So imagine this, just for the sake of the argument. You wake up in this world for the very first time, as an adult. You are hungry, so you step outside to grab food. You are starving, so you go to the nearest place where you can get something. Once you eat, you feel satisfied and go back home.
You wake up the next day, and to your surprise, find yourself starving again. That’s when you realise that eating once is not going to cut it for the rest of your life. You need food for survival on a regular basis. So you head out once again to eat.
Day after day, you wake up, find yourself starving, rush to the nearest place where you can find anything edible, because it is a question of your survival. If you don’t eat, you will die. You do not have the privilege right now to access the nutritional aspect of your meal.
One day someone mentions to you that you can keep some snacks at home, so that you don’t have to rush out of the door every morning simply to survive. It’s a new concept for you. You buy a bunch of snacks for the first time. The next morning that you wake up, you have some snacks at home. You still step out for your meal, but this time you go farther than you have ever been before, because you are not starving to death. You find a new food joint where the quality is better than your regular spots.
You later start learning more about food that you can keep at home. You start buying fruits, and healthier snacks. Eventually, you tell yourself you are going to learn how to cook. You start with simple things. Now you still go out to eat 5 times a week, but you are discovering new food joints and the quality of the food you take is improving.
Slowly and surely, you put in the hours, you put in the work in the kitchen and now have learnt enough that most days you cook at home. You are no Michelin star chef, but you know enough to help you keep full and satisfied while also nourishing your body.
You still step out to eat every once in a while, but these days, you do it because there is something very specific that you want to try. It’s no more a question of survival.
Now replace food with self love/respect/esteem/validation. We all need it to survive, and to thrive. But if you don’t learn how to cook for yourself, you will be stuck in this cycle of seeking it from outside day after day.
The food example seems unrealistic, because you have seen people around you cooking their meals all your life. But if someone loved themselves, they were tagged arrogant and full of themselves.
But the day you learn how to feed yourself, your life will never be the same again. It won’t happen overnight, you will have to put in the work, things will go wrong, you will have bad days. But the more you do it, the better you will get at it.
And then there will come one day, when you will cook all your meals, and won’t even realise that you did not seek anything from outside. You will realise that consuming food from outside is now totally a choice, and not a need. And that day my friend, you will find peace in your homemade khichadi, more than you would have found in any risotto ever.
-Mansi
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