The Thing I Was Good At

What happens when the one thing that made you proud becomes the thing you can’t go back to.

People find it confusing. I get that.

I worked as a yacht chef for about twelve years.

Based out of South Florida, summers in New England or the Mediterranean, winters in the Bahamas and the Caribbean.

All my expenses were covered. I was compensated well, especially when tips were involved.

I paid off every debt I had. I could afford the things I wanted.

On paper, it sounds like THE LIFE.

So I understand why it catches people off guard when I tell them I don’t cook anymore.

Not only do I not cook, sometimes I don’t really even like to talk about it.

What I find harder to explain is the feeling that comes over me when someone asks what I’m doing these days.

There’s a pause. A small, internal brace.

I tell them I’ve been writing. Learning graphic design. Building something.

And then I watch their face do a thing. It’s not always a comment. Sometimes it’s just a look. A slight shift.

The kind that says: that’s not real work.

Or the version that stings a little more: so you’re not doing anything.

What I want to say, what I’ve never quite gotten to say out loud, is that cooking was the only thing I was ever really good at.

It was the one thing I could be proud of. The one thing that made me proud of myself.

And that’s exactly why what happened out there hurt as much as it did.

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The yacht world has a certain image. The destinations, the boats, the clientele.

What people don’t see is what goes on below deck, or between the crew, or in the quiet moments after an eighteen-hour day when you’re trying to figure out if you can keep doing this.

The guests were a mixed bag. Some of them were genuinely wonderful. Those were the ones I invited into the galley. They were curious and grateful and they made the work feel worthwhile.

Then there were the others. The majority.

People consumed by their money and their power, who couldn’t care less who I was.

All they cared about was being demanding, and they were demanding for sport. They didn’t care that I regularly worked eighteen-hour days, ten days in a row without a break, just to make sure everything was perfect for them.

They didn’t care that I once collapsed on the job, that a doctor had to be called from a nearby hospital to treat me. The diagnosis was exhaustion and dehydration.

They never knew. And if they had, I’m not sure it would have changed anything.

But the guests weren’t the whole story.

I wasn’t like a lot of other chefs onboard. I didn’t run the galley like a restricted zone.

I was friendly. Outgoing. I welcomed people in. I hosted cooking lessons sometimes.

And they responded to that, gravitated toward it, toward me.

I thought that was a good thing. I thought everyone would.

I was wrong.

The Captains and Chief Stews didn’t see it as a perk. They saw it as a problem.

The more time guests spent with me, the more visible I became. For the Captain, that visibility was a threat from below. For the Chief Stew, it was something harder to name, we were equals, but I was getting the attention.

So they made it their mission to make my life difficult. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily, surgically.

In small, deliberate ways that are hard to explain but impossible to forget.

I’m not the type to retaliate. So instead, I absorbed it. All of it. Day after day, season after season.

And over time, it basically destroyed me.

If someone came to mind while you were reading, send it their way.

These days, when a cooking show comes on, I change the channel.

It’s not a decision exactly, it’s more like a reflex.

There was a time when I could spend an entire afternoon watching the Food Network.

Cooking competitions, chef challenges, anything food related. It didn’t matter.

I was transfixed. Inspired. I’d be reorganizing the next three hours of my life before the episode even ended.

Now my thumb just finds the remote. Automatic. Like muscle memory for avoidance.

And instead of walking into the kitchen, I reach for my phone.

I open a blank note and I start writing.

Whatever I’m feeling, the discomfort, the memory, the flash of something I don’t have a name for yet, I try to put it into words.

Somehow, turning it into a story is the thing that helps.

It’s like the feelings are a messy pile and writing is the way I give them a shape I can actually hold.

I’ve come to understand that I love writing about my life’s experiences.

Including those years. Including the time I’ve spent trying to heal from them.

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Not everyone has been understanding about where I am right now.

Some of our friends probably think I’m lazy. That I’m taking advantage.

And I know what they mean by it, even when they don’t say it directly: you can cook, so you should cook. It’s a job. You should be working.

What they don’t know, what I haven’t had the chance to explain, or maybe just haven’t had the right words for until now, is that I’m not trying to rest.

I’m trying to rebuild something.

I want to do something great. I want to create something I can look at and think: I made that. I’m really proud of myself.

Getting back to that feeling has been harder than I expected.

Being proud of myself used to come through the food. Through the craft of it.

And now that door is, if not closed, then at least not open in the same way.

So I’m looking for a new one. I’m trying to build something I can stand behind again.

That’s what the writing is. That’s what all of this is.

It’s not nothing.

And one day I hope the look on people’s faces will reflect that.

–R. Michael

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If any of this hit close to home, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you have questions, about the yachting world, about starting over, about any of it, ask away. That’s what this space is for.

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