Yes, I have an inner chef.
I also have an inner lawyer.
Back in the 80s and 90s, some of us worked on ourselves. We went to therapy and had dialogues with our inner children. There was a guy I knew who used to show up at support groups with a teddy bear. He was about 35, wore glasses and looked like an old-school computer engineer. I have done my time sitting on different chairs, talking to myself in front of a therapist, at $75 an hour. At least I never carried around a teddy bear....
Around that time I discovered my inner lawyer. I was working for lawyers as a legal secretary, and painfully aware of how I'd fallen off the professional path long before. The people I worked for could have been my classmates and peers in high school and college, but they were the conscientious, driven, competent ones. I was smart enough, but flaky, alternative, a bohemian slacker with weird clothes and unruly hair. I made lots of careless errors. I could type very fast and churn out documents in record time but I drove the lawyers nuts. Then I discovered that I usually knew when I was making a mistake, overlooking something, not doing something right. Normally I would just slam through, ignoring the little inner twitch. I learned to listen to my inner lawyer, look at the paragraph or word or filled-in form that bothered me.
The lawyers thought this new development, my inner lawyer, was pretty weird, since I liked to tell them all about it. But my error rate dropped off and I got to be a demonically productive secretary. They had to hire two people to replace me when I left that last position.
In the mid-1990s I worked in a culinary school. I hung out with the chef instructors at lunch and after work, learned how they think and operate. I am no chef - too uncoordinated to be in the hot kitchen, too sloppy to do pastry or garde-manger. Really I have small-motor issues, I'm sure of it. But I did pick up some attitudes. For one thing I'm very paranoid about cross-contamination. For another thing, I feel guilty whenever I throw out bones, pan juices or cooking liquids. They could make stock, you know.
Thus my inner chef.
I'm working on having an inner Micheline Marcom - literary mentor and extraordinary writer. She's younger than I am but quite an inspiration. Every aspiring writer needs an introjected genius literary artist.
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