On Bread as Therapy / On Bread and Therapy

I am not, by nature, a very patient nor a very peaceable person. I have a temper — and believe me when I say that it’s a horrible one. I have been known to fly into incredible rages, break things that could be thrown easily against a wall (or, for that matter, at someone’s head), snap at people, and crumple up into a stormy fit of uncontrollable weeping. It comes with the territory, I think: the women of my family can get quite vocal when riled and the results are never pretty.

But what does this have to do with bread — either the eating thereof or the making and baking thereof? Believe it or not: a lot.

In the early 2000s, I bought my first-ever Nigella Lawson book How to be a Domestic Goddess. At the time, I was finding me feet, so to speak, in the kitchen: a Home Ec flunker who thought that she had the moxie to prove her teachers wrong by whipping up awesomely delicious treats. And, typical me, instead of trying out the least complicated recipes in the book, I had to go try out something that was, for all intents and purposes, enough to make even seasoned home bakers take a step back and say “Whoa, hold it right there.”

Schnecken — cinnamon rolls: a recipe that takes multiple steps and involves making the dough, the filling, and the topping (which actually bakes under the buns in the process) all from scratch. No shortcuts, no substitutions; I decided to bake the bloody things or die trying (in a manner of speaking.) If I remember correctly, I baked them for my father’s birthday which, that year, coincided with an event at the seminary where my brother was studying.

And bake them I did. They turned out a bit tough on the edges and the topping pretty much glued together the jaws of my brother’s fellow seminarians, but — much to my delight — my first batch of cinnamon rolls was a success and not a crumb was left at the end of the day. It was at that point that I realised I could actually — could really — bake; I just needed to practise.

At the time, I was dating a guy who was pretty much allergic to anything and everything. Peanut butter was a no-go, so was anything with coconut; shellfish was prohibited, and I wasn’t ever to think of anything made with milk, eggs, or cream. I considered all that a challenge and my new-found baking skills enabled me to rise up to that. All in vain, I’m afraid: he wincingly told me that anything with yeast didn’t agree with him either. The breakup, which happened nearly a year later, was brutal but inevitable. (No, my penchant for cooking had nothing to do with it; the bastard was actually cheating on me — with several others.) But, while I lost the guy, I only gained more baking skills — and, in the process, a way to process my emotions without having to resort to a shrink.

Mental healthcare in the Philippines is a disgustingly expensive and incredibly stigma-ridden thing. The average cost of a visit to a psychiatrist or therapist is roughly the same as (or possibly more than) the average worker’s daily pay. Medications will set you back several thousand pesos every month — and, even if you can afford to take them religiously, the financial implications will hit you hard in the long run. Likewise, having depression or anxiety is considered a no-no by many local corporations and those suffering from them are [politely, in some cases; not so very politely most of the time] are asked to take an extended leave of absence — without pay in many cases — or are pointedly asked to leave because their mere presence is considered “detrimental” to the morale of everyone else in the workplace. Add in the fact that anyone with depression or anxiety is automatically considered crazy or defective, and you have a truly dark situation.

But baking bread has helped me out of my doldrums for nearly two decades now. Doing it from scratch and by hand has proven to be therapeutic time and again. There is something I find soothing about measuring out ingredients: it is an activity where I feel like I am in control of things, where I can dictate how the end result is going to be without any qualms whatsoever.

Kneading dough by hand allows me to unleash my aggression: to imagine that the floury mass in the bowl before me is my worst enemy, my biggest pet peeve, and I can beat the tar out of that person or situation. I punch, and tweak, and twist, and smash, and fold — just until the shaggy mess of flour, yeast, water, and sugar melds together into a soft, malleable ball that I can allow to “sleep” for about an hour in a warm, draught-free space, allowing it to rise into a puffy, airy mass that will eventually bake into soft, fluffy pillows that are delicious when slathered with lightly salted butter.

Sometimes, though, as with anything else in life, things don’t go according to plan. The dough may not rise (old yeast or the weather has grown too cold); the gas might run out in the middle of baking; the bread might turn out too hard; fillings might ooze out and toppings might scorch. There are so many things that can go wrong — just as it is with everything else in life. But I do what I can with what I have, and this has taught me patience, perseverance, and how to accept the things that, no matter what you do, cannot be changed or repaired in any way.

Baking bread has also taught me that I can do anything if I set my heart and mind to it, if I can shut my eyes and ears against the naysaying of others. These are lessons that I still struggle to learn every single day, and — despite wanting to give up so many times because of one setback or issue or another — I keep trying and I keep learning. Why? Because, like the bread I have taken such pains to learn how to bake, all that effort will be worth it in the end.