{VITAMIX GIVEAWAY CLOSED} My childhood was not the standard American norm. I lived on a remote tropical island (Maui). I went to a very alternative school (Waldorf). I ate very alternative foods (millet! tofu! nutritional yeast!). And I played with very alternative toys (knitting needles! compost bins! handmade fairy dolls!). Hippies and rose quartz and the Voyager Tarot cards were most definitely involved. By the age of seven, I knew my sun, rising, and moon signs by heart, and even understood what the dreaded Mercury in retrograde meant.
Today, I can’t stand astrology but I still douse myself and every available inch of my kitchen with nutritional yeast and hemp seeds. In fact, both are in this luscious vegan green soup, which is a recipe from the Kale & Caramel cookbook (preorder now!). I am a hippie in a pragmatist’s clothes. But I’m not exactly here to talk to you about nooch today. Today, we talk about dreams and constructions of selfhood and invisible husbands and ways we hold ourselves back. (And yes, I am giving away a Vitamix, too.)
My childhood was also full of stories—fairytales and Gwynna and the American Girl dolls and, yes, Barbies. I played with my dolls for hours on end, styling their hair, dressing them, cuteing them up for their future husbands. Even then, I was a straight girl stuck in a heteronormative world. I knew two things in life: I liked to tell stories and I wanted a husband. Wasn’t that story enough?
But here’s the funny thing that happened as I grew older: No husbands came. I’m getting ahead of myself, of course. First, no boyfriends came. My first kiss was at age 17, with a boy who kissed me and then immediately told me that could never happen again. And though I had my first boyfriend at 18, I spent three years of college unintentionally celibate. I was stymied by some mix of heartbreak and sophomore slump depression and fear. I spent the first few years of my twenties in deeply emotional relationships that never worked out. I wrote reams of mostly overwrought poetry and sat around imagining my future husband and kids. And when my mother died, though I had a wonderful partner at the time, this strike of mortality only clarified my knowledge that he was not The One.
And then, as I exited that relationship and dated one man after the next that was so far from being The One as to be tragically laughable, my desire became a kind of myopic fixation: I laughed and I slept and I wrote and I taught myself to code and I had sex and I fell in love and I had my writing published and I studied photography and I made beautiful food and I inherited a piano and I got a book deal and yet. And yet.
Underneath it all, no matter what I did, there was a niggling, very loud voice reminding me I had only lived out one half of the story I grew up telling myself. I was writing, telling stories, but I most decidedly did not have a husband. And let me be the first to tell you that that—that sentence you just read, that entire paragraph above—drives me absolutely batty. It is 2017, after all. Am I not aware that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bike? Am I not summoning the power of Beyoncé and Audre Lorde on the regular? Am I not a student of Madonna and Ani DiFranco and Rebecca Walker? Of course I am.
But all the knowing in the world doesn’t undo the fundamental stories I told myself from the time I was a child. Those stories are powerful. They stick. They are the neural pathways upon which we build the rest of our lives. Which is why, at this moment—at the precipice of publishing my first book—these two primal stories I’ve told myself are duking it out for precedence in my brain.
One tells me I’ve done something wonderful, something I’ve waited my whole life to do: I wrote (and photographed) a book! And on May 2nd, it will be out in the world. And the other insists I’ve really mucked it all up because the other half of that deeply imprinted, Barbie doll-driven childhood narrative—the story so much of the world still wants girls to believe—is missing.
So let me tell you what I’ve decided to do. I’ve decided to celebrate. To celebrate so hard and so loudly that the voice in my mind that wants me to think I’ve failed is drowned in a sea of knowing better. A cacophony of sanity.
Because all of this? Everything that’s happening right now? All of this is delicious. It’s vital. It’s what I’ve worked for my entire life. I don’t know what’s coming next, and that’s ok. But I do know that this book, the culmination of so many years of research and writing and recipe testing and photography, is worth every ounce of joy in my body. And I know that there is no space left in my heart for self-doubt and self-loathing and all the other forms of misogyny we girls internalize along the way to becoming women.
This book is my love, and I get to share that love with you.
And that, in this sweet moment, is everything.
So let’s celebrate!! Preorder KALE & CARAMEL: Recipes for Body, Heart, and Table now and get the recipe for this vegan Zucchini Basil Soup with Creamy Hemp Swirl and Garlicky Breadcrumbs.
Enter to win a Vitamix A3300 Ascent Series blender below, and come hang out with me this weekend as I take over the Vitamix Instagram account with my favorite blendable recipes from the site and the book.
