I quit work a month ago.
I was not getting any younger (nobody is), and while there are parts of being a pastry chef that I loved, and miss, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days with the people I was working with. One of them has narcissistic personality disorder, and had been targeting me literally for years. I dealt with it by learning about the disease, and seeing her manipulations as symptoms and patterns. But it was still ugly. The others were okay, but it had become a conservative, country music crowd for the most part. We didn’t have much in common, but made the best of it.
It wasn’t always that way. I’d been there for eleven years, and there were times that I very much liked the people, and felt like we were a team. That’s important. If a group of people is going to work long hard hours together, you need to be a team.
My widowed father was getting extremely old and confused, and was 800 miles away. My enameling business was in a busy season, and the work season, the catering season, was in full hard drive. Downtown Nashville had gotten so crazy, you could work a party, then take an hour trying to get out of downtown. It was gala season, wedding season. So I put off everything else and gave it my all. And an end date.
My father passed away before the season ended. I had been planning to go see him in June, once the last ball was finished, but it didn’t work out that way. It was merciful, to be honest. I tried to call often, and I felt like his life had become tortured. I was carrying this with me, aware that someone I loved was going through something awful, and that while there might be a some good moments, it wasn’t going to get better. His vision was nearly gone, his body was failing, and his once brilliant mind was scrambled trying to make sense of it all. Most of all, he missed my mother. I hurt for him.
This isn’t what I set out to write. I wanted to talk about the transition from being someone who could make upscale plated desserts for 650 people, to finding out who I was when I wasn’t doing that. I was looking for a path back to being me, so I retired from being a pastry chef. I had planned to blog about the journey, but I didn’t have it in me. The death of a loved one leaves you scatterbrained for a while.
So I’m doing it a month later.
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