A couple of months ago, I found myself decluttering with a frenzy. I’ve written articles about the how-to of decluttering, and the mental health benefits, but there was nothing strategic about my efforts; they simply fell out of my long post-flu convalescence.
I focused on one room — my study, which for years has just been a messy archive of my life. “Oh, don’t bother with that little room,” I would tell the quarterly cleaners. The floor was littered with books, papers, and photos; the cabinets were filled with notebooks stacked in no particular order.
I always told myself that someday I would go through everything — every page, every line, every word. Just not today. And during my recent decluttering, I gave only a cursory glance at my words. I read quickly, with an editor’s eye, pulling phrases that caught my attention, flagging them for future use.
I also found random paraphernalia: my first labor contract (for delivering newspapers), my orthodontics records (I wore braces twice), my baby book. Inside was a bittersweet clue about my pack rat tendencies. Taped neatly in the corner of a page was an odd-looking gray-brown, slightly raised bump of a thing. Next to it, my mother had written chicken pox scab.
One of my journalism professors told us, “If you want to write a book, have a day job that doesn’t involve writing.” Baking fit the bill.
My mother saved everything of sentimental value: my baby teeth, a pair of Wonder Woman underwear, all the love letters I wrote her. My father, also a hoarder, saved random stuff, such as stacks of Styrofoam cups, thick red rubber bands, matchbooks. It took two years to tidy up the family home.
Perhaps as an act of rebellion against my hoarding parentage, I’ve adopted a minimalist lifestyle in adulthood. I really only hold onto one thing: words. While decluttering, I found a job application that speaks to this devotion. It wasn’t a writing job, but one as a “bread shaper” at a French-inspired bakery.
I didn’t know what that was, nor did I have any formal baking qualifications, but I enthusiastically filled out the application, which required hand-written, short-essay responses to surprisingly reflective questions, such as “What foods do you love, and what foods can you just not bring yourself to love?” and “Why do you suppose you feel strongly about these foods?” I wrote about my aversion to animal parts (having gotten sick on zampone, or stuffed pig’s foot, one New Year’s Eve in Italy) and my vegetarian epiphany the summer after my mom died, when I locked eyes with a cow.
How do you feel about baking? “I love the way baking warms a house,” I wrote, reflecting on my mother’s rhubarb pies and German cakes. Her best friend, a cookbook author, let us be her guinea pigs for brownies, banana bread, and baklava. I also mentioned that one of my journalism professors told us, “If you want to write a book, have a day job that doesn’t involve writing.” Baking fit the bill. But curiously, in the process of writing the application, I wrote my way out of baking and back into writing.
The last question on the application was “How would you sum up who you are at your core?” I wrote about rediscovering my love of writing in the aftermath of my first-ever romantic breakup; that passion had in fact triggered the breakup. I also wrote about my later realization that words weren’t enough in life — but that I continued to love them anyway, and the version of myself that could call them my clay. My last line was “I think this is not an easy path, but it is the only one that sets me free.”
With that, I had folded up my application and stuffed it into a folder, only to rediscover it a decade later — as if it had been waiting all this time to prove its point.
