My Birthday...!

A few days ago, I was standing in line waiting for my morning coffee at a local coffee shop. It was bright and airy, one of those wonderful breezy California summer mornings that never fails to make me smile.

As I stood there blissed out, I could hear two girls talking. My ears grew itchier as I started to pick up bits and pieces of their conversation. The two girls looked to be in college, trendy and from what I could hear, very opinionated. They were murmuring between themselves, but loud enough for me to hear that the topic of their discussion was…me. They had seen me on MasterChef, and were talking about how they thought it was dumb how a lawyer could quit her job to pursue food. “So stupid, who would do that…who does she think she is?”

with Tracy, Alejandra & Adrien at LA Street Food Fest

And that, as my friend would say….was the last string (or the last straw, as the rest of the world would say). I went up to the girls and to give them a piece of my mind. Ever since MasterChef had aired, I had been called stupid, a coward, a whore…and many other things by people who were convinced they knew me after watching an edited reality tv show.

I went up to the girls and told them there were many lessons and things they were going to learn in the next ten years. As much as you think you got life figured out in college…there is so much more out there. My life had been centered on my goal of being a lawyer, making a certain income and climbing up the corporate ladder, but while I was a lawyer my ambitions evolved. I started to look at the world of other opportunities I had out there – and looked at people like Oprah, President Obama, Martha, Charles Williams, Emily Giffin, Amy Atlas who in my eyes were heroes (yes, I do realize this is a random array of people), and wondered what was keeping me from trying to do something else. I probably should have known this may have been my path when I wrote my 80 page law school note on food and my legal business paper on Williams Sonoma. (HA!)

As I was telling the girls about my life experiences since college, in the corner of my eyes I saw two elderly ladies watching me. Immediately, I could sense the wisdom they had collected during long lives in their eyes.

On the morning of my 29^th birthday, I woke up startled from this vivid dream. There is so much more life to live…as much as I feel like I have learned a lot in the ten years since I started college, its really just the beginning. Even in just the past year, many things have changed. Last year, I was working at as an associate at a national law firm and getting ready to buy a home with my husband. Now, I spend my days baking cookies, coordinating our next event, designing sell sheets, strategizing marketing and pr plans and thinking of ways to take Batch From Scratch to the next level. I know I have a huge task ahead of me, but there is no part of me that regrets my decision to take a chance on myself and try.

I just hope that when I became the age of the two elderly ladies in my dreams, I can say that I may have had some failures...but those failure are what made my ultimate victory so sweet! =)