 I love cooking. I love experimenting with different flavors, which is why I asked my husband, who's the victim of my culinary experiments, to get me a cookbook for my birthday. As I was looking through all the recipes that were on different bits of paper, I came across my high school yearbook. In the yearbook, everybody had a picture with a quote underneath it. My quote was, life is a shit sandwich, and every day you take a bite. I was thinking, wow, how pessimistic were you back then? And actually looking back at that period in my life, my mindset was really filled with cynical resentment. You see, I wasn't the usual immigrant coming to America looking for the American dream. Rather, I was thinking, what the hell is wrong with you people? You guys got to be asleep to believe it. And part of the reason was the transition to the US was at a very difficult age when I was 16 years old. It was the second transition to a different country. The first time, we moved from the Czech Republic to Germany when I was eight years old. And at the age of 16, I had to leave all my friends behind and move to a white upper middle class suburb in America. And there, of course, I was different. And different is good. Different is interesting. But as a teenager, being different is also very, very hard and painful and all you're trying to do is try to fit in and try to find your own identity. Well, eventually, I moved on to university. And I changed my major probably as many times as I changed countries. And eventually, I found a deep interest in psychology, probably in an effort to try to figure out my perplexed mind. And of course, diagnosed myself with cultural schizophrenia and cultural personality disorder. But eventually, I started taking charge of these changes. Changing my major into something interesting would have probably been one of the first good changes that I made in my life after that. And then many changes came to follow. I changed countries again. After graduating, I moved back to the Czech Republic. I changed relationships. I changed jobs. I changed my flat. And all to the better. Because I decided I wasn't going to eat shit anymore. I was going to eat a delicious sandwich which was composed of all the different flavors that I enjoyed and that I liked. So if I were to go back, I might change the quote from my high school yearbook to something more inspiring, like life is a sandwich that you create. But in order to do that, you have to throw out all the foul ingredients and figure out which flavors or combinations of flavors actually work. So you see, change is actually the only constant in life.