I stared down at the perfectly shaped, tan-brown egg teetering on the counter and swallowed hard; I had to crack it. Cupping it in my hand, I sized up the enemy. It was cool to the touch and had some weight to it. Squinting my eyes with determinedness, I held it with both hands, four fingers supporting it and my two thumbs hovering a few centimeters above the shell, poised to administer the fatal blow.
It was 4 p. m. n a Sunday, two hours past the allotted time for a late lunch, and I was home alone, woefully abandoned by my parents who were at some lunch and probably on their second slice of cake. I had been alternating between punching out angry texts to my mom and standing in front of the fridge until goosebumps formed on my arms when I finally reached a conclusion. I would have to make myself a meal. In the midst of clanging around in the dishware cupboard, I had decided I would be making an egg and cheese sandwich.
It was optimal; easy, loaded with protein, and I had seen my mom make one a million times. My ingredients consisted of a single English muffin, an uncracked egg, and three slices of Swiss cheese- one and a half slices for each muffin half, so that you could taste it with the egg, but not so that it took over the entire sandwich; the perfect ratio, my family had discovered through years of eggs and cheeses. Jaggedly, I had wiggled the knife through the muffin, splitting it into two pieces. The cheese was laid carefully on top and then both were pushed into the toaster oven.
Satisfied, I had turned back to the stove, drizzled a circle of oil on the pan, and that brought me to where I was at the moment; standing, the egg cradled in my hands and the subtle tick-tock of the toaster oven narrating my battle. Tick-tock, tick-tock… I had to do it, I concluded. Pressing my lips together, I pushed my thumbs downwards, creating a long, thin crack on the brown surface. In one fluid motion, I pushed the two halves apart and simultaneously flipped my hands downwards to face the pan. The contents of the eggshells settled elegantly on the pan and with a triumphant sizzle, the egg began to cook, sunny side-up.
The egg and cheese I made that day was the first of dozens; admittedly it was the only meal I knew how to cook for a long time, but it was still a meal I knew how to cook- all by myself, with zero adult help! Zero adult help, void from the fact that I still had to rely on my mom to buy the ingredients; although I didn’t consider this at the time. For me, at 12, that egg and cheese was all my own, purely independent work. There was a sense of pride that came with this feeling, and perhaps it was from this moment I associated independence with happiness.
All lives are measured by the ratio of independency to dependency. We begin our lives completely dependent and as we grow into adolescence and catch fleeting tastes of independence, we begin to crave it. And as we grow into adults, we come into a state of almost complete independence and might even have other people in the world who depend on us. It is these adults who crave a time when they were younger and could depend, selfishly and immaturely, on another. It is a defining moment in one’s maturity when they, ironically, want to be a child again, exempt from all independence.
This moment came a few years post egg and cheese for me, at age 14 and hundreds of miles from my kitchen, in the depths of the Himalayas. My entire body was shivering with a cold unlike that I had ever felt before, one that emitted from the mountains themselves. I was resting on a rock, head in hands, breathing shakily through my splitting headache and jilting nausea; surefire signs of altitude sickness. With a sickening lurch in my stomach my breakfast of dry toast came hurling up onto the sharp, white rocks. Turning away from the vomit, I faced the rest of my family, my face pale.
They were all looking down, eyes clenched, fighting the headache. My mom looked up and wearily handed me a protein bar and urged me to eat it with a forceful nod of her head. It was a situation I never thought I would find myself in; the midst of spring break and I was on the eighth day of a ten day hike to Everest Base Camp. It had been the hardest week of my life thus far, and we had woken up on this morning at 5,000 meters and completely ridden with altitude sickness. It was the most panicked I had ever felt; I was quite literally trapped in this headache, this nausea.
It was a result of my very surroundings and I could not escape this little town of Dingboche, even if I sprinted as fast as I could. Here, huddled with the rest of my family somewhere among these cavernous mountains, I had never felt more isolated. I felt the unfathomable large space between us and the rest of the world, my world back in the United States, but even more so, I felt the space between my rest of my family and myself. We were all sick, weak in that moment; the playing field was level and each of us were tasked with taking care of ourselves.
I accepted the protein bar from my mom and as I forced myself to chew and swallow every tiny bite, I felt the air the hung over us giving us the burden of independency. In these last three years I learned two things: the value of being independent and the equal value of being dependent. Depending on one’s age, their life will be structured towards one of the two but even for an adult, who has to exist as an independent individual, is it important to find someone or something to depend on.
At this point in my life, I find myself in an optimal position- I am allowed reasonable independence, within the security blanket of a constant dependency on my parents. While the ratio will probably never be as perfect in any other stage of my life, it is crucial that a ratio must exist. I move on from middle school knowing that at any age, any time in my life I need to have some measure of independence and some measure of dependence. It keeps me firmly situated in the barrier between maturity and immaturity, young and old, work and play, and brings balance to my life.
