A couple of months ago, along with a larger institutional conversation about pay equity and the lack of advancement opportunities for BIPOCs across the board, I decided to investigate the wages of the previous title holders of my current job position. Sometimes when you're eating a crisp, refreshing salad, you accidentally bite into a stray citrus seed and it turns everything bitter. And you're mad that it ruined your palate. In my case, I bit into the seed deliberately. As a matter of fact, I bit into so many bitter seeds, I started foaming in the mouth. I induced and triggered my own bitterness.
Bitter is a contrast. And it makes you aware of everything. I haven't been able to stop comparing myself to others. The bitterness from my job spread to other projects. Constantly scoffing at every twitter announcements of success, especially from white chefs and food writers, and the POCs who put them on a pedestal. We are far from the reckoning we think is happening. And when my desperate calls for advice from writers I looked up to were ignored, more bitterness was extruded. But I get it, they don't owe me anything. Bitter at all the books being published that contained ideas very similar to mine. Bitterness from questioning if I am actually skilled or if I'm just delusional. Food media seems to circulate through the same roster of writers, even though I think anyone who can string words into sentences and are given the proper and right amount of information and resources can write a decent article. (Yet, I have trouble writing shit). Gatekeepers make it that much more bitter.
Bitter is raw and we find every which way to cook it out. I've been cooking out for a long time that i'm swimming in my own steep.
I am burnt to crisp. Is bitterness a defense mechanism if i'm a deboned fish on the grill, being open and vulnerable about it?
Bitterness is a sore loser.
But, in the same way as smelling the bitter, roasty notes of coffee beans clears your olfactories and sets you up for accurately smelling a fragrance, bitter resets and serves the magnetic north for my personal moral compass. how much more sweetness do I add? How long do I want to stay in this? How much success do I want to gain from it? How much bitter to relieve the salt? Do I continue writing? How much sour to mask the very flavor I'm embodying?
Bitter aggregates. Bitter is a call to action, asking, is everything else about you balanced?
