Je-m'en-foutisme!
My watchword for the rest of 2023.
Content Warning: General talk of past suicidal ideation and planning a suicide. I do not mention the method that was chosen.
Last post you all learned about Yma o hyd! and what it has meant to me post-hospitalization. “Still here!” has been a good phrase for my recovery period, but it’s not enough to still be here. It’s been over six months since I came home and I want more from life than to be just counted amongst the living. It is certainly better than the alternative, and I remain grateful for the life I have—please don’t get me wrong. Yma o hyd! will always have a place in my heart and in the culture and lore of my inner life. At least once a day I repeat that phrase—in my mind if in public, and aloud if alone. Yma o hyd! is not going anywhere:
That said, I have been looking for a new rallying cry for the past couple of months. I believe that I may have found it:
Je-m'en-foutisme!
Je me’en foutisme /ʒə.m‿ɑ̃.fu.tism/ literally “I don’t give-a-careism” or the slightly more loose “couldn't-care-less attitude”. I first heard the phrase in the context of a very short lecture that The Late Great Julia Child gave about how fear of failure makes it impossible to become a good cook. This lecture came along at just the right time for me. My friend Heather had shared it on their Instagram story. I then posted it, with attribution, to my Facebook page. I was in a dark place that day. One of my “blue funks” as Maa would call it. Feeling aimless and useless. Unemployed again and without a clear plan for how to rectify that situation. I was feeling like all of the jobs that I might qualify for are either too physically demanding or require way more customer facing phone time than I can handle mentally. My therapist has all but forbidden me from taking on a customer service job ever again. I was feeling truly stuck. Not just in a rut, but in a shallow grave with the dirt being piled upon me. Inescapable and claustrophobic. Death by imposter syndrome and general ennui. Then I watched this little lecture and it lifted me out of my funk temporarily. I’m no closer to figuring out what to do with the rest of my life, but I do feel that I should not get so worked up about every little failure that I encounter in that life. At times like this I also need to remind myself that the biggest failure is not to act at all. Unfortunately that is my go-to move. But it does not have to be. There is a prison between my ears that only I have the key to. I cannot remember where I mislaid it, but as soon as I find it I will let myself free. Until then, I’ll let myself walk the yard and get some fresh air every day. Maybe start tunneling. Who knows?
Below is the video clip on YouTube courtesy of the excellent public broadcasting channel WGBH Boston:
Here is the transcript (as close as I could record it):
Now one thing, I think a lot of people are just so scared of any recipe they see that says sugar, syrup, or caramel that they’re “Oh, I won’t try anything like that.” And that is, I think this is one of this awful American syndrome of fear of failure. And if you’re gonna have a sense of failure, you’re just never gonna learn how to cook. Because cooking is, well, lots of it. It’s one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn. For instance, you’ve got to have developed what the French call je m’en foutisme, or I don’t care what happens. The sky can fall, and omelettes can go all over the stove, I’m gonna learn, I shall overcome. It’s sort of women’s liberation. And everything like that, if you’re not gonna be ready to fail, you’re not gonna learn how to cook. That’s what that little lecture is all about. (Laughing.)
WGBH first introduced Julia to the airwaves sixty years ago. As a child who had very little interest in learning to cook, I still loved Julia’s irreverence and joie de vivre. She made cooking look fun. In my early twenties she, along with Martin Yan, the late Jeff Smith, and Jacques Pépin taught me how to cook. She and Jacques Pépin even had a delightful show in 1999 called, “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home”. Their gentle bickering is what I loved the most about that show. They have such clear respect for each other, but they don’t give an inch when they disagree. It’s a hoot.
Jennifer and I own three of Julia’s cookbooks as well as her lively memoir, My Life in France. We used to watch early broadcasts of The French Chef when they were still available commercial-free on Prime Video. Sitting through commercials to watch a limited selection of episodes seems contrary to the spirit of Julia Child—she spent her entire career on public television. I suppose I could pony up the dough to get PBS Passport, but I think that adding one more streaming service is truly a bridge too far for me right now. Even a good one like PBS Passport.
I just saw that there are many official looking full episodes of The French Chef on YouTube. So, problem solved.
Learning to cook was the last time in my life where I did not let fear of failure stop me from trying new things. Fear of failure has kept me from trying really complicated and expensive recipes, but I’m not crying myself to sleep because I’ve never made Beef Wellington or Sole Meuniere. I pass no judgement on myself for being a cook and not a baker or pastry chef. Store-bought puff pastry or filo is good enough for me. I need to take that Je m’en foutisme attitude into the rest of my life. Will I write a perfect screenplay with absolutely no errors? No. But more importantly, I should write an imperfect one that tells a story that is important to me. That should be the only criteria. Thank you Julia for showing the country, and me, that competent cooking is not always a series of perfectly executed skills and techniques, but can be several near-misses and failures, but with a bit of grit and ingenuity you can save almost any dish from disaster. Perseverance is all. I need to be reminded of that daily. And her devil-may-care attitude that Julia brought to the kitchen and into our homes for almost forty years. She was and will always be a treasure.
Here is something you may not know about me:
Julia Child indirectly saved me from suicide.
I woke up one morning in the spring of 2010 with a plan to end my life. That day. I took a shower and then called in sick to work. I ate a leisurely breakfast. A breakfast that now escapes my memory. It must not have a been a monumental last meal. I then walked to the Shell station on the corner and bought a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t want to run out of smokes before I enacted my plan. From more than a decade’s remove that doesn’t make much sense, but I suppose it did at the time. Nicotine is a strong addiction after all. Strong enough to distract me long enough from a suicide plan to put on shoes and hard pants to go to the corner store for smokes.
After I returned, I set out to follow my plan. I gathered the necessary items and laid them out on the coffee table then put them in a shopping bag that I tucked into my messenger bag. I then debated on leaving a note. A perfectionist at all times, I decided that if I could not write the ideal note, I would not bother. But then I felt guilty for not leaving at least some instructions for what to do with my remains and what little property I owned. I jotted down a quick will and testament on a sheet of printer paper that I signed and dated. I wrote “Good bye” at the bottom. Would it hold up in court? Who knows? All I did know was that I would soon be beyond caring. One thing I did still care about was where I would kill myself. I knew that I was not going to do it in my apartment. No need to traumatize my sister, her boyfriend who was over often and had his own keys, or my friend who lived with us at the time. No, I would get in my car and drive to somewhere beautiful. Somewhere near the lake, but I hadn’t decided where. Somewhere relatively remote. Preferably at magic hour. This would be the last thing I would see.
My plan was that my car would be found before my body. That a cop or other first responder would find me and not some poor civilian out for a walk or jog by the lake. Not a great plan, but I figured a cop would have seen a body or even a few on the job and would not be too bothered by the scene. At that point, I honestly didn’t care who found me as long as it was not the people who lived with me.
Since it was only mid-morning and I was waiting for magic hour, I literally had some time to kill. Maybe I would write a better will or give drafting a suicide note a go. Out of habit I turned on the television. Mostly for background noise. Sometimes a quiet room is too quiet to think in. The movie was just starting. It was the relatively new-to-cable Julie and Julia starring Amy Adams as the real-life blogger and memoirist Julie Powell who cooked her way through Julia Child and Simone Beck’s absolutely classic and absolutely intimidating cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell cooked all 524 recipes in 365 days. Quite a stunt. The blog and ensuing book were massive successes and The Late Great Nora Ephron not only directed the film, but she wrote the screenplay based on both Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and Julia Child’s memoir that I mentioned earlier, My Life in France. The movie was fine. Uneven. I found the parts with Julie to be pretty tedious, but the parts where we follow Julia, played by Meryl Streep and her husband Paul, played by the national treasure, Stanley Tucci to be highly entertaining. Here I’ve been talking trash about a movie that grabbed and clearly held my attention for the full running time. I found myself deeply moved by the Childs becoming more and more enamored with France. The scenes with Julia learning how to cook and attending Le Cordon Bleu were quite fun. To see Julia almost give up but persevere in the face of sexism and Gallic enmity was surprisingly touching. Julia finding her life’s work in middle age resonated with my then thirty-seven-year-old self. Maybe it was not too late for me. Maybe I am just a late bloomer like Julia Child. I finished the film and turned off the television. One thing was for certain, I was not going to let Julie & Julia be the last film I watched. Uneven as the film may be, it did not deserve to be the final media I consumed. It deserved to at least be remarked upon by me with others that had seen it. It had made me laugh and cry. It deserved more. That said, some genius edited a vastly superior cut of the film called Julia sans Julie which is occasionally available online. Check it out if you can find it.
If today is not the day to end it all, I needed to do something else with my time. Thank you Julie and Julia for making me push the pause button on my suicide plan. I called a suicide hotline and the nice person behooved me to call my own psychiatrist. Which I did. You see, at my last appointment I had sworn that I would call her if my suicidal ideation got out of control. Having a suicide plan and the means to execute said plan seems like of a good time as any to call my psych doctor. She was glad that I called, but alarmed that my plan got so close to implementation. She told me to call 911 and go to the hospital to be safe. I told her that I was not taking an ambulance to the psych hospital when I was perfectly ambulatory. I would walk in on my own power. So she gave me an hour to get to Northwestern Hospital from my house in Bridgeport on the sunny South Side before she called 911 on me. An hour was enough time if I hurried, but not so long that I could lollygag—as is my custom. She then asked if I have a friend that could go to the hospital with me. On my walk to the Sox/35th Red Line stop I texted my friend Marialla and asked her to meet me at the Chicago stop just below her apartment. Northwestern hospital is only about a ten to fifteen minute walk from there, and we got there with plenty of time. I was able to get the triage nurse to call my psychiatrist to let her know that I was in the emergency room waiting to be moved to the psych emergency room. Mari kept me company all afternoon and into the night before they found a bed for me at Northwestern. She made getting checked into the psych ward as close to pleasant as humanly possible. I will always love her for that day.
We lost Marialla almost exactly a year later. I hope that I thanked her enough for literally holding my hand that day at the hospital and that she died knowing that I loved her. I’ll never know, but I think that she did. Marialla was fluent in French, and had possibly been exposed to the phrase, Je m’en foutismse! before we ever met. I think that she would have approved of the moxie behind it. She was a close enough friend that she would support anything that might light a fire under me and motivate me to dare-to-be-great situations. Anything to make me not so afraid of my shadow. I’ll never know, but I think that she would have.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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I absolutely didn't NEED a distraction today, and yet... Julia Child videos are one rabbit hole I can't pass by. Thanks - ? :-)
Separately and more importantly, I'm glad you're in the world and sharing these powerful stories. Thank you.