“Can I ask you a control freak question?”

October 1, 2018October 1, 2018 Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments

Umm, YES, ALWAYS!!

This was the exchange between myself and a coworker on Friday. We were in the library where our Scribbles! club had just met (Yearbook, Lit Mag, AV club), and as she looked over to the book stacks she paused and asked me the title question: “Can I ask you a control freak question?”

I lit up: “YES, OF COURSE YOU CAN!” How did you KNOW that I spend my life waiting for that question?! Is there something at all that I can help to put in order, set right, make perfect?!?!

She walked me over to the shelves of books and we had a brief exchange of ideas about how this genre should be displayed. She expressed worry that if by changing the work someone else did (a volunteer whom she’d asked to do the organizing), she was being too anal. I assured her that her display idea was the right one—that she wasn’t “correcting” the work, she was “improving” it!—and to go for it.

There is a compulsion to believe that by making order of the world, we are safe or the world is fixed or that we are the reincarnation of Atlas, ensuring the world is hugged and held properly for ourselves and everyone on it.

My mother tells me that her mom had OCD. I don’t know the veracity of this, but my mom tells me that her mother would lock the door a certain number of times on the way out, check over the oven range knobs a certain number of times, and whether OCD-related, that she’d wash a slab of meat with dish soap before cooking it.

I laughed to my coworker on Friday, as we sussed out the perfect book display, that it was a sheer wonder that I never developed OCD.

My deep-set desire for the world to lack chaos has certainly manifested in a myriad of ways. My desk at work is generally lickable (should one ever desire to), two people in the last week called me “diligent,” and I’ll straighten all the place settings in a restaurant once I’ve sat down, touching everything just so, not as if I can’t enjoy my meal if it isn’t aligned, but just… well, it makes me calmer to feel like everything is set “correctly.”

While none of these impulses leaks over into the compulsion category, my desire for order in the world can mean that I have little tolerance for very many things that involve other people: The person who doesn’t understand that merging is a “you go, I go” zipper up the highway, the physical disarray of another person’s home, receiving a promise from someone to do something and that promise not being fulfilled…

Allowing for the fact of others’ good intentions, without seeing the actual proof in the pudding, is agonizing for some parts of myself. You told me you would do X, and you didn’t. You did X, but it’s not right, and now I have to ask you to do it again. You did X, and it wasn’t right, so I took it on myself to do it even though it wasn’t my job and now I resent you.

So many thought cells devoted to how others are “behaving” or not, how others “should” be or not… how “right” I am or not!

The elemental desire for hospital corners (not that I ever have or will put those on my bed!) can bring friction to my relationships. I want a perfection of my own invention, whiiiich relates back to my blog recently about being the “bitch” and demanding everything from others to be just so. But, I have zero true desire to be a bitch — which is also to be alone.

There is zero effect I can have on others. So I suppose I try to find it by organizing books, cupboards, and forks.

If this ordering of the world brings me solace, then, yes, I’m happy to remain a conduit for “control freak” questions. Where this ordering causes me to suffer in the world, then, yes, I’m going to have to accept, release, and remember that I am Safe.

healing · judgment · meditation

Trust Fund.

September 30, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

9.30.18 safety cloud.JPG There’s a spiritual practice called “Feed Your Demons” that I was introduced to about a year ago. In this process, you actively amplify some one of the trillion negative voices in your head and give it a form. You invite it to come before you—and it’s safe to do so because of all the other work you’ve done—and you start to see if it has a face or eyes at least.

Once here, you ask a series of questions:

How do I feel about this entity/voice? What do I experience in my own body when it’s before me? How do I react when listening to all the crap that it’s spewing?

Then, you go inside the demon. You probe in to see yourself through its eyes: How does it see me? What is its opinion of me, really? What is it scared of?

Coming back into yourself, you imagine offering the demon an unending supply of whatever it is that it’s needing. What is it actually trying to get or feel? I have imagined this, in different meditations, as the demon bathing in a golden liquid, or being rained upon from a redwood’s soaked needles, or, once, like a lab rat licking from an inverted water bottle.

You imagine that this demon, this voice, drinks of that worthiness, of that golden satiety until it is full, until it is wholly full of whatever comfort it needed. And you observe what has happened.

That rat, having drunk its fill of love/gold/worthiness, transformed into a very young girl who just loved to hold your hand and repeat with that certainty and experimentation of language that a 2 or 3-year old has: “I’m important!” To which, the older me who was with her would reply, “Yes. Yes, you are.” And just a few steps later, excited at her burgeoning discovery and with the facility for repetition only a child retains, she’d repeat with sunny authority: “I’m important.” Yes, love. Yes, you are.

In some cases, these demons are just perverted assets or positive beliefs that have gotten so twisted in their attempts at protecting you that they just require untwisting and then they get to hang with you for always, like the little girl. Sometimes, though, the voice really doesn’t belong to you. It is composed of something corroded and you must invite it to leave in whatever way makes sense — which it has to then do. It is no longer allowed to stay in your consciousness if you have asked it to leave.

So.

Yesterday, I invited in my Judgment — the character defect/defense/outmoded protection element (whatever term makes sense to you) — that I’m presently working to loosen.

Partly as a function of a Facebook advertisement repeatedly showing this Magritte painting of a man in a suit and bowler hat with a floating green apple obscuring his face, and partly as a result of my having read Lev Grossman’s Magician series this summer where the main evil is a man whose face is obscured for much of the book by a floating branch, my Judgment came to meet me in the form of that man in a suit.

But its face was a scribbled, swirl of black lines, crackling and spitting like an electrical storm, and its eyes were molten red. The thing scared the hell out of me.

The words it produced went along the same lines that perhaps some of yours do, vicious and biting and cold, harsh words that erode your very sense of self, of purpose, of ease in the world. Judgment is a blaring asshole.

To forward to the end of my “Feed Your Demons” process, here’s what happened for this man in a suit: I imagined he was fed that gold liquid from a large wine skein, an unlimited supply of whatever it was that demon was trying to get from me by keeping me scared and small and distracted. It drank and drank, its stomach started to swell, I thought it would become bloated and kind of fall over.

It filled moreso and began to blow up like Violet Beauregarde, rounding and inflating. The man in the suit started to pale as he drank, the color washing out of him, bleaching. The man became something else, it was turning into …

A cloud.

A cottony, white, ice-cream-scoop shaped cloud, the perfect ideal of a kindergartener’s crayola drawing.

Once he’d begun to drink, the words from the golden liquid, from his nourishment, became audible: You are safe. *glug glug glug* You are safe.

Judgment, loosed of all its vitriol, detoxed to reveal a sweet, enveloping little cloud floating just beside me, chiming and repeating: You are safe!

Judgment… as a mechanism for Safety?

If I judge you then I don’t feel vulnerable or uncertain. If I am different than you, I don’t have to exist within the discomfort of your oh-so-humanness nor do I have to admit that maybe I’m human, too. If I savagely eviscerate myself and judge my efforts, I will recoil, crumple, and never attempt things unfamiliar or growth-oriented.

Judgment as a crazy-ass way to keep me safe? That crackling litany of incessant brutality… to keep me safe?

Well, yeah. It sorta does make sense, albeit a radically circuitous kind of sense.

To think: behind all that blackness can now be a white, fluffy cloud bumping along beside me? Every time that I think a worried thought, that I question a novel move, that I wonder if I said/did/am the right thing, this cherub of Divine Love is now here to chirp at and remind me, “You are safe”?

Damn, those meditations are good.

faith · trust · uncertainty

Courting Constance

September 29, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

My tattoo came up in conversation twice yesterday. A male coworker was having a really hard time. He was feeling extremely riled up about the Senate hearings and as I sat in his empty classroom during the recess period, he said that he felt everything was topsy-turvy, that everything he thought was good and just in the world was falling apart.

In short, he was feeling unmoored.

So I told him about my tattoo. I have a small black ink tattoo on the inside of my left wrist. I got it in college, but I had first sketched it out on paper then drew it huge on my bedroom wall! (I wanted to make sure I could live with it on my wall before living with it forever on my body.) Two facing bedroom walls were painted lavender and the others a muted mint green. On one purple wall, there was a rectangle of chair railing painted in white relief around where a doorway must have stood at one time.

In the center of this white frame, I sketched a sun with flames that coiled and looped with artistic sun flares. Within the sun, I drew the sign of infinity done in a Mobius strip manner so that it curled in on itself again and again, like infinity is wont to do.

The tattoo version that made it onto my wrist is a much simplified knock-off of the intricate design on my wall, but it retains its meaning (to me at least):

The Sun, and Infinity.

I told my coworker yesterday that my tattoo represents Constants. In the chaos and unmooring of all life, the sun is a constant (at least in my lifetime). It is extant. It exists whether I can see it or not, whether hidden by cloud or Earth. The sun, as I live, is something I can depend on intrinsically and marrowly.

Infinity, in turn, is also a constant. The idea that time itself, that lines, gravity, mechanical force have no beginning and no end — that there is something that exists that never, ever, ever ends. That is infinite. It’s infinity, for crying out loud! Infinity is something to depend on. It is always there. Esoteric as it is, infinity is a place to hang my internal hat.

I told my coworker that there is not one goddamned thing within or without us that is constant. Politics, morality, safety — not one of these is impermeable. A person on the left has the same intractable righteousness as a person on the right. One person’s idea of what is acceptable human behavior flies in the face of another’s. What was a body that repaired itself one day is a host for disease the next.

Not one damn thing is dependable… except the things that are. Except the choice to make goodness. Except the choice to not be an asshole in the world. Except the choice to keep living a life you yourself consider admirable or upstanding or moral. There is no reward for this. There is no morality prize. There is no blue ribbon at the pearly gates of heaven where we can depend upon a reward for our perceived goodness.

What we have is only the choice to anchor ourselves. I choose to find that relief, that constancy, in my perception of the sun and the inevitability of the infinite.

When, later that same school day, my students were working on a journal prompt to list at least 10 things about which they were curious, one of my 7th graders wrote, “I’m curious about Ms. D’s tattoo.”

And so I told them. I told them that, frankly, we cannot always depend on people. We can’t even always depend on ourselves! And that notion can chuck us off this blue, spiraling space orb so fast that we can completely lose ourselves.

So I choose to remember that there IS something to hold fast to. There are universal constants from which I find relief, comfort, safety, confidence. I find ground in remembering how imperturbable a few things in these cosmos actually are.

fear · growth · humor

Playing Possum with God.

September 28, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

9.28.18.jpg Nope nope nope, not going, leave me here. Out there is scary, unknown, this is fine. I’m fine. Nope, being impaled on my own self-doubt is fine. I’m cool with the middling life that affords me just enough to feel nipped at by lack and struggle. It’s fiiine, God. Jesus, lay off. I built this whole small life myself, man! I have small passions I follow briefly then abandon, that’s good because I don’t get too good at anything and won’t make anyone feel uncomfortable, and I won’t be judged, and I can continue to call myself a Master of None (you know, if Aziz Ansari is okay with it).

Wait? What’s that noise? No, you heard it… it’s faint, listen hard, you have divine hearing for chrissake. There! It’s someone else! I think they need me! Yep, uh huh, they totally need me. Omigod, Phew. See, I’m just going attend to them first, it’s cool — HA! See, I’m totally doing something. Can’t fault me now! Well, they may not have actually said that they need me, but I’m sure that they do. I’m just going to psychicly mine them for any point of lack or fault so I can go charge in with my spackle. Nah, it’s cool, wearing cargo pants is totally how I want to go out into the world, a utilitarian life that plods inexorably toward death. It’s fine!

Yes, I heard you. Yes, I see these open doors, these other options, but whatever, this is easier. Yes, I said easier. No, it’s not hard to shrink back and pretend to be something otherwise. I’ve been doing it for most of my life, so why wouldn’t it be okay? No, I already told you this is comfortable, my legs and arms twisted into a grotesquery of hiding and smallness — I’m good here.

What do you want from me?? Let go!

You and your choir of angels and highfalutin’ abundance talk and shiny opportunities can go fart in your soup. This is the level at which I’ve been raised, it’s the level at which I’ve built a life, why would I give it up? I’ve staked so much on this smallness of being. My whole identity is wrapped up in believing and projecting that I am less, have less, do less, feel less than I actually am. What are you asking of me?? I feel really exposed, here, you know. Pulling my covers like this is not very courteous.

Yes, I seeeee what you’re showing me. I see that you’re offering a different way, but what about this one? It’s like Tom Hanks leaving his island in Castaway — do you know what kind of mourning there is when you’re leaving the inappropriate but familiar place you’ve build with your BARE HANDS!? And now you want me to just leave it? Crazytalk.

Alright God, Okay. Okay!, Whatever. I’m looking. I don’t know exactly what you want me to do yet — and I’m making NO promises — but I’m looking. I’m not completely listening yet, but I’m looking. Go fart yourself.

habits · stress · time

Straining the Seams of Sanity

September 27, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

When J and I were together he would bristle when I would try to get us to schedule something for the weekend. My time is scheduled down to the minute every day at work, he’d practically beg, I just need my weekends to be open and unscheduled. UGH! But how will we ever DO anything if we don’t plan it? What I want to spend time doing will be different than yours so if we don’t coordinate, they’ll never align — MUST PLAN THINGS!

So, sometimes we did. And generally what happened was he was grateful that we had, though at the cost of cohabitation bliss.

AND, OH THE IRONY! I am now experiencing what I think he must have been, and I feel kinda badly for my insistence…

My relationship with the clock has somehow shifted with the start of this school year. Much of it has to do with the increase in my teaching and meeting hours. My planning and grading hours are diminished, which means more work at home, on weekends, in my own “free time.” Last year, there were entire stretches of school hours when I could sit and read a book for exploration of what we may do next. Now, I’m feeling like I’m lucky if I have time to pee.

This isn’t altogether accurate, but that is how it feels. And so, with my Action Partner, among the actions for the day that I text her each morning is, “GO OUTSIDE ALONE.”

Sometimes this helps, but strangely, even THIS feels like too much scheduling!

There are several people and events to coordinate in the upcoming weeks, and all I feel like doing is screaming. They’re important, necessary events, but I could absolutely say verbatim what J had said to me: My work days are scheduled to the minute, I just want time to do whatever the hell I want!

But, I know myself better. I really do. I know that given time to “do whatever I want” generally looks like doing very little, and not in the good, “release achieving” sense of it; more in the binge-watching, pajama-wearing, did I brush my teeth today sense of it!

All things in moderation.

What I do know needs more expansion is this rush in the mornings. Journal faster, meditate faster, blog faster, get on the road faster! From the moment I set my mug on my breakfast table it feels like a stop-watch has begun, constricting and awful.

I have talked and delved enough recently to know that I do want to keep this whole morning practice thing the way it is. I really do love it. But there are essential adjustments to be made, whether they’re entirely an internal shift in framing or an external shift in doing, and likely both.

I don’t like feeling like a balloon about to pop. Even if I am filled with candy.

humanity · judgment · vulnerability

Queen B*tch

September 26, 2018September 26, 2018 Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

9.26.18_2 I began watching the 7th season of Once Upon a Time recently, and was telling a friend how a part of me envies the bitches.

There’s a new character (not the above pictured; I just love the Evil Queen costumes!) who, judging by the little we see, owns some kind of real estate business where she has a large office on a top floor, tall wooden doors that are frequently thrown open with drama, and tailored outfits that could bounce an Army quarter.

She’s fierce, in the meaning of the word that isn’t reserved for drag queens, but in the unforgiving, unflinching, unquestioning, decisive, detached sense of it.

This character doesn’t pause to consider sides, to consider another’s humanity or perspective, to question whether her judgments are just or kind or evil.

She just does.

And there is such freedom in that!!!! Or, so my poor heart would have me believe. (Though maybe it’s my ego.)

What a welcome relief to live in a tower of righteousness and galling assertion, to scatter minions with a sharp word, to know with formidable certainty that what you want will be attended to with efficiency and unflagging effort by others.

BUT, I told my friend, the evil queens always die.

They’re always alone in that tower. No one has compassion for them, as they don’t for anyone. An oak will topple in a storm where a reed will survive.

There is, of course, strength and wisdom in being a reed, but oh, the majesty of being an oak!

This human thing is hard. It necessitates humility and compassion and acceptance of the sort that makes a heart pump with ache.

But this human thing also opens the gates for connection and support that makes a heart pump with love.

Thus is the curse of living outside the tower, and (as you already know) thus is the blessing.

Besides which: I don’t need to be a Bitch Queen to wear fierce outfits.

humility · self-love · TEACHING

“Isn’t it unmodest?”

September 25, 2018September 25, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

One of my 7th graders asked me the above question this week.

Their daily journal prompt was to list 5-10 positive traits about themselves. This wasn’t necessarily things they were “good at,” I told them, but it could include those. I continued that the turn of the Jewish New Year necessitates that we look at the places we’ve done harm in the last year and the ways that we want to improve, but sometimes we can get stuck there in “what’s wrong with us,” so the prompt was intended to balance out those scales of self-appraisal.

When my student approached my desk during the 5-minute writing time and asked the above question, firstly I taught him the word ‘immodest,’ and then said, “That is a great question, and let’s talk about it as a class.” So we did.

We had a great discussion. The writing on the board, as seen in the above photo, was generated from their own comments and from my own opinions/perspective:

Is doing this activity being immodest?
Am I being “bad” by considering my positive traits?
Do I only improve by marking mistakes?
Can I improve by honoring my achievements?

We answered these questions with a few notations:

It’s not saying, “I’m better”; it’s saying, “I am.”
Humility = Being right-sized; an honest fair look includes the positive!

I am so proud of my students for this discussion and for bringing to light the darkness within which we shroud achievement.

As I wrote about last week, my Goals Group’s question of the week was, “How will I reward achievement?” and, frankly, we group of 4 bad-ass women had a complex time attaining an answer!

What we generally and individually came to was that we would reward our achievements with self-acknowledgement. None of us truly needed or wanted an extra bauble or scoop; that’s not really what makes us feel acknowledged or seen. What we really wanted was, simply, to feel acknowledged and seen!

And one way to accomplish this is to feel proud of ourselves.

I wrote previously that I was going to start allowing myself to say, “I’m proud of you,” without dampening it with self-doubt, derision, or some twisted notion of humility that breeds self-flagellation. And, strangely, I have begun to say it to myself.

I did laundry and put my sheets back on the bed (instead of sleeping on the mattress pad next to the clean sheets, as I have been known to do): Molly, I’m proud of you.

I ordered a replacement toiletry item (instead of waiting for it to run out and scrambling): Nice, Mol, proud of you.

I sent two blog posts/essays to magazine and newspaper publishers: Jesus bloody Christ, Mol!! I’m proud of you!

Eek. This feeling of pride in my achievements — of self-love, really — is a newfound one. As I texted my friend about it yesterday: “Frankly, it makes my heart feel denser—uncomf but also fuller.”

And that is how it’s feeling, this neophytic acknowledgement of myself and my achievements.

I do NOT think that it is immodest to honor our efforts. I do NOT think that we only grow through suffering. And while the quip “the beatings will continue until morale improves” is a wry and ironic one, it is NOT supportive of the kind of light I want to have, bring, expand, and grow from.

I’m excited for this new chapter I feel I’m entering. One where I am more attracted by my assets than hiding and immolating over my perceived failings. Either direction I go, I will not run out of items to list — so why not go with the side that makes me feel kinda giddy?

#metoo · truth · uncertainty

Benign #MeToo: Driver’s Ed

September 24, 2018September 24, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

9.24.18

In the wake of debate, ongoing and maddening, about how women and girls “should” behave in dodgy situations, I’ve been remembering one of the least dramatic of my own #MeToo moments, one I’ve never shared with anyone until now.

The year would have been 1997 and I’d have been somewhere between sophomore and junior year in high school. Being young for my class, there weren’t many kids who hadn’t already been liberated by their parents’ borrowed 4 wheels. I was still 15, training to get my driver’s permit in the Fall when I’d turn 16.

The remembered image of my driver’s ed instructor is of a 40something year-old man, maybe pale haired and balding, maybe with a paunch and a cheap button-down shirt. But, really, I don’t remember altogether what he looks like.

I do remember when I was in his car with two sets of brake and gas pedals—one on the driver’s side where I was sitting and one on the passenger side where he sat—that as we approached a gas station pump, I got panicky and began to press the gas pedal so we accelerated toward the pump! He slammed hard on his own brake pedal and I finally remembered which foot did what.

He also had a system where he said that he could tell when lights were about to turn red. That there was a moment when a yellow light turned a little orange, so you could time whether to accelerate through the intersection or eat the light. As we drove around my small suburban town, he would make predictions about stoplights. …

Sometime on this particular day when I was learning how to drive, he said that he needed to stop at home for something.

While unplanned for our route, I said okay because it didn’t seem to make much difference. It took a long highway to get there, I remember. I drove the car into the parking lot of this subdivision, probably rental units, pale beige siding with blue trim. And as far as my memory goes, he said it would only take a minute and to come inside with him.

So I did. What I remember of the inside of the apartment was again pale beige walls and carpet and window-height venetian blinds of the kind you’d find in cheap condos or rentals.

He told me to sit, that he’d be right back. I seem to recall I was on a sofa.

It was at this moment that a woman (dirty blond hair, white button-down) let herself into the apartment. She seemed quite surprised to see me there and the man who was apparently her husband came back into the room, also surprised and perhaps flustered.

He pointed at me, arm extended, “She had to go to the bathroom.”

The wife nodded quizzically, and the man and I left back into the car with two sets of brake and gas pedals.

Now, it would be simple to label this story entirely benign, except for the fact of the lie. The mixed stories. He’d told me he needed something from his house. He told his wife I needed to use the bathroom (which I hadn’t and did not use while there).

What to make of this disparity? Was there something nefarious here?

It’s impossible to know, except that this memory has stuck with me for 20 years as not quite smelling right. It has never felt clear enough to share, its heinous nature never obvious enough or easy enough to articulate.

So, what did I do? Nothing. I got back in the car and drove back to school with this balding 40-something man. Nothing more “happened,” nothing else went weird.

Was it a #MeToo moment? What could have been the motivation of a man during his work hours to invite a 15-year old girl into his home several miles away and then lie about why we were there? Were there other girls he made “swing past” his house? Were there other times when the wife didn’t walk in at just that moment?

While my catalogue of #MeToo moments later plunges into the black-and-white of rape and assault, it’s this one here sitting right at the edge of gray that niggles at me. The other experiences are clear and obvious, and have been processed with the right people.

But when it’s like this, when it’s unclear whether there was a monster teaching driver’s ed to scores of young people in suburban New Jersey in the late ’90s, that I feel most unnerved.

“Caution, Student Driver.”

aging · health · menopause

AARPing

September 23, 2018September 23, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

9.23.18.jpg Yesterday, I got the chance to continue reading the AARP magazine I’d liberated from my building’s mail slush pile. One of the major articles was about menopause, and… it gave me pause.

I texted my mom to ask when she’d gone through “the change” (although I’d asked for details before, I can never remember), as it’s generally accepted that whatever your mom experienced, you can anticipate you’ll experience something similar.

She replied that she was 51. I’m about to turn 37. That’s 14 more years of ovarian churning; 24 years of their production line have passed. That’s a lot of years!

And yet, it feels like such a short period (no pun intended!) between now and the anticipated change.

The article went on to report that a vast majority of doctors, even ob-gyns, have little experience or familiarity with how to help a woman going through this utterly predictable and common experience (51% of ALL earthlings!). They report that most ob-gyns focus on in/fertility and delivery — where the big money is at. There’s not yet much bank in “the change.” The article further states that, while the overall cause is the same, women’s experience and symptoms vary wildly so there’s no “one size fits all.” There’s more of a need to listen, interpret, and adjust one’s approach, which is also not something many doctors like to wade through.

It’s fascinating to me. There is a gargantuan industry for media and products aimed at anti-aging: the serums I buy for my face, the water I drink for my organs, the sleep I attempt to get for my brain function, and the workouts I try to maintain for my bones. And yet, I haven’t once read an article aimed toward someone like me looking for ways to improve my experience of menopause, even from this long a landing approach.

What was news to me was the fact that around 30 years old, muscle-loss comes into play, and at about 35 or so, we begin to lose .5 a pound of muscle mass per year, and that can increase to a pound a year as we progress through this life-span thing.

My metabolism, I’ve noticed, began to slow down earlier this year, almost as if it had hit some kind blaring neon mile-marker (our bodies are brilliant time-pieces!). My night-vision on the road has been on a decline for a few years, the brightness of headlights bothering me much more than it used to (no doubt partly in response to the new LEDs).

Plus, my body has never been one to maintain muscle mass without regular, near-daily (probably daily!) attention to weight-bearing exercise.

This aging thing is such a journey!

But I know, curious cat that I am, that the more I learn, the more prepared I’ll be and the more I can assist this vessel in its continuity, not its “decline.”

(Awed shout-out to my bad-ass, cancer-survivor sisters who’ve had to go through the change way earlier than ever expected.) ❤

dating · dysfunction · self-appraisal

We attract what we are.

September 22, 2018September 22, 2018 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

9.22.18.jpg As I begin to dip my toes back in the dating waters, I wrote the following in my journal this morning:

Remember, I’ve always attracted my loves/guys when I’ve been at my best. I want a guy to attract me when he’s at his best!!! Hmm. Have I been attracted to health before? If not, why not? If so, when & how was that? Never. Ugh. Ow.

What does this mean? My models of grown-ups were utterly dysfunctional and that’s upon whom I made my template of how to “grown-up/adult” and who was attractive. They. Were. Broken. And I thought that was, if not normal, then the only option. So that’s what I’ve sought. Oh, man, that’s hard.

Repatterning. Ouch.

Reflecting on this, I feel like a cast iron pan: I’ve seasoned and molded and re-seasoned and re-molded for years, trying to get the best results out of this one pan, but ultimately, the whole thing is never going to produce the results I want—the flavor I want, if you will.

I need to smash that pan; I need to “take another street.” But I don’t yet have directions to that new place — or, to continue to mix metaphors, the template for that new pan.

I am learning, gathering code on what makes a healthy adult. And it is pretty satisfying to note that, lately, some of the pieces I hope to attract aren’t pieces that I’m missing or wish I had, but pieces I know I’ve built and am building, like having a job and career I love. We so often look at the deficits in ourselves; it’s rare we contemplate our assets.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if I did look and if my partner did, too? If we engaged in a cycle of uplift and inspiration, challenging one another to reach for the next rung?

It’s both painful and necessary for me to see that, frankly, not once have I attracted a man who was on an upswing in his life, feeling confident in his place or jazzed about what was next. This isn’t to point fault but to affirm that I don’t merely want to be on an upswing myself, I want to attract a partner who is also jazzed, psyched, engaged … and stable.

In order to do that I need to start to even see those men in the world! Like being red/green color blind, I’ve never even seen those people before. I sift through the mental catalogue of former mates and dates, yet there isn’t one who was stoked on life, on an upward trajectory, joyful and confident in their person and future. I mean, isn’t that WEIRD???

I know this all sounds egregiously judgmental, I do, and for that I truly am sorry. But it is not my aim to judge these men, whose positive traits could fill the Library of Congress. Rather, my aim is to explore the idea that in order to advance on an upswing myself, I need to see where I’m limiting myself, where I’m not seeing the reds and greens, where I’m blocking out the positive things in life.

Magnets are attracted to one another because of forces of nature that none of us can cancel out. We can pull them apart, attach them to other things, paint them funny colors, but the magnetic force is extant with or without our permission — and I have been drawn to a type of person whose magnet looks eerily similar to those of the people who raised me.

I need to stop being a magnet and become something else altogether. Because even if smashed, a magnet re-creates the same set of poles from the new pieces!

So, what will I be? A shattered iron pan, a sidewalk without holes, a detector of ”upswing” metals?

If the latter is to be the case, then it will be imperative that I do a sweep for those upswing metals regularly within myself and begin to amass them into a meaningful concentration.

Because in the end, like everyone else, I am still a magnet.