Sharing about January

Imposter syndrome, my thoughts about being a chef etc

Hope 2021 has been treating all of you well so far! January has been a real struggle, dealing with massive bouts of imposter syndrome. For those of you who don’t already know, Singapore Noodles isn’t my day job. I balance it with the work that I do at a farmhouse-cooking school, and restaurant work. People always feel amazed at how much content I put out on Singapore Noodles, or how I get the motivation to do it outside of my regular work. But the truth is that, with Singapore Noodles, I feel like I’m playing to my natural strengths and inclinations far more than any other job that I’ve done, and for that reason, it comes easy. In a way, you could say that the work that I do with Singapore Noodles keeps me feeling alive.

I was feeling really torn up in Jan about the fact that what I love doing / gets me into the most flow-like state is ironically the thing that isn’t the work that is paying the bills. I had made an administrative mistake at my marketing work one day and my boss was so kind to me, but I just kept ruminating over it, and that led to teary outburst one night before bed about how I’m sucking at what I’m being paid for… that I don’t identify with my vocation as a chef either even though that’s my ‘label’ in articles about me. That mistake was a small trigger for this whole vault of emotions, thoughts and insecurities within me, I suppose.

I remember finishing a shift at the restaurant one day and thinking to myself what the hell am I doing with my life? I’m close to 30 and I’m doing a job that almost any other person on the street could do, given the training. It’s hard when the media defines you as a ‘chef’ and you look to your peers in the same line of work who are running wildly successful pop-ups, setting up their own bakeries, working at creme de la creme places, doing their own things. And I’m just a line cook who cooks professionally for a day or two a week (coupled with work at the farmhouse) to fund my true passion - being a true student of food and sharing what I know with others. It’s bewildering.

I remember when I was working at Candlenut, I was already feeling really disillusioned with being a chef. Spoke to a chef friend about it and he said that it was probably the teething phase. Is there something wrong or do I need to just persevere?

“Grit,” he told me.

On occasions, I spoke to Malcolm about it. (He always felt that I was meant to be a ‘writer’ and felt that me publishing WMTT was like his prophecy coming true haha!) In a job that is all about repetition and muscle memory, I felt like the breadth of my learning was so limited. It felt, to me, that I could learn so much more through cookbooks than hours spent in a kitchen. Kitchen life, for all its physical stimulation and adrenaline rush, didn’t feel intellectually stimulating or provide any creative fulfillment for me.

It’s a hard thing when you live in an age that straddles two worlds - one world where you are defined by a singular passion, one vocation that takes you from graduation to grave, and the other where you can be multi-passionate because of the power of the internet and democratization of information. It’s perhaps hardest when people ask me for a bio or a description of who I am - writing chef doesn’t cut it, but somehow it’s the easiest thing to write.

For the longest time, I felt like I was leading a double life. Because when I’m at work, cooking for a living, I find it so hard to speak of what I’m doing outside of it, creatively - whether it’s writing a cookbook, doing a podcast, putting videos on Youtube, or running Singapore Noodles. A voice within always goes, “What gives you the right to, when your colleagues or your chef (who are probably more deserving) have not?” And sometimes I know that it’s not just the voice in my head, it’s what some of my colleagues thought when I chose to tell them or when word got out eventually.

Which is why, in a way, I feel so much more comfortable sharing about my cooking and learnings on a separate platform from my personal Instagram account, or even sharing these thoughts with you through an email. I feel so much less judged. You probably signed up for this email for updates or the weekly pasar roundups but I just felt like I had to put some words into the void to feel some form of catharsis, so thank you for reading this. I already feel better.