I never learned how to cook on my own until this year, my sophomore year of college. Before, it was always my parents guiding me through the steps – let the pan heat up before adding the oil, add meat before vegetables, understand when it’s fully cooked. The base seasonings I use in my apartment are the same ones: onion powder, garlic powder, paprika. But as I’ve made food at Berkeley, I’ve found myself adjusting the flavors slightly, adding my own dash of perspective.
I think growing up is a lot like cooking. If you're cooking raw meat, the first seasoning gets baked into the essence of the meat, making up the internal taste. That’s like your foundation or family life as a little kid: your family paints your world for you. While the meat is cooking, you add more flavors to the interior and middle.
Teens learn through socialization and developing interpersonal skills. This is when your personality and interests are shaped by friends. Lastly, you take the food out of the pot and taste it to adjust. If you need to add seasoning at the end, you're always adding to the outside. So whatever you add last will be the first thing you taste, but it won't absorb into the inside unless you soak it for a long time.
For me, this last phase is college. My college friends and I have similar views on diversity and social justice because of the liberal nature of most Berkeley courses. We care about the same problems and agree with the same perspectives. But when I go home, I find that I have the same mental frameworks as my high school friends. We view life through a similar lens, and I realize that we’ve adopted some of each other’s personality traits. So even if we haven’t been talking regularly, they still feel familiar when I meet up with them. Yet they might not share my strong feelings about global issues.
These two identities can be conflicting; I’m not sure if either side knows the real me. Everyone I've met in college has only seen the side of me that is the seasoned exterior, but that also means they know the polished version.
The people from my past were there when I was still growing up, so it feels like they understand the source of my thoughts and actions better. At the same time, they aren’t fully updated with my new opinions. My high school friends know who I am, but my college friends know who I’ve become.
This also means my college friends have pasts that I’ve never heard about, while my high school friends grow farther from me with their own experiences. It makes me sad that neither of us will be able to know each other fully throughout our lifetimes. But at the same time, that’s pretty much impossible unless you go to college with your best friend since birth.
I don’t want to end with a cheesy conclusion that everything will work out and we’ll all make lifelong friends in college. I think it’s more that there will always be this weird liminal space between old and new identities, and we all have to find our own ways to inhabit it. Or at least find a self of ours that we’re most comfortable showing. After all, cooking is not just made of precise measurements; it’s also the creation of new, unexpected (and hopefully delightful) flavors.