Before I Knew to Be Afraid

Young Anthony Bourdain

The Strange Mercy of the Next Open Door…

I left the Anthony Bourdain movie thinking less about food and more about accident. About the strange mercy of not knowing exactly where your life is going, and still being willing to follow the next open door.

What stayed with me was not only the food, or the travel, or even the mythology that tends to follow a restless creative life. It was the way a life can unfold through appetite and attention. Through work. Through a room you did not expect to stay in. Through a place you enter for one reason, only to realize later it was teaching you something else entirely.

That is the part I kept thinking about.

I thought about my own years in hospitality. Restaurants, hotels, membership clubs, and strip clubs (yes, I said that one out loud). I moved through all of these rooms before I understood what they were giving me. At the time, I thought I was working to stay alive, making money, getting through the shift, figuring out what came next. Some nights I loved it. Some nights I hated it. Some nights I walked home with sore feet and a full heart. Some nights I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life.

But now I can see that those rooms educated me.

They taught me how to read people quickly, how to move under pressure, how to notice what someone needed before they asked. They taught me how much care lives in timing, tone, memory, and recovery. In a clean table, a remembered name, a quiet fix to a wobbly chair, a shared drink after work when everyone was finally able to be honest.

Hospitality gave me a kind of confidence I did not know how to name then. It was one of the first places I felt able to be myself, because the room was always full of people from everywhere, carrying all kinds of dreams, endings, performances, and private weather. I learned how to connect with people I might never have met otherwise. We leaned on each other, hyped each other up, and walked away feeling like life was going to be ok. We showed up for each other, challenged each other, and always called each other out on our shit.

For years, I did not know that would become part of my work.

I did not know that reading a room would become reading an organization, or that anticipating a guest’s needs would one day become anticipating an employee’s. I did not know that service, when you really pay attention to it, is one of the earliest forms of people work.

And then HR found me through a job I hated.

I wish I could make that sound more elegant, but that is the truth. Sometimes the wrong room gives you the clearest information. It shows you what you cannot keep doing. It shows you what you are good at. It shows you what you are tired of tolerating. It shows you that your life may be asking for a different shape. 

That is the funny thing about paths. We want them to look clean when we tell the story later, but most of the time they are made from accidents, pivots, brave exits, strange yeses, and jobs that almost break your spirit while pointing you somewhere better. That's what that last customer service job did to me. Then I met a woman who looked like me, and I knew the pivot was happening. You stop tolerating the life you have; you want more. That's the feeling you just feel, and you know when it's time.

My early twenties were full of that kind of motion.

I was brave then in a way I did not fully appreciate while I was living it. I would pick up and go, try a new job, walk into a new room, meet new people, let a place change me, leave when I needed to leave, and begin again before I had proof that beginning again would work. 

I was not fearless. I just had not yet learned to doubt myself in such organized ways.

I did not know enough to talk myself out of everything. I did not know what would work out, but I knew I could not stay stuck just because staying stuck looked normal. There was a part of me that believed more life was somewhere, and if I kept moving, I might find pieces of it. I left NYC at 21 with a suitcase and a duffle bag to head to LA. A place I had only seen on TV and not in person. The place where I knew no one. I just knew I couldn't stay; I had to leave. It was the best decision of my life. I had no plan; I slept on an air mattress and filled up vapes for a weekend to put down money for a bed in a studio apartment shared with 3 other people. Worth it. 

And I did.

Not always gracefully, not always with a plan, and not without consequence. But I found rooms that changed me, people who taught me something, work that gave me language, and mistakes that became maps. I found cities, meals, conversations, and versions of myself and people I would not have met if I had only chosen what made sense.

As I got older, I became more careful.

Some of that is good. There is wisdom in wanting stability, health insurance, a decent paycheck, a home, a rhythm, and a life that does not constantly require you to prove you can survive it.

But doubt gets louder with age, too. So do consequences. Money, reputation, resumes, timing, relationships, and the need for everything to look responsible can start to make uncertainty feel like danger, even when uncertainty is also where some of the most honest parts of life begin.

Watching that movie made me miss the version of myself who could move before she had the whole explanation.

Not because I want to go back to being twenty-two. Thank God. But because I want to remember what it felt like to be available to life. To the unexpected job, the strange conversation, the person I would only know for a season, the idea that arrived before I knew what to call it.

Maybe that is part of why I started this site.

There are still parts of me that want to move without justifying the movement first. There are still things I am curious about before they are useful, rooms I want to enter, things I want to make, essays I want to write, colors I want to follow, and questions I want to keep close without rushing them into answers.

Life has handed me so many things I did not know I wanted. Hospitality. HR. School again. Brooklyn in new ways. Home. Love. Language. A little more softness. A little more courage. A little more proof that a path does not have to look obvious while it is happening to be real.

I think that is what I carried out of the theater with me.

Not a lesson exactly, but a reminder that sometimes the life that finds you is more honest than the life you thought you were supposed to choose. Sometimes the thing you did to get by becomes the thing that teaches you how to care. Sometimes the job you hate becomes the doorway. And sometimes you do not need to know what something is before you begin following it.

You only need enough courage to notice what opens.

And, when you can, to walk through.

With Movement,

Kayla