in a month, I am taking a 52 hour train trip from Chicago to San Francisco to cook and eat with a bunch of strangers. I’m going to workshops on slaughtering chicken and butchering lamb and making sausage and smoking salmon— all for use that weekend. we’re going to talk about what food means and what it does for us and why we love it and hopefully why it is sometimes hard to love.

I am so excited. I am more excited than I have been about anything in my life?

But that excitement is also stirring up all sorts of worries and insecurities. What if no one likes me? What if no one values what I have to say about food? What if folks engage in sizeist dialogues and what if I can’t, for whatever reason, explain to them that they’re wrong? What if ED rears its ugly head and I can’t eat? What if my train derails or my luggage gets lost? What if I have nothing of value to contribute and the only thing I am actually good at, in life, in general, is faking my way through application processes only to be a gigantic, colossal disappointment once I con people into letting me participate in whatever? What if I mispronounce wine varietals or cry when I kill a chicken and never stop or slice my hand open chopping onions or get lost between the hotel and the train and the retreat site? What if I forget my deodorant and just smell really bad the whole time.

Logically I know all of this is nonsense. I’m going to come back fulfilled and grateful and full of really incredible ideas. I’ll probably make friends that I’ll have for ever and I’ll probably really want to take a long hot bath and sleep in my own bed but it’ll be great. but it’s Scary. Mostly good scary.