Wash dishes by hand!
Ican be a lazy, self-indulgent procrastinator. So in 2020, when my mental health was plummeting along with the rest of the world’s, I got turned on to “biohacking” as a way to cope. It’s a self-improvement trend that sometimes calls for drastic methods, like waking up at the crack of dawn every day or redlight therapy. I was working a dead-end kitchen job back then, and I was miserable. Now I’m in a full-time position that I enjoy. The cure to my indolence, it turns out, wasn’t meditation or bone broth cleanses. It was in my kitchen sink.
Take it from a wallowing Type B who would sooner consume an edible before noon than begin working on anything productive: Just do the dishes. Every day. By hand.
I know — how painstakingly ordinary. Washing the dishes by hand is a chore that even the most diligent overachiever might struggle to embrace with glee. Unlike meditating or cold-plunging, there’s no aesthetic appeal to hovering over a sink with oversized rubber gloves. There’s no teasing superiority to scraping dried egg from a pan.
But I tried everything. I woke at sunrise. I started therapy. I affirmed “I am worthy” to the bags under my eyes while face-tapping to cleanse my liver. I journaled. I fasted. I even became a yoga teacher, meditating for hours while detoxing from all the good stuff.
Microdosing ashwagandha tinctures and cryotherapy are great practices in theory but impractical habits when you can barely nail down the day-to-day — oil changes, grocery shopping, taxes, walking the dog. Because when you’re in the pits of self-loathing, you don’t need to uproot your entire being. You just need discipline. The good news? Any discipline will do.
My chef husband is naturally more disciplined than I am, and his time in the culinary industry’s rigid kitchen hierarchy made that quality more militant (opposites really do attract). Without fail, every time we make dinner, he cleans immediately afterward sans dishwasher.
Of course, dinner is only one meal. In 2020, we were cooking at home multiple times a day, every day. While I was teetering back and forth between extremes and trying to biohack my way to being the go-getter child my parents never had, eventually I succumbed to the good kind of peer pressure. Instead of avoiding the pile in the sink, I began to confront the stacks of dirty dishes after every meal rather than collapsing on the couch with a full belly.
It still felt like the world was ending, but each day I woke up to a clean kitchen — and a clean slate.
Forgoing modern appliances may seem extreme, but it’s key. It forces you to take pause, and this magical space of thoughtless productivity is where consistency builds. The rush of tap water transforming plate after plate, glass after glass, became meditative, an outlet for my nervous and anxious energy.
As chef Gabrielle Hamilton recounts in her memoir, “Blood, Bones & Butter,” “What I have loved about cooking my entire life, especially prep cooking, is the way it keeps your hands occupied but your mind free to sort everything out.”
After it became meditative, it became romantic. Now I watch the soapsuds eat away at each grease-riddled dish, stained coffee mug, silver spoon and scratched Tupperware. The faucet stream cathartically rinses away their muck, and even my “Good morning, a**hole” coffee mug, shiny with water droplets, gleams with gratification.
We love what we take care of, and we take care of what we love. Instead of groaning at the task of treating my cast iron skillet, I now treat it as a fulfilling act of service; I know that my time seasoning it with salt and oil will affect its life span and the palate of future generations. I scrub away at the hand-me-down dinnerware from my father-in-law, and I’m connected to him. In an unexpected way, pride has seeped into my kitchen work. Cleanliness is a matter of principle.
I don’t know why it’s not in my nature to be one of those detail-oriented workaholic types, but I certainly have a lot of excuses for it. It’s my parents. My siblings and I were latch-key kids. I’m an old soul constantly feeling crushed by the weight of the injustices in the world. My dog ate my Google Doc. Late-stage capitalism is consuming my will to live.
If you’re like me and have lofty dreams, then unfortunately none of these excuses really cuts it. As I began to take care of my world, bit by bit I realized I didn’t need to turn it on its head. I needed to embrace it.
As Carl Jung once said, “Modern man can’t see God because he doesn’t look low enough.”
Will you find God in your kitchen sink? I don’t know, but I will tell you this: While I can still be a self-indulgent procrastinator at times, I’m getting better. Last weekend, my husband was scrambling to finish the mashed potatoes. I had already baked my carrot cake the night before. Instead of idly watching, I helped out and cleaned the dishes.