I remember thinking I was independent freshman year. I would go down to a well-kept dining hall where healthy, unlimited food was prepared for me at the swipe of a card, and I would think to myself, “so this is adulthood.” Little did I know that “independence” doesn’t truly arrive until you’re sprawled out on a couch, starving, staring at the ceiling, but ultimately unwilling to mess with pots, pans, intuition, and opening containers in order to feed yourself. Instead, you munch on a stale piece of bread, pretending that it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever eaten. That’s adulthood.

But at one point, I decided to get over my lethargy and begin cooking for myself. It certainly changes your life in a variety of ways. Here are the most important things you learn when you begin cooking for yourself.

1. You’re not good at cooking.

The first time I tried to open a bag of frozen fruit, I bled all over the kitchen. The first time I made pasta, I accidentally made a serving size big enough to feed Texas. Texas. It takes a lot of mistakes to get anything right, and that’s okay. You need to realize that you have to be bad at something before getting good at it. When Michael Jordan was in high school, he had never even built a computer. Now? He’s the CEO of Microsoft.

2. Trader Joe’s is the only true friend you have in this crazy world.

You blow out another cloud of smoke from your cigarette. “You think you know a grocery store,” you say with a grisly tone in your voice as you crack your neck. “You think you got Ralph’s on your side. You call it your brother. Then you watch one of them documentaries, and you find it ain’t nothin but a salmonella and E. Coli factory waiting to happen. Then they add a goddamned sports bar and enough aisles to make a man go insane. That ain’t a grocery store.” You sigh. “That’s a goddamned mall.” You cough.

“Trader Joe’s, though, it’s the only one you can trust. It’s got your back no matter what.” You scratch your prickly beard then spit into a spittoon. “A whole bag o’ frozen potstickers that are delicious, easy to make, healthy, and cheap? I tell you, son, now you listen to me. You gotta stick by a grocery store like that.” You look down at your dirty boots, then up to the sky. It has stopped raining. The sun is breaking through the clouds. “It's sure as hell gonna stick by you.”

3. The dishes are infinitely worse than cooking.

Cooking itself isn’t that bad. It’s kind of fun to watch a raw chicken breast sizzle when you put it on the stove, and it’s fun to throw spices on things as if you know what the hell you’re doing. What’s not fun is the absolute “directed by Zack Snyder” quality disaster you’ve created in your sink that looks more like what would happen if Frank Gehry designed the California highway system than the result of your dinner. But, as bad as it can be to take care of, tomorrow is always the better day to do it.

4. 90 percent of all cooking is just throwing something cold on something hot and waiting.

I avoided cooking for so long because I always thought it was too complicated for me. I pictured people with spiky bleach blonde hair running around the kitchen, sprinkling whatever the hell “thyme” is on things, doing pirouettes, leaping across the kitchen, chanting ancient recipes to culinary gods, and the result being a work of art that came only with immaculate athletic skill and timing. But what I’ve realized is that most meals can be accomplished by you just dropping a piece of meat or vegetables on a pan and watching it sizzle while poking at it with a spatula.

5. Food just tastes better when you yourself worked on it.

You’re not a professional cook. You may not have made a groundbreaking combination of flavors that reinvents our perception of what “spaghetti” can be, but there’s something about the taste of your own food that’s satisfying. Maybe it’s the sense of accomplishment, or that you no longer have to rely on your parents, Chick-Fil-A, or the kid you kind of know but not really so you’re not sure if you should say hi who works at B Plate anymore for food. You’ve become independent. You are developing your own identity, and this pasta YOU have made is one of the initial, but most important signs of this metamorphosis. And what’s sweeter than the taste of self-satisfaction?

Or it could potentially be a subconscious defense mechanism that is making you think your food tastes good when in reality, it’s horrendous. Either way, it tastes good.

6. We’re all going to die some day.

Yes, it’s unfortunate, but it's true. However, you have just fed yourself, successfully putting in your body the nutrients it needs to have the energy to continue on to the next day, so you have delayed this fate that will eventually befall us all once again! Congratulations.