Ilana Shabanov
Life is messy, however you approach it. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or on a Thorazine drip. Even our cat, Papa, can’t make it through a week without some kind of emotional blip that, more often than not, ends in inappropriate pooping.
It is a challenge to stay the course, to hold fast to the decisions we make, especially if we have chosen a creative life. Most of the time, at least for me, things happen backwards or out of order. I unfailingly learn the hard way, bypassing the straight and narrow for the route that will most likely take the longest and be the most difficult and painful. But I get there in the end, slightly scathed, and with something great to show for it. Life lesson: if you’re going to fuck up, do it brilliantly, and take great notes.
Over a decade ago, I had one of those mandatory early twenties breakdowns, wherein I reached my quota of stupid life decisions and gathered myself up, and reevaluated. I believe Liz Phair had scored the soundtrack to that particular time in my life, “Exile in Guyville” to be precise. I had made a mess of things – a hot-ass mess of things. (Note: Everyone should do this at least once. It puts things into perspective in a way only desperation can.) In all honesty, I had been on quite a roll for a few years by then. I may or may not have left high school “early,” finished up my diploma at the local community college, worked bad retail jobs, and moved in with a 27-year-old musician who sold shoes for a living. That might have happened.
Most recently in that whirlwind tour of disaster, I had left school at Columbia where I was studying writing. It’s my life-long love, my sweetie since I was eight, the one thing I thought I was meant to do. I had loved storytelling since I could remember, but, once again, I had abandoned it, along with so many other plans and best intentions, until I was left standing in my apartment alone, another bad choice having packed up his things and moved on. What now? I had a blank slate – there was nothing standing in my way but me, and trust me, I am one hell of a barricade. So I sat down and made a list. Dang, I love a good list. There is something about lining options up on a piece of paper that solidifies things.
What makes me happy and how do I turn that into something productive? What, if anything, was I good at? And I knew immediately what that thing was at that point in my life: cooking. I had been cooking obsessively for over a year, pulling myself out of a colossal stupor by watching Food Network like it was my guru and making vision quests to the grocery store, attempting to cook magical things for my friends and family, trying to find my way back to the surface again. Cooking had become my Woobie. There was my answer. I pulled out the phone book (the internet was not the unicorn garden of magic it is today) and looked for cooking schools. There were approximately two around town in the late nineties. I scheduled interviews at both and made the choice of Kendall College in Evanston. I took a deep breath and put my writing away, burying my journals in the bottom of my sweater drawer – choosing to replace it with knives and the endless knowledge of stocks and sauces.
A few weeks later I was standing on a tiny, tree lined campus in head-to-toe cook gear: paper toque on my head, white chef coat with my name and school crest embroidered on the chest, checked Hammer pants, black clogs and a brand-new knife kit. It was go time. I had never been so horrified, exhilarated and hopeful in my life. All I could think of was: “Woman, don’t screw this up. I will own your ass if you don’t follow-through.”
Two years later, I had survived endless days of hardcore manual labor and a six-month internship at a French bistro. I had graduated from culinary school. I held my first college diploma in a proud death-grip and sported a gold medallion around my neck with the rest of my classmates. We looked like a bunch of misfit Olympians. I didn’t know what real pride felt like until then – it was the first Titanic moment of my adult life – I was Queen of the Friggin’ World. I had a job lined up at the restaurant I wanted and had met Jose, who I would later marry. I was officially part of the distinguished and dysfunctional brethren of restaurant cooks. Begin career choice number 1.
Two years after graduating culinary school and working as a line cook, I had moved on to working at a catering company, organizing delivered food events and holiday parties. You simply haven’t lived until you have planned and orchestrated a Passover dinner with waitstaff and rented china. Career choice number 1.5, if you will. Jose and I had been married for a month. We owned a home together and our careers were progressing and we were doing what adults are supposed to do. Everything felt like it was on a course, like we were quietly coasting into Grown-Up Town together. Enter The Shitstorm.
Things come at you with no warning. I got the call at work, sitting there in my cubicle, writing up a contract for a Bar Mitzvah brunch with miniature potato pancakes. It was my mother. There’s a spot on her lung.
Everything screeches to a halt.
Cancer is ridiculously inconvenient – like that friend that asks if they can come stay with you for a while and then you realize they are calling you from your front door. I spent the next 18 months by her side, through surgery, chemotherapy, late-night blood transfusions and pneumonia. Somewhere in the midst of The Shitstorm, I cleared my entire cubicle at the catering company into a garbage bag in one swoop of my forearm, and walked out on my job and any certainty of a career. I had no idea of what I was going to do next. Priorities are quick decision makers.
Mom recovered, slowly and with great intent. But there I was, jobless again, and every part of me knew that I couldn’t go back to what I had been doing. I had felt the shift coming since I cleared my desk at the catering company. You know how they say that sometimes the worst thing you can do with something you love is to make a career out of it? That’s what happened to me when I tried making cooking, a job. Working insane hours with no day off in sight; cooking the same thing over and over again while burning up in front of relentless ovens; helping unbelievably wealthy people order the right amount of pigs-in-a-blanket for a Briss. It just wasn’t for me. I had reached my limit with that life.
And there I was a second time, staring at a blank slate.
So I sat down and revisited that list again, and one thing became achingly clear: I needed to write again. This was the right time. Maybe I wasn’t ready before, or didn’t have the right amount of distance from who I was, and maybe, I just didn’t know I had a voice. I remembered what one of my very first writing teachers had told me right before I dropped out. “Write what you know. It’s where the best stories come from.”
I called Columbia and asked about re-applying. I was still in their system, although it wouldn’t be a simple process. Of course not. The college insisted I needed copies of my high school transcripts to complete the process and the only way I could get them was to go to my high school and sign for them in person. Seriously. I wouldn’t even want to make that up. There is something both horrifying and strangely validating about walking into your high school administrative office in your thirties, and seeing the same kind of kids sitting in tweedy chairs, waiting to see their Dean. Stories come full circle. Begin career choice number 2.
I went back to finish my bachelor’s in Fiction Writing almost exactly a decade after I had tried the first time around. Sitting amongst nineteen and twenty-year-olds, I was the oldest broad in the undergrad program. All around me I overheard conversations about bands I had never heard of and how much dorm life sucked, and there I was, wondering if Jose had taken his diabetes medication and if I had remembered to defrost chicken for dinner. It was one of the more humbling and completely affirming experiences in my life. It also made me realize I didn’t have nearly enough drug stories. But there I was in the semi-circle again, waiting for a story, a paragraph, a line to let me start over. When I brought my journal out for the first time I told myself “Write what you know.” And I did, and have, all through undergrad and into finishing my MFA. It’s amazing how things that were just too raw that first time around, stories that came out sounding strained and epic on paper when I was younger, now sounded clear and resonant. Oftentimes they were comic gold. Sometimes it takes a decade or so to find your voice, maybe even longer to gain the right amount of distance. Writing took a kind of patience that I hadn’t understood until then.
I write what I know as often as I can. I have an entire collection of stories that most probably fall into the category of Too Much Information, and when I get the chance, I get behind a microphone and tell them to small audiences. It seems I am slowly creating a new career out of embarrassing myself, and lucky girl that I am, my family could not be more proud. Most of the stories I write out of order, as they come to me from memory, piece by piece, like a collage. The entire process is messy and sometimes the stories are almost too difficult to write, but it’s what I want to do more than anything. Except when I want to make soup. I will put a story on hold any day to make a great pot of soup.
About the author…
Ilana Shabanov is a writer, storyteller, and occasional editor. She has a degree in Culinary Arts from Kendall College and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago, which officially means she can write you a great story about making soup. Her writing has appeared in the story anthology Hair Trigger (volumes 30, 31, 33), Fictionary, and thismaygetawkward.blogspot.com, among others. A native Chicagoan, Ilana lives in Roscoe Village with her husband, their cat, Papa, and their growing collection of cookbooks.