THE PANIC YEARS & MASALA CHAI

a steaming hot cup of chai and the pre 30 panic

Good morning!

Last week I shared an interview with my sister, Lily, where, amongst other things, she talked about the years of anxiety and indecision leading up to her 30s, which she is ultimately grateful for. Lily and I both had big career changes as we went into our 30s and I shared online a bit about the blind panic I felt in my late twenties, leading up to that decision. The response from all of you was overwhelming, and seemingly a lot of you are going through something similar. So this week, I thought I would share a little more about my experience, how I got through my panic years, how I ended up here, writing this newsletter today and the lessons I learned along the way. I will say that this is just my experience, and I have lots of friends who glided into their 30s without blinking, who knew themselves far better than I did. No two journeys are the same, but I hope that by sharing mine, I might help someone else feeling the same worry, panic and anxiety as I did.

Of course there is a recipe too, this week I am sharing my recipe for Masala Chai. I like to have a jar of the spice mix ready to go at all times, so that I can have chai whenever I like, without having to get 12 spices off the shelves and dig out the mortar and pestle. I love chai year round, but in winter it is especially good, I like mine heavy on the black pepper and cardamom, laced with a touch of maple syrup.

So, make yourself a steaming hot cup of masala chai, get comfy, and enjoy the following account of my late twenties fever dream panic years.

Sending love, Rosie x

MASALA CHAI

I had my first cup of Masala Chai in 2017 in India while working in a boiling hot underground kitchen in the heart of Delhi, where there was an urn full of the sweet spiced tea that kept the kitchen caffeinated all day. I’ve been hooked ever since, and have been tweaking and refining my spice blend over the years. This is my current recipe that pleases my savoury sensibilities, but make it your own, if you know you don’t love nutmeg, or cinnamon or you are more of a fan of cardamom, then tweak the mix to suite your palette. I like to sweeten mine with maple syrup, but brown sugar would be delicious and you can also keep it traditional and sweeten with condensed milk if you have a can open.

Masala chai spice blend:

3 tbsp ground cinnamon

3 tbsp ground all spice

3 tbsp ground ginger

1 tbsp ground nutmeg

1 tbsp ground cloves

1 tbsp ground black pepper

6 black cardamom pods, seeds ground

Method:

1. To make the spice blend, simply combine all the spices in a clean jar and store in a cool dry place.

2. To make a cup, take a sauce pan and place over a medium heat.

3. Add a cup of your favourite milk and 2 tsp of the spice mix, whisk to combine.

4. Add a cinnamon stick, a few star anise, a drizzle of maple syrup and a tea bag of your favourite black tea, I like earl grey.

5. Leave to infuse over a low heat for 15 minutes.

6. Strain and pour into your favourite mug and enjoy.

THE PANIC YEARS

(I’ve very much borrowed this title from Nell Frizzell’s brilliant book)

(T.W. Abortion)

a note I wrote to myself in April 2023

I bought myself a clean notebook in early April 2023, a few weeks before my 30th and labelled it ‘Food’. This was before I had told anyone I was planning on changing careers, I had about 1,000 Instagram followers, I didn’t have a TikTok or this Substack and I didn’t really know what I planned to do yet, but I wrote this list and since then, every single thing has happened, the most exciting one still being a secret.. Nearly a year later, looking at this, I am so proud of myself for being brave, listening to the quiet voice and taking a leap of faith. I am so much happier for it.

It took a lot of struggle, panic and indecision to get to that point and I would say a solid two years of blind panic before I made the leap. Before we really get into it, I’d like to set the scene. It’s 2022, we are on the heals of a global pandemic, going into a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, in the midst of a climate crisis and deep into a community crisis. Things were bad, globally, and everyone was going through their own personal struggle. I had just moved back to London after a year of living in the countryside in complete isolation with my then boyfriend. Because of his medical condition, we had made the decision to shield, until he could get the vaccine. A week before Christmas 2021, I fell pregnant. We chose to have an abortion, and because we were shielding, I had to go through it at home. It was the most excruciatingly painful and difficult experience of my life, whilst also being an absolute privilege to be able to safely make this decision for myself. I’ve always known I wanted to be a mother, it’s probably one of the only things I have known about myself for as long as I can remember that hasn’t changed. And so, whilst having the abortion was the right decision, it also was also extremely difficult and amplified the voice in my head that screamed MAYBE YOU’LL NEVER HAVE BABIES.

Cut to 2022, I was back in London, 28, newly single, feeling lost, panicked, stressed and full of anxiety. I felt like a complete failure, that I was about to reach this milestone age and I didn’t have any of the things I hoped I would, I didn’t have any money, a relationship, a career I was proud of, or a home of my own. I felt I had let myself down, my family down and that it was sort of “over” for me. I felt disappointed in myself and embarrassed. I had spent a decade working as an actor and a writer in theatre, film and TV. It was what I always wanted to do, from a very young age and I had spent my whole life working towards this career. It made me very happy for a long time, but it slowly dawned on me, through a lot of therapy and self reflection, that it wasn’t making me happy any more. On top of that, it wasn't making me any money. I was living hand to mouth on roughly £17k a year, which in London, was a real struggle. My therapist said something to me at the time, which was a big deal because she didn't tend to say a lot, along the lines of “what you are reporting is that your career no longer makes you happy, isn’t making you any money and is causing you stress. My question is, who are you still doing it for?” I realised I felt chained to that career because it was what I had said I wanted to do for so long, it was something I had invested in and committed to for over a decade and it felt like a failure to move on from it, even if it was the right thing to do.

So instead of listening to my therapist, I ploughed on and piled on an immense amount of pressure on myself to make it work before I turned 30 and I said if things weren’t improving by then, I would give up. I had also promised to quit smoking by the time I turned 30, so there was that as well. I set about working on a new play, applied for a big Arts Council fund, wrote a short film and applied for every writing and funding opportunity I could find. I downloaded all the dating apps, experimented with ethical non monogamy (not for me!) and went on some truly harrowing dates. All the while I was ignoring a quiet voice in my head, that had been there for a few years but was getting louder and louder, saying: it’s food!

Up until then I had worked in food as my rent money job, always as something on the side, never considering it my career. But as I got closer and closer to my 30th, I realised that actually it was food, it had always been food, it is the only thing that makes me truly happy, cooking for and feeding the people that I love. It’s the thing I go to bed thinking about and wake up thinking about, it is my marker for joy. When I consider how much I want to do something, I mentally weight it up against, say, making a ragu. And the ragu, more often than not, comes out on top. Once I realised that this was my life, and no one else’s, that no one was going to make these changes for me, that I had absolute autonomy over my own life, I felt free. It was so obvious, so simple, I felt like such a fool as soon as I found the answer. By then it was Spring 2023, I had successfully quit smoking and been with my boyfriend, Jamie, for just over six months. We’d met when he came to stay in the warehouse for a month over summer 2022, deep in my feverish days of dating through despair. We soon realised we had gone to the same school as kids, but never met, became fast friends, fell in love and within a few months we were together. I had never met someone as positive as Jamie before, and his upbeat outlook on life started to rub off on me. I looked at his life, his passion for music and the way he bounced out of bed every morning to go to the studio, and I thought, I would like that.

So, I started to privately make a plan, think about what I would do and how I would do it. I wrote that list. And then I quietly built up the courage to to tell Jamie, my friends and my family and to my absolute delight, no one was angry or disappointed! They were in fact thrilled for me. I started to feel completely jubilant, liberated, free and ecstatic. I had a renewed energy for life and all because I had listened to myself and taken charge of my own life.

As women particualrly, society makes us feel like 30 is a very important age, a marker for success and a deadline for achievement. There isn’t much we can do about that, but what we can control is the amount of pressure we put on ourselves. Life doesn’t change at 30, it really is just a number, we all know that. I look back on that time and wish I hadn’t put so much pressure on myself and that I had listened to my gut sooner, but I’m also glad for the struggle, because it makes me even more grateful for what I have now.

My top takeaways are this:

• listen to your gut, always, if there is a quiet voice in your head, it’s probably worth listening to

• start a skincare routine that includes retinol now

• lean in to the things that bring you joy and spend time with the people that make you happy

• as much as possible, cook and eat delicious food, with the people you love, there aren’t many things more important than good food and community

• it gets better

If you read all the way to the end of this, congratulations and thank you. I hope it has been of some use to you, or at the very least, entertaining. Thanks, as ever, for supporting this newsletter and reading my writing; without you, it wouldn’t be possible.

x