These past two semesters were my first experience living away from home, having to take near complete responsibility for myself and my life. That meant cooking, cleaning, laundry, and the works. Because I was fortunate enough to live in a house for my first year of college, I decided to forego a meal plan and cook for myself. I’ve never enjoyed cooking, or having anything to do with the kitchen; but I figured it’d be fun to have the responsibility of feeding myself. Man, was I wrong. When you have nearly zero experience cooking, what took your mother 30 minutes to prepare can take upwards of 2 hours. On top of that, what do you even make? Don’t even get me started on the grocery shopping that comes along with cooking. The only item I can find within a minute of entering either a Publix or Walmart is ice cream. Anything else takes walking up and down nearly every isle.
This may all just seem like a list of problems, not really failures, so where did I fail? Well, once I got the hang of my local grocery store and knew a bit more about the process of cooking, the next step involved learning what to cook. I knew I needed to eat healthy. Heck, I enjoyed eating healthy back home when my mom would cook. However, I could never get myself to prepare a well-balanced, healthy meal. This is where I failed nearly daily for about 20 weeks, pretty much up until we were all sent home due to the corona virus. And I failed despite having what I thought was a sound plan: schedule meals for the week and go shopping on Saturday, then cook on Sunday. When planning my meals for the week, I would sit down with a recipe book my mom gave me and pick out some recipes I thought looked good. Then, with a list of ingredients in hand, I’d head to the grocery store. After way too long, I’d have everything I needed and drove back home. These Saturday activities were the easy ones. On Sunday, I had to cook. Here is where I failed: as I mentioned, I’ve never cared for the kitchen, and so, I have very little patience for cooking. Thus, almost every Sunday, despite my best intentions to cook three recipes so I’d have a nice mix of healthy options for the week, I’d only barely make it through the first one before I had had enough of standing over the counter-top. This then affected how I ate during the week. For some reason, instead of cooking the other two recipes during a week-day evening, I’d go for the easy and unhealthy box of mac and cheese once my Sunday meal prep had been finished-off. Even if I had completed all my school work for the day, had plenty of time in the evening, and wanted to eat healthy, I failed to muster up the willpower to get in the kitchen and cook for longer than it takes to boil water. I failed on a weekly basis to eat healthy.
The crazy part was that I possessed complete awareness of this failure as it happened. I tried finding easier meals that didn’t sacrifice on the health aspect. I tried figuring out ways to enjoy being in the kitchen more, like turning on an episode of TV as I cooked (turned out to ridiculously multiply my cooking time). I tried preparing meals that took less time to make, things that I could just throw into a crockpot. Not much really helped to get me to eat well balanced meals. However, after over 20 weeks of failure, things started to get slightly better. I realized that if I wanted to eat healthy, I needed healthy options readily at hand. Not just healthy meals, but healthy snacks. For the first 20 weeks, I probably ate all of 7 apples, a box of grapes, and no other fruits. So I decided to change things and buy a whole bunch of fruits. I figured, if I didn’t feel like preparing a healthy meal, it’d be easier to grab a bunch of fruit, throw it on a plate, and eat. That turned out to be even easier than boiling water for pasta. Also, the simple act of eating a fruit instead of a processed protein bar (of which I have eaten hundreds by now), made me feel healthier. And that feeling provided a bit of momentum to then prepare a real, healthy meal. So, I finally figured out how overcome my inability to eat healthy: eat fruit.
My repeated failure to eat well hurt not only mentally, but physically too. I started gaining a bit of weight and losing muscle. It probably didn’t help that I completely dropped my habit of going to the gym once college life started. These physical changes put me in a mental rut of feeling miserable. However, they also provided just enough motivation to continue trying. Fortunately, I found something that worked.
In regards to the relationship between this class and my perspective on failure, I think this class has been a stepping stone in realizing that failure is okay and necessary in order to make improvements. I’ve always known this fact, however, I’ve never really lived it out. Up until a year ago, school and life had been easy. I never really failed. Now I think that may be because I didn’t take enough risks. Going forward, I hope to get more comfortable with risk and make a habit of strategically failing. Instead of cowering away from pursuing dreams and ideas, I plan to focus on doing. I am going to do the things I think will be challenging and rewarding instead of just thinking about them. It’ll be a journey and I’ve got this class to thank for having a hand in setting me on it.
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