At the Cheesecake Factory, We Talk About Decolonizing our Minds
Thoughts from the turn of another year
“When something can’t be fixed, then the question is, what can we build instead?”
-Mariame Kaba
We’ve wormed our way past clumps of waiting crowds and into two miraculously empty seats at a little table in the bar section where no reservations are needed. It’s New Year’s Eve, and we’ve decided to while away an hour or two at the Cheesecake Factory in the middle of downtown Seattle while the night is still young. We’re doing this partially for the goofiness of it and partially because the Cheesecake Factory can be a genuinely fun place to go if you’re not in the habit; the menu could warrant its own college survey course, the interior design is utterly baffling and spectacularly gaudy, and, in case you hadn’t heard, there’s cheesecake. I have no idea where the nearest Cheesecake Factory is to our current home in New England, but my guess is that it’s at least an hour away. So as long as we’re back in the city, we decide to indulge in the novelty.
So there we are, two people who in a few short hours will relish the ability to say “we’re getting married this year!”, sitting across from one another in a corporate chain restaurant on New Year’s Eve while Vampire Weekend songs from high school play in the background. A few years back, my fiancé got us out of the habit of making New Year’s resolutions and into the habit of new framings, like “for me, this will be the year of X”, or “my word for 2024 is X.” Now, like the English teachers we are, we look at upcoming years in terms of themes and motifs rather than concrete deliverables.
This evening, waiting for our food, we start on it again. What will 2024 be for us? What do we want it to feel like?
If you know me, or if you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you know it’s been a whirlwind two years for us, and probably the biggest whirlwind was self-inflicted: in 2022, we quit our jobs as successful and busy teachers at one of the largest high schools in Washington, put our apartment in the city up for rent, packed up only what we could fit in our car, and moved with our cat and dog to a small town in Western Massachusetts, sight unseen.
What most people don’t know is that we almost moved from the middle of Seattle to the middle of Boston. And when we decided not to, it was because we were acting on an impulse that had quietly grown during our 2020 quarantine. During those strange days, we started asking each other, “what if we just moved away from all of it?” Not just our city, but cities in general? Not just our particular hustle, but the idea of hustle in general? What if we did things completely differently?
And we did. When we got to New England, we took jobs that allowed us to work from home, and we committed to putting work at the periphery of our lives rather than the center. This isn’t extraordinary, necessarily: it’s an enormous privilege, and it’s also something many people do at some point in their lives. We aren’t special for doing it. But we were very aware that it was unusual, especially in a culture where if you aren’t about to have children (we’re not), the default setting for young people is to play the game as hard as you can for as long as you can. To hustle, to advance, to be seen, to earn, to spend, to be perpetually new.
At our Cheesecake Factory table, we started to talk about a sort of mental decolonization that both of us yearn for and want to move closer to in this new year. After all, “the game” is a game of colonial structures: capitalism is colonial. Hustle culture is colonial. Craving newness and flashiness and instant gratification is colonial. Anxiety, depression, and existential dread are in no small part the products of how incompatible our souls are with these colonial structures. Indigenous peoples have known this for centuries and have been telling us as much, but of course, we don’t listen. We just keep going. We play the game so we can escape the game, and all the while, we reinforce the game. And as an added bonus, we make ourselves miserable along the way.
When we moved away from the city and traded our high-urgency jobs for less exciting ones, it was one tiny act of personal rebellion. It was our way of unsubscribing, of deciding that actually, playing the game so we could escape the game just didn’t sound like a cause we wanted to live and die for. And this year, we realized, we both want to be more intentional about seeing it that way.
At the end of the day, we are still participants in and beneficiaries of all of those systems. It’s not as though moving from one state to another made us magically stop consuming or participating in social structures. We have no desire to go off the grid, renounce money, join a commune, or make our own toothpaste. But while our move was quite a small life change in the grand scheme of things, it was also enormously symbolic for us, because it was an act of giving ourselves permission to do things differently. We were allowing ourselves to take a step away from the treadmill mentality of capitalism and a step towards something slower, more intentional, and more focused on inner contentment. We’re not necessarily changing the world, but we’re breathing a little deeper now. It matters.
Amidst the chaos of the Cheesecake factory on New Year’s Eve, we expressed our gratitude to each other for the fact that we see the world in such similar ways. We decided to lean a little more into this journey of mental decolonization we find ourselves on. Our word for 2024? Cultivate. This year, we’ll cultivate a marriage, and we’ll continue to cultivate the life we really want, not just the life we’re told to want. And if you need us, we’ll be here with our neighborhood foxes and our early bedtimes and our tiny homemade revolution-in-progress. Hopefully happy. Hopefully you’ll be happy too.
What to Eat: Warning: these cookies are not pretty. But they are delicious, and perfect with a hot coffee, and after all, when was the last time you let yourself bake cookies for no occasion at all?
On Repeat: I know this is strange, but I haven’t been listening to music in the last few days. I was sick, then traveling and watching plane movies, and ever since getting home I’ve been glued to an audiobook. So maybe it’s your turn. If you have a great album suggestion, let me know, would you?
In my opinion, having known you longer than anyone else on the planet, you are doing just what you were meant to do:
Writing. And doing it beautifully. 🥰