Introducing Kitchen Bookshelf
Recently the hosts of the Everything Cookbooks podcast interviewed Carla Lalli Music. They asked her how she crafted her writer’s voice and how she found an audience. She said that whoever you are, you need to dial that up to 11. “It’s a performance,” she said.
I got to thinking, what if I live my life at an 11 and dialing myself up puts me at more of a 15 and that drives people crazy? And who is it that I decide to be anyway? I’m the friend who tells all the irreverent jokes. But, I am the person who cries every time the monarch butterflies make their way south too.
Way before Instagram, I started my first of many blogs back when things didn’t have to be polished. I remember a close friend being surprised at how I wrote. With her, I was the comic relief, macabre humor slinger extraordinaire. I’ll sell out to make someone laugh. But at my core, I feel things down to my very marrow. I felt that friend wilt under anything tinged with tenderness at times, and so sometimes I flip the script and save those thoughts for another day.
Ideally, we’re more integrated, but I’ve found that who I decide to present depends on who the person across the table allows me to be. I’ve found those who accept me for who I truly am, sappy and sincere, and off the rails all at the same time to be rare.
I hope that we don’t always have to be the person we chose to present at a single moment in time forever. Recently, Marie Kondo decided she was tired of tidying up. She just wanted to spend time with her kids. Anyone with kids knows that tidy and children don’t always coalesce. I respect a person who gives themselves room for change.
The tricky part is for those who sit before the world. I admire those of you who share the best parts of yourselves not knowing how you will be received. I suppose the way of the artist or writer is to put something out in the world and be the first to declare it good. And being yourself, whichever self you choose to present, takes a whole lot of guts. But it’s a part of the process all the same.
And so, after overthinking and sitting on a website URL for over two years, I’m finally hitting publish.
Let the chips fall where they may.
