Learning to cook is a small reinvention. You stop waiting for someone else to feed you.

Feeding yourself is one of the first things that quietly shifts you from dependent to independent. It is less about food than about discovering that something you assumed required another person turns out to be five steps and a pan. Whatever else is unsettled, you can now handle one of the basic problems of being alive.

Learn three meals properly rather than twenty badly. Cook one of them this week start to finish, mess included. Then cook for somebody else, since feeding people is most of what it is for.