My own limbo

Or "On my love for cookbooks"

In my mind, there are endless subjects to study, infinite amounts of books to read, numerous papers to dive into. In my mind, this is heaven and hell. Heaven when I see all the things to study, read and dive into as possibilities to broaden my perspective on life, to become more creative, to gain knowledge about something I didn’t know before. Hell when I pause and reflect on the fact that I will never be able to study, read and dive into everything I want, that I will always be a little bit behind. Being in this middle ground between one and the other, we could call it limbo, is something that has given a slightly tormented cue to my life, to the way I see the everyday world and my own trajectory in it - a way that I would never change, a way that allows me to seek for every little crumb of beauty in food writing and cookery media.

There is this constant imbalance between extreme enthusiasm about what’s out there, what my creativity is capable of, what I can build by studying, reading, diving into things and the daunting idea that all of this work is useless because it only scratches the surface, it only satisfy a little curiosity without ever ending. To complicate more, this daunting idea is what fuels the enthusiasm first hand, it is the burner that is constantly open to indicate that something is always brewing and that I cannot sit still without asking myself questions, thinking about what to write, what to photograph, what to read, what to create. Moreover, the pinnacle in this tentacular experience is the idea that I’m still searching for my language - being a graduate in Linguistics seems a little strange to say so, but that’s how complicated I feel. I have a style of photos I want to take, that I cannot take; I have a way of writing in my ming that I cannot fully express in written form; I have art in me that does not know how to be expressed. I’m so frustrated by this sensation that I often compare myself - in an absurdly false and not correct way - to a mute person, one that has no way to express herself, but still sees the world and grasps the inputs it gives her. 

This is how I feel constantly, the urge to express the multiple trains of thoughts that go on at the same time in my mind is so potent that there are instances in which I just shut down and others in which I just pour creativity into the void I feel around me, just to fill a gap between what I see with the eyes of the mind and what there really is out there. 

Does it seem awful? Or is it something everyone has to face? How do we face such an experience, how is it possibile that heaven and hell are so close together and yet when you feel in one of the two the other seems impossible to reach?

As you may have understood, I don’t have answers - if you want, I have trillions questions. I don’t have answers to how to silence all the voices in my mind, to how to let my creativity flow. But I found a mechanism that allows me to feel a little island of heaven while feeling the pleasurable flames of knowledge-hell. This mechanism is to read cookbooks, write about my experience with food - very broadly, and trying to cook the things that come out from these creative outlets. 

I cannot describe the feeling of reading a cookbook, being it old or new. To me, it is an out-wordly experience - one where I truly feel a connection with that part of me that knows how to express what is still only inside, what has never came out yet. Reading a cookbook, to me, is as creative as writing. To me a cookbook is a way of writing in my mind, while feeling the creativity of others. The creativity that lies in the photos, in the writing, in the recipe testing, in the produces that went into the dishes, in the editorial work that has been done in other to construct a book that then is out in the world for people like me to read, cook from and admire. When I see a page with a picture, I imagine the process that lead to the result, I imagine the ways in which the same image could have been different by just changing lights or by buying the same ingredients from a different grocery store. I imagine the care that went into the page and I get emotional, I admire the authors that are able to convey with such grace what they have imagined before, what they have written in multiple notebooks, on the apps on their phone, what they told to their loved ones during holidays because watching other parts of the world make them inspired more than anything else. 

Cookbooks are what truly inspire me to continue to try and find my language, like a child that tries to learn the one of his parents by trial and error.

There are endless cookbooks in my mind, they are only waiting to be deciphered and written, to then be what I can only call my own limbo.