Daily Bread: Meditations of an Anxious Baker
I am obsessed with baking yeast breads. This is unusual for me, as I've never had success with traditional yeast breads before now, nor expressed any desire to learn to make them properly. I am notoriously impatient with recipes and prone to just start eyeballing measurements and ingredients. This mania started around Christmas, when I saw the most glorious recipe for a sandworm-shaped cinnamon bread that I just HAD to make. (I must not fear yeast breads. Fear is the mindkiller.) This led to a whirlwind of bread-making over the past several months. I bake several times a week, everything from challah (rich and versatile) to olive fougasse (so much work, but worth it) to brioches stuffed with ridiculous sweets (my own inventions.) I usually take two fancy loaves of bread to my new church each Sunday, explaining that I can't possibly eat all the bread I bake. It gives me something to talk about in a high-stress situation, a way to keep from bolting and hiding in the bathroom. I jokingly tell people that baking bread is my therapy, but this is more true than most people suspect.
About five years ago, I lost my job and my car within a single week. A few months later, the worst depressive episode of my life spun me into a world of darkness and misery. I woke up one morning in April of 2012 to find myself in a state of dissociation. I felt as though a stranger were in my head, looking out from behind my eyes. The person I had always known as "I" was simply gone. This feeling persisted for several months; it finally faded, but nothing was normal again. Shortly after the depressive episode ended, I discovered that my beloved priest was leaving his wife to marry my housemate, and my entire faith community fell apart. The stress of the situation crystallized into intense anxiety. Ever since that time, I've had smaller, less intense dissociative episodes almost constantly, in addition to chest pains, anxiety attacks, and other symptoms. I have difficulty believing that I am really here, that my life is real, that the world around me isn't a dream. I feel like I flicker in and out of reality.
But baking helps. Baking is something that knits my body and soul together, calming the mind that is so desperate to escape. My body becomes an anchor to the real world. Baking is tactile, purposeful, and produces a usable result (most of the time.) Due to years of unemployment, under-employment, and abusive workplaces, food has not always been a guarantee. I've had to choose between keeping my phone connected, feeding my cat, or buying groceries for myself. Things are still tight. I have no hope of owning a car any time soon. I'll never own a house or be able to retire. Some weeks, all I can afford to eat is cheap pasta. But as long as I have flour, water, yeast, and salt, I can make bread. Bread takes on a new importance when it is an essential part of a meal plan. It may not be exciting, but it's always nourishing, always filling, always simply there. It's not a feast, but it is food. It keeps me going.
And that's what "daily bread" is. It's not ecstatic experiences or emotional highs; it's just enough to get you to the next day. And then you do it all over again. And so I bake my daily bread, and eat it with soup, pasta, or whatever else I can afford this week. I bake bread to keep my mind and my body in some kind of truce, to convince my mind to stick around for just one more day, to power the body it so badly wants to leave behind. I go to church every week, in spite of the anxiety and panic attacks, because that is also daily bread. And so it goes.
Give us this day our daily bread; for some of us, it's all we have.
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