Cupcake Celebration

A very wise friend of mine gave me some great advice after reading my previous post. Hopefully she doesn't mind me quoting her directly for this post...

"This may sound a little ridiculous and crazy, but celebrate tomorrow. Celebrate because without that incident occurring, you would not be the person you are today nor would you be where you are today."

At first, yes, this did sound a little bit crazy. Who celebrates getting a DUI for goodness sakes?! Thankfully, however, I woke up on the right side of the bed yesterday and made a conscious decision to make it a good day.  As the saying goes, "You are a happy as you make your mind up to be," and for a lot of years I kind of thought that was nonsense. I thought people were born either happy or angry, with no middle ground. Thankfully, that isn't the case.

When I think about celebrating, laughter, family, a home cooked meal, good friends, and cupcakes come to mind. As I went through that list, the only thing I didn't have yesterday was cupcakes; which meant, of course, that I needed to make some.

For those of you who don't know, I am a culinary school graduate; and yes, it's okay to chuckle at the irony of that. I do it all the time. Since I have started recovering from my eating disorder, I have only spent time alone in the kitchen maybe one or two other times. There are usually too many unsettling memories and reminders of blown opportunities for me to handle; but for some reason, yesterday was the exception.

Instead of beating myself up for my past failures in the culinary world, I found myself thinking, for the first time, about how thankful I was to have had that experience. Those might have been some of the most difficult years of my life, but in return, they also taught me the most about myself. Sometimes you just have to go through the bad in order to reach the good.

My mom recently asked me if I miss cooking and I gave her a very quick "no." But I don't know if that is necessarily true. Sometimes I don't think I allow myself to miss it because I know there is no use; deep down I know I will never return to that field of work.

But hey, at least I can make some pretty cupcakes.

This has been one hell of a year, however, not only have I survived it, I am in a much better place because of it. If it wasn't for that mistake I made one year ago, I would not have such an awesome reason to celebrate today.

Progress.