I baked a cake no one had asked for, and that made all the difference

Dear Delyara, If it had been for school or visitors or someone else’s birthday, it would have counted as usefulness. This was different. I baked because I wanted the smell in the kitchen. I wanted to crack eggs and measure flour and make something soft and sweet for no reason that could be defended in a family meeting. That felt strangely important. When life becomes too built around necessity, desire starts shrinking from lack of use. I’m beginning to understand how much of my emotional exhaustion has come from forgetting what it feels like to do one thing that belongs only to wanting and not to function. The cake was simple. The effect was not. For an hour, I was not running a life. I was inside one.