When I was a child, I hated shopping. In my adult life, for a long time I cooked meals every night that were recipes from cookbooks. I also had a highly detailed pre-filled shopping list I would comb through for up to an hour before even getting the car keys. Combined with my anxiety at the time, I found it exhausting. Therefore, one day I dropped the cooking and kept shopping to a minimum. Depending on where I lived, I could get away with doing neither because someone else did it and I could just pay them back. However, it came at a cost. There seemed to be an unspoken expectation that they would keep cooking dinner and doing shopping, and therefore I 'should' be home to share it with them. I felt guilty about just taking a serve from the freezer and eating it with my friends somewhere else.
Today during self reflection I had an epiphany. Actually do shopping and cooking myself, then I wouldn't need to feel bad about taking pre-cooked food for some night time socialising. I bought the ingredients from Gilbert's and cooked a satay sweet potato curry I found on Google. And the person I was living with was very happy about it, because they had a project deadline to meet. Not only that, this could be a significant and positive shift in the relationship. This was possible because of the ability to self reflect in an extraordinarily effective way.
Thanks to Canva's Text to Image generator for the AI generated images.