the kitchen and i do not get along. 

hi, fellow internal earthquakes. the name's jorge, and i don't know how to fry an egg.

slightly exaggerating there, but *only* slightly—truth be told, i probably only learned how to fry an egg in the past year, give or take. 

for context, i just turned 18 last week. milestone, right? sure, if you have something to show for it; my life skills checklist is bone-dry. of those yet-to-unlock achievements, cooking is the most immediately relevant, and embarrassing. my anxiety makes it so that any recipe i haven't had either explained to me in full, step by step by somebody in person, or that i haven't done successfully on my own before feels impossible. insurmountable. 

i live in an emotionally neglectful household, and one of the reasons i feel so incompetent tripping over myself and my ingredients is that my parents (my mom, mostly) ridicule my missing skills rather than helping me fill in the gaps. the expectation is that i "should have picked these things up by now", so any cries for help are shut down as "my own fault" for not paying more attention.

needless to say, that's made me tiptoe around the kitchen. 

i'm tired of it. sandwiches, quesadillas, scrambled eggs, they're all well and good as standalone meals. sometimes they hit the spot. but when my pool of recipes to pull fits on both hands, i start to feel like there's more out there i'm not getting. my breakfast, lunch and dinner motto, when i do actually have three meals a day (not a given, shockingly) might as well be "simple and quick". not a bad way to live. just not the way i want to live.

youtube is a good resource. it's not foolproof for me, though. i tend to need someone physically present to explain the process to me in order to feel confident enough to repeat it later, preferably someone who can gently correct my errors, of which there are many. 

so my questions are, have any of you felt this before? how did you work through it, or how are you trying to? do you have any content or advice to recommend to a pretty much constantly anxious teen? 

thanks to anyone who made it this far. it helps to feel less like an isolated incident and more like an anomaly among anomalies.