Luka has been a chatty, maître d’ type since he learned to talk, so I put him in charge of offering our guests water (aka the one beverage I wouldn’t mind him spilling—and the only one I could afford anyway). Matea was a well-mannered, semiantisocial child at the time, so I gave her the very important job of handing out napkins. It was the perfect task to make her feel helpful yet allow her to run away from the guests without having to schmooze.
Then 5:30 p.m. rolled around, and I got nervous. Really nervous. I started chewing on the skin around my fingernails and pacing. What if no one shows up? What if my friends are embarrassed to bring people to my little apartment? What if they’re embarrassed to introduce people to someone like me? What if I just spent this whole day cooking and cleaning for nothing? What if my idea is stupid? What if the one and only thing I feel I have to offer fails? What if? What if? What if? (Those two words are each quite lovely on their own, but when you pair them up . . . what a downer.)
At 6:00 sharp, with bleeding nailbeds, I opened the front door. No one was there. There was a lot of pasta in my kitchen—a lot of pasta, and no one at my front door. I felt like I was being stood up. Not by a boy. But by hope.
But within five or ten minutes, three or four people showed up. Then more people came. And then even more. By the end of the evening, I had made a second batch of pasta, run out of napkins, met a lot of new faces, and fed approximately thirty people. Thirty people! In my tiny little apartment. On my tiny little budget. With my tiny little kids who, by the way, proved to be incredible at pouring water and handing out napkins.
I will never forget shutting the door after my last guest left. I sat on the floor and cried. Understatement. I sobbed like a baby. But this wasn’t the same sobbing with despair I had done night after night sitting alone in my car. This was different. That Wednesday night I sobbed like a broken little girl who had just experienced her first glimmer of healing. There was something so powerful, so magical and wonderful—and above all, peaceful—about the fact that I could feed all those people. I had been convinced that I had nothing to give, yet when I gave the little that I had, the results were something so much bigger than I ever could have expected.
The following day I started hearing from people who had come to my Wednesday Night Dinner. These people were so thankful, so happy. They told me how much they enjoyed my cooking, how nice it was to eat a homemade meal. Some told me they had just moved to town a few weeks before and that the dinner made them feel less homesick.
And that right there was a turning point for me. I don’t remember ever feeling completely hopeless after that. Sure, I felt sad at times, angry and scared, but I didn’t feel defeated or desperate. Because for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel useless. Even when I thought I had nothing, I still had something to offer. I, Kristina, have something to offer. I, Kristina, am worth something. Understatement.
It would have been easy to take that incredible feeling I had after the first Wednesday Night Dinner and assume all would now go well for me. But I knew that a turning point doesn’t equal a onetime fix. As I continued with Wednesday Night Dinners, friends would often drop off ingredients to make sure I could afford to continue hosting those evenings. People started bringing salads and sides to round out the single giant pot of rice or pasta or potatoes I was serving that night, and executives in three-piece suits rubbed elbows with college students and other people struggling even more than I’d felt I was. There were so many interesting, open hearts walking through my door, and I was feeding them.
The people closest to me knew that these dinners were much more about me helping myself than me helping others. I needed those days of cooking for strangers more than those strangers needed my cooking. I needed the weekly reminder that I don’t need to have a lot to give a lot, and that it takes only a small helping to feed the soul. In this case, my soul.
We humans crave a quick fix to our problems. But going from hating your life to tolerating your life to feeling like your life is good or maybe even amazing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly. Because life is cruel that way. Or maybe because our patience needs to be tested at every turn. Or maybe, just maybe, because the things we get quickly and easily carry less significance. And not as many lessons. And without lessons, just as quickly as we make some progress, we’re right back to where we started. Clueless and lost.
I remember in my hardest days being told that there is light at the end of the tunnel. That’s super cute on a fridge magnet or a key chain, but when I was deep in my misery, a beautiful quote like that from a well-intentioned friend, which under normal circumstances would have encouraged me and given me hope, sounded dismal and empty. It was cheesy gibberish that didn’t apply to someone like me. Misery can be deafening. It’s like wearing earmuffs. Misery earmuffs. You’re listening hard for encouragement, but it all sounds like nonsense that definitely wouldn’t work for you.
Escaping from complete misery is not like driving through a straight, dark tunnel toward the light waiting to embrace you at the end. It feels more like crawling neck-deep in muck through the darkest, scariest, muddiest bat-filled cave of your nightmares with so many twists and turns that the light is rarely visible at all. And then continually choosing to search for the light, believing against all evidence that it exists and is reachable.
That kind of crawling is exhausting. It takes time. It takes feistiness. And if you can leaven that feistiness with a whole lot of patience, you’ll save yourself an enormous amount of frustration. Because I’m not terribly patient, I was frequently frustrated. What I learned through my slow crawl out of that cave was that I already had the tools I needed to get unstuck. I just hadn’t been using them.
It’s easy to overthink things, to judge your ideas and make excuses for why you should wait for this or that to happen before you take a proactive role in dragging yourself out of your misery. When you’re sitting passively, hoping something will change but not actually doing anything to catalyze change, you start to get numb. It’s like sitting on the floor in the same position for hours and hours and then trying to stand up. Your muscles are tight. Standing up is uncomfortable. And the last thing you want when you’re already miserable is more discomfort, especially when you’re not guaranteed, in writing, signed and notarized, that moving on will change anything. But going from “everything sucks” to “life is good” requires discomfort. And blind faith. It’s not easy. It’s not quick. It’s mostly moving forward, but occasionally tripping and falling backward and getting bruises on top of bruises and having to pick yourself up and keep pushing forward again. The outcome we crave is often found by taking the steps we keep trying to resist.
I’m sure I could have easily spent months (or forever) planning out every detail of how I would throw my first Wednesday Night Dinner, writing lists and questioning myself at every turn. But I had to just get up and actually do it. When you’re feeling helpless or hopeless, stop thinking about how helpless and hopeless you feel and just do something. Do something positive. Do something that matters. Do something without focusing on the list of things that could get in the way. Do not let the few things that are completely out of your control, control you completely.