By Chloe Bennett • January 26, 2026 • Share
Grief didn’t make me cry. It made me clean. It made me scrub countertops until my knuckles went raw, organize spice jars by color, and fixate on tiny tasks that felt controllable. That’s how I ended up staring at a stainless-steel vegetable peeler in a thrift store bin like it was a decision that mattered.
It wasn’t fancy. Just metal—cool, worn smooth in places where hands had held it for years. The blade was still sharp, the swivel head solid. The handle had that simple loop shape, like it belonged to a time when tools were built to survive generations and nobody expected you to replace them every year.
I should’ve walked away. I didn’t need a peeler. I didn’t even cook much anymore. But something about it felt… dependable. Like it had done its job quietly for a long time.
I bought it for fifty cents and carried it home in my coat pocket like it was fragile.
And that’s the part I still can’t fully explain: how a cheap kitchen tool became the first thing to pull me back into my own life.
The last few months had been a blur of “operational survival.” Wake up. Work. Reply to emails. Pretend to listen. Go home. Stare at the fridge. Order takeout. Repeat. If someone asked how I was doing, I gave them the same answer: “Hanging in there.”
What I really meant was: I’m functioning, but I’m not present.
My mom had died in October. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that turned into a big story everyone else could process. Just a normal, brutal ending that left me with paperwork, a quiet apartment, and a kind of silence that pressed against my chest at night.
People tell you grief comes in waves. They never mention the admin. The logistics. The endless transactions. The way your life turns into a queue of tasks that you complete while your brain feels like it’s running on low power mode.
The thrift store was one of my “coping channels.” It was cheap, it was mindless, and it gave me the illusion of progress: look, I’m improving my home. Look, I’m building a future. Look, I’m not falling apart.
So I stood in my kitchen with that peeler in my hand and told myself I was going to cook something real, just once. Not because it would fix anything. Not because it would make me happy. Just because it was a basic, sensible step toward stability.
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