I am insecure, awkward, passive, unclear, confused, and not at all confident. But I have been told that I am extremely intimidating to men, as I don’t need their help or support. I have been told that demands I make on intimate relationships with men are quite heavy. I ask for the one thing men find it hard to give, what one of my past loves called “the inside demand”. It’s the most intimate requests to ask of anyone- what you’re made of, what’s inside, how you came to be the person you are. Anything less is just too superficial for me. I tend to be drawn to creative types, especially musicians, and I find it fascinating to discover where inside of them the music comes from.
In general my creative depth is one that I rarely see mirrored in others, but typically musicians and artists reflect this creativity and it fascinates me. I am slowly discovering others in the food world with this same creative edge, and it is kind of exciting. I had an Israeli man in my life for a while who was very “superficial” about feelings but a very deep guy. One day he said to me, “I’m scared that I don’t have enough inside of me for your liking”. I think this exemplifies the pressure I put on men to share their most intimate selves. I am what they call TOO DEMANDING OF A HUMAN BEING. I get that from my father, and I am learning to find the right balance of expectations in order to have better, longer lasting, deeper relationships, basically relationships that nourish the soul. I found one man who was perfect for me in this way who understood this need of mine to know his insides and he wanted to know mine- a solid and deep connection that epitomized everything I needed and had to give to another. But like many men in my life the timing was DEAD wrong. He had already made commitments he felt he couldn’t break, but really in retrospect I think he was just too weak of a man for me. Regardless I think he is the one that got away. As a strong lady I have a very hard time finding loves that have a strong character, foundation, spine- loves that can tolerate the depth of life’s truths.
The dwelling is done. Good news is that I know now that it’s time for me to start to place importance on relationships and loving friendships. It’s time to let sustenance lead the way, through healthy eating and living, as well as mentally. As Maya Angelou taught me through her book at age 18, “once you know better you do better!” I want to do better for myself this time around. I want to have love and loving relationships in my life. Healthy and giving in both ways……..and certainly for me all the sustenance I give to myself through food or love, from this point forward shall be meaningful! Look out world!
