Letting winter be your teacher before the thaw.
There’s a full-on blizzard blizzarding this morning, and I’ve done what New Yorkers do—stocked my pantry with essentials like popcorn and wine, charged my devices, braced for the quiet chaos of a city forced to pause.
But I keep thinking about what happens after. Not just the digging-out part, though that’s the first step. The moment when you first step outside and the world looks completely different than it did the day before. Unrecognizable. Transformed. Terrifyingly exciting in its blank possibility.
I’m writing this in the early morning from my couch on the Upper West Side, watching the sky turn that particular shade of white and the sound of the first plows scraping the road below while snow buckets overhead. I’m here…42, with my daughter entering middle school in the fall…and with my new husband…brilliant, neurodivergent, literally dubbed the king of SEO last year…who is finding himself six months into a job search that keeps telling him he’s too experienced, too senior, too intimidating to the people who would be his bosses.
I just got diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety this fall after years of white-knuckling my way through life without knowing why everything felt so goddamn hard, why I insisted doing my best work was under pressure and waiting until the last minute for everything.
Turns out, the high-performing-oldest-daughter-people-pleasing-Virgo-energy masked it beautifully for decades. I was so good at compensating, at organizing, at making it all look effortless from the outside while drowning on the inside. I masked it all, until I couldn’t anymore. I masked until the systems I’d built to hold myself together started cracking under the weight of everything I carried.
There’s still painful grief I haven’t unpacked from my divorce a few years ago. Grief I thought I’d dealt with because I kept moving, kept building, kept doing all the things while becoming an executive chef and starting a new business and most recently, remarrying.
But here’s the thing about grief you don’t process: it doesn’t disappear. It just waits. And when I remarried this past fall, I realized I’d carried all that baggage in with me like a ton of bricks, pretending it just didn’t exist. The weight of a 16-year marriage that ended. The weight of everything I thought my life was going to be. The weight of all the ways I failed and was failed. I brought all of it into my new marriage without even realizing it.
And out there, beyond my apartment window, the country feels actively hostile to everything I believe about care and belonging and basic human dignity. Minnesota. Full-scale attacks on immigrants and murders of US citizens. Greenland. Iran. Division and distrust. And we feel frozen.
Jobs are disappearing to AI and the market seems rigged against anyone who’s been around long enough to know what they’re worth. Everything is monetized. Everyone is chasing passive income because active income…the kind where if you stop moving, you stop earning…is literally unsustainable. I know because I’m doing it, too, every day.
The hourly grind feels like a prison. And, as someone who actually loves what I do, who built a business around care and belonging through food. But here’s what I’m reckoning with: I don’t extend that same hospitality to myself. I haven’t figured out how to make this work financially and emotionally sustainable. I haven’t cracked the code on profitable and meaningful in an industry that overworks and underpays unless you’re one of the lucky few with a salary—and even those aren’t holding up against rising taxes and expenses.
Everything feels heavy. Everything feels dark.
And I’m the queen of optimism, so that’s saying something.
I had plans for a planning retreat last weekend in Wilmington. The kind where you map out the year, get clear on direction, do that whole visioning thing everyone does in January. Conversations were sort of had. But none of us were really ready for the kind of planning session we thought we needed. And that’s okay.
Because here’s what did happen:
I got rare 1:1 time with each member of my family…my sister, my brother, my parents. The kind of time that’s almost impossible when everyone’s together and the noise level rises and you’re performing the role of daughter-sister-mother-wife instead of just being a person.
I got to visit Wrightsville Beach and stare at the bright blue ocean. The vast ocean that always reminds me that this world is so much bigger than myself. That very ocean has always been my grounding place, my perspective shift, the thing that says: whatever you’re carrying, the waves will still come in.
Then last week, I went to the James Beard Women’s Financial Literacy Conference and soaked up the knowledge and inspiration I desperately needed. I sat down next to a woman I’d never met, and within minutes, we both said it: “You feel familiar. Like, I know you from somewhere.” That recognition, that immediate sense of connection—it doesn’t happen often. We talked like we’d known each other for years. It felt like confirmation of something I can’t quite name yet.
And then, almost by accident, I ended up at my chef mentor Nadav’s new restaurant on a mock service night, weeks before the official opening. He invited me to stand at the pass, watch the kitchen do its dance, and to taste everything coming out of that line. Nadav was one of my first chefs. He’s the one who saw something in me when I was still figuring out if I even belonged in a kitchen. Watching him now, in this new elevated phase of his cooking, felt like witnessing growth in real time. It felt full circle.
All these moments felt like confirmation of things I know to be true, about which directions I should explore, about the foundation of who I am underneath all the noise of this particular moment, when everyone is so hip, so creative, so cool, and imposter syndrome runs rampant.
So here’s what I’m sitting with: the darkness is real. The weight is real. The government chaos, the job market cruelty, the financial pressure, the unprocessed grief, the new diagnoses I haven’t even begun to unpack—it’s all real.
But so is the ocean. So is the stranger who feels like a friend. So is standing at the pass in a kitchen that smells like possibility. The sometimes impossible-to-see moments of light in the darkness…but we can’t ignore the darkness, it has its own lessons for us as well.
I’ve always believed that hospitality is the beauty of meeting basic human needs. But what I’m learning—slowly, painfully, in the middle of a blizzard I’m watching from my window—is that I have to start with myself. I have to figure out how to feed myself first before I can sustainably feed anyone else. Not in a self-care-bubble-bath kind of way. In a this-system-is-broken-and-I-need-to-find-another-way kind of way.
I don’t have answers. I haven’t figured out how to make The Freckled Fork profitable or, at the very least, sustainable. I haven’t cracked the passive income code. I haven’t processed my ADHD diagnosis or the full weight of my divorce or found the perfect work-life balance. I’m in the mother-truckin’ thick of it. I’m standing in my kitchen watching the sky turn white and thinking about what I’m going to cook when the power comes back on.
And maybe that’s enough for right now.
Maybe what people need isn’t another resolution-setting, goal-crushing, optimize-your-life newsletter. Maybe what they need is someone standing at the window saying: yeah, it’s fucking cold out there. It’s heavy. It’s dark. Let’s look for and talk about the moments of light AND let’s let the darkness teach us what it can. Let’s talk about the ocean and the stranger-friend and the mentor’s new menu. Let’s talk about what it means to feed yourself and others when the world feels like it’s falling apart.
The Freckled Fork started as a blog and an Instagram account back in 2017, when I was just discovering I had a thing for food. I already knew I loved people; that part was never a question. But The Freckled Fork was born from this vision, this dream of watching those two loves collide and seeing what kind of fire they could make. Food and people. Nourishment and connection. The table as the place where both could happen at once.
That philosophy didn’t stay theoretical for long. It grew teeth. It pushed me to uproot my entire life and move to NYC. It compelled me to walk into a professional kitchen with zero experience and ask for a spot on the line. It drove me to work harder than I’ve ever worked at anything, to prove I belonged there, to become a head chef in a year because I was too naive or too stubborn or too hungry to know that wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
And then—because life is nothing if not ruthless in its timing—that same table, that same philosophy I’d built everything on, became the only thing holding me up when the rest of my life burned to the ground. My previous marriage ended after 16 years. The custody battle that followed severed my relationship with my daughter in ways I’m still trying to repair. Everything I thought I knew about who I was and what my life looked like turned to ash.
So I packed my knives. I walked away from the restaurant world—the late nights, the weekends, the schedule that made being a present single mother impossible—and I went looking for chef work that would let me show up for my kid. That’s how I ended up here, as a private chef, trying to figure out what The Freckled Fork looks like when you’re also trying to figure out what the fuck you yourself look like after everything falls apart.
The Freckled Fork has evolved. And so have I. We’re both still here. Still standing. Still setting the table even when we’re not sure who’s going to show up.
And maybe that’s what this moment is actually about. After the thaw. After 14 years of Neptune’s transit through the 7th House of blah blah blah—this fog I’ve been navigating through, this blurred vision around connection and what I’m supposed to build with other people. Virgos are coming out of that cycle now. Clarity is supposed to be (fingers crossed) on the other side. Fresh starts in how we relate, how we partner, how we show up.
I’m standing at the edge of that clearing, squinting into the light, not entirely sure what I’m looking at yet. But I know. I know something has shifted. The fog is lifting. The thaw will happen. And whatever comes next—whatever I build, whatever table I set, whatever way I figure out how to feed myself first so I can feed others—it’s going to look different than anything I’ve done before.
So this Substack? It’s me working through what comes after. It’s the conversation I need to have with myself about building a life that’s actually sustainable, about extending the same care to myself that I give so freely to everyone else, about what hospitality looks like when you’re done performing and ready to just be honest. No scripts. No polished brand voice. Just the real thing, messy and true and still becoming, still evolving.
Pull up a chair if you want. Bring your own mess. The storm’s not over, but neither are we.
After the thaw comes the digging out. After the digging out comes… I don’t know yet. But I know there’s a kitchen. There’s a table. And there will always be the basic
human need for nourishment and for each of us, the radical act of feeding yourself.
Let’s figure out what comes next together.
Welcome to The Freckled Fork.
I’m Jess, and I’m glad you’re here.