My leadership, because I was in a very high position, back then things were different. When it was offered then, 'Do you want help? Go to your leadership,' I did that. I knew very early on that was going on with me when that happened. I used cooking to mask a lot of that when I started. That's actually part of the journey of why I'm here right now as Chef Rush. I do combat that, but for me, that was the start of a journey that I didn't know I was supposed to take. The only part about that is it happens a lot with the kids, so I have to try and combat that. They feel comfortable by grouping up and just attacking. You have your triggers, which people are my triggers as well because on social media, you get a lot of trolls and people that can't do what you do. One of the things that I learned to do was to use people as my coping tools.

People ask me how I stay grounded, how I cope. One of my other sisters, she helped the blind live in communities. I had another brother who retired as an officer in the Navy. Then I had one of my sisters, she was in special education. My other brother, he was a Merchant Marine. They were already older, mature teenagers. It was eight of us, so the next one up from me is 13 years older. My younger sister, she's a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. Army and how did that time shape your cooking career? When you eat the food, you want to say, 'Okay, this chef, he put love into this. I can go very fancy, but I try to capture, regardless if I'm doing extremely fancy or extremely simple, I'm trying to capture the heart, that passion. I mean, you think about demographics, where you're from, Southern food, Italian food, Asian food, New York food, LA food here, all of it's so very different. That's when I realized all food is not created equal. When I joined the military and did all those other things, they weren't all the same.

White house andre rush