Alessandra Basso

Cheesemonger

How to Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, An Origin Story

Start by admitting you like order. Demand grids and legends. Know what to wear, what
to say, what to cook, where to go. Insist on directions, always directions.

Make big plans for yourself. When you don’t know something, devour everything you
can until you do. Start working the day after graduation. Keep working for decades.
Work for glossy global companies. Travel so much you start to smell like jet fuel and
hotel shampoo. Get married. Raise some kids. Let all that go.

On vacation, sit with your best friend a glass in hand, and confess: you want to leave
your job, go back to school, do something radical. Then find every reason not to—kids,
mortgage, bonuses, timing. Repeat this ritual until your friend, chemo scarf tied like a
warrior’s headband, looks you in the eye and says: “Stop telling that damn story. Life is
short. Go back to school.”

Do it.

Walk into a graduate classroom even though you look like you are there to audit it. Feel
the canyon of age between you and your cohort. Let your self-consciousness need its
own chair. Notice the absence of guides, No rules to reference. Write your own. Sit
with the anxiety.

Pick a degree just because you’re curious. I picked Food Studies. It’s not nutrition, not
agriculture, not culinary school. It’s bigger, messier, about systems and politics and
solidarities that radiate outward from a single bite.

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