Observations On Confidence.
Notes From The Field
As I start to finish up my book proposal small feelings of dread are starting to bubble up. I feel like in a world where you either are a "celebrity chef" or get your credibility from numbers on social media there's no gray space. Where does that leave the people who just really enjoy making others happy through their cooking? Are they any less prepared in the kitchen or any less worthy of donning an apron? I know I definitely live in that space.
During the book proposal writing process I kept dreading one crucial part which was my bio. Talking about myself makes me squirm sometimes. I feel like a fraud and I don't know where that feeling genuinely comes from. I've accomplished a lot and rarely talk about it. I struggle a whole lot with confidence. It manifests in different ways but the most popular form is imposter syndrome. Mental anguish is usually my go-to for feeling like I don’t know enough or even know what I’m doing.
Over the summer I applied for a Fulbright scholarship and wrote several pages for my proposal but when it came to crafting a professional CV I froze. As a person in the culinary world who didn't go to culinary school, I sometimes feel like I'm missing something. Like that piece of paper will give me validation for all the knowledge that I learned on my own. As I write this right now I see how colonized my thinking has been. Education should be a fundamental right but it's still an elitist tool to segregate + classify. This segregation + class system permeates right into our self-esteem. I know it certainly has for me.
Even when I have good days and feel like I can take on the world I fall right back into the funk of believing I’m not good enough based on what others think of me. A few years ago I remember meeting a woman who was a trained chef and who I was taking over the reins for. She grilled me on where I went to school and what I had done to earn the position. Flummoxed and incredulous by her line of questioning I told her I was self-taught and had actually started a successful business teaching children and adults how to cook. She seemed somewhat satisfied with my answer. Mind you this lady wasn’t the person who even hired me. She was a consultant who didn’t even want the job when they had offered it to her. She just wanted to assert her dominance and was basically saying “I could have taken this job, but it’s so below me it’s not worth it. But for you, it’s just fine”.
Reclaiming my confidence is a rollercoaster ride. At times I can shake myself out of the dark holds of low self-esteem and other times I fall deeper into the abyss. For example, my readership of this Substack is pretty small. Just a handful of friends and family who have decided to sign up and hear me ramble and wax poetic. For someone who needs to have a following to get a book deal, I'm doing quite a lousy job of spreading the word. I keep putting it off every day. Announcing that I have my writing public is nerve-racking. Not because I’m not confident in the writing but more so because it's personal writing, which usually requires deep dives into my well of memories. It makes me an open book for judgment.
I’m pretty sure that I’m my harshest critic + that as I continue to grow as a human being I’ll be confronted with moments of self-doubt. Hopefully, in those moments of existential talks with myself, I can remember that I actually know what I’m talking about. I don’t need an extra layer of education to prove something to people. I have accomplished A LOT with a little. People + opportunities gravitate towards me because I’m deserving. I’m living a life that I built on my own terms and for that, I am forever grateful to the sneaky voice that keeps drowning out the negative one saying, “Keep it going. You’ve got this. Your voice matters. You matter.”