Category: community

authenticity · community · confidence · courage · encouragement · intimacy · laughter · vulnerability · writing

But We’ve Got The Biggest Balls of Them All!

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When I was living and teaching ESL in South Korea, I earned
a nickname: Ballsy Mollsy.
It was not uncommon for me to approach a stranger in a bar
and ask inappropriate questions. Or, maybe I was with a group of friends, and
wanted to steer the conversation in a more exciting direction, and would pose a candid question to a group that would earn laughs, but few answers. Maybe I would just stumble out to the next bar in search of new conversation without
telling anyone, but that was more stupid than ballsy, fyi.
As chance would have it, one day last month, I attended a
play my friend was performing in, and I ended up sitting next to the 25 y.o.’s
mother. “How did it even come up?,” he answered via text. When I told him, he
replied, “That’s right, I forgot you talk to strangers.” (Indeed, how we met.)
I do. I talk to strangers. I mean, how are we ever to meet
anyone new if we don’t talk to them? Like the other day, waiting for my
burrito, I ended up waiting on the bench next to this guy I see
around my neighborhood a lot, who I’ve seen working at the café on the corner. We
struck up a conversation, turns out he’s a nice guy, we had a pleasant chat about movies,
and he went off with his burritos for himself and his girlfriend.
It’s not always about “meeting dudes;” in fact, it’s more
than often not about that. I just like to find out about people, not walk around like
the Ants that they talk about in A Waking Life who, unseeing, run into one another and then walk around and continue
on their way, antennae down. I mean, that’s what New York is for. 😉
I suppose I learned this from my mom. My mother is
notoriously gregarious. To the point, growing up where it was embarrassing, and
not a little evidence of her manic tendencies. But, still. We’d be in a store,
she’d exchange more than a cursory Thank You with the cashier or salesperson. We’d be on a
bus, and she’d ask the woman next to her about the museum she’d just
visited, based on that metal entry pin tacked to her lapel.
Sometimes, she’d flirt with the cashier or waiter or
whomever. There was a base note to her conversation that wasn’t just cordial or conversational. Pre-divorce, this was a little unnerving.
But. A few years ago, she recounted a story to me that she
held as an exemplar of growth and self-aware change.
She was in Zabar’s (Manhattanites will know), and was in an
aisle next to a couple. She could overhear them debating which of the cream
cheeses they should get. If the tofu spread really tasted like cream cheese, if
the chive was better than the dill?
My mom. Had an opinion. She always does.
The success came when she didn’t offer it. She reported to me that she realized they were not
asking for her help, they didn’t need her help, and she picked up the chive tofu cream cheese she loves, and
went on her way.
Trust me. This is a big success. To “mind your own business,
and have business to mind” is a very important boundary to learn. I was amused
at how proud she was of herself, too, like she knew that she was learning
something, that she was changing something.
I mean, it’s part of the reason our relationship has been
able to grow where the one with my dad has faltered: she really is trying to
change. And it shows.
Like all of us, change and growth takes time, isn’t simple,
and sometimes means taking contrary actions.
But sometimes, how we behave in the world influences others,
too. How she interacted in the world helped to inform how I do. Now, sure, I’m
not Holly Go Lightly everywhere I go. Sometimes I wish I had a burka. But
sometimes, the purchase of a burrito is transformed by the simple act of
connecting with another human being.
I leave you with this: I received a card in the mail this
week from a friend. In it, she thanks me for what I write here and on my
Facebook; that reading “me” helps to buttress her flagging spirits.
I told her how much that meant to me. How much it means to
me that my interactions with the world are making a difference; that I’m not
telegraphing into deep space for purely selfish and masturbatory reasons. I
never really know if how I’m choosing to express myself here is “too much” or “too honest,” and
I have to trust that those of you who choose to click on the link to read me
do so because you find something here, even if it be self-congratulations for
not being as bipolar 😉
To hear that how I behave in the world influences and
affects people for the better is one of the greatest gifts of having big balls. 

community · inspiration · love · persistence · service · spirituality · willingness · writing

Did you live happy? Did you live well?

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I don’t really believe in heaven and hell. I suppose if I
believe in anything, I believe in some kind of version of reincarnation. Not
that my soul gets inserted into some new being on the planet, but that the
anima that makes my heart pump disseminates into other things – surely, the
worms, and dirt, and grass that’ll be fed by me, but also, I feel like there’s
some way our spirit gets to try again.
Maybe not. Maybe we’re all worm food. But I think about the
concept I’ve heard that we choose the life that we’re born into. That
we somehow float cosmically one step outside of this reality, and when it’s
time, we are born into the lock that our life provides the key for – and the
lessons and situations we walk into in life are what turns the key. Toward
what? Who knows. Enlightenment sounds like such a heavy word. I don’t know that
there’s ever any “fixed” or “done” for us. I think that’s part of what our
souls, for lack of a better word, enjoy about the whole thing.
It’s sort of like an infinite book of Choose Your Own
Adventure. We’ve all heard me talk about how the lessons we’re here to learn
aren’t always the ones we want; it’s not like I would have chosen some of the circumstances that have surrounded my life
or the situations that occurred in it. But, on some level, perhaps I have and
did. And perhaps for some benevolence greater than my own. – Or not.
Sometimes I ask my cat what she did in former lives to be a
cat this time. What she was before? And who she bribed to get to be as pretty as
she is?
Sometimes I think about the Indigo Girls’ song Galilleo, and how maybe the being we’re born into next time will
have so much baggage from our fucking things up, or not “evolving” enough, to be
the next great writer and artist, or inventor fixing the world.
Sometimes I sit home sick and watch Saving Grace on Netflix and write a blog about theology. Like
today.
I have heard about the whole Pearly Gates thing, and we (or
Christians, at least) get asked questions. And I wonder if I were asked the
questions in the title of this post, what my reply would be? And if it will
continue to change, as it’s surely changed before.
A friend of mine has a mission statement for herself and her
life, and squares the actions and activities she engages in against it. If it
doesn’t jive, then she finds a way to align her wants with its message: To be
of maximum service to myself and others, for the good of all involved.
The other day, as I was sitting in my car, waiting for
the call with my potential new somatic therapist, I was struck with a phrase for
me and for my life that feels pretty appropriate. It was less a mission
statement at the moment, and more a simple observation of the sum total of my actions & endeavors, at least in
adulthood: To voraciously expand my consciousness of love.
It’s sort of what I have been doing lately, I think. It’s
sort of what I think I want to continue to do. It’s a tall freaking order, for
sure. And it’s uncomfortable and vulnerable and occasionally plain biting, but
at its base, at my base, I think it’s a pretty good mission for my soul to have chosen.
Once, in meditation, I got this edict for my life: To love,
as much as you can. What comes to me from that is that it’s also really as much
as you can on any given day. Do your best on any given day, and that level will
change, and sometimes will be really freaking low. But if I believe, which I
do, that I am here for a purpose, and if I believe today that that purpose is
to voraciously expand my consciousness of love, then it’s sort of like when
they put those bumpers in the gutters of the bowling lane: I’ll never be too far off center. 

change · community · friends · gratitude · health · perseverance

Time: in fair and foul

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Oops, I did it again — I changed my clocks on the wrong day! (Last time, I changed them in the wrong direction!) I don’t think I’m cut out for this. 
In speaking of time, tomorrow will mark one year from my
final day of chemo. Last year, today, March 8, I was in Kaiser hospital, 6th
floor, on the “off day.” Since I had Leukemia, the
treatment is different than you hear for outpatient breast cancer treatment or
even lung cancer (not that they don’t go through hell, too). How the treatment
went is that each month I spent a week in the hospital (after the initial first month in),
and would get chemo on days 1, 3, 5, and then on day 6, if I looked healthy
enough, I could go home. 
“Healthy enough.” Sheesh. What a thing.
A year before that, I was probably working on and
procrastinating on my MFA Poetry thesis at Mills College.
There was a moment after my diagnosis during which I was
sitting at this same kitchen table, likely in these same pajamas, when I looked
out this same window at the cypress trees that grow over the roof of the
building next door. I’ve always watched them, since I’ve lived here. They’re
one of the few trees in my area that loses leaves, and then regrows them in
full regalia in the spring and summer.
I sat at this table, and as it was October/November, I
watched it shedding the last of its leaves for the year. And I wondered if I
would see its leaves return. If I would be alive to witness it.
And I was. And I will be when, once again, the brown tree suddenly sports those green buds that never cease to surprise me, like an overnight graffiti
artist.
Perhaps some people think my marking of this time is morbid.
And maybe it is. But, it’s impossible for me to turn away from. I don’t always
think about it; in fact, over the course of these few months, the “this time
last year” thought has become pretty scarce. But sometimes, there are moments to remember, to recall, measure against, and
praise to high bloody heaven and hell and all the imps in between that *I made it,* through all of it — the terror, the loneliness, the unknowing, the isolation of it. I made it through alive, and healthy, my eggs still ticking in my ovaries, my blood producing what it ought to. I made it through the arguments with doctors, through giving myself injections, through Christmas in an inpatient bed. 

I made it through with your soup waiting for me in the hospital fridge, with the cup of coffee you went out of your way to Peet’s to buy, with the fuzzy blanket and the neon socks you brought to keep me warm. 

I made it through with the green shakes you made for me, and the protein drinks you sought out at Whole Foods. With the burritos you bought and the chicken you made. I made it through with our conversations about leaving your store, leaving your soon-to-be ex-wife; about polyamory and the ’89 fire. I made it through when you held my hand as I bawled into your chest, heaving the Ugly Cries because I knew you could take it. 

I made it through when you brought a big book and a 12 and 12, and we sat and talked about other things anyway. But the praying helped. 
A year ago tomorrow, I will have been awoken at 6 in the
morning. I will have had my pee measured, my temperature and blood pressure
taken, and swallowed the pre-medication meant to stave off nausea. I
will then have gotten dressed, eaten whatever plastic-wrapped breakfast they’d
provided, done my morning pages, meditated, and perhaps written my blog if I
could get it in before I got hooked up to the IV pole.
The nurses will have come in in yellow apron suits over their
scrubs, and thick blue gloves and goggles. The two, always two, would call
the numbers of my ID back to each other, the volume of the chemo, confirming
the three hours it was to drip into the port line that entered my chest and
pumped into my heart.
A year ago tomorrow, in the evening, they would do the same
12 hours from the first one. And by the time the bag of clear but ominous
liquid was empty and the machine was beeping loudly for the nurse, I will have tucked into the stiff hospital bed with that fuzzy blanket, curled up maybe with a book, maybe too tired to
read, and they would come back in their yellow suits and thick gloves, and
unhook the tube from my chest. 
And I will have had my last round of chemo. (Ever.)

community · compassion · grief · healing · perseverance

The Tell-Tale Heart

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Written 2011:
i meet with a grad student who tells me
not to take split-level poetry because all the under-grads write about is date
rape – so i don’t tell him about the drunken carride from two strangers, later
finding an earring twisted into my shirt, or being turned away from four Korean
hospitals because rape is not an emergency.
i read an article on how to snag a
man which suggests that women think about something naughty when out because
women won’t pick up on it, but the men will – so, i imagine licking pre-cum
from a cock, which provides a lascivious revolt against public decorum and not
undamp panties.
but, in the unwalled house of my
memory, these situations sometimes mix – and the salt sours, the armor
rebuilds, and the currency of reality cripples.
In Bernie Siegel’s book, Love, Medicine, and Miracles, he reports that his research has shown that most cancer patients have suffered a
significant breach in trust at an early age.
“I will slice your face with a
razor blade/
and watch your smile fade.”
– The couplet I often recite in my head when I’m feeling
cornered, scared, and angry.
I informed you a little while ago that it seems like
repairing my relationship with intimacy, trust, and sex is probably back on the
agenda. Yesterday, after my work at my shamanic journey group, this was made
pretty apparent.
And luckily, one of my great friends in attendance told me
afterward that our mutual friend is having a hugely positive experience with a
therapist/healer around similar issues. I plan to contact her today.
In fact, I’d referred the same friend to my own “intuitive” (read:
psychic), and it’s just humorous to me that me and this group of women have
this rolodex of woo-woo witchy healer folks. And damned, if I’m not grateful
for it.
For those unfamiliar, shamanic journeying (according to my
novice understanding) is pretty much an intense meditation, but there’s a drum,
the sound of which is purported to help induce a dream-like state—it’s like a
guided meditation, where instead of listening to someone’s voice tell you to
follow down a path in the forest, you sort of follow the drum, and make your
own path through the forest. I’ve been journeying for years now, and find it to
be one of the best and quickest ways to access internal information—however
uncomfortable that information may be.
Yesterday’s overall message was that I have to repair my
relationship to trust. Yuck.
It’s like trust for me is a broken port, and until it’s repaired,
there will be glitches and sparks and melted fuses.
The thing about sexual trauma is this: you want to show
people (the right people) the wound, you want to share about it, you want to
exorcise it, you want to talk about it in order to heal from it, to release it and move on from it. You want to
expose it to fresh air so that it heals instead of festers. You want to bring
it into the sun and let the forces at work do their magic to create something
beautiful out of something horrifying.
And yet.
Because of the nature of sexual trauma as a secret, and the prevalence of people dismissing it as exaggeration… You also
don’t want to share about it. You are ashamed to bring it out, to tell anyone,
to share about it. You feel that to mention it is to invite revulsion,
rejection, dismissal. And perhaps, you have experience to back up that fear,
and so you remain locked up tight with it, and it will continue to burn a hole
in your heart.
The longer you hold onto it, the more painful it becomes,
until it becomes something so immense in your heart and head that you can’t
imagine that you can actually share it with other people, because it will
overwhelm everyone, including yourself.
This, is why god made therapists. Healers. And friends with
rolodexes.
The arrows toward healing this next came from “going in” to
my meditation with questions about my recent fatigue. Over the last month or
so, I’ve been so fucking tired, and my western and eastern doctors can’t figure
it out, except that my eastern doc said, “You’re energy center is depleted.”
Well, yeah. But why?
The information I got last night was that I have been
fighting this, this knowledge, these experiences, this anger, this sorrow, …
well, for years. I’ve been avoiding it for just as long. I’ve been fighting
dealing with it, but it’s there. Believe you me, apparently, it’s there. And
somehow my awareness has cracked open about it. Somehow, I am aware that I am
exhausted from this fight, from this constant battle to suppress, dominate, and
deny.
Some veil has lifted, some curtain shifted, and I am finally
able to experience the exhaustion.
And if I want to get healthy, then I have to heal it. And if
I want to heal it…–well, as I mentioned earlier, I’m more than a little
ambivalent about doing so.
First things first. Call my friend who’s working with
someone. Get that info.
Second thing? Ensure that I approach and treat myself with
the most radiant compassion and care that I can muster, cuz,
We’re gonna need a bigger boat. 

abundance · community · fun · laughter

The X Factor

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Yesterday morning, after I left you with my maudlin, mildly
self-pitying blog, I went to meet up with some folks, and I was able to
identify the word for how I was feeling: deprived.
Usually in those groups, we talk about deprivation around
things like clothing (wearing your boots even though they’re falling apart), or
entertainment (not seeing live music for months in a row), or food (not going
food shopping). I use these as examples because I’ve “used” deprivation in just
these ways. I’ve been in deprivation around all of these things, and am working
my best to walk away from those ways of being and treating myself, through
recognizing that there is enough in&of the world to get my needs met, too.
So, as I sat down with them, I was thinking about how, precisely, I was feeling about my lack of group interaction, and I identified the term
deprivation.
In talking with them about it, I came a little bit further
into it: I realized that what I’m missing is being “on.”
About a year ago, I walked past a restaurant where a good
friend of mine was finishing up brunch with her husband and a friend of theirs.
They waved me in to sit down, and I spent a few minutes talking with them—not
catching up, just making conversation.
The same friend later told me that she’d never seen me like
that. That, in fact, she’d never seen me with other people. That I lit up, that I was funny, and charming, and
conversant, and “on.”
I was “on,” because being with other people like that, in
that way, a small group that isn’t there to listen to music or poetry or go to
a movie, in a small group where I can turn “on” my charisma—man, that’s what I’m missing.
I took one of those Meyers-Briggs personality tests, once as
a fun, short version, and once where an actual trained woman interpreted my
zillion answers to the zillion questions.
What she came out with was pretty telling to this new awareness: I
fall so directly between being an introvert and an extrovert, that I’m neither
an “I” or an “E”—I’m an “X.” (An XNFP, if you care to know.)
I need both. I am fueled and fed by both. I need the kind of
quiet, introspective time with myself, and the quiet, one-on-one interactions
where we can get really intimate and honest. AND. I need the loud, boisterous,
active hilarity of being with other people, where I don’t know what conversation
we’ll have, and I jump from topic to topic, volleying back and forth with
others.
I miss that. I miss that part of myself, and I think that
part of what I was recognizing yesterday was an atrophying of that side of
personality. It really only comes out in those situations, and I’m simply not in
many of those situations these days. (Although, flirting has a very similar timbre to it.)
I love feeling “on.”
I love the rush of feeling expressive and funny and bold and intelligent. I
love the rush of feeling the charm that pulses from me when I’m in that state
of being. I love feeling charming. Here meaning, engaging, self-possessed,
active, social, humorous, with levity. Oh levity. Donde esta levity?
That’s another longed-for part of that style of interaction—the levity.
We’re not going to get deep here, those are the rules of engagement. We may not chat about Karl Lagerfeld’s new collection (necessarily) or what
mascara we’re using (though we could), but we certainly won’t talk about deep self-work
or spiritual progress. We’ll talk at that mid-level of fluff that happens when
you’re engaged with friends and acquaintances in a social setting.
I’ve had plenty of opportunity, and continue to, to talk
about the heavy. And although people say they hate small talk, I guess that’s
sort of what I’m talking about – the chit chat and conversations that happen
over a bowl of punch, as you float from one corner of a party to another, or… at a dinner party.
I’m glad that I have been able to pin-point what it is that
I feel has been missing, because it makes it much easier to invite it into my
life, and find and create opportunities for that kind of Upness to happen. More
importantly, I’ve gotten to see why
these kinds of interactions are important, and indeed critical, to my level of
contentment and happiness. And just like the other places of deprivation I’d
identified, I first had to admit that those things were important to me, that
they were “needs,” not wants, not brush-aways.
However, I am sorry we both had to read through yesterday’s navel-gazing blog to get here. 😉

acting · adulthood · change · community

Oh Envy, Have a cuppa tea & be off with yourself.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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A coworker asked me what my plans were this weekend, and
along with my regular commitments, I am also going to my friend’s poetry reading, the
first meeting of a new writing group, and a shamanic journey group I
attend monthly.
She said, Wow, I wish my plans included things like writing
groups and journey groups.
I asked what her weekend plans were, and she said, they were
having some friends over for dinner. That’s about it.
I said, Wow, I wish my plans included things like having
friends over for dinner.
I live in the strange time/place between apartment- and
house-dweller; between the young able-bodied, go-into-the-city-at-10:30pm-er (as I was invited to last night) and the slightly more cautious, actually-10:30-is-my-bedtimer. I live between the single person world, and the time of
coupledom.
And in this place, though there is a ton to “do,” I feel a
little lonely. Not for the partner, per se, but for the friendships that begin
to fall away as a single person in a paired up world. Nostalgic for the times when
a gathered group of women would carve pumpkins together on a Thursday night,
for the time when there was occasion to take photos of a gaggle of folks, and a
little longing for the camaraderie, simplicity, and elegance that “having some
friends over for dinner” could offer.
I know life has different phases, and the majority of
the things I’m doing right now (though they are communal, simply aren’t
friend-inclusive) are in support of a grander plan and dream: acting classes,
auditioning, rehearsals, practicing my lines and reading scripts. I know that
this is an exciting part of my path, and, believe me, I am *stoked* to get to
do these things, but I also recognize that a shift is occurring. I am on the
blank page after one chapter has ended, and before the other has begun.
My friends will be at the writing group, the poetry reading,
and the shamanic journey group. These are people who I can have hours’ long
conversations with, and last week, did have coffee with one of them, but, I
don’t know – there’s a zest of communal living that I haven’t replaced from the
days of late-night group dancing and diner-ing.
Perhaps all things in order and in time, but I’m just
noticing. I notice that I’d like to be someone who goes to dinner at friends’
houses. Maybe I just want to be able to invite people over to dinner, like I had been able to in my 1-bedroom in the city, but not in my studio in Oakland. I know that’s a part of it too. 
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the grass is always
greener?
I have plenty of people I consider friends—I’d just
like to see them more often. And apparently, in groups. (I also recognize that I
don’t want to be your token single friend in that group to whom you say things like, “Have you tried internet dating?” For more on this, see this article my
friend sent me!)
That said, there’s a viewing party for ONCE upon a time I’m
attending in a few Sundays at a friend’s; there’s a birthday party at my
friend’s house in Discovery Bay next month that will bring out some of my most
cherished friends and their families;
and, anyway, this navel-gazing blog is boring me. 😉
I have some people to go see, followed by shopping for a
jewel-toned top for Monday’s new headshots, and a facial to help those
photos come out awesome. Then line-learning, vegetable roasting, and poetry
attending. My life is certainly full—now if it could also be a little more
stocked with you.

acceptance · change · community · love · trauma · truth

in.to.the.light.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had occasion to sit with two
friends who shared with me about trauma in their past, as well as reading an article by a
sexual abuse survivor about the upswing of the Dylan Farrow case.
A little less than a year ago, after I completed chemo, I started reading a book
about healing that kind of trauma. As you may remember/know, it’s my
understanding that disease can be a function of underlying emotional or
spiritual dis-ease, and after my bought with cancer, I was (and still am)
determined to do all I can to root out causes and dis-ease that may underlie
the causation of cancer. The book suggested that before you really begin, you collect your army of support
because the work would be intense. So, I sought out a somatic therapist, as the
book suggested, and saw her a few times. I wasn’t a good fit, and I soon
stopped seeing her, and soon stopped reading the book, maybe a chapter or two
in.
However, this morning, I was toodling around on my phone,
compulsively checking my email for the rehearsal schedule for the play in which
I’ve been cast(!), and I clicked on the “Notes” app I have on there, wondering
if there wasn’t some old “to do” list that may have good ideas for me.
Instead, I found a series of quotations from that book. A
series of words that struck me, applied to me, and offered me compassion,
understanding, and hope.
I … don’t really want to do this. Read that, re-read that.
Tell you here. But, my friends, it is all related. Don’t worry, I won’t get
specific here—it’s not appropriate, and not necessary—except to say my abuse
was not incest or young child abuse, but simply a series of events from a youngish age into my 20s when I didn’t
understand what No was, how to stop things, how to not
go along.
But, apparently, several things in my current life are
pointing me back at looking in that direction. And, from my own understanding
and cosmology, the “Universe” tends to bring things up when you’re ready to
deal with them. … And, if you don’t, you’ll be given occasion to deal with them
later, we promise.
One of the quotes in my app says something about moving out of
isolation into relationships. Va voy, if that’s not what I’ve been trying to do. And
here is a hiccup I didn’t see coming. A gentle nudge from the Universe saying,
Hey, there are these unresolved things. I know they’re hard, but you’re not
alone, and we’ve already pointed some support structures your way, if you want
to work on this now.
I may say, Fuck you. I don’t wanna.
I may call on the language I read once that said, Stop
Identifying With Your Trauma. Don’t use it as a shield and a sword to say, LOOK
SEE THERE’RE THESE FUCKED UP THINGS THAT HAPPENED, SO YOU CAN’T GET CLOSE TO
ME, AND I’M TOO SCARED TO GET CLOSE TO YOU—BACK! OFF!
I could call on that language and say, see, I need to not look at this, because then I’m just wallowing in my
past, instead of moving out of it.
See…. but the thing is. I haven’t wallowed. I’ve avoided.
Plague-like.
Partly because “it wasn’t that bad.” Partly because it’s
so damned fucking common. Heartbreakingly.
Partly because there have been other fish to fry.
And mostly because it’s really really hard.
I have some Louise Hay “Affirmation Cards” over my kitchen
sink, so I can look at them when I’m doing my despised dishes. The one that
calls to me about this reads, “All these changes are easy to make.” These
patterns are easy to heal and change. Maybe. Maybe this is easier than I fear.
The big boogey man with a flashlight projecting himself on the wall much larger
than he really is.
It’s happened before.
I know it’s a heavy thing to lay out to you here, but I also
know some of you are there, were there, get it, and are curious, like me, on how to go
through this stage of healing. As always, I write this for us.

community · fear · nature · spirituality · truth

Remember What the Redwoods Told You

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Two weekends ago, I attended the annual women’s spirituality
retreat I’ve been going to every January for the last 6 years, since the group
was formed. Last year, I asked my doctors to move my chemo treatment so that I could
attend it. It’s a pretty important milemarker for me, and every year, I sit in
the circle of twenty or so women, and I get to see where my levels are that
year. I get to remember the crises or issues I was working on in previous
years, and how they’ve fallen away, or if they’re still present. It’s my annual
stock-check.
I still remember the first year when my big issue was around
the food they were serving. Everything was homemade, delicious… and in buffet
style. I found myself eating beyond capacity at each meal, and by the end of
the retreat, I shared what I learned was why: I had no food at home. I was
trying to gorge myself, as if that would satiate me beyond the 24 hours, and I
could bring some of that fullness home with me to my empty fridge.
This was in the days long before I got a handle on money or
my relationship with it, and I didn’t buy food. Sure, I ate, and it wasn’t an
anorexia thing; I just felt that I didn’t have enough money, or enough care for
myself to buy anything, so I’d eat popcorn for dinner, or cook up the 55 cent
packages of asian noodles I could buy near my work. It wasn’t abundant for
sure.
I shared this with the group, I cried about not treating
myself well, about not prioritizing my needs. And, several years later, I can
report that that behavior around food, though occasionally rearing, is pretty
long past.
This year, however, I was eager to “get to the root” of
several things—one thing in particular—and it was the last day of the retreat.
We had our morning meditation session, we’d shared, and the closing meditation
always took place after a walking meditation through the forest path and down
to a lower outdoor chapel of sorts, with wooden slats for benches, right
next to a trickling stream, in the center of a wooded bonanza of nature.
I didn’t want to do the walking meditation. We’d walked down
the path silently yesterday, though not with intention, and I just wanted to
GET there, so I could have more insights. I wanted to get to the real meditation. I even voted that we skip it.
But, I was overruled, and found myself walking about 15
feet behind another retreatant, with slow, purportedly meaningful steps. So, I
walked slowly, and a little past the wooden bridge over the stream, I began to
relax, to notice, to breathe, to see where I was, to be where I was – exactly where I’d been one year
before, when I was chemo-bald, in the middle of treatments, and so very unsure
of what was going to happen to me.
I felt that duality,
the nature of being in two worlds, one in the present, one in the past, walking
with my past self and experience, knowing that a very frightened but very brave
woman had worn these very shoes on this very path one year before.
And I recalled something else.
After my first round of chemo and month-long hospital
stay last October. After my esophagus melted in reaction, and I was told I
would probably be infertile after treatment. After my doctors told me that even with
treatment, my best statistics were a 40% five-year survival rate, I went for a
walk.
I am lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where I can walk
pretty close to trees, and I was taking a much needed walk, albeit slowly.
Coincidentally, it was on this walk when I got a phone call from Stanford,
looking to plan our intake interview for bone-marrow transplant. I hadn’t yet
made my decision to pass on the transplant and go with straight chemo,
believing that to be enough. I hadn’t yet heard all about the pre-transplant radiation that zaps
you to smitherines, that I would have to relocate for 9 months to the
Peninsula for 24-hour care, that even with the abominable treatments, I would only be given a
60% chance to live instead of 40. And this woman was calling to talk to me
about it.
I told her I needed to call her back. I was taking a
walk.
I walked up near a house where a large redwood grows next to
the sidewalk, pushing the concrete out of its way, slowly and surely. I walked
up to that redwood and I put my palm
flat against its umber, striated flank.
And I silently asked the tree: Am I going to live?

(Did I lose you yet?)

And in my body, in my poor shop-worn blood, in the center of where we listen, I felt and heard
the answer: Yes.
Yes.
I am going to live.
I get emotional writing about it. And, walking down that forest path in Napa
just two weeks ago, I got emotional, too. It was
there I remembered all that had happened, all the fear, and the relief, and the anger, and the
certainty I felt (even though who can be certain) that I was going to live
through my cancer. The trees had told me so, and I believed them.
I may have lost you with the tree-talking thing, but, meh,
c’est la vie.
The point is, I lived. ‘Til today. I am healthy, besides
this damn cold; my blood is normal and cancer-free, and I am alive.
Every single day is a relief, a question, an imperative
question and invitation. I heard on NPR last night about a woman whose mother
went into full remission for a year and a half, and then the cancer returned
with vengeance and she died. But how important that year of life was, to her
and to her family. It’s been a year and two months since mine went into
remission, and stories like that turn my insides to ice.
Luckily, I was on my way driving to band practice. The band
I didn’t belong to a year ago, couldn’t have conceived of, in a car I didn’t
have or conceive of a year ago. I reminded myself that I, too, have made this
year important.
And—for whatever it might mean to you, it means the world to
me—I remind myself that the redwoods said Yes. 

community · faith · friends · generosity · gratitude · help · Jewish · love · service

That 20/20 Thing.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I guess I should tell you about the miracle-y things that have been happening during this time. There are two major
ones, and here they are:
One: My Job
(It’s funny, when I was home sick with strep prior to going
to the hospital, I emailed my boss about my home-sick-from-work status with the
title of the email “I thought Job was a later chapter” – little did I know!) ;P
So, as some of you have been reading, I’d been unemployed
since graduating with my Master’s in May. I’d been actively looking, thinking
about moving back home, applying to anything and everything, with no luck for months. Then, I got the job I now have at the synagogue in
Berkeley.
When I got this job, I was resentful. I was thrilled to
increase my bank balance from $3.98, but I felt ashamed that I had worked so
hard and arrived at what I considered to be an entry level position in the
front office – somewhere I’d been many times before. You heard me gripe about
it, be the opposite of humble about it, and generally kinda be a dick about
having finally gotten a job when I so desperately needed one.
So, here’s the “oo ee oo” part. I got sick. I got really
sick. I will be in and out of the hospital for the next 5 months or so, mostly
in. So, I can’t work, obviously.
My boss’s son had cancer when he was a child, and his son is
alive well, and just had a kid of his own. My boss has had empathy for my
situation from the beginning, and as this started to go down, he said to me
that they would have a temp in until I came back – that they would hold my job
for me. …
At the time this was said, I still didn’t really know what
all this cancer treatment would look like – how long it would be. So a few
weeks later, when I now knew it was going to be 5 months, not one, and my boss
came to visit me in the hospital, I hemmed and hawed – would they still keep my
job for me, knowing how long it would be ‘til I came back? Should I tell him?
Should I not and just hope for the best?
Well, I ended up telling him. And you know what he said? “I
know how important job security is at a time like this, and your job will be
here for you when you’re ready.” WHAT THE HELL? How are people so nice?
And here’s the miracle part – IF I had gotten a job with any
other company, I can’t imagine that they would be a tenth the amount of
understanding. I mean, a bottom line, deadlines, emails, someone needs to be ON
IT. If I had gotten any other job, I
can’t imagine that they’d hold my job for me ‘til I was healthy, let alone come
visit me in the hospital as several of my BRAND NEW coworkers have, and the
others who are planning to.
I couldn’t have planned this at all – and I was so pissed! So, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, right?
Although, there’s the part of me that’s like, um, hey G-d,
you OBVIOUSLY saw this cancer thing coming, having set me up like a champ here,
couldn’t we have gone a different route … but, it is what it is.
Two: My Apartment
I used to work for the property management company that
manages my apartment building here in Oakland. When I worked for them in SF,
they helped me get my apartment in SF, and when I moved to Oakland, they were
equally as generous in helping me with my apartment here (which, by the way, is
a 5 minute walk from the hospital at which I’m being treated…).
I left that job under not the most admirable circumstances,
and earlier this year, I emailed my former boss to say as much and to apologize
for not having been the worker I could have been. He emailed me back to say, yes actually, I could have handled that better, but that
he “had my back” if I needed a reference or anything.
Later this summer, however, I emailed him when I was in my mania of “do
i move back to New Jersey right now??” and I asked if I could give two-weeks’ notice on the
apartment if needed, instead of a month. He emailed one word. “No.” And his
assistant emailed me a form for the 30-day notice format 😉
So, I had no idea where I stood in his shit books or not
when my mom called him early in October and said, basically, my daughter has
leukemia and isn’t working, what can we do here?
Cue the “oo ee oo” once more. My former boss said … he
himself had leukemia two years before. He asked if I’d applied for disability
(if I’d have any income at all), my mom said yes. And he said, Don’t worry
about it. Just keep me informed, and we’ll work it out.
…
What? In SF Bay Area? Rent is a “we’ll work it out”??
Miracle. He told my mom that I’d helped him out when he’d needed it, and true,
I drove his dad to dialysis three days a week for a period while I worked there
(although, I think I got more out of that one – I learned a lot in those
conversations with that man).
My friend said recently to me that we get what we put into
the world, and all the goodness that’s coming back to me is simply that. I’m
just getting back what I’ve put into it.
It’s a little weird to think like that though, because my
immediate thoughts are, it’s not like I am nice on purpose, it’s not like I’m keeping score of how great a
person I am as I go out into the world. I just am how I am. So it feels weird
to feel like, in a way, I’m being rewarded for that “just the way I am”ness.
However, I was contemplating that ridiculousness the other day, and I
thought to myself, Molly, I don’t think cancer is a reward. 😛
The bottom line of the above two amazing stories is the
generosity of the human soul. It doesn’t really have anything to do with me.
I was talking with my current boss the other day about how
many people are wanting to help and do things for me, but there’s often not
much to do. I mean, I don’t really need much, except for some cards, and
visits, and on occasion a ride to the doctor or a grocery run. But only one
person at a time needs to do that. So there’s not a lot for people to do, and I
feel that desire they have – to want to do something. To want to take some aspect of my own burdens away
from me, because there are going to be many things that only I can and will go
through by myself in this process.
So, I’m going to try to think on what people can do that’s
concrete, that gives an opportunity to help and feel useful. Because this is what I
said to my boss – these days, we rarely get the chance to help each other
anymore. We’re all so independent, and I can do it on my own, that as a society and a people, that no one seems
to need help anymore.
In a way, my being sick gives others the opportunity to help
– to allow them to feel that good nachas
(Yiddish) from doing something for someone else, just out of the
kindness of their heart. Not for gain, or
to check that score card I talked about. But just to help, because you can, and
because you want to.
The capacity for human kindness shines very much in this
portion of my story. Which, really, isn’t Job, because I’ve got a lot more
support than he ever did. And I never owned any goats. 

art · community · fortitude · friends · fun · say yes · vulnerability

Ain’t Dead Yet

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Last night, I went to a Halloween party. Like a normal
person.
I did fancy glitter make-up on my face, pretended my
dress could pass as a 60s throw-back, donned my friend’s blue wig, and called
myself a psychedelic stewardess (as they were called in the 60s, pre-politically corrected “flight
attendant”).
It was amazing. It felt like normal. Like something a normal
person would do the weekend of Halloween – get dressed up, go to a party. It’s
something that has felt nearly unattainable for me after the whole cancer
thing – normal. I danced. I danced a
lot. I laughed, talked with friends, and it wasn’t about my cancer. Sure, a few people asked me how I was feeling, and
if there was anything they could do, but for the most part, the people there had no
idea the blue wig covered a shaved head. They just saw a girl at a party – and
I am grateful for it.
Part of the anomaly of being so sick is that sometimes my health is what’s top of my mind, and it’s immediately what I talk about when people call or visit.
Sometimes it’s top of their minds, and they want to know about it. But … sometimes, I just want to know what the heck else is going on in the world. I mean, I didn’t even
know the Giants were in the World Series. (Though, I remain partial to the NY
teams, ahem.)
I want to know how your new job is, or your relationship, or
what happened with that thing. I want to talk about something other than
CANCER. It’s so overarching and undergirding that it feels hard to get away
from, and just talk normally. That’s part of the “watching Ben Stiller movies”
thing I was questioning yesterday – am I allowed to still have normal
conversations, activities?
Thank G-d, as shown yesterday, YES. As I painted a star over
my eye yesterday and asteroids on my cheek (despite a weird double-vision thing I have that the
doctor tells me “will resolve itself”…) — I felt
like my old self. Engaged in an activity I love.
I do feel the guillotine though. I go back into the hospital a
week from tomorrow, and it’s hard to not feel like my days are numbered. It’s
hard to not get defensive in advance. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to
do this 4 more times. And yet, this is what they know to do to cure cancer, or
at least send it packing for what they hope is years, if not forever.
So, I try and remain present, if possible, but I know it’s
looming. I have scheduled a bunch of self-care things this week, chiropractor
tomorrow to realign all the sitting in a bed for three weeks issues; a masseuse
that a generous friend gifted me on Tuesday to work out the rest of the kinks;
Thursday, I’ll do work with a friend who’s a professional at inner/spiritual healing to help work out the kinks from the inside as well.
It’s seems hard to try to live normally, and yet, as I saw
yesterday, it wasn’t hard at all — All I had to do was show up. – Plus, I kept the wig. 😉