Ella, Help! I Think I’m Typhoid Mary

you are not Typhoid Mary and here’s why

Ella, help! 

I have developed a very strange problem around cooking. I love cooking. I am quite good at it, but recently I constantly worry about whether I've cooked something enough. I worry about poisoning people and have to check to see if the meat or chicken is cooked several times. Then I worry until the next morning that maybe someone will get ill. This is slightly ruining the cooking experience and I'd like to get back to how I used to be. I also worry about washing up knives that have had chicken on them - this is an anxiety I've picked up from someone else (something I never used to think about at all). I avoid using knives for chopping veg if they've been used to chop raw meat (is this normal?). They have been washed up. As if it wasn't annoying enough to have my own weird things, I am also absorbing other people's. Any advice on how to get back to cooking in a relaxed way would be great. I've tried using a meat thermometer, but that doesn't seem to have helped as I just use it for unnecessary things. 

I'd like this to be anonymous as I feel pretty stupid about the whole thing.

-M.

Hi, pal. 

Thank you for writing to me. I have been going back and forth about how to start this advice column, what letter I want to write back to first, because it felt kind of like a big decision: like the person I wrote to first would set a tone, or a precedent, or something; and also I wanted to get it right, to make sure the advice I gave was perfect, to make sure I was doing it all formally and correctly and unimpeachably. Anyway, I had a couple of stabs at it, nothing quite settled. And then you wrote to me, and I knew that I was going to write back to you right away. It was you! It was you I was waiting for! You, the What If I Am Secretly Typhoid Mary sister of my dreams! What if we kill someone with our cooking? What if we make someone sick with our kitchen hygiene? What if we are found wanting in this most basic of ways?

So it’s you I’m writing to, not because I am going to give you perfect advice; and not because I am going to be unimpeachable here. But because you are me, and I am you, and maybe I am a couple of years further down the line than you at this particular thing, i.e. being afraid. Which means I can tell you that things can and will feel better than they do now. I promise you: it is possible for things, cooking, hosting, everything, to feel better than it does right now.