My Story: Creating Something New · New Earth Community

My Story: Creating Something New

Before:

When I was a kid, I was in love with learning. I soaked things up like a sponge. I had straight A’s, teachers loved me, and my parents loved me for it. I also had a love for food that far exceeded all the kids around me. Since my parents never really cooked, I learned how to make food for myself. Starting with scrambled eggs and working my way up to homemade pasta and more. Cooking was my passion and a way of giving my love to others. Eventually, I went to college to study Food Science, studying why food does what it does.

Crisis:

When I got to college, I thought I knew what I was going to do. I was going to make the next hit food item. I wanted to see people all over the world eating something I created. But then I had my first internship, and all of that changed. My days were spent in a quality lab, doing stuff I could’ve easily been taught to do right out of high school. By the end of the internship all I could think was, “What am I even doing in college?” When I hit my major specific classes junior year, this unhappiness with the food system continued to grow. Why weren’t Food Scientists learning about agriculture and sustainability? All we needed to graduate were classes that taught us how to make tasty products and increase their shelf life. It didn’t help that every class wanted me to cram 500+ facts into my head just to spit it back onto a piece of paper. Junior year was hard. The more I learned about the food system, the more I wanted to burn it all down… my classes, the food industry, everything. Hate started ruling my life more than love.

Chase:

I started looking for a way out, chasing anything that gave me the possibility of not selling my soul to the system. I learned about the power of leveraging other people’s time/money through investing, but I never committed to it because investing never resonated with me. Then I thought about becoming a regenerative farmer. I have high respect for that life, but after my next internship on a farm, I knew that that life wasn’t for me. What other option was there?

Conflict:

I was conflicted, and still am. I know that I would never be happy in the system, but at the same time, I experienced corporate life during my quality internship. I saw the benefits of working for a big food company with steady pay and fancy benefits. That feeling of safety and comfort strongly called out to me, and still does. When I started my senior year, some of my classmates were all starting to commit to companies, while I applied to maybe 3 because I felt I “had” to. As most of my other classmates had trouble finding jobs, I knew I had to look for an alternative. I didn’t want to slave away as a lab tech for the rest of my life. I had more to offer in this world.

Breakthrough:

So, I decided to take a step back… to reset… to take a look at what would make me truly happy. I had so many passions when I was younger, ones that got shoved to the side. I reflected on the skills I gained throughout the years: video editing, making presentations, teaching, music theory, writing, and more. But what I realized was - my skillset consists of everything I need to create anything I want. The world is my playground. I could literally build a story from the ground up if I wanted to. This realization brought me back to what my strongest skills always were - writing and teaching. Truthfully, I feel like I’m still within my “breakthrough” stage. Every day adds another layer to my story.

After:

As I finish my senior year of college, I know that I will face many more challenges in my life. Even if I end up in an “industry job”, I know that I will be working towards something greater. But for right now, in this present moment, I have 2 clear goals:

Number 1: to share the truth about food. To shine light on why businesses create what they do, and how our society can begin building a new system that challenges the current system. There is a place for science and research, but it should be used to learn, not for power.

Number 2: to write a story that everyone can connect with. I want to reflect the divide that is happening in our society, and how we can either grow from it or be destroyed by it. I’m not really telling anything new, just sharing what I already see and feel.

My hatred led me wanting to burn the world down, but reconnecting with what I love allowed me to see that creation, not destruction, is the only way forward.

Thank you for reading. This is the first online community that I've ever interacted with, and posting this terrifies me. For anyone else that's living the college life right now or has lived it, I get it.

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