The Travails of Tangled-in-Trepidation

Dear Tamar:

Do you have creative anxiety? What do you do with it when it comes—in the kitchen and on the page? I have a very big project I’m wrapping up which has filled me with thoughts of my own idiocy. These visions feel both urgent and compelling. Normally the kitchen would be a balm and a compass, but as life would have it, the kitchen is part of the project. What do you cook when you are concerned God made you fit for one thing and one thing alone: failure. Is it possible to stay in love with something which also carries the weight of creative ambition?

Yours,

Tangled-in-Trepidation

Dear Tangled,

Sit down, rest your chin in your hand, and get ready. I am going to lecture you.

As the saying goes: none of us is getting out of this alive. Not me. Not you. Not whoever looks like they were made for success. You’ve got a ticking time bomb on your back. Let this be a comfort to you. God made us all to fail—eventually. And it’s not just the final failure. You’ll fail in smaller ways, too. You’ll forget birthdays, say insensitive things, write clunky sentences that barely make sense. You will undersalt and oversalt. You are right: This is your destiny.

You are also wrong. You’ll also succeed. You’ll salt correctly. You’ll write sentences that are artful in their clarity—musical and brief. You’ll glimpse a remarkable cloud, recognize a hawk’s cry, be soothed by a touch—succeeding at life just before a hairpin turn or in the midst of one. As I said: You are also wrong: This is also your destiny.

No matter how hard you press on it, how fixed your determination, how badly you want it, you will not shake this dialectical destiny. Because of how much you care, your big project—the one that has confusingly colonized the space you normally go for rest—shares your dialectical fate. I don’t know what rubric you’re using for success. I don’t know if your project will sell a lot of copies. Or get you a promotion. Or catapult you to stardom. You already care. You already work. You act. Will events and tastes and trends and circumstance conspire in your favor? If they do, will that success make you happy? When will you decide? How will you know?

I write all this from an anxiety I can’t call “creative.” Mine is a conventional anxiety—a little hackneyed, uninventive, greyed. I live intertwined with it, so uncertain of myself that I’m surprised when I make something delicious; I’m surprised when I learn someone has read my writing—though I make my living cooking and writing about cooking.

If either of us could accept that we are destined to fail and succeed, we might do what we do, but easier. The luckiest among us get to choose our burdens—the materials with which we work, the arenas where we’ll be tested; the luckiest among those get to do it again and again. I can suggest various forms of escape. I can suggest that you go run your fingers through soil—it may inspire you, as it does me, to boil potatoes in salty water. I can suggest that you find a sauna, sweat it out, dunk yourself in a tank filled with ice. It may remind you to put on a big pot of Lohikeitto. But the lecture I’m delivering now is about the wisdom of no escape—of staring straight at the inevitability of failure and success, and laughing or crying, or both.

Dear cook, in other words: God make you to roll with it. God made you to roll with it. God made you to roll with it. I could tell you to fail, fail again, and fail better. But you will, regardless. It’ll be easier if you do it well fed—hot soup on the stove and friends coming over to eat it. If you don’t have that on your calendar, stop reading and get it on there. You will worry, regardless. You will succeed and fail, regardless. So, as you do: smile, cry, tuck, and roll. And call me in the morning.