On joyful noise, and the warmth of a kitchen
Shrugging off my shame in eating. CW: This alludes slightly to symptoms of disordered eating.
In a somewhat recent conversation with someone I care about, they brought up the idea of joyful noise. When I thought about what that meant to me, I heard the sounds of conversation in a kitchen. Voices diffused into the sounds of something frying, of feet shuffling across the floor, the water running and then stopping, the simmering of heat and crowd and laughter.
When I first moved away from home, I used to eat little, or not at all. I would wake up in a silent place I didn’t recognize, to a roommate I didn’t know, to an apartment-style dorm that faced a city I felt I had no place in. I didn’t know where the best grocery store was, so I would walk to the closest one, which sold food in mainly wholesale sizes. I would buy the same kind of pasta and marinara sauce, my earphones firmly plugged in for fear of having to talk to anyone. On my first few tries, I overcooked pasta, I undercooked mushrooms, I added either too much or too little salt. Sometimes I didn’t eat, instead subsisting on bottles of Dr Pepper, the piles of empty plastic rattling when I took out the recycling. This wasn’t for a lack of money – I had the privilege of my parents being able to support me financially – but an all-consuming anxiety to express out loud to anyone, be it a classmate or a cashier at a restaurant, that I needed to eat. That I could want to eat, by myself and with little idea of what was socially normal.
A year or so later, I swelled with happiness when I saw the kitchen in my prospective house for senior year. (A lot more had changed in that year besides my eating habits: I made friends, gracious enough to coax me out of isolation, and to one day ask: “Wait, you’re living with us, right?”)
I remember walking in and seeing pans hanging from hooks on a wall with brick detailing, the chipped-paint shelves lined haphazardly with Tupperware, and feeling like the prospect of making a home again could be possible. I had been slowly learning to cook (more than pasta) over the year I spent alone, and the thought of having a space in which I did not feel ashamed to be in, let alone to spend time and effort on making myself food in, brought me genuine joy.
Joyful noise, then, sounds like a collapsing of my shame in simply being, and letting people in – people for whom my existence was not something to be tolerated, but that they actively wanted to be around. When I heard it, I would usually be turned towards the stove, or hunched over the low, blue kitchen table. Footsteps would come down, or a door would open, before someone I love would walk in and ask me what I was making and how I was, before running water into the Brita or heating up their lunch, the microwave humming as I figured out the best way to chop up a sweet potato.
I remember a night when a housemate and her friend were making dinner together, before two other friends came in to make pasta, before another friend and I entered, and amidst the sizzling, the oven beeping, every spot on the stove occupied, we talked loudly, played some music, and laughed louder.
(There is so much more to be said beyond this re: the sounds that a kitchen can bring forth, and what that does or does not do for someone’s spirit, and I have too many thoughts about it. I hope your respective weeks involve some kind of joyful noise.)
Things on my mind this week:
I just started watching Sex Education and I can’t believe how good it is. I can’t believe how well they dismantle the idea that therapy is a panacea for everyone/that having someone give you good advice is simply the solution, without demeaning or making fun of openly communicating about feelings! Wow. Also Gillian Anderson - that’s it that’s the tweet.
The podcast Urgent Care. It’s so truly silly and fun, and Joel Kim Booster and Mitra Jouhari are among my favorite comedians.
BONG HIVE ALERT: Parasite won best cast at the SAG Awards and the news almost certainly cleared my skin.