I miss writing here. so while I gather some inspiration, here is an essay I wrote in October 2021, while I sat in my parent’s living room healing from eye surgery and burnout, months before I decided to move abroad. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for a year, and it feels like a good time to share it.
I hope this inspires not just myself, not just people with physical or psychological disabilities, but anyone who feels stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill. Hope you find your own pizza soon.
Thanks for reading. <3
Shab
I had never been to therapy. I probably should have started when I was 18 and newly diagnosed as legally blind, but to be honest I never thought of it.
Nothing swayed my emotions so far out of place that I couldn’t handle it on my own. My diagnosis was no surprise. I’d been dealing with my poor eyesight for years, so the diagnosis was actually a welcome relief if anything. The way I see it, I was lucky that my problems started at a young age. By the time I was diagnosed with Macular Dystrophy, a rare, genetic, and early onset form of macular degeneration, I had fully come to terms with my circumstances. I knew I’d never drive when my friends were all getting their licenses, I knew to sit in the front row on the first day of classes, I knew how to enlarge the font on my laptop…
I was truly, genuinely, totally fine and it was definitely, absolutely, 100% because of the grit and resilience I’d built from years of learning how to deal (and years of standing up to unbelieving doctors...) So I never thought of therapy.
When I was 26 I was going through what was the most tumultuous relationship I had ever been in up until that point. Because it wasn’t a romantic one, it took me a while to realize how deeply it was affecting me. I thought to myself for the first time “Should I see a therapist?” while sitting in a Whole Foods coffee shop in Santa Cruz as I had snuck away from my band to take a moment for myself. Too scared of the weight of my own emotions, I decided to do the next best thing I knew I could do for myself. Over the course of the next year, I ate up countless Psychology Today articles, read multiple books on emotional intelligence, started meditating again, and found podcasts with titles like “How Do You Know if You’re in a Toxic Relationship?” That was truly the definition of deep work because I was in deep. And I got through it. So I still didn’t think of therapy.
Now, cue 2020. My macular dystrophy had plateaued, and I was a rather healthy 27-year-old. The bounds of my creativity were endless, and I was determined to not let my disability get in my way. Save for the fact that I lived in Los Angeles without a car and I was constantly struggling to find work, everything was fine.
A couple of years prior we had found a brand new problem in my right eye, a partial macular hole, that had been rapidly deteriorating the vision in that eye since we’d found it. But again, I was unstoppable! I felt like I had cracked the, albeit temporary, code to Living in LA as a Legally Blind Person Without a Car!
Then Covid hit. Everything stopped. As did the buses. As did the Ubers. As did the rides from friends. As did all my creative work.
In July 2020, about a week after my 28th birthday, I was on my laptop and I thought I noticed something new in my vision. Since we’d found the macular hole in 2018, I’d been checking my sight every few months to make a mental note of its progress. Now, I was zoomed in all the way into my laptop screen, so magnified there were only a few words blown up across the page… and I think it’s blurry? So I zoom out. I zoom back in. I look at my phone. I open Instagram. I look at the captions...
I was sure of it: my vision had just gotten worse yet again, and now it was finally affecting my screen time.
I was a photographer, an artist, a designer, someone who genuinely liked the internet, the way it expanded our minds, the way we connected through it. Technology was the thing I thought I could trust. I truly thought it was all I had left. And now it was slowly starting to slip away.
I closed my laptop, made an Instagram post about my new revelations and went to my room. Staring at the ceiling, I had no questions left. I was tired of looking for answers. I was tired of trying to figure it out, day after day, year after year. Trying to live in LA without a drivers’ license. Looking for jobs that I was able to do. Looking for employers who would hire a legally blind person who, aside from her 20/200 vision, I swear could do any job you let her do.
I was beat. So I let my room swallow me up.
Even while at the bottom of the ocean, I still didn’t think of therapy. I would only go so far as to think, “one day, if I get a therapist, I’ll only trust her if she is also legally blind.” And the thought of searching for said legally blind therapist was so daunting I was exhausted before I even started.
So instead, I started baking. At the bottom of the ocean (it’s the metaphor I found most applicable then, roll with it), I decided to let myself float and just listen to the silence underwater, let it take me wherever it wanted. In July 2020, this meant making food for me and my housemates. I couldn’t be bothered with anyone else, not even my closest friends. But in the air conditioned heat of the pandemic summer, I found purpose in my kitchen. I had a journal where I would jot down recipes in a weekly schedule at the top of the page, and my grocery list at the bottom. Every day for two weeks, I made something new.
Coincidentally, my friend had just given me some sourdough starter for my 28th birthday, and this is where the story I’ve been trying to get to finally starts. What better time to dive into the world of sourdough than in the middle of a depressing period when we were literally not allowed to go anywhere and I genuinely couldn’t be bothered less? Sprinkled between my various recipes I’d find with my new NYTimes Cooking subscription, I began playing with sourdough. Breads, focaccias, pizzas, baguettes.... Thankfully my 3 male housemates never complained about how often I was in the kitchen because they got plenty of food and late night snacks out of it, and for that I will be forever grateful. It was during those few weeks, deep in depression, lost out of my mind, that I realized I hadn’t thought of my eyesight in a while As I stood at my kitchen counter mixing flour, water, and salt, stretching the dough into gluten, I wasn’t relying on my eyesight to do any of the work. Could this be my new thing?
This is the point in the creative process where things can unfold in two ways, depending on who is spearheading the journey. Do you let your curiosity simmer at the surface, until all fodder has been burnt to a crisp? Or do you follow it? Do you let your creativity follow your curiosity into the unknown realm of endless possibility? I have always been the latter, so naturally, I ran with it.
I began reaching out to bakeries and cafés, looking to apprentice or stage under the wing of any LA stronghold who would have me. Covid made things complicated, but I eventually found one kind café owner to take me in. For 3 weeks I went into the bakery twice a week, starting my shift at 3am. The owner and I would ball and bake bread loaves that would later be turned into their infamous sandwiches. It was a very small kitchen, and it became clear that there wasn't any room for me to come on the team more consistently. So I left, and I was glad to end my early morning shifts, to be honest. Maybe the bakery life wasn’t for me?
Discouraged by covid, but still inspired by dough, I continued baking at home. Gluten became my photography subject, and naturally I began posting my photos on the ‘gram. I created a new account, asked my brother to make my logo, designed a color palette, and did what I loved doing best: I started a new project.
Almost instantly, a friend reached out and asked if she could buy a pizza from me. Mind you, my first pizzas were not good-looking, but I guess enticing enough that my supportive friend wanted in. This sparked an idea.
What if I sold pizzas from home every weekend? It was the rise of the Instagram food pop up and I was inspired not just by dough, but by the concept of starting a new project from scratch where I’d be able to reconnect with the world around me once again. So I tested my theory.Over the course of 2 weekends, I rallied some friends to come pick up their free pizzas to test my concept and to test their taste buds. My pizzas were still subpar, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from buzzing on this new idea. So on the last weekend of August 2020, I launched my unofficial pizza pop up on Instagram.
I started selling to friends and friends of friends until I decided to lean in even harder. I bought a portable gas-powered pizza oven and I started reaching out to anywhere I could think of with a parking lot or sidewalk where I could pop up. 3 months after my unofficial launch, I officially launched the next phase of my little project and began popping up in public places. The next 9 months were a blur. I hired people to drive the pop up to and fro, I hired people to help on the cooking line, I hired people to drive me around town for errands... Eventually, I bought 2 more ovens and pushed the operation to its true limit.
One year after my unofficial launch from my home kitchen, our last pop-up in September 2021 sold out 120 pizzas in 3 hours.
The day after that last, insane event, I decided to take a break. The business and operations of a pizza pop up were getting out of hand. In trying to grow my little project, I began hitting the same walls I was facing in my own life. I began asking the same questions I’d been asking for years that burnt me out the first time, and it was no surprise they burnt me out again.
So I put the business on hold.
And now, just over a month into this new stillness, I can see the last year with more clarity than I could when I was trying to hustle pies left and right.
Covid came in really hot and not only took the systems I had built that made my life easier as a legally blind person in LA, but it also took the creative work that fueled my purpose. When my eyesight began pulling at the last bits of myself I thought I had left, I was stumped.
So, when dough and pizza crashed through my life like a rocket, I jumped on board and held on for dear life. All the creative energy I had built up, I threw into my pizza project.
And all of a sudden, I found agency again. I felt empowered again. I found something I could make again, at a time when it felt like covid and my eyesight had taken everything else from me.
It’s been about a year and half since .I’m in a different mental place than I was that summer. Technically, not much has changed. I am still legally blind. LA is still a hard city to live in. My creative endeavours have totally shifted, but so has my mindset. Whatever I’d told myself was being taken away from me through the pandemic and my deteriorating vision, I’m changing the narrative. I can always find a way to create and take my life back into my own hands, even in the most abstract of ways.
That’s what making dough taught me, and in some ways, I feel like I just went through a year of therapy. These ups and downs of dealing with a disability will always ebb and flow. But it’s about having the right tools to be able to deal with the waves so we can stay afloat, heck maybe even stand up on the surfboard if the vibe is right.
As long as I say Yes to my creativity and follow my curiosities, I can let the process heal me.