Someone sent this to me today, and boy did it make me think:

“It’s been said that you are what you eat. But it would be more accurate to say that we are what we hunger for. What we eat has nothing to do with who we are. It has to do with who we think we should be or who we’ve become in our unconscious behaviors. But very rarely does it have to do with who we actually are because we haven’t learned to decipher the language of hunger and then feed it with pitch perfect response.”

This sent me into a hole for a minute. I don’t think we are what we eat, and I do believe we are what we hunger for. I think what we eat is unconscious behaviors picked up from the people around us. What we hunger for is what we truly want out of life, and just don’t know how to get it.

I am arguably a perfect example. What is eat is a lot of negativity and pessimism, I was surrounded by it my entire life. My dad is the most negative pessimist I’ve ever met. My mom also. My sister has a pretty jaded few on life, but hell I would too if at 22 years old I had to adopt my 11 year old brother. It causes me to be a lot like them, to see dark instead of light. Sometimes it’s a benefit, I think it’s what makes me creative, it’s what helps me write, and come up with drinks and name drinks, it’s all around negativity. The worse I feel when I’m work shopping a cocktail the better it ends up being.

I hunger for the opposite. I hunger for positivity, for people who only see the light, who never end up in the dark. I hunger for joy, and love. I hunger for human connection. I hunger to be seen and heard. I hunger to be enough.

You know, the reason I work in hospitality is that every day, I have the opportunity to make people feel seen, feel heard. Growing up with absent parents, and being bullied as a kid, I was never seen or heard. No one cared what I had to say until I started to find some success in life, now people wanna know. I do it so people know that someone cares about them, that they’re valuable to the world. I don’t get to touch every guest, but I like to think the ones I do, I leave them a little better than they were before they met me.

And it’s interesting, most days I get lost in the negativity, I get lost in being pessimistic, in telling myself that I’m not enough, and never will be. That leads to not speaking up because you know people don’t see you or hear you the way you want them to. Which leads to self isolation and a lack of human connection.

I know what I hunger for, I don’t know how to nourish myself with it though. It’s funny I see people in my life have the opportunity to live that life, and throw it away. Maybe it’s not the life I was meant for, but others were. Maybe I’ll never know.

Maybe I’ll always be hungry.

Where the skies are gold not gray,

J.