We all want to belong. To something greater than ourselves, to have a community, a tribe, even just to have a family, biological or chosen.
The last few weeks have been a serious trial of my personal sense of belonging. Getting (mostly) off of social media has helped stem the tide of belabored bullshit. โYou are either with us or against us,โ whatever the โusโ is, is a big red flag for whether you actually belong to a certain group or whether your belonging is conditional on saying and doing the โrightโ things.
Work in the kitchen has provided a sense of place and community. Kitchens ave historically been my โsafe spacesโ and sanctuaries. Everything has a place, a purpose, and my belonging in them is undeniable and absolute- by my experience and skills if not myself.
โMatt the Bakerโ is only part of me though, and leaning into that solely for my sense of belonging is dangerous. I am also an American, a Jewish man, more a leftist than anything else politically, and fundamentally a human being.
โBelongingโ to any of those things has been intensely difficult lately, but I still feel the need to have a tribe and not be a โman without a countryโ when things get tough.
We have to learn to belong, first and foremost, to ourselves.
If you are like me, you are constantly fighting with yourself between staying informed even at the risk of marinating your brain in Sensationalist Hate Broth of social media, and burying yourself in tiny comforts and ignorance until it goes away.
I have my own opinions of Israel vs. Hamas, and since October 10th I have felt the need to share them as loud as possible. Maybe, just maybe, at the cost of my peace of mind and sanity I could get people to stop being pissy and angry and screaming past each other so that maybe- MAYBE- we could all make sure the violence, madness, and death stops.
Wasnโt gonna happen. Thereโs room for every voice and opinion on the internet, but social media in particular isnโt built for connection or communication. Itโs built for engagement- for keeping us doomscrolling and โinteractingโ and staring at ads and being on the platform for as long as possible.
Things that make sense donโt help that. Patience, compassion, complexity, and nuance donโt jive with that goal. Anger, rage, hate, pain, and self-righteousness do. After marinating in that hellbroth for way too long on a false hope, I made the call to back off for my own sake. I post for this blog, I answer messages, and (every now and then) I watch funny videos. Thatโs it.
Thereโs ways to bring happiness and reason to the world, but screaming on social media sure as shit isnโt one of them. By backing off, you get the brainspace and emotional bandwidth to find them on your own.
Coming into a new restaurant to take control of an existing menu and program is an interesting experience if just because of the line that gets walked between tradition and innovation. Telling a new cook who keeps talking about โthe way it was done at their old placeโ that it doesnโt matter- theyโre here now, we do it this way, you will too- gets a twist when you step in at a level of creative control. โMake it newโฆโ but not too new.
The house bread at my winery cannot be radically changed- too many people love it, itโs too embedded in the menu. Well and good. The cookie recipes, however, and especially a Canele recipe that only one person could ever make work well? Those required the addition of creativity and craft to make them work better and BE better.
No fancy new ingredients. No strange chemical or additions. The best โsecret ingredientsโ are techniques- and the very best ones arenโt even that.
a person who is an adept conversationalist at table
– Dictionary.com
Whenever I get asked why I got into music and writing young, my pat answer has always been โbecause pens and clarinets donโt stammer.โ
Most of the people I call friends today who didnโt know me as a kid find it hard to believe I had a speech impediment. Itโs taken me quite a long time to get some control over the how and why my tongue would tie itself up, and I still stammer when I get excited or upset.
โStammerโ isnโt quite accurate, though. I think itโs actually called a hesitancy, but everyone knows what a Stammer or Stutter sounds like. Hesitancy in speech is when your brain gives orders to say words faster than you physically can manage them, so you buffer with a lot of โUhsโ and โUms.โ
Why yes, this does like both a symptom and cause of Anxiety- as does my tendency to hate recordings of myself speaking where Iโm not reading off a script. Coping mechanisms for a hesitancy include the tendency to mentally โrehearseโ statements and deliberately speaking slowly with pauses between sentences, both of which increase the likelihood of being spoken over or interrupted.
Neither is great for ones self-confidence, especially in a Jewish household in New Jersey where conversation is more like a demolition derby than an exchange of information.
Here I am though, describing myself as an amateur storyteller, a deipnosophist and a raconteur– all of which are very fancy words for โchatty bitch.โ Iโm an introvert who frequently โruns out of people minutesโ but who extols the Life-Changing Magic of Talking to Strangers.
Clearly there was a grand struggle, a great effort made to conquer my disability and emerge from my Bullied Child Cocoon as a Magnificently Eccentric Social Butterfly.
Nope. Nothing nearly so interesting as that. I just became really really good at telling stories. I donโt stammer when Iโm reciting from a script- so I learned to treat telling stories as recitations.
โConfidence is what we call the equanimity we see in others.โ The ability to look social anxiety and fear in the eye and say โWhatever, Iโm not going to let you affect me.โ Some liquid courage may or may not be involved in shaking off social inhibition, but when it comes to Talking To Strangers or being a raconteur, I donโt really have โtricksโ or โhacksโ for being a good conversationalist. At least, I donโt have any that arenโt covered in greater detail by others.
There was no โa-haโ moment of conquest over my anxiety and stammer. The only โtrickโ I can point to was literally just building that confidenceequanimity for speaking to strangersโฆ and that developed over time.
Itโs psychological, and it wonโt be shaken off overnight- or ever completely really- but the first step for me was finding opportunities to be brave and practice pushing the anxiety aside for a few minutes, an hour, the length of an evening.
I wonโt lie to you, itโll feel really weird. As a relatively tall, bearded, hairy dude, I was terrified of coming off as a creep. Thatโs where deciding to let equanimity rule will come in clutch, and the best feeling in the world will really just come from finding kind people.
The best way to find kind people? Start off with something kind. Even if it doesnโt turn into a stirring conversation, you will have made someone feel good. It can- and probably should– be something casual and surface-level. โDude, love the suit.โ โThatโs a super cute outfit!โ To this day, I sometimes worry that thatโll sound creepy, but truth be told? Most folks are just happy to be noticed kindly.
After that, for me, came something harder. The fact is people are really good at picking up on sham or fakeness. Any place you have to act fake to โfit inโ isnโt somewhere you belong OR will enjoy being. Being told to โbe yourselfโ is trite bullshit and too easy- you have to learn to be okay with being yourself. To quote Dr. Brene Brown, โWe belong anywhere we show up as our authentic selves. Everywhere, and nowhere at all.โ
That is a tall orderโฆ and having friends, loved ones, and the company of kind people make it easier. My friends donโt care if I stutter when Iโm excited- they know I have something worthwhile to say. Enough kind people have responded well that, despite the anxiety, I know that I can be my chatty, eccentric, Anthony Bourdain/ Jimmy Buffett/ Bilbo Baggins mashed-together self.
Thatโs one thing I should mention, though- it probably is my single biggest โtrickโ to being a storyteller. Any storyteller, writer, artist, or creative of any type will likely tell you something similar, but hereโs my version.
To have space made for you, make space for others. If you want to tell great stories, you have to listen to the stories of others.
Thatโs the biggest perk of talking to others- you donโt always talk. You listen, you learn, you absorb, and you connect.
At least until you run out of people minutesโฆ then you get to hide out, recharge, and think of more brave ways to tell and hear new stories. Not a bad way to spend a night out in any case, right?
It took growing up for fall to be something I looked forward to. Growing up on the Jersey Shore, itt meant the start of school, the tourists going home after leaving all their money and trash behind, the streets becoming cold and quiet, and the beaches being empty to enjoy any stray warm days after Labor Day.
In college, I got to see the legendary โHartford in the Fallโ and enjoyed the changing leaves, the coziness of hot beverages and fire pits at night, and the death of all the bloodsucking insects that swarmed in the summer.
Now, in the PNW, I get to experience and enjoy autumn on my own terms. I get to wear warmer, fuzzier clothing more. Evenings spent drinking whiskey in my cozy rocking chair are the constant rather than a treat, and IPAs finally start to vanish from taplists to make room for the darker, maltier beers I love.
