How to make a salad

A former honor student ponders self-care while using that now-lifeless phrase only twice

You would think I start with the lettuce. It’s actually closer to the last thing I do.

First, the grape tomatoes. I slice their red flesh easily with my new, too-sharp knife. I have never owned a panoply of knives the colors of Skittles before. These are the types of things I am interested in now—the kinds of things that make my inner child, which is to say, me, giggle. I accidentally lift a thin layer of skin from my thumb with my orange knife. I told you: new, too-sharp. My hands are full of tiny lacerations these days. I have to learn how to hold these new knives, this new life.

It feels weird to be learning about life at this age. Life should always be about growth and change, but the world I live in, we live in, this most odd American one, is committed to both stagnancy and destruction. She lives for maintenance of a status quo and radicalism that supports that status quo, though if you asked her, she’d call it maybe something like the American way.

It’s safer, I know, to stick with the familiar. I’m sure it probably hurts less. This shit is by no means fun, to reach 35 years young and realize you don’t actually know how to care for yourself.

Yes, let me not forget about the tomatoes. Into the air fryer they go. I Googled how to roast tomatoes in an air fryer because nothing about cooking feels innate to me. I’m always too worried about fucking something up. This is also why I don’t know how to care for myself—I was taught that not fucking things up was always more important than listening to yourself. Probably because listening to yourself could create situations that maybe resemble fucking things up to the trained eye. What does a mistake mean to a recovering honor student who was taught perfectionism was equivalent to worth, to goodness?

The bell pepper and the knife are the same color. I pull the tray out of the air fryer; toss the oil-and-seasoning-coated tomatoes around so they don’t stick. I chop the previously hardboiled egg, finding myself annoyed with this egg—no, with myself—because it didn’t separate cleanly from its eggshell. While I’m doing this, I’m also scrambling an egg for the next day’s breakfast, the one I will eat hours after I get to work, because my body has told me that sometimes, it doesn’t like to eat when the sun is just beginning to cut across the sky.

The tomatoes are almost done. I pull the red butter lettuce from the fridge. The container is made of such hard plastic it slices through a not-so-thin layer of skin on my middle finger. Every time I bend my finger and feel the ache, I remember accidentally stabbing myself with a not-new, too-dull knife while trying to cut the top off a green bell pepper in the first of many apartments I shared with the same person in the last decade. The plastic now is sharper than the knife then, and the pain is as well. Back then, I received only two stitches. But this pathway that is open, these memories of what feel like another life in another universe are too wide for minimal stitching. How could so much time have already passed? How could so many things be different? How could things be both better and still hurting?

I am taking my time to make this salad. I could have purchased a ready-made kit and had a salad in five minutes. But I am tired of five-minute food. None of it tastes real anymore. None of it feels real anymore. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, and I hope I don’t. This is a consequence of this journey, wondering whether these technicolor emotions make sense to anyone else, though another consequence of this journey is knowing that whether the answer is yes or no, it doesn’t actually matter.

I stick my hands in the glass bowl, gently running cool water over the lettuce, turning it with my palms and fingertips. I just learned—yes, Google—that someone who I will never meet cleans their lettuce in this way and then lays it out on a clean dish towel and softly dries the leaves because they hate their salad spinner that never actually dries the leaves. I also hate my salad spinner that never actually dries the leaves. Touching them makes me feel connected to my food in a way I realize I haven’t maybe ever felt, or maybe just not felt in a long time. I pull the leaves out onto the towel to dry. I dunk a small handful of cilantro into fresh water. I am not one of those people who thinks it tastes like soap.

The other night, the first night I made this big ass salad that I ate straight from the wide bowl, it took me an hour to finish preparing it. I felt my irritation rising at how long it was taking, not because of hunger-driven impatience (though I was hungry), but because I felt stressed because, shouldn’t this not take so long? My mother could prepare a salad with her eyes closed in five minutes and not nick her fingers. Who the fuck spends an hour making a salad?

When I say I do not know how to care for myself, this is what I mean. The key ingredient to self-care is being able to actively listen to one’s self. Everything I was taught involved unintentionally ignoring my own voice. Can you imagine how ridiculous it feels to have to learn to trust a voice you’ve always heard? I hope you can’t imagine, but I bet you can.

I like taking an hour to make a salad only I will eat. I like listening to the local jazz station, the only station left in town that gets the evening vibe perfect, even though one song immediately floods my eyes, unlocking something in me. My body remembers it is alone and without the responsbility of parenting for the first time all day, and though I don’t necessarily like sobbing in my kitchen, I appreciate having the space to do so.

The tomatoes are done and my eyes are too. Both are now wrinkly, but only the tomatoes are sizzling, their natural sweetness now able to come through. I pepper the lettuce, crunch up leftover bacon, add roasted pumpkin seeds, crispy onions, and avocado. I drizzle the avocado lime ranch dressing. I sit while jazz plays through my otherwise silent kitchen. Every time I sit it feels like I haven’t in years.

Each bite bursts with flavor and texture. The cilantro adds brightness. The tomatoes do their thing. The onions are a brittle crunch, while the seeds are a softer one on my molars. The avocado is truly creamy, and I have come to understand why people have espoused it for so long. The bacon is, well, bacon. (Delicious.) The egg and bell pepper blend in while still maintaining their own vibe.

I was not given the space to learn how to care for myself, because I did not sit at the feet of people who were taught how to really care for themselves. I come from a maternal lineage of caretakers—nurses’ assistants and aids and maids and domestics and lunchroom cooks and nannies and on top of all of this, mothers and wives. I do not know what it feels like to look to the past as an example, because no one who came before me ever, it seems, cared for themselves out loud. There’s really only one generation that even had half the opportunity to attempt to do so. I can’t look for bread crumbs because there aren’t any I can see.

So I am learning while doing. There are no blueprints because they are being written while I am living. What does the possibility of a mistake mean to a recovering honor student?

It means fear of fucking it up. And yet, the freedom to discover that maybe the supposed fuck-ups are indeed the point.