Once in a Blue Moon, You Cook for Yourself

Last night was a blue moon. The second full moon in a calendar month, something that only happens every two to three years or so. Something rare inside something ordinary.

I've been signed off work for two weeks now. And I want to tell you something about that, because I think we've been sold a lie about what rest actually looks like.

The recipe I'd been saving for months

I cooked for myself this week. Properly. A new recipe I'd been saving for months, the kind that takes time and attention and makes your kitchen smell like somewhere you actually want to be. And I stood there stirring something and thought: I had forgotten this. Not the recipe, but this: the feeling of doing something just because it's good.

Not because it's productive. Not because it moves anything forward. Just because it's good.

There’s a saying in German: ‘Good food keeps body and soul together’, and it’s true. We just rarely take the time to do that.

I also had long conversations with people I hadn't properly talked to in too long. I read things that interested me without feeling guilty about the time. I watched seminars I'd been meaning to watch for ages. I watered my plants. I cleaned my kitchen, really cleaned it, the kind where you move things. I did a little magic.

None of this sounds impressive, but that's exactly the point.

The lie we've been told about rest

We've built a story around rest that makes it conditional. You earn it by being exhausted enough. You justify it by being sick enough. You perform it correctly by lying very still and doing absolutely nothing, or else it doesn't count.

And if you do any of the things I just described, the cooking and the conversations and the seminars and the magic, there's a quiet voice somewhere that says: that's not really resting. You're still doing things. You haven't earned it properly yet.

That voice is wrong.

My nervous system didn't need me to lie still. It needed me to remember what it feels like to be a person who does things she actually wants to do. There's a difference between exhaustion and emptiness, and I'd been confusing the two for a long time. I wasn't just tired from doing too much. I was empty from doing too much of the wrong things, things for everyone else, things that kept the machine running, things that left no trace of me in them.

The cooking left a trace of me. The conversations did. The magic did.

Be here, be in the now. That's enough, really.

What the blue moon has to do with any of this

The blue moon only comes around every few years. And there's something about that rarity that feels important right now, because this particular week, this particular pause, this particular version of me standing in my kitchen finally trying something new, that doesn't repeat either.

We talk about rest like it's a reset button. Like you press it, wait for the loading bar to finish, and come back exactly as you were but with more energy. But that's not what's happening in my kitchen. Something is shifting. Slowly, quietly, in the way that things shift when you stop forcing them.

I'm still in it. Next week too. And I'm trying to let that be enough without turning it into a project.

Permission, without the performance review

If you're in a pause right now, or if part of you is desperately waiting for permission to take one: this is it. Not because you've earned it, but because you're allowed to choose it.

Rest that looks like lying still is valid. Rest that looks like cooking something new is valid. Rest that looks like finally calling the friend you've been meaning to call for three months is valid. The only version that isn't rest is the one where you're still performing for an audience that isn't even in the room.

And if the automatic yes is what got you here in the first place, The 3-Second Pause is a free six-page guide to building a gap between the reflex and the reaction. A small thing, really, but that's where it starts.

Jen is the Witch of a Thousand Faces. She works with people who always function, always smile, always make themselves available... and who at some point no longer know who they are when nobody needs anything from them.