Category: connection

change · connection · disconnection · envy · friends · friendship · health · relationships · scarcity · self-care

The Facebooks.

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Yesterday, I saw another of those articles posted by a
friend on Facebook about the rose-colored facade that Facebook allows us to put out to the
world. About how we only see photos of grand trips and lattes with foam hearts drawn in
them and that uber cute one of you and your partner looking so darn happy.
This article and those I’ve seen like it tell one side of
the truth, but not all of it.
I didn’t comment on my friend’s article, as his friends were aggro-commenting about Falsebook and how pissed it makes them that we don’t see the “whole” picture of others’ lives. I didn’t want the agida
of the notifications if I put my thoughts there, so, I’ll “post” my comment here:
Facebook saves my life.
When I was first diagnosed with cancer in an ER and led
right upstairs to start intensive chemo treatment, there was no packing of
stuff, no notifying loved ones or having some hippie prayer circle. I called my
mom, and then I called one of my best friends and asked her to do the major
task of letting Facebook know, because that is – whatever feelings we all may
have about modernity, technology, and disconnection – where my friends “are.”
Because she did that for me, my friends knew where to find
me, and what to bring me, and how to get in touch with me.
A few weekends ago, an acquaintance – someone I’ve met only a
few times, someone I could say “hi” to “in real life” but
wouldn’t call “in real life,” aka a Facebook friend – put up a call to go to a local lake for a
lazy Sunday afternoon. I had no plans that day, I’d never been to that lake,
and I took a chance at spending time with someone I barely knew by letting her
know, via the Facebooks, that I would love to go with her.
We did, and I made other new (Facebook) friends. I had a
wonderful and, for me, an adventurous afternoon.
When I got frustrated with my job search recently, I threw my resume
up on my “wall,” and two people have given me actual live leads for work, and
two have contacted me to offer me help on my resume. I’ve looked at this thing
so many times, I see only dot matrix anymore.
When I couldn’t stand that I don’t know if I’ll get to go
camping this summer once rehearsals start, I let the Facebooks know I wanted to
go, and now will be going into the wilderness with “real” friends, having a respite from this
social network thing that brought this trip to fruition in the first place.
I get to see that my college roommates aren’t dead, what
state they live in, how many kids they have. I get to see friends from my high
school musical days launching and thriving in their artistic careers. I get to
read the witticisms, intrigues, and slush that my friends post, and I get to
feel that I know they’re safe.
I have learned about friends’ weddings, deaths, job changes,
moves, births, divorces, successes, struggles, and banalities. And they get to
learn about mine.
I won’t say Facebook is a benevolent entity, wanting us to
all feel connected in a disconnect era. I won’t say that this is the “best” way
of keeping in touch with people you’ve lost contact with, or moved a few zip
codes from. But it does work.
I can also see it from the side of the aggro-commenters, lambasting the system for creating a culture of constant “less than.”
I can admit that just the other day, I Facestalked a
crush’s ex, and felt the creeping compare/despair that I see so many of those
Facebook “expose” articles lament. But, what I did as I felt that gnaw of “not
as pretty, funky, cool, yoga-y, artistic, traveled, fun, witty” creep
up was not to skewer Facebook for allowing her to present an awesome and curated
face to the world. What I did was LEAVE HER PAGE.
For the love, peoples. It’s certainly not that I don’t also fall prey
to that depraved inclination and curiosity. I’ve Facestalked ex’s new
girlfriends (or wives), and I’ve Facestalked crushes exes. I’ve kept tabs on who’s “talking” to who and leaving little digital roses on one another’s doorstep. But, what I’ve
learned to do by now is to remember that a Facebook wall is NOT the whole story, but EVEN IF IT IS, it’s NOMB (none of my business).
Other people are allowed to have happy lives, curated,
sappy, enviable. And the choice I get to make is whether I want to engage with
envy, not with Facebook. 

avoidance · community · connection · courage · disconnection · fear · laughter · life · love · meaning · messiness · purpose · vulnerability

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face." Scott Pilgrim Vol 4

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As those of you who follow (or haven’t yet hidden) my
Facebook know by now, I’m actively looking for work. I have been, but some dam broke
this week, and I’ve pulled out more of the stops – those stops tend to look
like “fear of looking bad, desperate, needy.” However, SURPRISE! I feel those
things, so I guess if I look that way, then I’m just looking honest, huh?
I’ve been reading back into some of Brene Brown’s work
lately. I have her book The Gifts of Imperfection, and have been reading through the Amazon previews of her other two
books, most especially, Daring Greatly, because it’s got her own biographical story at the beginning that includes the following exchange: 

      Therapist: What does it [vulnerability] feel like?
      Brene Brown: Like I’m coming out of my skin. Like I need to fix whatever’s happening and make it better.
      Th: And if you can’t?
      BB: Then I feel like punching someone in the face.
Nonetheless, what she goes on to discuss is the virulent necessity to
be vulnerable in order to achieve anything of worth, mainly love, connection,
and compassion.
People have commented to me often that what I write here is “so
honest.” Which I guess is another way of saying I allow myself to be vulnerable
here. Partly I do this because this is a protected forum. There are many layers
to getting here: You have to be my Facebook friend (or somehow have the link),
and then you have to click on it.
Well, two layers
then!
So, this is a bit of a more private club than public. And I
suppose that I feel brave enough to share this all with those of you who have
leaped those two “massive” hurdles toward connection with me. If you’re this
interested, or amused, then why shouldn’t
you get to see some of me? Which this blog always is: some of me. – It’s honest, but it’s
not my diary, nor my therapist. (Aren’t you grateful!)
I suppose that mostly what I feel about sharing here, and why I feel it’s “safe” vulnerability, is that
you’ve probably felt this way, too. I have heard that feedback many times from people from wildly different arenas of my life and backgrounds and
circumstances.
We all feel the same
way at times. Have felt that way, or simply “get” what it feels like to do so.
In short, we are an empathetic and compassionate community
just by my writing and your reading. We create connection, however zero’d and
one’d it is, in this exchange of ideas.
I suppose I write all this today to say– No, to remind myself that
I have great capacity for courage, authenticity and vulnerability. I don’t mind
telling you about the depths because you’ve been there, and can relate. I don’t
mind sharing my journey into and out of the chaos of my brain, because,
surprise, you all have brains, too!
In this time when things for me feel uncertain and
uncharted, this blog is a constant and a place for me where I know that I can do and
be well. Even when I’m vomiting on this page, and raging into and at it, I know
you’re here, smiling, waiting for me to pull through. Or nodding and saying, Me
too.
And. (Point):
If I have the balls to be as vulnerable and honest as I am
here behind these hurdles, then there is a significantly greater chance that I
can own my authenticity out in the “real” world.
Which I’m pretty sure is what all this mind-fucking job/meaning of life search is about, anyway. 

change · community · connection · courage · fear · isolation · persistence · recovery

Nasty Jenga Partners.

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I wanted to be a botanist. In 8th grade, I decided that if I
were a botanist, I could live in a tree, far away from people. It had little to
do with botany.
It’s funny to see that what I wanted most, isolation, is
what I’ve actually been fighting against most of my life, into the present. For
someone who purports the necessity of community, and told my interviewers that
what underlines all of the work I want
to do in my life is a passion for bringing people together – they sure do scare
the crap out of me most of the time.
Not surprising. Not unique. But funny to have a primary
motivation in my life be the thing that is also hardest for me to let in, let
percolate. I suppose it’s that way for most people. Or not.
I told my therapist the other day that I want to strive
without questioning/battering myself at every step. I asked her if that was
possible, if “normal” people can actually do this? She said, Yes.
I told her that I’d once admitted to a mentor that I was
scared I was too analytical to be happy. I told her I still have that fear. If
at every turn in your life, you hound yourself, where is there room for
happiness, satisfaction, self-acceptance?
Where is there time?
Because time continues to be a mindfuck for me too. I’ve
been typing up this woman’s life stories she’s compiling at a workshop where I
work. The one that’s sticking with me is entitled, “Turning
80.” At 60, her family brought all her old friends from her home town whom she
hadn’t seen in years, and had a big party. At 70, she got together with the
close friends she’d met while living here in the “new” iteration of her life.
What will she do at 80? How will she celebrate? What’s
important?
I was driving my boss’s dad to and from dialysis in San
Francisco several years ago a few days a week for a few months. He was probably
about 80, too, and I asked him the key to life, as he seemed happy and
satisfied enough. He answered, Do what you love, and Travel.
Simple enough… if you’re not also standing at your own heel
questioning the importance and wisdom of all your moves, like a crappy Jenga
partner.
But, my therapist seems to think it’s possible. No. She knows it’s possible for people to go through their lives,
interesting, interested, engaged, without the “itty bitty shitty committee.”
I’ve said that I don’t think that committee ever actually
“goes away;” I just think the volume gets turned down. On good days, it does.
And certainly, I can admit with fervor
that my own self-doubt is light-years (light-decibels?) quieter than it had been.
Because it is those voices – those nagging thoughts to be
better, wiser, travel more, act more, play music more, paint more, engage more,
be friends more, be available more – that serve to do the exact opposite. Leave
me the fuck alone, voices! And the lie is
that being alone is the antidote, is the cure, for those voices. That isolation is the cure for
loneliness.
The lie is that isolation is the cure for loneliness.
Of course I’m not meant to live in a tree, or observe the
apes, or tick away hours in a lab, or in front of Netflix. My primary
motivation for living is to engage with
people, connect with them and help them connect with each other. I am the diplomat incarnate.
“Did you meet so and so? They make jewelry, and you make hand puppets, maybe
you should talk.” “I know someone who just did what you’re looking to do, I’ll
give you their number.” “You’re both writers, bakers, candle-stick makers, let
me help you connect.”
Bringing people together means that I have to be willing to get together with them. I know
my hesitations, I know my underlying reasons and history, I know all the “justifiable” reasons not to. And I know how that looks like me abandoning
relationships, abandoning hobbies, abandoning myself.
But this path has become boring. Not to mention lonely. And
if I’m such an intrepid world/life traveler, then (my breathing becomes shallow as I
even contemplate this) I will have to allow myself to try this other
route, this one called Sustained Human Connection and hope the voices get bored
of me not listening, and fade out.

connection · healing · love · recovery · synchronicity · trauma

How I met my best friend from Long Island in South Korea

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It’s 10 years this Fall since we met. I’d come
off a 14-hour flight from JFK into Seoul. I seem to recall I was actually
picked up by the Assistant Principal of the pre-school where I’d be teaching who drove me the 45 minutes back to the Samsung Apartments. The LG Apartments
were over the hill. 
I arrived to a large 4-bedroom apartment with heated floors,
one Texan, and a Canadian, the two other “native English speakers” who taught
at the school just up the road – or over a fence if you were late and feeling
adventurous. I tore my favorite pants that way.
Further up that road was a mountain spring, where my
Canadian roommate, the one who showed me the short-cut, would refill his water,
in line with agimas, old hunched Korean women with no front teeth who would
cut in front of you no matter how long you, young white person, had been
standing there waiting to fill up at the fresh, cool water tap.
The Texan insisted that I come “into town” that very
first night, before jetlag and culture shock set in. Beer. The great equalizer.
It was halfway through the school year, so the Texan had met some of the other
ESL teachers in the area, one from South Africa, one from Ireland, all in our early to
mid-twenties, all young enough to be stupid and adventurous, but old enough to
have consequences. We celebrated on the first of many nights to come over uncountable
pitchers of piss-water beer, bad games of darts, and laughter
that always got too loud, and if you were me, too sloppy.
About a month into my new life there, culture shock,
homesickness, alcoholism running like a hotshot through my veins, I found
myself hailing a cab in a dark corner of Seoul. Well, I was attempting to hail
a cab. But wherever we’d ended up wasn’t the typical wei-gook (white person)
hang-out, and fading, wasted, and tired, there weren’t any cabs.
This is where we flash forward through the two Indian men
offering to give me a ride home, me saying no thanks; long minutes passing without a cab,
and them coming back; me agreeing to the ride. This is where we flash forward
through them pulling the car over on a lonely stretch of highway, and taking
turns raping me, too drunk and immobilized to fight.
This is where we flash to them actually driving me home, and where I collapse inside my apartment’s front door and begin to wail.
And, by the grace of something I will never quite call
coincidence, this is where Jess walks out of her boyfriend, the Texan’s room,
and comforts me.
She picks me up, I tell her what happened; she offers to
stay in my bed with me, I tell her it’s alright. But the darkness of my bed
is too large, and I pad across the heated wooden floor to their room, knock on
the door and ask her to stay with me after all.
Jess insisted the next day that I go to the hospital. I
wouldn’t have. Never would have even crossed my mind. She came with me to all 4 of
them, because at each we were turned away, because “rape is not an emergency.”
To flash forward over the harrowing and humiliating events
of that day that only compounded the isolation and violation I’d suffered, I’ll
tell you it’s over. And the rest will have to remain the content of therapy
sessions and the slow course of healing, which over the years since I’ve
considered turning toward volunteering at a crisis hotline. But honestly, it’s not over. I’m not over it enough to help others. 10 years later.
Two years later, I lived in San Francisco. Jess lived in upstate New York in a
partially-converted garage next to a washing machine while earning her
Teaching Certificate. 5 years later, she met an old high school-mate at a New
Year’s Eve party. 9 years later, I watched them get married. And three weeks ago,
she had a baby girl. Who I’ll get to meet, and hold, and smell next week on Long Island.
My friendship with Jess is inextricably linked to one of the
hardest events in my life. I’d barely known her before that night, met her
sure, another East Coaster, great. But friends? As dramatic as it is to say,
but real enough anyway, it was while holding the hand they’d botched the IV into
that Jess and I became friends.
It’s accrued and built and become many more colors and
tenors and experiences over the decade, mainly on the basis of a shit-talking,
wise-cracking, overly honest relationship. (Yes, the nurse stuck her hand up
Jess’s vag to pull out the rest of the placenta.) And although it started as it
did, and though I would eagerly and instantly give that experience back–despite how it might
“benefit others”–our friendship is easily one of the great and unexpected treasures of my life. 

community · connection · courage · encouragement · poetry · spirituality

Connect.

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I haven’t much to say today, so I’m going to pull a Melissa
and give you one of my favorite poems.
I first heard David Whyte on the carride home from my annual
women’s meditation retreat perhaps 5 years ago. My friend, in her new and
exciting Mini, maybe even with the top down, decided we were a little too
altered at the moment to listen to music on the drive down the mountains of
Napa, and so put in a CD of David Whyte. I’d never heard of him. Or his Irish accent. Or the way he repeats his own lines when he recites
them, the way he pauses to savor and emphasize words. But, I did that day.
The next time I heard the poem recited, it was in the
hospital, maybe a year and a half ago. The same friend brought a slightly battered, second-hand copy of the David Whyte book named for the poem. The nurse that
day, with her Hawaiian flowerprint scrubs and her own Aussie accent, saw the gift exchange and exclaimed her own
love of David Whyte. So I asked her to read this one aloud to us, and
reluctantly, shyly, she assented. It was so still and lovely in that room then.
When you get a chance to hear him, do it. Till then, reading
will suffice.
            Everything
Is Waiting For You
            Your
great mistake is to act the drama
            as
if you were alone. As if life
            were
a progressive and cunning crime
            with
no witness to the tiny hidden
            transgressions.  To feel abandoned is to deny
            the
intimacy of your surroundings. 
Surely,
            even
you, at times, have felt the grand array;
            the
swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
            out
your solo voice.  You must note
            the
way the soap dish enables you,
            or
the window latch grants you freedom.
            Alertness
is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
            The
stairs are your mentor of things
            to
come, the doors have always been there
            to
frighten you and invite you,
            and
the tiny speaker in the phone
            is
your dream-ladder to divinity.
            Put
down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
            the
conversation.  The kettle is
singing
            even
as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
            have
left their arrogant aloofness and
            seen
the good in you at last.  All the
birds
            and
creatures of the world are unutterably
            themselves.  Everything is waiting for you.
                    David Whyte. listen. (start at 1:19; so good!) read.

acting · career · connection · fun · isolation · laughter · loneliness · love · perseverance

“Just about the time you’re rotting with seriousness or serious boredom, something happens or else you’d die.” ~ Lorine Niedecker, poet

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“The thing about grief,” she told me, “is that something is
broken, but you’re not – and you’ve got to keep going.”
Years ago she told me this, and I reflect on it in so many
situations.
Yesterday, after writing that blog that tore me up a bit, I
had to go assist at a work event, and then head to an audition for a play. I
really wasn’t feeling it.
It’s been two months now since I’ve auditioned, as I’d been cast in a play (yay!), and then turned down for other parts that allowed me the
time to go on vacation. In the meantime, I did go on vacation, and had
elaborate experience and processing about relationships, values, love. I also
got clearer about my career goals, and implemented some action around them at work,
which not surprisingly, I was told last week were great ideas but probably
aren’t going to happen “within the next year,” if at all. So, there’s been
processing around that, too.
In all, it’s been kinda heavy around here. Making
check-points of where I am, where I want to be personally and professionally.
And so I showed up to that audition, late and lost in the hills of Berkeley, with
little more than the feet I was standing on.
But, most times, that’s enough.
God, it was fun. I
really had forgotten that I love this stuff. I’d forgotten the titillation and
excitement, and the nervous sizing-up from the other auditioners, and the
frantic reading of sides before your name is called, wondering if you’re
supposed to do an accent or not.
It was great. It’s less than 20 minutes of life, but it
pulled me back to center, away from the future-gazing, away from the
grief-feeling. I still feel off today, and that’s alright, but for a few
minutes yesterday, I got to do something I love doing, simply for the effort of
trying it. I got to meet other women trying it too, and have a coffee date to
pick one’s brain on the whole “Bay Area Theater Biz.”
It’s strange to get back to this again, this thing that I
just want to do because it’s fun and not because my life or income or goals
depend on it. It’s strange to just have the fun thing simply because it’s
fun. There’s no stepping stone here, no ladder, no life plan founded on it.
It’s an extraneous, avocational, extra-curricular dalliance, and isn’t that so needed right now?
I told you I’ve been thinking about getting back into
band-ing again, playing bass again. Simply for the same reason. I forgot what
it’s like to have fun. To do the things I find fun.
In this time that I’ve been “figuring out” my life and my
strategies and my goals, it’s been satisfying and reinforcing and relieving,
but it hasn’t been fun. In fact, it’s been hella lonely in some ways I don’t
get.
All work and no play, and all that.
But, without really intending to, every single day this past week, I spent time with women friends, mostly
long-established, report-having friends. It, too, reinforced something – that
combination of history and laughter and understanding and ease. It, too, brought me back to a sense of myself, a
little lost in the myopia of “life planning.”
I saw a friend’s post this morning that read, “There’s got
to be more to life than this.”
I replied aloud, “There is.”

adulthood · ambition · connection · death · direction · life · mortality · stagnating

Caution: Lifeguard on Duty

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Today, I think of Death as the figure of the Grim Reaper
lounging by a public pool, a lifeguard. Watching, waiting for the people to
tire, and when they do, reaching in his scythe, and hoisting them out of the
water.
Over the last week, I spent my time with several people I adore who are all in their 30s and 40s and in phases of change in their lives. I
got to witness how they’re handling, adjusting, chafing, and, sometimes, enjoying their lives. And if
I’m honest, I got to witness a good deal of loneliness. (“If you spot it, you got it,” the saying goes.)
Because this isn’t only my story, I will be courteous to allow others their story and their privacy, but it inspired in me a great deal of reflection
over the week about my own life, my own story.
Early in the week, I heard a woman, a stranger, say, “At some
point, we have to give up all hope of our past being different.” There’s a lot
of standing in two worlds–past & present, present & future–that I got to witness this week, and see reflected in
myself. I had a line from Fiona Apple repeating to me on the plane home yesterday:
The child is gone.
I got to see that there is a pivot point in life; that adulthood is more than an age, or bank account, or relationship. It’s a
marrow-deep understanding that the time that was is over. We’re no longer looking toward the top of the mountain and how to get there: it’s now a horizon we are looking toward. There is a plateau in the middle of the ‘natural’
course of life between the climax of our lives to come (if we
get to it), and its decline.
Maybe it was all the True Detective we watched this week!
I don’t mean to be grim, I just mean to be realistic
with where I am standing in my own life. I simply saw the story arc. I heard
the restlessness, the ambition toward something not yet attained, and I
believed for the first time, despite all cancer-awareness and mortality-facing,
that the long life we have is shorter than I’ve known, that the center of that life is closer than I’ve known.
Mostly, I thought about my own ambition toward family and
career. Toward relationship and being “settled” and the timing of all that.
I’ve written before that being in a metropolitan area, I feel less inclined to
think “TICK TOCK” than some of my suburban friends. But, on the heels
of the new job proposal I handed into my work last week for myself, and the
idea that if I spend 7 or 8 years in that job, I’ll be 40, and then be poised
for a more senior management position. Seeing my professional future suddenly chopped up into finite chunks, seeing that I actually do want that kind of trajectory, having the ladder open up to me suddenly, and fucking taking a step onto it
– well… everything else seems to now be broken up into those same finite chunks.
I’ve never had a “five year plan” or a “ten year plan.” I’ve
never known enough about what I want to do to have any path whatsoever seem
like it makes sense to pursue in any certain direction.
There may be “many roads to the mountaintop” and “All roads
lead to Rome,” but I’ve been so stilted in knowing where the fuck Rome is, that
I’ve sat at the base of the mountain, stared at the nailed signpost with its
array of choices, and drawn figures in the dirt with a stick, waiting for one
of them to illuminate or something.
Well, honestly, one of them has, career-wise, and I see the
opening, and I feel myself– well, no, I actually did take a step in that direction at work. And in seeing
that there is suddenly a path that I’m actually on and actually taking, I see
that there are all these other 5 and 10 year plans that I kind of have to be aware of now… and I see what implication that has for life. For
romance, for family, for place.
I see that I’ve sat at that intersection for much too long,
or, simply for as long as I needed to, but now I feel like I have to race to
catch up to the toll of the clock.
I feel like the sense of timelessness in life has
disappeared. That, “eventually” and “some day” are not allowed anymore. And not
really that they’re “not allowed” or “not permitted,” but that there’s just no
room for them. The dreaming must be directionalized now.
This terrifies and goads me. I feel pushed in a way I haven’t.
I feel more certain of what I want in my life, and a bit of a manic thrall
toward doing it. – Sure, All things in time, and All things in balance, but: I have
begun to think that this might be what ambition is; and what it is for. 

community · connection · faith · grace · healing · isolation · laughter · spirituality

Too Hot to Handle

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There’s a maxim around here that goes: G-d will never give
you more than you can handle.
To echo Wednesday, bullshit.
I think this phrase is missing a key point at the end of it: G-d will never
give you more than you can handle with the help of others.
I think G-d or the Universe or life will always give us more than we can handle *alone.* I think, in
fact, that’s the point. In order to be able to handle that which is handed us,
we must reach out for help from
others, or help from “god,” which often comes in the form of help from others
anyway.
I think it’s important that we are given more than we can
handle alone, otherwise, surely, we all would. If we could live like Sandra Bullock in “The Net,” ordering
pizza via the internet, watching a yule log screen saver, and never knowing our
neighbors, we would. But I still think about that movie every time I nod or say
a passing hello to my neighbors: I am not anonymous; I am not alone.
In that movie (sorry, y’all!), Sandra’s character gets
accused of something or other, but no one can identify her, and her identity
gets stolen. No one except one character (her shrink) actually knows who she
is, actually recognizes her. The neighbor says, no she doesn’t think that’s her, even though they’ve
lived in proximity for a dozen years.
What kind of challenge of growth is there in that? If we
were intended to live in isolation, there wouldn’t be all this talk about
connection and community, mehta and helping one another, and my understanding of tikkun
olam (repairing the world) has a lot to do with
eliminating disconnect.
I opined to my coworker, who was listening to Pandora the
other day when one of these new modern radio songs came on (I don’t remember
which one). But it was one that eventually has a chorus of voices yell, Yeah!,
or Hey!. And I theorized that the proliferation of “modern” songs that feature a chorus of voices at some point is a call for
connection, to refill and replace the actual being with others—if we hear a
chorus of voices yell, Hey!, on the radio, we want to yell along with it, too. For a
moment, we are also connected to those voices, even though they be
computer over-layed with one another.
This “new” sound I hear has a lot of that, and my opinion is
that they’re also trying to create community in the best way they know how, to
create a moment of connection and a feeling of being a part of a crowd…even
when you’re just driving alone in your car, and the person next to you is as
well.
I do think “G-d” gives us more than we can handle. In the utter inability to handle things on our own, I think
we’re intended to reach out to one another or to a “power greater than
ourselves” for help, for guidance, for support, and mostly, for laughter.
The amount of laughter you can have alone is much less than
what you can have in interaction with each other – like I’ve been saying about
random connections with store clerks or bus passengers: You never know what
will be said by the other, and it creates something totally unique.
This morning, with all of this on my mind, in my notebook is
a printed quote by Anais Nin:
Each friend represents a world in
us,
a world possibly not born until
they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that
a new world is born.
I make it a point to say hi, or at least nod to or acknowledge
my neighbors, to let them see my face, and I theirs, as I rush in and out of the building at
the ends of a long day. I want to be able to recognize, and possibly say hi,
when I see them on the street, and, mostly, I want them to be able to pick me
out of a line-up. 

adulthood · compassion · connection · courage · friendship · healing · leadership · perseverance · recovery · self-love · trauma · writing

Seeing Someone

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Yesterday, I saw my new somatic therapist for the 2nd time,
and we’ve decided to continue to work together, for the next little
while. I don’t know, exactly, what changes will be wrought from it, but it’s
nice to have someone to talk to again who’s third party and kind and uninvested
in propping me up or giving me advice.
Which isn’t to say she isn’t keen on helping me recover and
heal, but she doesn’t really have any agenda except that. Which is nice.
At the end of the session, I said how it galls me that I was supposed to, all these years, work on trauma recovery and grieving, and now I
have to go through recovery from the trauma and grieving of cancer to even
get to that layer of healing and muck.
She said something heartening, which I’m not sure I agree
with yet, but maybe will eventually: That it’s all connected. That if we work
on one part, it’s pulling on all the others. Like a spider web, if I work and
tug and pull and excise over here, it’ll ripple across and affect the other
parts.
We’ll see. As always, the act of showing up is one of hope
that things (that I, my life and how I engage in or hide from it) will
change. I have hope, every time I call a friend or reach out for help or write
this blog – this blog is an act of writing myself out of the darkness.
In my “stats,” I see someone read that first blog called
“Cancer,” so this morning I went back to read it too. So much of what I wrote
about the recovery process was true and so many of the questions are still the
same, if not a little more in focus. My cousin is a doctor in palliative care,
and reads my blog (Hi, L.!), and she emailed me the other day after she’d read
my blog to say she’d never thought of life-threatening illness as trauma
before, but of course it is. And to thank me for the bravery of putting my
process of coagulation up for the help of so many.
It’s interesting to read back to that first blog, and to
read the virulent ambivalence of being “an inspiration.” And it’s something
that came up yesterday in my session: the desire to be someone who holds the
torch, and the desire to stop being the
f’ing person who holds the torch all the time.
The duality of being a leader, if you can call this that
(which, frankly, I’m coming to see it is), is that sometimes you want to just
march along with everyone else. You get tired of standing at the top of the
mountain alone to look out and see where you should go next, what horizons need
staking. You get tired of being the one who charges into the fray – of being
the person, as I wrote in that blog, who just “goes with it,” faces it, accepts
it.
AND YET, of course, for me, I want to be that person, too – I want to be the person who is a light for others; I want to be a teacher and a leader and an inspiration. I
want to exact positive change in the world.
Yesterday, in session, we spoke about vascillating between
both these feelings, and allowing it to be. It’s part of owning the all of
myself: the fearless leader, and the exhausted soldier. The tireless explorer,
and the guy who just wants to carry the horse oats and play cards in the tent.
I think part of my ambivalence is a conscious understanding
of what leadership might mean, too. To recognize, without slipping into
workaholism or unseeing “progress,” that I am, and have always been Both/And.
At some point, I also told her that I’d been scrolling
through my profile photos on Facebook just the other day, since I’d put a new
one up. And I came, on Tuesday, sitting in my car waiting to meet up with some folks,
to the photo of myself at graduation from Mills College in May of 2012. That I
stand with a cap and gown, long hair, and a “radiant smile,” I told her.
I told her how I began to cry, looking at that photo, out of
grief that that girl had to go, and would go, through all this. That she had no idea what was about to happen. That the innocence of that
moment and that glee was … time-limited. To see that girl, to know what she was
about to go through, to feel so sorry that she does and will, and still is, is
grief. To know that my right eyelid will never look quite the same, an eye
infection during chemo causing it to droop slightly, so that I can see it now,
though others can’t. To know what that graduation day meant to me – to accomplish
something, to put my energies in and to excel, learn, progress, and shine.
I suppose, truthfully, I can say the same for my current
profile photo. Almost 2 years later, headshots for theater gigs. The result of
something I’ve also put my energies and monies and progress toward in order to
shine the way I know that photo does, too.
It’ll take some time, as I wrote in that first cancer blog,
to heal from all this. But I am a leader with a torch–though, please,
sometimes, can you be one too?

authenticity · balance · community · connection · family · happiness · joy · laughter · love

Yo’ Mama.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Apologies, reader, for the rain delay (lack of blog)
yesterday. It was this wonderful Spring rain in the morning, and instead of
sitting at my stoic kitchen table, and peering out the window while writing
morning pages, meditating, and composing a blog, I took my mug of
coffee into my studio’s bedroom/living room, tucked myself into the corner of my couch
against the window, and sat next to my cat on the arm of the couch watching the rain make everything greener.
It was warm and cozy, and I just couldn’t bring myself to
break the calm of the spell. The sound of the rain, the steam from the mug,
watching my cat’s chest expand and contract with each breath. Oh, calm! How I
miss you! Oh, rest, you ineffable minx!
I let my thoughts roam over the landscape, and thought how I
missed my mom, when she was here last, and sat on this very couch with this
very cat. And so, I called her. – Strange and funny thing to do, eh? Think of
someone, and actually call them? Not
text or poke or email – but make a phone call – God, it’s luxury and connection
incarnate.
I knew she’d just returned from her annual trip with her
beau to some Caribbean island (Back, Envy, BACK!), and even with only a half hour (barely enough
time for us to scratch the surface of a conversation), I called to find out how
it went.
I love talking to her. Sure, there are times when it’s
grating, and I have to remind myself she’s human with flaws and working on
them. But, on the whole, especially these past several years, talking with her
is more refueling than it is draining – which is a gift.
She’s just hilarious. Our conversations meander, and
side-track, and disambiguate, and non-sequiter, yet always find their way back,
like six degrees of separation. It’s these things that I know I’ll miss most
when she’s gone. And why I’m trying to get what I can now, to call, and make
plans to visit, and email when I can.
Call it morbid, call it realistic. I just want to store it
all. Engage in it all.
Coincidentally, one of the anecdotes from her trip was about
interacting with the armed guard at the airport, the process of going through
customs and homeland security, and the stark seriousness of it all. And, so, as
she is wont to do, she planted a funny sentence into the bleak and rote
exchange with the check-point guard.
He cracked a smile and then cracked wise. Suddenly, it was
an exchange between people instead of
objects.
I told her how synchronistic it was that just this very week
I wrote a blog about learning from her to talk with strangers, to make our interactions
with one another just that much more engaged and alive.
I shared with her my own story about being in Port Authority
around the Bush Iraq invasion, and bantering briefly with a guard walking
through the orange-tiled halls about exchanging his gun for some flowers.
I love that she does this, and that I do it, as I wrote the
other day. It’s part of what makes this life worth living and engaging in, part
of the surprise of being alive. When you engage, you don’t know what will
happen, you’re rolling the ball onto the Roulette wheel. Maybe the person won’t
want to play, maybe they’ll look at you with a “look, I just want to clock out,
please stop talking to me” impatience. But, perhaps, both of your days will be
lightened just that little bit. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only time you talk to
someone all day, as can happen in our disconnected world of modern
conveniences.
I asked my “intuitive” once what she thought about my moving
back to New York-ish to be closer to her, since sometimes it really is painful
to live so far away, to not get to pick up the phone and say, hey that movie’s
playing on 72nd tonight, wanna go? Or, I just saw this exhibit is opening at
the FIT Fashion Museum, meet up this week? Or, can you come with me to Sephora,
I need to find a new blush?
Honestly, it pains my heart to not get to do that with her.
But, my intuitive, whenever this was, a year or so ago, had
a pretty logical answer: If you go, you’ll be her caretaker, and that will not
be good for you.
It’s true. There’s a fine line from being involved to
being too involved, and there’s a
pattern of being her caretaker that I don’t want to repeat from my childhood.
And it’s a role I know I can easily fall into, without strong enough
boundaries: Love as Caretaking, instead of Love as Equanimity.
The jury has been out indefinitely on my move back to the
East coast. It doesn’t have to be New
York. It doesn’t have to look
like moving into caretaking distance. It can look like, “I’m coming down or up
for the weekend, let’s do stuff,” which is easier than “I’m taking a
cross-country flight.”
Luckily, I am not in charge of my destination, I’m only in
charge of doing the work. Perhaps my boundaries become stronger, perhaps I am
better able to stay out of the grooved rut of caretaker. And perhaps they
don’t, and I allow myself to say, That’s okay, Mol.
But, on a rainy Saturday morning, I can still give her a
call, and we can laugh, meander, and enhance one of the cherished relationships I will ever have.