Recipe for Disaster

Recipe for Disaster

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Something sharp and bitter burning in the kitchen, curling its way down the hallway and into my chest like a warning I had already ignored too many times. It wasn’t the kind of smell that suggested dinner was ready. It was accusation. Heat without comfort. Evidence without witnesses.

I was sitting on the floor with my back against the cabinet, knees drawn in, staring at the blackened coil of the stove as if it were staring back. There was a strange intimacy in watching something else burn — a quiet recognition. A mirror.

My mind felt the same way — scorched, hollowed out, stripped clean. Whatever had once lived there had already fled.

Once, I had been full. Radiant. Alive with creative force and energy that moved through my body like light, like something sacred that hadn’t yet learned how fragile it was. My thoughts used to arrive whole. They had edges and color. They built worlds. They trusted their own continuity.

Now I felt like a lifeless black canvas stretched too tight, waiting for something — anything — to touch it again. Even if that touch hurt. Especially if it hurt. At least pain proved I was still here.

I let the pan burn.

I had been trying to follow a recipe I didn’t care about. Something simple. Something grounding. Eggs. Olive oil. Salt. The kind of meal people make when they’re pretending they still know how to take care of themselves. The kind of meal that looks like effort from the outside and feels like survival from the inside.

The oil had already gone still in the pan. I should have noticed that. Stillness like that usually means it’s too late.

My hands were shaking. Not dramatically — just enough to betray me. My breath kept breaking apart inside my chest, snagging on something old and lodged deep where language never quite reaches. Every scream I swallowed turned into a gasp for air, illuminating parts of my body I hadn’t felt since before I knew how to name pain. Before words arrived and taught me how to hide inside myself.

The smoke thickened.

And with it came everything I had buried.

Anger.

Sadness.

Grief.

Shame.

Jealousy.

Rage so old it felt ancestral.

Not emotions — presences.

A shadow I had walked with for years without knowing it had a name. Without realizing it had been growing alongside me, shaped by every moment I chose endurance over honesty, silence over rupture, survival over truth.

It fed quietly off every misinterpretation of love, safety, and belonging I had ever learned. It sharpened itself in the spaces where my needs went unnamed. It learned patience. It learned restraint. It learned how to wait.

I had slept next to it.

Eaten with it.

Laughed with it.

Let it speak through me when I didn’t know it had a voice.

It was invisible — until it wasn’t.

Until I saw it clearly, standing across from me in the reflection of the darkened oven door. Bent slightly. Familiar. Not hostile. Not kind.

Patient.

This was the moment I stopped running.

I realized then that the shadow wasn’t a monster.

It was a collection.

Fragments of myself abandoned during moments when the pain was too much and survival demanded sacrifice. Pieces left behind in time — not because I was weak, but because I was human. Because there are moments when the nervous system decides before the mind ever gets a vote.

During trauma, the soul does what it must.

It fractures to survive.

Those fragments don’t disappear. They don’t dissolve into memory or fade with distance. They wait. They lodge themselves into muscle and nerve endings. They alter breath patterns. They teach the body what to expect long after the danger has passed.

Trauma is not just remembered.

It is embodied.

And now, here I was, standing in the smoke of my own life, called — not gently — to gather myself back.

The smoke alarm screamed.

Its sound sliced through me, sharp and panicked, mirroring the way my body had learned to respond to threat long before I ever understood what safety was supposed to feel like. My heart raced as if it were late for something it could never reach.

I turned off the stove and slid the ruined pan into the sink. Blackened eggs clung to the surface like evidence — not of failure, but of neglect. I didn’t scrape them off. I didn’t try to fix it.

I didn’t eat.

The plate stayed empty.

That was when it happened — the knowing.

Not a thought.

Not a conclusion.

A knowing that arrived fully formed in my body, bypassing logic entirely.

This wasn’t destruction.

This was alchemy.

In the first stage of transformation, everything calcifies. Fire strips away what cannot remain. The nervous system panics as old programs fail. Structures you were built on collapse all at once, and there is no graceful way through it.

You burn.

Not metaphorically. Somatically. Systemically. Every illusion you leaned on for stability dissolves, and the mind scrambles to rebuild what the body already knows must go.

And if you stay — if you really stay — something pure rises from the ashes.

I sat there long after the smoke cleared, breathing into the quiet, letting the silence press against me instead of fleeing from it. I called back every forgotten fragment of myself not with force, not with urgency, but with a tenderness I had never been shown.

I didn’t demand forgiveness.

I didn’t demand coherence.

I let them return as they were.

One by one.

The system I had been built on was gone.

The scripts.

The roles.

The strategies that once kept me alive and now kept me small.

In their absence, something truer began to take shape. Something quieter. Something that did not need suffering to justify its existence.

I washed the pan.

I dried my hands.

I left the kitchen exactly as it was.

An empty plate on the counter.

No fire.

No smoke.

Just space.

And for the first time, I understood:

this wasn’t a recipe for disaster.

It was the beginning of learning how to feed myself again.

By Ellen Tjaden

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