Learning To Be

An essay from a period of no decisions and a warm welcome to my Substack

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to walk away from something huge, something you felt you couldn’t, or shouldn’t, quit? I felt that way for a long time, quietly drowning for years in a way that didn’t matter how well I could swim. And then I did it. I quit¹. I closed my business and stopped doing the work that defined me. What I can tell you is that on the other side of it, the relief is real. 

Taking a massive life step like this might make me sound like a brave person, but I can also tell you that my confidence was at an all-time low as I spent months trying to find the courage to take action. To choose myself. The only thing I wasn’t scared about was the first question everyone ultimately asked me, “what’s next”? I wasn’t worried about where I would land or what I would become, because I had forgotten what it was like to just be me, and that was more frightening than anything. So after I walked away, I took three months off to (re)learn things about myself and practice just being here. In this life. On this earth.

One of my intentions for the time and space this transition afforded my brain was the cultivation of a writing practice² as a form of expression. I’m actively working on letting go of what I feel I should do, listening in quiet moments, and learning what I want to do. I know I want to (re)discover my creativity in this medium of words. I’m also trying to be more sparing with my own resources. I want to be kinder, to ask less of myself, and to not worry about how other people respond to my choices, especially when I choose me. 

I still don’t know what’s next, but my heart tells me it’s time to push publish, share what I’ve been writing, and start some new conversations. Please consider this a warm welcome to my Substack³. Thanks for joining me. I hope you’re hungry.

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Hungry Heart is a weekly-ish newsletter featuring personal essays, interviews, and Edible Extras from Heather Marold Thomason. Sharing thoughts on food, sustainability, and just being here.

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No decisions: Day 85

Monday, September 11, 2023

My calendar says “HMT OUT NO DECISIONS”. I gave myself ninety days, and only five remain. Eighty-five days have passed as I’ve tried to prioritize myself, to practice having a “me first” attitude. I’m getting better, and yet it still feels unnatural. I’m letting go of the guilt, the need to apologize, or at least express my privilege and gratitude, when I answer the question about what I did this summer, which, based on standard expectations of professionalism and adulthood, is not much.

It took me years to take decisive action and choose myself. Everything I was walking away from in giving up my business, quitting really, I had chosen (if not directly than indirectly) by the goals I set and the choices I made to try to achieve them. But as a seven-year business anniversary approached, two years past the point in time when I once believed that my giving would give back, my sacrifices rewarded, I realized I was no longer choosing what I wanted. 

I had tried to identify and prioritize my own needs; the basic ones like health, well-being, and happiness, as opposed to the gratuitous ones like wealth and fame, but I couldn’t do it. Because at the start of each day, I believed that if I did not choose the path for the greater good that my business’s mission required, that failure, disaster, and suffering of many more people than just me would result from my choices. So I put my own needs aside, and I continued down the hard road, quietly struggling along the way. 

When did I become a martyr? I can’t stand martyrs. I always want to tell them to get off that cross and take care of themselves. Easier said than done, it turns out. 

When I finally quit, the suffering dissipated with an immediacy that surprised me. I feared so many things in taking hold of my choice, in deciding “me first”. But what I never anticipated was the positively overwhelming relief that would rush into me upon abandoning the burden, so immediate that I was emotionally, if not physically, levitating. An involuntary smile returned to my face within days of sharing my decision with my community, and yet it would take me months to reset the behaviors that the past decade had trained into me. A deep sense of responsibility was hardwired.

Once I took the steps that no longer allowed me to turn back on my decision, I had to intentionally practice starting my day without an automated attitude of disaster management. For example: Waking and immediately checking all channels of communication. I used to begin each and every day hoping for no issues. “Please let there be no news”, was my morning mantra, too often ignored by the universe I pleaded to. After a few weeks, I no longer had to fight the urge to check in. The panic and anxiety that once drove me began to dissipate, appearing in moments only when my mind reviewed the responsibilities that used to run me. 

My husband Brad said to me one day as we returned from a late morning dog walk somewhere around day twenty-five, “It’s funny how quickly your communication seems to have fallen off.” It had been nearly a month since I took on a final series of business-oriented tasks, a to-do list that had a true end. I had crossed many of them off, and doors I had worked to open were closing. “I’m not sure if it’s because you’re less responsive or if there is just less happening,” he said. It was both, but primarily it was my “me first” attitude taking hold. I had stopped believing that all problems require solutions from me. I was trying to walk away, and as he noticed, it was working.

The most frequently asked question of me upon announcing that I would be closing my business was “what’s next?” To which I answered over and over again, “I don’t know yet.” I had envisioned and built my business from nothing, given a decade of my life to the work that drove it, and in doing so, hung my identity on it. My work became the lens that other people saw me through. But the more I achieved in the eyes of others, the more I felt like I no longer knew what I was doing. I understood myself less by the age of forty-three than I did as a thirty-two year old who made bold, confident decisions to upend my life and never hesitated to decide “what’s next” in the pursuit of things I believed in. 

I lost so much of that youthful confidence in the final years of running my business as it was privately running me into the ground, and with it, any vision for myself. But in the end, I didn’t fear the unknown. It called to me. I felt unafraid because what I knew more than anything was that I didn’t know myself anymore, and I wanted to. Approaching the end of ninety days I feel, more than anything, calm. That is not a word I ever tried on in the past. I’m not sure I was interested in calm. I sought space, I wanted time, but I didn't know what I would find in those places, I was just looking for genuine independence so I could rediscover my own needs.

Now when I come across others, my former small-business-owning colleagues who are grinding, stressing, and striving, I feel a sort of survivor guilt. I can relate and empathize with their overwhelming feelings of fear, anxiety, and ultimately hopelessness (which I find myself quietly hoping they are not feeling), because I’ve been there. But I’m not there anymore. Upon waking I reach for a book, not my phone —that device that once had the power to encourage me to respond to the needs of others first and chart a different course than the one I intended to travel. I tell myself I’m working on my confidence, but more than anything I am learning to trust that it, along with a new path I’m choosing, will reveal itself in time.

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My apple watch notification approximately a month after I closed my business.

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5 favorite reads of from 90 days of no decisions:

1. Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India

   I have so much adoration for Madhur Jaffrey, who weaves her food memories with fascinating tales of family, religion, and the politics of India in the final years of colonial rule.

2. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

   This is a beautiful memoir from poet Camille T. Dungy, reflecting on society and our impact on the environment while gardening as an act of resistance and resilience.

3. The Great Believers

   Co-recommended to me by two writer friends while traveling this summer in Idaho, I’m so happy to have discovered

   Rebecca Makkai
   . This is a powerful story about art, love, and loss during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

4. No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating

   Alicia Kennedy
   ’s deep dive into the history of vegetarianism is a true page-turner. I loved this book and highly recommend it as a meaningful read for ethical eaters of all kinds.

5. Eating Animals

   I finally read Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 work about meat eating in our industrialized food system. More on this in my next newsletter…

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1. I closed my business, Primal Supply Meats, after seven years of operation in Philadelphia in the Spring of 2023. This was a massive decision and change in the energy and direction of my life. I had an honest conversation about it “on the record” with my trusted friend and advisor Kate Tyson who writes

Thoughtful as Moss

in what became a two-part podcast. You can find her posts and listen here, and then here, if you have some of those “why” or “how” or “when” questions about deciding to walk away.

2. In a moment where the universe was clearly listening, I confessed this to

Kate Tyson (Strathmann)

who directed me to #1000wordsofsummer by

Jami Attenberg

just days before it began. There could not have been a better jumpstart. Thank you both.

3. For more clearly defined expectations of what to find here, I recommend the about page.