{"id":1466,"date":"2007-02-03T15:32:05","date_gmt":"2007-02-03T20:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/2007\/02\/03\/cooking-therapy\/"},"modified":"2011-03-19T11:23:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-19T15:23:02","slug":"cooking-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/2007\/02\/cooking-therapy\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking as Stress Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not a wonderful cook. Because the rituals of cooking don’t interest me very much, I haven’t learned how to make the things that I love to eat. I may have to reconsider. I’ve been making a monster lasagna today, and I discovered something. Cooking, all of a sudden, seems to relax me. <\/p>\n

I’ve had a strange couple of weeks, involving much more emotional turmoil than I can easily handle. I’ve been feeling fragile, tired, angry, sad. I’m not yet back to myself. The one good thing about it all is that I seem to have gotten some excellent crying done. I’m such a stoic that it tends to build up. I’m good to go for at least another year.<\/p>\n

It was a manifold crisis – a miscommunication in my family (well, it was more than that) was the breaking point. But it had been building. <\/p>\n

I’ve gotten a bit disheartened about the difficulty of securing a professional position. There aren’t any university jobs. I’m now refocusing on finding a job as a discourse analyst or rhetorical strategist – maybe at a PR firm or something like that. That may be better than pursuing some sort of IT or Project Management position. It would be more targeted to my talents. I don’t have the certifications that would make me an attractive candidate in some of these other fields anyway. And, as a former Jehovah’s Witness, I’m not comfortable with sales (grin). I’m good at it, just not comfortable with it.<\/p>\n

Anxiety about my future is compounded by student loan debt and the feeling that I might have wasted my time and money getting the Ph.D. It seems bizarre, but the degree seems to work against me more often than for me.<\/p>\n

All of this hit me at once, or perhaps it was a relay, a cascade, a feedback loop. I had the it’s-not-fairs. I was swamped, smashed, splintered into bits.<\/p>\n

I can’t, and don’t, stay in that horrible psychological space for long. Life keeps moving on, after all. Fortunately, I also appreciate small comforts and pleasures, and there are all sorts of ways to lick your wounds (so to speak). <\/p>\n

Today I discovered that as I was chopping, and mixing, and layering the lasagna, I went into a state of serenity. It was almost hypnotic. Very relaxing. I started to breathe more easily again, like I do when I meditate. I took the pace way down (I tend to move quickly).<\/p>\n

The lasagna smells great. I’ll have to remember the cooking method of stress management. I shouldn’t resist it simply because of the “traditional gender role” aspect of the thing.<\/p>\n

Today is the five-year anniversary of the day I very nearly died<\/a>. I can’t help thinking that the pregnancy I lost that day (a ruptured ectopic) might have been a little girl or little boy now. I can’t help mourning the fact that I will never have another baby. Knowing this day was approaching made the family problems worse, as related things tend to do. <\/p>\n

Any little comfort helps. And I can’t complain, really. I’ve been surrounded by love and caring as I struggled through this difficult terrain.<\/p>\n

\"Snowbird<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

And now my little boy comes in to this tiny office of mine and gives me a hug. It’s not such a bad day after all. He’s such a gift of the cosmos, and I am grateful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not a wonderful cook. Because the rituals of cooking don’t interest me very much, I haven’t learned how to make the things that I love to eat. I may have to reconsider. I’ve been making a monster lasagna today, and I discovered something. Cooking, all of a sudden, seems to relax me. I’ve had a strange couple of weeks, involving much more emotional turmoil than I can easily handle. I’ve been feeling fragile, tired, angry, sad. I’m not yet…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,6],"tags":[3456,3437,3457,230,3028,3458,3459,1863],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mommy-stuff","category-personal","tag-cooking","tag-discourse-analyst","tag-ectopic","tag-phd","tag-pregnancy-loss","tag-profession","tag-stress","tag-student-loans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4385,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions\/4385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virushead.net\/vhrandom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}