The bread break begins

5/28/2019

Sitting on the first of two 5-hour plane rides sending me thousands of miles away from my beloved D.C. neighborhood, friends, boyfriend and family seemed like as good a time as any to start wading through the life swerve I’m making.

I’ve always done some of my best thinking and writing while trapped on a vehicle. I daydreamed about life in open fields and rundown barns while road tripping on family vacations, turned musings into stories while on an Amtrak between my hometown and my college city and jotted bits of jumbled verse on crowded S9 bus commutes in D.C. Something about the tight quarters, slim options and transitional timing hits a sweet spot in my millennial mind that allows me to shut off my to-do list and give over to the blank boredom that seems to foster the best reflection.

That state of mind has been hard to reach recently. I’ve been feeling unmoored, frenetic even. Up until very recently, I’d lived in D.C. for almost four years, and been entrenched in the daily blow-by-blow of national digital news for three and a half of them. Moving to the capital fresh out of journalism school in 2015, I had high hopes for being a video journalist, a correspondent, a storyteller about issues of policy, people and social impact. And for a while my work as a video editor seemed like the ladder there. I was working for a national newsroom that was, somehow, not flailing for finances. It was expanding and exciting. And I believed in the mission, even as early morning shifts lead to a year of graveyard coverage and then a helming daytime role as a political video editor. All through the divisive, disruptive, destructive years of 2016, 2017, 2018, to now: the early summer of 2019.

I spent those years ping-ponging between buzzy headlines and chasing high-traffic stories. I dug into interesting angles, important explainers and overlooked issues whenever I could, but I soon became a go-to editor for “mashups” — supercuts of speeches and events produced in lightning speed — and dayturns because of my speed and accuracy. I tried to put in the extra effort to bring my work above the fray — I stayed late to work in After Effects instead of only using pre-made graphics templates, went in early to film side projects and put in the time to research pitches for each morning — but my assignments came to revolve around cable news reactions and Twitter battles, and my days started to be sucked up by chasing soundbites, editing quick turns and spending solitary hours in front of a screen.

Through it all, I started baking more. Always an avid baker, I started dabbling in bread, mostly to curb my sweet tooth and stop filling my kitchen with cookies, but also out of a desire to bake a staple in my kitchen instead of buying it at the supermarket. My incredibly thoughtful boyfriend Lincoln gave me “Beard on Bread” on the morning of my 23rd birthday, after a long overnight shift. He presented it to me while we huddled together to watch the sunrise on my breezy work rooftop, eating the quiche he made with utensils we scrounged up from the quiet building behind us. 

I soon fixated on sourdough, despite James Beard’s seeming distaste for it — “sourdough bread is much overrated and is difficult to perfect at home,” he says when introducing his book’s lone sourdough recipe — and watched as flour, water and air created a bubbling caldron of yeast and bacteria far greater than the ingredients I fed it. My lumpy loaves started to perk up, then spring back. I learned how to knead properly, how to feel the dough’s strength, how to harness its tension while shaping it and how to bake it with lots of heat and steam (and only minimal knuckle burns and kitchen rag fires). And I bought many more bread books, by authors with more of a reverence for sourdough than Beard.

With a growing dread for the sorts of daily digital political news I was covering at work, there were mounting roadblocks and frustrations to me personally; roadblocks that had nothing to do with the media landscape. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I came home crying twice in two months, unable to hold back the frustration and hurt on my walk from the bus to my doorstep. I comforted a co-worker in the bathroom and another over coffee about similar blindsiding critiques about our ambition and attitudes. I started to apply for jobs wildly, without any purpose but to escape another endless day of Trump pool sprays, Cabinet meetings, speeches, press conferences or rallies. And I whipped up more doughs in my KitchenAid (which, in a continuation of the trend, was gifted to me by my ever-thoughtful boyfriend), shuttled more loaves into my oven (and sometimes my friend and neighbor Ben’s oven in emergencies) and filled our bellies, our friends’ tables and our freezer with more loaves than I could count.

Baking bread was a form of coping for me. It was a tactile, nurturing and time-consuming escape from a screen-filled, confrontational and reactive news cycle. It gave me time alone to work with my hands and ponder the scientific reactions occurring under my fingertips. And then the final product, pulled crackling from the oven and cooled for hours before cutting through its crusty hide, brought people together. It sparked conversation, curiosity and community.

Big questions, and fears, started to trickle in. If I was getting so much joy from something so different than what I was doing for 8, 9, 10 hours a day, was I really on the right path? Did I leapfrog up too fast and burn out? Would I ever find fulfillment in news, if I couldn’t find it at a prestigious news organization? Or maybe there’s a different sort of journalism I should be doing, one that I missed in my rush toward a paycheck, toward student loan repayments, toward security? One that is not so transactional; one that involves a little more give and a little less take; one that isn’t so disparate from all the things I like about bread. And, lurking behind it all was the fear of giving up: if I left my job, is that the same as throwing in the towel at this crucial time for journalism?

These questions and so many more are still turning over and over in my brain. But instead of sitting, stagnant, while I tried to answer them, I started looking into a big swerve. And then, seemingly all at once, I dove in headfirst. The first baking job I applied for got back to me with an interested but skeptical response and I soon convinced myself, my boyfriend, my family and the bakery owner that we would make it work. The gig happened to be in Talkeetna, Alaska, at a small bakery-cafe called The Flying Squirrel. So that’s where I am now, and plan to be until mid-September.

I know a change of scenery and a change of pace aren’t necessarily going to bring me any answers. That takes hard work, active reflection, vulnerability and an openness to fail - publicly, in some cases. But I also know that I can’t sit on the sidelines of my own life, waiting for fulfillment to find me. So this is my best shot at it getting back into the game. I hope to make writing a part of that process, and a public one. It feels good to write and edit again, to let the words tumble out in tangents and then trim and refine. It crystallizes moments and priorities. It puts successes and failures in proper framing, and gets it all out of my head. 

My goal is to post semi-regularly, with a caveat: somehow, after working as a lifeguard, receptionist, nanny, research assistant and administrative assistant over the years, I have never worked in the food service industry. And after life in St. Louis, Chicago and D.C., I have never lived in a truly rural area like Talkeetna. So I fully expect my romanticized and, honestly, privileged notions about bread and self-fulfillment and “finding myself” to be waylaid by exhaustion and humbled by mistakes at times. But hopefully I’ll have the courage to share that, too.

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