Face Everything And Rise: What Sourdough Taught Me About Fear
There was a time when fear felt like a houseguest who never left—one that rearranged the furniture, turned down the lights, and whispered catastrophes until I believed them. In the rooms we call that future tripping: my mind racing far ahead to every worst‑case scenario, rehearsing pain that hasn’t happened and, many times, will never happen. Fear became not just an emotion but a map I followed, and its directions were always toward smallness, isolation, and paralysis.
Early in my sobriety, I found myself sharing in meetings about the "what ifs,” about how they consumed me. I’d sit in a circle and tell the story of futures that hadn’t happened yet but had already stolen my peace. Six years of sobriety and counting, I don’t do that anymore. Acceptance is the answer. That real change didn’t come from pretending fear didn’t exist; it came from learning to notice it, name it, and move through it.
In AA we use a simple, stubborn piece of language: FEAR: Face Everything And Rise. It’s not platitude. It’s a practice. To face everything doesn’t mean to be fearless; it means to notice the fear, call it by name, and take another step anyway. Rising is the decision to keep showing up to life’s questions rather than pretending the answers are already written in disaster.
Sourdough taught me the rest. I didn’t set out to use bread as therapy, but the work of keeping a starter alive, of feeding it and waiting, of accepting imperfect loaves, mirrored the work I needed for recovery. When I’m creating loaves for a customer, my neighbors, or Manna Cafe, I find myself staying in the moment. Trusting the process. The routine, measure, feed, fold, wait, anchors me to the present and into a mindset of humility and patience.
There’s a useful comparison here. Fear, left unattended, behaves like an unfed starter: it grows wild and sour. But when tended with small, consistent practices it becomes manageable. Bread teaches this plainly. Some days the starter bubbles with enthusiasm; other days it’s sluggish. Sometimes a loaf sings in the oven; sometimes it collapses. Each outcome provides immediate feedback and the quiet lessons of cause and effect. The point isn’t perfection ; it’s showing up, learning, and rising again.
Grief and fear often sit side by side, indistinguishable at first: both heavy, both hungry. Grief wants to be named and felt; fear wants to be avoided or controlled. When they mingle, logic leaves the room. I’ve watched myself act irrationally, convinced by fear’s louder stories, when what was needed was breath, company, and a willingness to sit with not knowing.
If you’re being consumed, paralyzed by a future that hasn’t happened, try these steps I use when the what‑ifs start to crowd in:
Name it out loud. Say the fear or the “what if” in a meeting, to a friend, or into your phone. Naming moves the fear from imagined verdict to noticed feeling.
Take one tiny, concrete step. If your brain invents disaster scenarios about a meeting, make the call. If it invents failure, do a small action that contradicts the story. Tiny proof trumps the loudest what‑ifs.
Tend something that requires waiting. Make sourdough, water a plant, or keep a daily log. The discipline of tending grows tolerance for uncertainty.
Practice acceptance, not resignation. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking the situation; it means recognizing what is so you can act from there. In my experience, acceptance has been the difference between being hollowed out by fear and learning from it.
Each time I faced a fear, I collected a new kind of evidence: I survived, I learned, I rose. Each failed loaf reminded me that mistakes are information, not indictments. Each sober day taught me that the unknown is not an enemy but a landscape where possibility lives.
Fear won’t vanish overnight. It will visit. It may even move back in for a while. But fed with attention, met with small actions, and softened by acceptance, it loses its authority. You don’t have to outthink every what‑if. You only have to out‑act it one small step, again and again.
Face everything. Rise. And maybe…while you wait for the loaf to rise…you’ll learn how to keep rising too.
Warmly,
Kathy
Art of The Crumb