Forte. Più Forte. (Loud. More Loud.)

April 10, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

It’s come into my awareness again this week the fallacy of
perfection, and its venomous tendrils. The three “p”s: Perfection,
Procrastination, Paralyzation.

I’ve also read that procrastination is simply another way
for us to prolong feeling crappy about ourselves, and to delay feeing proud of
ourselves.

This week, after a conversation with some people of
authority at work last week about my position, my ambition, my vision of “Where
I’d like to be;” after I was given the feedback that, great, sure, put it in
writing and we can talk more… I stalled and dragged my feet.

It wasn’t acres of time, this time; it was only from Friday until
Tuesday evening, when I finally wrote what I needed to
write. But I could see those tendrils curling up around me, waiting to choke my
ambition and self-esteem from me. The tendrils of hopelessness (What the use
anyway), uncertainty (What about acting, my art, moving), and simple
perfectionism (If it’s not perfect, they’ll reject it, and then I’ll be stuck
answering phones the rest of my life, anyway, so f* it, I’ll just watch some
more Once Upon a Time).

It was so helpful to hear other people talk about how this
weed of perfectionism crops up in their lives, marring their attempts at a full
life—it reminds me that I’m not alone, and mostly, as I heard people talk about
their struggle with perfectionism, I sat
there in that chair and decided (for the hundredth time) to go home afterward
and do the write-up I needed to hand in to my superiors.

I heard them battling the beast, I heard them being flayed
by it, and I decided I wasn’t going to let that be me, if only for an evening.

I cannot tell you how many times I make this declaration to
myself. And then, simply do come home
and watch Netflix, or surf Facebook. I wonder if the advent of television and
internet has created in us a generation of procrastinators, but I certainly
know that I am none too helped by it! (in binges, especially)

But for whatever reason (and I won’t call it exasperation,
because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been exasperated, and still done
nothing), I came home on Tuesday night, wrote what I needed to write, emailed
it to a few friends for feedback, and handed it in yesterday.

And here’s the/a reward for overcoming perfectionism: It may not go the way you wanted anyway. I may hear, “Thanks, Molly, but we’re not
in a position to… We’ll think about it for some undetermined date… This just
isn’t in our vision or budget… We just need someone (you) to stay doing what
you are doing indefinitely, or at least through the next year or more.” I may
hear things I don’t want to hear in response to my action on behalf of myself
and my ambition, BUT, the reward is that I get to hear something at all,
instead of sitting, spinning, resenting, foaming, fuming, and … watching
Netflix.

The reward for overcoming perfectionism (and it’s
paralyzation) in just this one moment is that, no matter the results, no matter
the response, I am actually moving
forward, internally, for sure. What this does is tell me that, See Molly, once you did something. One time you took action on your
own behalf, and instead of delaying your good, instead of languishing in a sea
of self-pity, you get to feel proud, pro-active, like a leader. You get to feel
like yourself, instead of like the skin of mutating fear that creeps up yours
and mimics you out in the world.

I don’t know the result of the action I took, externally, at
least. However, having put things in writing and gotten clarity around my
vision and desire, if I don’t get the result I “want” here, in this environs,
then I get to take that information and that knowledge and shop it around
elsewhere. Because I took the action that I did, suddenly, I have a beginning
instead of what my brain and that malevolent skin tells me is an end, a sorry, pathetic end.

Finally, I’ll repeat something I heard a long time ago,
which I’ve agreed with and disagreed with over the years: We ask “god” for what
we want; “he” gives us what we need; and in the end, it’s what we wanted
anyway.

I know that what I wanted anyway was clarity and
self-esteem, so, Team: Mission Accomplished.

change · community · faith · fear · growth · prayer · trauma · vulnerability

Witchy Woman

April 1, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I’ve been back to reading through that Louise Hay You Can
Heal Your Life book before bed. Just
reading through some of the affirmations, saying some of them out loud.

I’ve also begun more consistently reading my Tarot cards,
pulling one daily.

And, it should come as no surprise to you that I have variously: burned sage,
taken a bath in a blend of “protection” salts, participated in a sweat lodge,
buried letters to G-d, dissolved some in the ocean, carried rose quartz in my
jacket pocket, and burned a blend of incense powder mixed for me by a man in a
dress.

When I was in college, I took a class on Witchcraft in Literature. I don’t remember much from it, except what the classroom looked
like, and probably that most of the classmates were women. I know it’s not
gender specific, but I feel like in the teenage years, many women (or those
that I’ve come into contact with) delve in the occult for a little while. I
mean, with the proliferation of movies at the time we grew up that embellished
witchcraft as both hot and powerful, like The Craft, Teen Witch, Practical Magic, and Hocus Pocus (for a humorous bent!). Plus, the 80’s show, Out of This World, where the main teenage girl could freeze time
(though, she was half-alien, not a witch), or Sabrina the Teenage Witch (a far worse show).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(both the movie and the t.v. show) can also be seen as a teenage girl “coming
into her power,” the development and surge that happens in the teens. And I
think there’s something about the occult that offers girls a channel for that
energy; something that offers safe guidelines and something a little special
and weird and creepy and, perhaps, powerful.

I’m not saying I believe in witchcraft; I’m saying I believe
that we all want to believe that we have the power to change ourselves and our
circumstances, whether that’s through spells or prayers or good karma or electro-shock
therapy.

And I want to believe that I can divine some information
about the world and myself through things like shamanic journeys, meditation
circles, and, yes, Tarot cards.

Recently, I’ve been pulling this one card consistently. The
8 of swords depicts a woman bound with ropes, blindfolded, and surrounded by a
barricade of swords. In the distance, there is a castle on a hill. At least in
my book of interpretations, the meaning of this card is restriction, hopelessness,
accepting inaction. The last paragraph of the description says, however, the ropes are not that tight around the woman; she
could ostensibly wriggle free out of them, knock over the swords, and head
home. She, the figure, waits for someone to save her, instead of acting to save
herself.

The words “accepting inaction” have been echoing for me
these few days and weeks.

I met, post-cancer, with a therapist who works with PTSD. I
described to her the vision/metaphor I currently have of myself:

There is a birdcage. I (forgive me) am the bird. The door to
the cage is open. Has been open for some time. I walk out of the cage into the
freedom, but the freedom is too big, too unknown, too scary, and so I walk back
into the cage.

I know I am not alone in describing self-made prisons. I
know I am not alone in cleaving myself to the devil I know rather than the
devil I don’t. I know I’m not alone in fearing that there’s a devil at all out
there in the wide scary world. (Not like THE Devil. Pretty sure I don’t believe
in that!)

But I have become restless in this self-made prison. In the
looking at things that interest me, and backing away. In the participating in
things I love for a little while, and quitting. In exploring what kind of work
I want to do, and procrastinating indefinitely.

And, I do know that countering fears with affirmations is one of the only tools I have in my belt
right now to help me wriggle out of those self-made, and self-maintained,
bonds; to bend a crowbar behind myself and shove/encourage me back out of the cage, where, underneath all the doubt, I know it is not only safe, but inviting, enlivening, and waiting for me to play/lead/inhabit.

So, if I have to meditate to a drum that “mimics an alpha state” for 20 minutes, tack the Sh’ma AND a cross
to my wall, or pull a card from a deck to help me feel like I have support and
protection as I try, so very falteringly, to enter this wide scary world, so be
it.

abundance · dishonesty · faith · fear · honesty · recovery · trust · truth

Horse Thief

March 31, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

There’s a phrase I heard when I got to certain rooms in San
Francisco: If you sober up a drunken horse thief, you still have a horse thief.

Lately, I’ve been getting the chance to acknowledge where I
still act from Horse Thief tendencies and impulses.

I was a thief in High School, probably in Junior High, and
actually come to think of it, in college, too. It was sort of “a thing” me and
my friends did, to see what we could get away with, and also, because we were
only stealing from big conglomerate stores, we felt (or at least I did)
justified, since they were always screwing the little man anyway – What did they care if Maybelline mascara went into my pocket? That’s a fraction of a cent they’ve lost in profit, and I’m standing in solidarity with the
Chinese children they hired to mark the packaging. (Riii….ght.)

I was, however, pretty clear about not stealing from people, only from these big stores, because there was a line I felt I still had to
maintain, a standard of behavior I adhered to. It wasn’t right to take from
little mom & pop shops, or to steal from actual people I knew. That was wrong.
Stealing from the mall was just expected, written into their budgets in some
corporate headquarters somewhere, and therefore right — or at least okay.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve stolen anything. Probably
since before I moved to SF. But that doesn’t exactly mean that the Horse Thief
has been repentant or ousted.

I have all the stores I’ve “reappropriated” from on a list
that I am slowly chipping away at, to make amends to, either by sending in
money for items, or “paying it forward” by donating to a charity. Each will
have a conversation with a trusted friend around it when the time comes.

But, I’ve lately recognized that there is still a pattern of dishonest behavior and thinking that infiltrates my current life.

When I was working through a temp agency while in grad school,
I got to open the invoices to see what the company I worked for was actually paying the temp agency, and it was certainly higher than the rate at which I was being paid by said agency (which, duh, is how they profit). So I approached the company I was working for, and asked if they
would just hire me under the table. That way, my Horse Thief logic went, it was
cheaper for them, and I would get a few more dollars, since it wasn’t going to
be taxed.

Um… Yeah. That didn’t work out so well. Even though I was
“working a program,” even though I could talk about the necessity of honesty
and integrity in life, and seriously really mean it, this dishonesty was
creating holes in my abundance, and in my sobriety/serenity.

Plus, I got caught. The temp agency found me out, and called
the company where I was a receptionist, and when I answered the phone, she
“surprisedly” said, Oh, Hi Molly…

Oops.

So, there were emails and phone calls and conversations
between the HR at the company where I was and the temp agency I’d spurned.
After talking with some trusted friends, I wrote an email to the agency, owning
up to my part of this deception.

And, in the end, when tax time rolled around, I got a 1099
from the company, anyway, since I’d earned a significant amount in the 5 or so
months I temped under the table for them, and I had to pay taxes on that money
anyway. Which meant that I ended up earning less from my time there than I
would have if I’d just continued working through the proper (read: legal)
channels.

I have a moral line about not stealing pens from work, or
using stamps I didn’t pay for. But there are other ways in which this fear of
not being taken care of, this fear that my needs will not be met creeps out.

This poisonous fear seeps into my life, and I make choices
based on that fear. And eventually, I am screwed by it.

It’s been interesting to notice that this is a pattern that
has continued into my adulthood. It’s certainly rooted in a long-held belief
that my needs will not be met. That if I behave along “proper” channels, I
won’t get or have enough. That if I behave by rules and laws that are set down, I will not be taken care of.

So, I better get my fearful, sticky claws into something, I better come up with some better, sneaky ideas, or
else I’ll be eating ramen again.

I get it. I see it.

And I hope to change it.

A trusted friend does a lot of work with affirmations to
counter fear. So, this morning, I used that tool:

I fear my needs will not be met.

I trust that the Universe cares for all my needs.

I fear that no one is looking out for my good.

The Universe cares deeply for me.

Sure, maybe it’s bunk. But, right now, I don’t know another
way, except to “act as if” these things are true. To try to behave in a way
that really does align with my morals, instead of with my fears.

I have also heard that, with every bought of true honesty or clarity or bill paid on time or phone call from creditor answered, that we are closing up the holes in the sieve that holds abundance. Each time my covers are pulled, I get the chance to be more honest, and thereby the chance to mend the bucket into which the fullness of life is surely always being and going to be poured.

I cannot turn a drunken horse thief (or a sober one for that
matter) into an upstanding citizen. But I can try to trust that I don’t have to
be one anymore.

adulthood · adventure · anger · courage · family · fear · healing · health · hope · love · perseverance · relationships

Nature vs. Nurture.

March 23, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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Being raised by a psychoanalyst, I grew up believing pretty
strongly in Nurture vs. Nature. I believed adamantly in Tabula Rasa, and that
every aspect of my personality was developed in reaction to my environment.

Eventually, even through a Psychology Major (that switched
to Minor), I began to admit that perhaps there were a few inborn traits that one
has out of the womb, but the majority of a human’s personality was forged out
of their experiences before the age of 3.

But, I have to admit that the aggregate of my own lifetime
experiences, up to and including a Leukemia diagnosis, has begun to make me
admit that perhaps there is something more to the Gattaca within us. Perhaps
something like perseverance, courage, and visceral insistence on life has more
to do with my wiring as “human” and as “Molly,” in particular.

I would never peg myself as someone brave or bold. I don’t
charge into the fray, or head corporations, or tie myself to a tree before a bulldozer. I have few
of the outward markings I would associate with leader or change-maker.

But I am compelled to admit that my undertakings as an adult
do, in sum, mark me as someone willing to rage, to rail, to fight, to excavate all in the
service of healing.

Though perhaps if my formative years hadn’t been what they
were, I wouldn’t find the need to heal from much. Perhaps.

I had a therapist a few years ago who said something novel
to me: Your dad is not a courageous man. This struck me as apocryphal. My father, the one so quick to temper and anger and
rule of iron fist was not brave? Isn’t that what violence is—bravery? Isn’t
that what power is—anger?

Yet, her words rang so unbelievably true. Like seeing the Wizard behind
the curtain in Oz. I know now that that kind of anger does usually hide and
house one who is critically afraid. I mean, I usually wear my black leather
jacket when I’m feeling more insecure, as if its made of chainmail instead of
leather.

But, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday, answering
her question about why I was in Victoria’s Secret the other day. I told her
about my upcoming trip to meet my consummate penpal—and she squealed. She
thought it was so bold and brave, and adventurous, and ALIVE. She rattled on
that this experience is going to help so many other people down the line, help
women to see that life is meant to be
lived.

It sounded so epic when she mirrored it back like that! And
maybe it is. And maybe it’s not.

But, I do know that with every meditation, every alternative
healer, every inventory, every striving, every goddamn picking myself up, that
I am taking something back. That I am reclaiming something. And if that impulse
to charge onward, in light of all that is, is called courage, then I guess the
Wizard granted me a heart on the day that I was born.

action · adulthood · beauty · courage · fear · self-esteem

Isn’t It Ironic, Don’tcha Think?

March 18, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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The curvature of our lives is funny, isn’t it?

Like most people, I was an acne-riddled, ugly-glasses
wearing teen with unruly hair and a limited rotation of ill-fitting clothing. I
remember when I was 16, I was at a retreat for Jewish teens, and we were sitting
around in a circle on some Saturday night, singing the service that ends
Shabbat. All us nervous, hormone-addled teens in one place! And there started a
“kissing chain” around the circle–on the cheek, modest-style. The boy sitting
next to me had to kiss me two times as the chain came around twice, and I remember hearing him “whisper” to his
friend that he tried to kiss a spot that didn’t have a zit on it, but he
couldn’t find one.

Kids are mean, sure. But, there is a thick stripe of “Ugly
Duckling” syndrome down the center of my story.

Once, in middle school, in a stroke of self-esteem beyond
that of usual, I answered a modeling casting call at Nordstrom. My mom
supported me and came with me, and I just filed behind some other girls in a
line in front of some auditors, hoping, Kate Moss-like, that someone would
pluck me out of my angsty teen life and whisk me away to something fabulous and
without blemish. (You can assume that didn’t happen.)

What happened instead is I got to live the angsty life I was
handed, and nearly 20 years after that cattle-call, be asked to do it again.

I still haven’t sent in those photos to the real-people
modeling agents. But, (maybe) I’m closer. The only time I was ever approached to
be a model was when I’d shaved my head when I was 21 and was wandering around
Manhattan looking for a savior. A man approached and said he was an agent for
bald models, and his business card did actually have a bald model on it.
(Instead I went to the asylum, but I digress.)

This Christmas, while busking in Union square, I was
approached by another modeling agent, and I followed up with a call, and was
told to submit my photos. To send them by print. There’s so much resistance to
this! Is it the Ugly Duckling saying they’re only conning you? The girl with
the acne no one will look past? Or just the ennui and hopelessness of a woman
engaged in a professional life that saps her energy and enthusiasm?

In whatever case, and whatever resistance, it’s not up to
me, is it?

I had a mentor once tell me, G-d will either fulfill your
desires, or take them away. I sort of believe that. The urges and wishes and
ideals and fantasies that we have; either they’ll morph into something else;
they’ll fade; or they’ll be met. How many of us desperately wanted that X Y or
Z, and having not gotten it, later exclaim, jeez, I can’t believe I really wanted
that!

What I’ve really been thinking about though, is the irony of
having become someone people consider beautiful, which has necessitated the
desire to be seen for more than my
beauty. I find it a cosmic raspberry that after so many years of being the
awkward, painfully shy, unseen thing, I now want people to stop seeing me for my exterior
alone.

I think your soul is sexy, he wrote me.

Followed surely by a nice bought of sexting. But, Still.

What a curvature of life, eh? To become the beauty you
always wanted to be, but then want people to look past it? It’s odd; I dunno, I
don’t have a more well-thought out way to put it.

But, I also know that part of what makes my soul sexy is that
I do things that scare me, like submit photos to agencies. I do things that I
don’t feel worthy of, and hope the self-worth follows by the esteem of doing
them. Right actions lead to right thinking, and all that.

I would like to list this check-box on my list of life
participations; just for the fact of trying. Like the acting; just for the act
of trying. I hear the screaming teen inside me saying This is WEIRD, but that’s okay. I can drag my feet and do it
anyway.

anger · fear · growth · recovery · sex · sexuality · the middle way · vulnerability

Discovering The Third Thing

March 14, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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A or B, Molly? Your life depends on it. Is it black or
white, Molly? Your life depends on it. Is Dad coming home right now, your life
depends on it. Is he in a temper-FIGURE IT OUT-your life depends on it. Is Mom
crying? Is she still alive-LISTEN HARD-your life
depends on it. Is it black or is it white, Molly, YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

A woman I met once and have never seen or sought out again asked me, What if there’s a “third thing?”

Much of what I hear is about how we break things into black
and white, but that life is not that way. There is an indoctrination, as above
italicized, that makes us learn and perceive that life is and must be black and
white as a way of survival. And in adulthood, that must be unlearned.

What folks have suggested as remedy to this, however, is
“life is gray,” shades of grey (no allusion intended). That it’s somewhere in
the middle.

Years ago, I decided that “grey” didn’t work for me in this
metaphor, too bland; that instead, “not black and white” could be interpreted as “in
color.” Life isn’t “black and white;” it’s in color.

But, this woman told me something else entirely. That it’s
something I haven’t even conceived of before.

We were not talking about life. We were talking about sex.

I was telling her how I’ve vacillated in my life between the
icons I have named Betty Crocker and The Vixen. How I swing the pendulum of
myself from one to the other; bored by the first, burned by the second.

I was emailing with a friend yesterday about how some of situations I find myself in at the moment are reminiscent of something that happened in my early twenties,
a situation I got myself in as a result of swinging from Betty Crocker to the
Vixen, to disastrous results. She pointed out a few places where things are different now, that I’m
sober, older, and it was just plain different.

But there is a rubber band that pulls this circumstance
back to then, a sense memory that lashes out, OH! UH-UH we’ve done this, lady!
Remember!! Remember the outcome, the consequences, the disaster! Warning,
warning!

She tells me it’s not the same. I remind myself of the year;
I look around myself at who and where I am. And it’s very freaking hard to
separate the past from the present.

Which brings us back to the trust I’ve been working on. To
trust that I am different, that I am safe, that I can allow myself to
experience life in a different way today. That I am able to be the third thing.

It only occurred to me today that perhaps the person I’m
becoming as I sort all this out is the
third thing, neither the puritanical Betty Crocker (who avoids all human
contact in search of the unicorn idea of a risk-less relationship), nor The
Vixen (who overrides all hesitance toward prurient wantonness).

I had my first initial phone call yesterday with a woman who
works somatically with trauma. We’re scheduled to meet next Wednesday, the one
day I have off rehearsal during “tech week.” As helpful and warm and not really “getting into anything” as our
conversation went, my body closed up tighter than an asshole over a flame. And, this is why I want to see her! (duh.)

I used the words “ingress” and “egress” a lot in my morning
pages today, the allowance of things to enter and to exit. Currently, I allow some of
myself out, but I refuse anything entry. Or, if I allow entry of someone or some
emotion, then I refuse them anything in return.

The two-way mirror of my skin. One side can look in, the
other cannot look out.

The third thing, here, would be a window, instead. (Don’t
even suggest something without a pane; I might deck you.)

commitment · fear · intimacy · love

The Lionhearted

March 13, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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I didn’t want a cat. I sat for a friend’s once, and their
constant up-in-my-grillness was off-putting to my isolatory nature.

My aunt had cats; was/is the stereotypical cat lady,
unmarried, living alone, 3 cats of circulation when one dies.

They’re nice and sweet sometimes, and good for petting. But all
that fur! Forget it.

My ex had a cat. It was good enough, companionable enough,
but there were so many things in his apartment that identified him as a cat-lover/owner: the framed New Yorker cover
with a cat; a magazine about cats (that he swears his brother bought him as a
gag-gift); the industrial vacuum meant for all that fur.

It took me almost a year to put up curtains in my last
apartment, because to do so would mean that I couldn’t abscond in the middle of
the night. I would have to unscrew it slowly, with meaning and intention; I was
committed to something.

Commitment was the largest reason I didn’t want a cat. Not the commitment of keeping it fed and littered, but the commitment of
caring.

My brain would go immediately to, “I don’t know how I could
deal with its death.” The hypothetical death of a hypothetical cat. The
consequences of feeling that deeply for anything frightened me.

And yet. During the time I was with that ex, I moved to
Oakland from San Francisco for grad school, and I was living a bridge away from
anyone I knew, and things were a little lonely here in my studio apartment.

After a side-track story I won’t tell now, I ended up adopting Stella from the SPCA. A green-eyed (no freaky yellow-eyed cats please!), silken, mottled
brown/black two-year old cat.

She has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to
me.

She’s not an in-your-face’r. She’ll hang when she wants to,
and over the 3 years we’ve lived together now, she began to sit more and
more in my lap as I meditate in the morning or nap on the couch. Over time,
we’ve grown more accustomed to one another; and over time I’ve gotten to see
how much my love wants to express itself.

I say things that only my mother must have said to me in
endearment. They come naturally and without thought, these names and phrases
that I whisper to her, or chide at her. The sweetened names of love that were
hanging out inside me until there was a vessel in which to pour them.

I didn’t want a cat.

I didn’t want the responsibility of love.

But it’s opened rooms in me where there were only walls.

courage · fear · happiness · healing · love · relationships

"Forget Your Troubles, Come On, Get Happy"

March 11, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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So you’ll have to bear with me – I haven’t totally got this
one down.

I was on the phone with a trusted friend Sunday morning. I
was giving her the update about this potential Cupcake Situation, the pros and
cons, the merits and demerits. The gnawing maw of my brain.

I fully expected her to say something like, That sounds
reasonable. It makes sense to not do something that has potential negative
consequences. Yes, continuing on the path of solitude sounds like the right one
toward health.

Instead, she surprised me by saying, Life is meant to be
lived.

Instead, I surprised myself by beginning to cry.

Somehow, hearing her “permission” enabled me to feel what
was actually happening in my heart. The joy, the longing, the contentment, just
in the idea and fancy of anticipating being with this Cupcake.

And I said something to her, actually I sobbed something to
her, that I’m not sure I ever admitted or understood – “I don’t know how to be
happy.” And I cried some more.

I don’t know how to let myself be happy. To admit good
things. To trust that I’m able to face good things – that I even think I have
to “face” them is evidence that I still think happiness is something to be
battled.

In my early experience, happiness wasn’t reliable, and so
you mistrusted it. You forced away the “temptation” of happiness because if you
allowed it in, it would corrode. Better to be mildly miserable than submit to
betrayal.

It’s astonishing to me that I’m still facing this same
demon. This same old pattern of beliefs and behavior. But then, I must be at a
place where I’m ready and able to uproot it in a new way.

I read an email from the Cupcake (the person I’ll potentially spend a few days with next month) telling me that he welcomes the chance to
melt with me, open his heart, sit in lazy contentment. That the idea of doing
so stirs something in him, emotionally and physically.

When I read this (for like the 8th time), I was walking
outside my work, trying to get away from the gnawing Pro/Con-ing catalogue
inside me. I reread it on my phone on a side street in Berkeley. I had to stop walking. I crouched
down in the sunny afternoon, held the screen toward my face, and felt the same feeling I would have on Sunday when my friend said, Life was meant to be lived.
Something moved, something heard this. Something within me allowed the
possibility for even a moment to trust that someone was honestly saying, Let’s
be happy. I offered myself the possibility that I could be happy.

And on that sidewalk, my eyes filled with salt water, my brain
temporarily ceased arguing, and I felt in my heart.

I just felt in my heart, being in it. hearing it, feeling
it. I was moved.

I don’t know how to be happy. It’s not something I know how
to do. Like a learned skill, this will be something I will have to try my hand
at, and be inexperienced at, but try anyway.

I’ve been amazingly dexterous at learning all kinds of new
things–grad student, performance poet, bassist, actor, painter–physically at
least. Emotionally, I’ve learned how to be more honest, how to have more
feelings than anger, depression, and mania, how to be more visible and trust I
won’t be shot.

I don’t know how to be happy. But if my emotional responses
are any indication (whether this whole Cupcake thing comes to fruition or not),
I am apparently, on some level, ready to see if I can be.

And I hereby give myself
permission to try.

commitment · discovery · fear · performance · theater

Give me some wool, and I’ll spin you a yarn.

March 7, 2014 Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

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I have another audition tomorrow, this one for the role of a
mother in her early 40s. And I’ve been thinking about who I can believably “play,” what my
“place of life” would be as a woman in her early 30s? I feel too young to be
the queen, to be the mother of adult children, but I feel too old to be the
ingénue or the lover. But I suppose I fall more easily castable into the latter
category. Lover, Romantic, Unwed.

So many actors have sordid pasts and upbringings, making it
easy and understandable to want to lay on the skin of someone else, the idea
that it’s easier (safer?) to be someone else than it is to be yourself. However, I think
I’m realizing that to take on the skin of someone else means that I have to
find that person within me, those feelings, and then face them, understand and
inhabit them. And not all of those feeling are easy for me to have. Not all of
those parts are natural for me to play.

And I think that’s why I love it and am challenged by this
so much. (With all my scant experience!) I will have to find the romantic within me, the tyrant within
me, the tortured within me. I’m going to have to let my internal flashlight
illuminate corners I’d rather mark off-limits. Some of those corners I avoid
because I’m afraid I’ll enjoy them too much—Who doesn’t want to dissolve into
rage instead of pulling yourself up to decency? Who doesn’t want to allow the
gnawing chatter to become a cacophony and play itself into Ophelia’s mad death?
How easy it is to go mad; how very hard to stay sane.

And, surely, some of the corners of experience I may be
asked to play, I don’t want to go into because I’ve spent so many years
avoiding what they demand of me. To fully feel passion, desire, or even (don’t
say it!) love?

It’s amusing to me that once I changed up my blog settings
to list the subject tags in order of frequency, “love” became the first one. I
think it makes sense if you put before it the words: “avoidance of,”
“challenges with,” “attempts at,” “softening to,” “fear of.” But, just “love?”
Hm. Yes, it makes me smile.

I also know that acting isn’t therapy, and can’t be primarily intended to process my own demons or fears through its use, but I can’t help
but imagine there will be some side-effects like that. I imagine that I’ll get
to see where my flashlight is happy to go, and where it isn’t. Where I’m
naturally at ease, and where I’ll have to cull my acting chops.

But, isn’t that the thrill of anything new? Isn’t that the
thrill of being alive? Being challenged to feel, do, and be that which you
weren’t able to before, simply by the act of showing up with intention?

I have no idea how long or wide this acting path will be for
me. But the caves it is already calling me to explore are worth the
price of admission.

change · fear · perseverance · sex · sexuality

Nightmares / However…

March 5, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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Nightmares

I have noticed over the last several years that I only get
nightmares when I’m about to change something really big. When something really
big is changing. I never had nightmares growing up, or none to really take note
of, but in the last near-decade, I’ve had about 3 or 4, plus last night’s.

The first time it happened, I was still in therapy, and was
able to process with her. I came to realize that, for me, my nightmares were
like big boogeymen waving me away from the work I was doing. However, instead of
being something that frightens me away from the path I’m on, I realized that if my subconscious
is going to pull out all the stops and create a massive ‘hell dimension’ for
me, then I must be doing something right. I must be on the right track toward
health, and the scared part of my ego, my habits, my core fears must be truly
shaking in their boots that I’m about to abandon or walk through a pattern that
doesn’t serve me. I am about to shed whatever it is that’s blocking me from my highest
good, and, altruistic though the nightmares’ goal is (to “keep me safe” by
holding me back in a stagnant pattern), that pattern I’m working on is about to go.

For me, nightmares are actually a guidepost that I’m on the
right path. And desperately terrifying though they are in the moment, and in
the moments after I wake in a panic, like last night, I do know they are simply
showing me that the work I’m doing is poignant and positive.

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes.

However…

To continue the thoughts from yesterday about discovering
the necessity of wearing or having some kind of buffer between me and the
untoward thoughts that come toward me as I walk in the world, there is a
rub—and not the good kind.

The rub is that I also want to be seen, I also want to be
attractive, I also want to be asked out. So, if I conclude that in order to be
“safe” in the world, I have to put up a boundary between me and you, then that
means that I’m deterring positive as well as negative attention.

And then I’m back to the thought of being “the undefended
self,” a book I’ve heard the title of, and am loathe to pick up (yet).

How to walk in the world with enough self-ownership that I
don’t feel corroded by the lascivious thoughts of some, but attract the
interest of others?

I mean, surely, we all know, (well, for me this is true) –
physical attraction means a lot on first impression. But, if I’m walking with
some kind of “you can’t touch me” attitude, then the guys who I may want to touch me will get that message too.

I don’t know the answer yet. I think much of it will lie in
the work I’m doing and starting to do that caused my nightmare in the first
place—around healing my relationship with sex, sexuality, and trust. I probably
don’t know the answer yet, because I’m trying to divine it out of the same
information and pattern I’ve always had and used.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard: “You can’t fix a broken brain
with a broken brain.” And extreme and diagnostically critical as that notion
may be…

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes.