Carrot Cake

I read recently that womanhood is having a voyeuristic relationship with your own pain. It's constantly asking yourself if your suffering is beautiful enough, your agony lovable. I used to not believe in the strength of my friendships until we had survived several crises, because aren't women just bags of stuff until placed in hot water? 

Unfortunately, being self aware does not make you evolved enough to not engage. After all, every worthwhile thought that has entered my head over the last five years has found its way onto this very blog, carefully documented for whenever someone from high school who I no longer speak to decides to open it up for nostalgia. And I'm on no path to stopping anytime soon -- case in point: I'm about to describe, in painstaking detail, one of the most healing experiences I've ever had. I mention this not to detract from the profoundness of my healing (or the value of my writing about it), but rather, to let you know that this epiphany of mine might just be a gilded sculpture of my pain. It might not be real, or last for very long, but I'm on this tightrope trying to make it into art anyway. Which means this blog is not a museum -- it (and I) will change, because having learned this lesson once only means I will feel a vague sense of deja vu when I inevitably learn it again, not that I am now permanently and irrevocably grown. 

Earlier this year, I had the honor and privilege and joy of being treated to a dinner at Carbone in New York City. I stuffed my face for eight courses, taking pictures of a painting on the wall that read De Che Sel Fatto with my new friend's old digital camera. My aging grandfather, who can hardly remember my name these days, saw a picture of me from that night and told my mother that I looked happy. And at risk of sounding arrogant, I really did.

The final course was, predictably, dessert. They brought out a giant slice of carrot cake, and my first thought was Deepti, you've had a good night but if you eat another bite you will explode. I was trying to figure out a classy and relatable way to refuse the cake, wondering if I should explain all the health issues that plague my internal organs or just quietly shake my head and say "No, thank you". Ten minutes later, I was convinced to have half a slice, and I was sliding the first forkful of cream cheese frosting between my lips when...

Oh. My. God.

This is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

Why haven't I had carrot cake in all these years? Why am I not eating carrot cake every single day? Why do I do anything else with my time but find new versions of this cake to eat? 

The truth is that I haven't had any cake at all in the last six years -- not when I graduated, not when my sister graduated (either time). Not when I turned 18, or 19, or when I got into college, or got a perfect SAT score, or survived a global pandemic. Not on random Saturdays driving back from the temple with my father, like we used to when I was little, and not with my friends on the way to Barnes & Noble after class while blasting Why Don't We through the car radio. 

Most of this lack of cake in my life has been unconscious; after all, I'd venture that most people probably don't eat carrot cake twice weekly. But it's also true that I've spent a lot of time thinking of myself as not a cake person. My favorite foods are peanut butter, oatmeal, feta cheese, and chickpeas. If I were to opt for sweets over savory, it'd be for my sister's date walnut bread or a berry shake. Eating cake did not align with the tightly regulated image of myself I had within and wanted to project outwards.

Does this sound like nonsense? Because it should. It struck me that this entire pillar of my personality was formed by opinions I made at twelve, and was therefore completely meaningless, and I became so unbearably, inconsolably sad. This -- the things we like and dislike -- are cornerstones of our identities, and mine was as stable as a projected movie on a bedsheet. My rage turned biblical, and incoherent, and undirected. To be young, talented, and female, am I right? I thought of this quote, from "Notes for a Magazine":

Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against 'losing control' -- of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind. 

- Elana Dykewomon, "Notes for a Magazine"

I grew up with a mother who whispered self control is the best control like a mantra to her two daughters, hoping, for their sakes, that they'd be refined and restrained members of polite society. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, one I can predict and prevent if I grasp enough independent variables in my small hands. But unfortunately, I am hungry. I am angry. I am vengeful, and ambitious, and have no desire to stop my lawless mind from thinking as it is wont to. I'm spending close to half a million dollars to be disgustingly overeducated, and so I'll be damned if I don't walk out of here having finally learned self-acceptance. 

Put simply, the next time I have carrot cake from Carbone, it won't have been six years since I let myself do whatever I wanted without wondering what butterflies flapping their wings in the wind would make me pay for it later. It'll just be a slice of goddamn cake.