My mental illness has been with me since I was about ten years old. It wasn’t until I saw a psychiatrist for the first time at 15 that I understood it as depression. When I say depression, I don’t mean feeling sad a lot, or down in the dumps, but depression in the sense that an oppressive force was weighing down on me at all times. Depression in the sense of a constant feeling of crushing loneliness that was overpowering, even in a room full of my family and friends. For the longest time, I didn’t have the words to describe what I was feeling or, what it was like to exist inside my brain where the constant self-hatred and negative self-talk told me that everyone around me felt that way about me too. By the time I was 17, the issue of “mental health” had become very important to me. It gave me the language I needed to begin to express what was going on inside my head. One thing people often say is important for your mental health is to practice self-care, perhaps by doing activities that give your mind a break from the darkness. Cooking is an act of self-care. I know cooking is good for your mental health because it has saved me in some of my darkest moments. Cooking is one of the things that has helped me in situations where I may not have otherwise survived.
Let me explain by sharing the story of how my relationship with cooking weaves in and out of my struggle with depression. A common symptom of depression is “loss of interest in activities you normally enjoy,” and what that means in my experience is that I don’t want to exist in the first place, so I have no interest in doing anything that was a part of that existence. Children already struggle with their sense of identity as they grow up – many explore hobbies and group activities as they try to find their sense of self. So, as a child unknowingly struggling with depression, it was even harder for me to feel like I had an identity, because I had little interest in doing much of anything, most of the time. Then, for my twelfth birthday, my parents got me the Joy of Cooking cookbook which became a great inspiration for a lot of my early cooking, and remains my kitchen bible to this day. I can’t tell you why; but, suddenly, I had something I liked to do. When people asked me what my interests were, I had an answer. And for a little while, I ran with that. When I struggled to sleep late into the night because of the constant negative thoughts racing through my brain, I would sit up and think about recipes instead. What flavors might go together in a new, delicious, way? Even now, I can remember how important I felt when my parents let me make one of my recipes for our family dinner one night, and how proud I felt when my siblings said they liked it. These feelings I felt so rarely were so unfamiliar to me but did wonders for my mental health. Cooking gave me a creative outlet, and sense of identity, when I struggled with most of the thoughts and emotions I was feeling.
Throughout the years that followed, the depression inevitably returned; and I even lost interest in cooking for a while. Depression makes it hard to connect with others, as you become consumed by the extreme emotions you are feeling. You firmly believe that no one else could understand what’s happening in your brain, because you can’t even fully understand it. So, for most of my teenage years, my mom and I were never really close. I didn’t know how to tell her about the pain I was experiencing, because I didn’t know how to put it into words. And yet, I resented the fact that she did not know the pain I was feeling every day. This is what I call “depression logic”: a self-fulfilling prophecy that prevented me from truly connecting with anyone.
There was one exception. Every so often, my siblings and dad would be out of the house, and it would be just me and my mom. She would suggest we make something fun for dinner, and we would plan an elaborate, adventuresome meal just the two of us, and spend all afternoon making it together. We made fresh pasta with homemade Bolognese sauce, paired with an appetizer we recreated from one of our favorite Italian restaurants. We searched a few different spice shops looking for specific Indian spice blends for a dinner of our favorite Indian dishes. I think one of the most important parts of these all-day cooking extravaganzas was the escape it gave me from everything else going on in my life. Thoughts and feelings were so hard to talk about, but my mom and I could always talk about food. I truly believe now that the kitchen is the heart of the home, because it was the space I needed to connect with my mom when I found doing so to be difficult. Designing a meal together gave us the opportunity to create together, and no matter how complicated our relationship was at the time, cooking together was always easy. These breaks from the depression helped me to survive it.
In the years that followed, I took my life down an admittedly self-destructive path. I used a lot of destructive coping mechanisms, because I hadn’t yet learned healthy ways to cope. The depression interfered with my work, with school, and with a lot of my relationships. The situation eventually became serious enough that I needed to take time off from my normal life to pursue a more involved treatment program. This Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) saved my life and began my recovery journey. When I reemerged on the other side, I was a blank slate. I was no longer depressed, but I had to rediscover who I was, what I liked to do, and regain my sense of identity. Around the same time, a colleague of mine had become bakery supervisor at the place I worked. Having noticed my interest in baking earlier, he asked me if I wanted to become a baker there. This was my first job in food service, and I loved it. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure why, I just knew it beat being a cashier in the front. After that job I got my first job as a cook, but it wasn’t until the next cooking job after that first one that I figured out why I enjoyed it so much. I had spent years being self-destructive, but now I got to spend my time being creative. Not just creating for the sake of it, but creating things that can bring joy to others.
Starting to see myself as a creative force rather than a destructive force was a huge game-changer for me. Cooking not only gave me a sense of identity, it became a vehicle for showing other people love, bringing them comfort, or making their day. I find the smile on people’s faces after tasting something delicious powerful. And harnessing that to be a positive force in the world gave my life new purpose.
I share all of this with you now because the feelings many of us are experiencing during this pandemic are feelings I have dealt with most of my life. So that’s why I’m sharing with you: Cooking is good for your mental health. In the past few weeks, cooking has helped me just as it has in the past- I spend an hour creating something I’ve never made before, losing myself in the scents and tastes as I explore new depths to more complex flavors. It is the opportunity to forget everything going on in the world around me, take control of my kitchen, and focus only on creating something that tastes good. It doesn’t matter if your cooking is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ what matters is the time you are taking to care for yourself. For me, it is an escape. But it’s also something that I can give to others, to care for them and offer them a brief escape into something delicious. I bake cookies for my downstairs neighbor, who is working from home alone in her apartment every day, so she doesn’t feel so isolated- maybe she even smiles. I make my sister’s favorite food for dinner just to see the stress fall from her face for at least an hour- maybe it even makes her day. Even in these dark times we are facing now, there is still light to be found: you only need to start looking in your kitchen.
Mother’s Day, May 10th 2020