It was while peeling a knotty hunk of ginger in a soupy kitchen that I first began to appreciate the fine art of slowing down. A few weeks prior, I’d found myself sobbing in an airport bathroom next to the B Terminal Chili’s after a Christmas trip home crystallized an uncomfortable truth: you can love someone but not necessarily like them. It’s especially cruel when you realize it extends to mothers and daughters. And when the frays in a fundamental relationship begin showing like that, you start taking stock of the rest of your life, too.
Don’t get me wrong. My life was, and is, a good one. I mean, I write about food for a living from a sun-dappled apartment in a city I love. But that falling out — what was said, what had been simmering between us for years — destabilized me. I’d always known I was an anxious kid, but that day in the airport bathroom, something shifted. I started having panic attacks. Real ones. The kind that punch you in the gut and convince you, with absolute certainty, that you’re dying.
