A Kitchen of My Own.

I started learning to cook at ten. By thirteen, I’d already stopped enjoying it.

Somewhere between peeling onions the way my mother liked and getting the rice just right, something inside me switched off. Cooking stopped being about curiosity or creativity, it became routine. It became duty.

Not because I didn’t care about food, but because, in my mother’s world, or the part of the world i come from, cooking was never presented as an act of independence or nourishment. It wasn’t about survival or creativity, it was a woman’s duty. A performance tied to worthiness. A woman must know how to cook, not to feed herself or out of joy, but to please a man. That was the unspoken message. Softly delivered in daily expectations, in casual remarks, in the way my brothers were excused and I was not. It wasn’t harsh, but it was constant. And it settled in my bones before I even knew I had a choice.

I didn’t hate the kitchen, at least, not in the beginning. As a child, it was just another room in the house, filled with the aromas of spices and the sounds of pots clanging. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, it stopped being a space of warmth or expression. It became a quiet stage, one I never auditioned for but was expected to perform on. Each meal I cooked wasn’t for the sake of learning or joy, it was a ritual of proving. A test of femininity. A rehearsal for a future that had already been imagined for me: one where a man’s approval would be tied to the softness of my rice or the tenderness of my stew. And so, what might have been a craft, a joy, a source of power, slowly turned into obligation. The joy, once budding, quietly slipped away.

The truth is, I can cook. I’m not helpless in the kitchen, despite what assumptions might arise when I say I don’t enjoy it. And that’s a sentence I’ve only recently learned to say without guilt tightening in my chest. For years, I felt the need to over-explain, to justify why I didn’t light up at the thought of preparing meals. But I’ve made peace with it now. So many women are still fighting silent, exhausting battles in kitchens they never chose struggling for the right to simply not enjoy what was never offered to them as a joy, only as a duty. Resisting a lifetime of expectations wrapped in the language of tradition and care is a privilege i so happen to have.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find joy in cooking again. Not out of obligation or to prove something, but for the simple, quiet pleasure of it. Maybe one day, I’ll reclaim that space. Maybe I’ll stand in a kitchen that feels like mine, not a proving ground, but a sanctuary. I imagine myself making cooking and baking on my own terms, with no one watching, no performance to uphold, no invisible checklist of worthiness to meet. Just me, my hands, my hunger, my pace.

But until that day comes, I’m giving myself grace. I’m learning to be gentle with the girl who flinched at expectations she never agreed to. I’m slowly unlearning the shame, the quiet conditioning, the inherited belief that to be valuable, a woman must serve. And in that unlearning, I’m tasting a different kind of freedom.

Because maybe worthiness doesn’t come from a kitchen. Maybe it never did.