Life is hard, and other sugarcoatings.
Highlighting the chef in you: an essay on life's flavours and recipes for living.
You wake up in the morning, hoping the coffee will kick harder than your memories of yesterday. The sun rises, the same way it always does, you are not even looking—you’ve seen it before and it is just as you expect it, with the indifferent monotony of a clockwork. Just like it, you rise from your bed, expectedly and ready or not for your face-to-face with life’s menu—an assortment of experiences, garnished with the mundane, the bitter, and the occasionally sweet.
It is a restaurant you never chose to enter, with a menu you never asked to see. The specials of the day? Heartbreak à la carte, with a side of existential dread. Dessert is a fleeting joy if you are lucky enough to order it before it melts away. It is not the food that is bad, it is the whole place. The walls are closing in, and the background music is a never-ending loop of your worst regrets mostly composed of letting the dish get cold.
Here is the secret they don’t tell you: if you don’t like the menu, change the restaurant. That’s the only rule in this absurd culinary existence. You don’t have to sit at that wobbly table with a stained cloth. Walk out.
The surreal part is—and what is surreal is only the fact that you did not know: we are all chefs in our own right, cooking up this existence. Some of us are just better at picking out the right ingredients. Others are stuck making soup with whatever they find at the back of the fridge, hoping it turns out edible. But what if you could find the secret recipe to a life that doesn’t taste like a reheated TV dinner?
Know this: if the ingredients don’t suit your taste, find another supplier. Life is too short to be stuck with second-rate produce. Move house: get closer to the supermarket you like. Better: grow your own. With love, care, and attention. With Sun. Fresh air and slowness. There is something real about cultivating your own flavours, letting things ripen in their own time. It is not about rushing, grabbing what you can. It is about savouring the small moments, the details, the imperfections. The world wants to sell you pre-packaged happiness, processed joy, but that is just empty calories for the soul.
***
If life is hard, suck it up, says the one handling over sugar-coated pebbles. The sweetness might fool you for a moment, dissolving quickly in your starved mouth, only to break your teeth on the hard cold truths of existence.
Sugar coatings are just that—coatings. Thin, fragile layers that crack and crumble under the weight of reality. Opening up to bitterness spreading all over your tongue, flooding your mouth like a river of hell running down your throat—you are too afraid to swallow. Pouring sugar on it is like drowning cheap booze in Coke—an insult to both. It won’t dilute the rotting feeling stuck in your throat, only pushing it down further. Sugar coating will make you rot way deeper than what you can see.
It is a shortcut not worth taking. Embrace the bitterness, the rawness, the vinegar, savour the richness of genuine experience. The flavours are rich, complex, intense, full of life. Not always pleasant, not always sweet, but real. A beautiful rift of mismatching winning flavours waiting to be harmonised. There is a depth, a nuance that you won’t find in the shallow sweetness of a sugar-coated lie and the only way to fully enjoy it, is to cook it to your liking.
***
Crafting a dream life is like stumbling into a kitchen with a hangover, armed with a dull knife and a half-boiling pan of hope. Making your way through the brain fog, you start with peeling and cutting, slicing away the bullshit and the lies you've been fed since birth. It IS messy, and you will probably nick your fingers a few times, but you keep going. You select the flavours of your life, the people and passions that make your blood pump a little faster, and you toss the rest into the garbage where it belongs.
The hard bits—those gristle-packed moments of pain and failure—you throw them into the pot. You let them stew until they are soft enough to swallow, seasoned with the grit of your perseverance. Composing your life is like layering a lasagna, each experience is a new sheet of pasta, each lesson a layer of rich, complex sauce. It is not about perfection; it is about making something that feeds your soul, something that does not vanish away.
You keep adding layers, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes some things you have not ever tried, until you’ve built something worth savouring. Life’s recipe is not written in any book; it is scrawled on the back of a billing envelope abandoned on the kitchen counter for weeks.
You cook, you taste, you adjust—some days need more seasoning than others. You might end up with something that does not taste like reheated despair. If you’re lucky, it might even taste like the fresh version of that dream you kept frozen for a big occasion.
Bon appétit.
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This is such a beautiful extended metaphor! Amazing piece
I had no idea where this would take me. Enjoyed the read and in particular the parallel to food, cooking and being the chef of our lives. Rich imagery and metaphors I can relate to. Now I need some restaurant recommendations too from you!