GREEK YOGURT POLENTA BOWLS WITH BROCCOLI RABE.

Still though, I spent most of the first two and a half decades of my life reaching out to a future self I was sure was already inside me, if only I acted older and wiser and far more serious than I was. At 19 I spent hours each day meditating, At 23, I memorized Sanskrit text from ancient tomes, and soon I stopped reading fiction, I stopped watching tv, I stopped listening to pop music. And then, at 24, my mother died.

Almost instantaneously, my longing for adulthood, for the promise of constancy and stillness and self-knowledge, ceased. In the wake of her death and the space carved out by grief, I suddenly and violently only wanted to be exactly what and who I was. I didn’t want to be older. If anything, I wanted to be much, much younger.

I felt fetal. Exposed. Supremely childlike. Things I thought were one way were actually another. What was up was down. What was healthy might have been what ended my mother’s life. I no longer had any answers.

And, very quickly, I began to relish the not knowing. I relaxed in the open palm of seeing and experiencing rather than longing for or grasping after. I blasted Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé. I binge-watched Gossip Girl. I let myself be.

I felt, and still do feel, younger than ever before. Younger, in some ways, than I was in my own childhood.

But still, adulthood comes in fits and starts. This week, it came in the shape of making hard decisions to grow the business of this blog in exciting new ways that I’ll be able to share with you over the next few months. It came in the shape of welcoming one friend’s new baby into the world and sitting down to dinner with other friends to discuss my quasi-faux-doula-ing at their birth next month. It came in the shape of having at least three conversations I was scared to have. Of staring them dead in the eye and saying yes, come at me. I am ready and I am here and I can take you. Whatever you have for me, I will meet you. I will be young and old and ultimately I will just be human.

And so, this week adulthood came in the shape of being fierce and relentless in myself. In being free.

And of course, in seizing the marrow of life so poignantly, I felt obligated to offer you this incredibly simple but deeply nourishing polenta bowl, rich and tangy with Greek yogurt, topped with tender baby broccoli rabe bright with garlic and chili and lemon.

Get the recipe on this week’s Intuitive Eating with Kale & Caramel on Sonima. For extra flavor punch, use vegetable stock for part or all of the water required in cooking the polenta. You’ll thank me later.