Category: growth

action · courage · fear · growth · relationships

Exile.

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

So, it’s finally happened – i’ve admitted that being in
Oakland is really lonely, and I’m
willing to do something about it. So, I called/texted 6 East Bay friends
tonight to see if they wanted to go to the Saturday night “cool kids” meet up
place, and I got 6 denies. It’s okay. I had to read for school and had a pretty
awesome day of out&about self-care (the trees are finally turning colors –
they look incredible), but I actually took action around it, which was a long
awaited step.
I have a few, mainly school, friends here, but most of the
friends I consider my closest live in San Francisco – yes, only across a
bridge, but that’s an immense distance if you’re on either side of it (It’s
like Brooklyn to Manhattan: you likely ain’t gonna make it) – I remember back
to times when in SF, venturing to Oakland seemed like crossing Egypt. Which
means, if I’m not willing to cross Egypt to hang out with people I know and
love, I better get willing to reach out to people on this side of the Nile …
Sorry, extended metaphor collapse!
I didn’t really realize it until last weekend at that
meditation workshop I went to – which was about relationships with others. I
said it out loud in my “hey I’m Molly, this is why I’m here,” and that was one
of the things that came out. Being so busy with everything is a good
distraction from making friends, and making effort to make friends.
Cuz, that’s what it really boils down to – there are plenty
of people out on this side of the Bay – I just have felt petulant to make any
new friends, and I have 5 years’ worth of friendships built up in SF, and
friendships take work. To form, to grow,
to create trust and intimacy, and I just haven’t been available for it since I
moved over here – it was just too exhausting to think about “starting over.”
In the beginning, last year, when I still had my car, I made
effort to get to the “cool” meet ups, but I didn’t feel any connections (or
make effort to go much beyond a few cursory hey how are yas). Then, I
had no car, and it was much easier to stay cocooned.
It’s pretty funny, cuz the first thought that I had in the
workshop last week which I shared with a friend (as there were two girl friends I hadn’t seen in ages, and just seeing them brought such relief – here
are people who know me, who’ve
seen me grow and change, as I’ve seen them – it was seeing these friends,
feeling that relief, ironically, which made me realize how starved I was for
them, and how non-friend-having I’d been over here). So, I say to one of them,
that my brain immediately goes, Maybe I should move back to San Francisco.
Of course, the simplest of all answers, Molly! That makes
perfect sense! It doesn’t. School is over here, which it’s why I’m over here,
“exiled” in the first place. – Just like the “simplest” answer to my
punctuality/time problem is to get a car, of course…
The simplest answer is to make friends over here. To admit
that it takes effort, and it’s scary, and I still think I come off as terribly
uncool around new people. But, it’s that, or me and my cat on Saturday night,
and I’m at least cooler than that. Well,
not this week, maybe – but I made the effort!
Next Saturday I’ll be in the city modeling in my friend’s
fashion show for her non-profit (that’s cool, right?) ;P but the following
Saturday, I now have plans with a girl I sort of know to go hang out with the
cool people. … in Oakland. 

action · growth · joy · painting · persistence · recovery

I love Mondays. & A Return to Art.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

It’s my least busy day of the week, and I get to see some of
my favorite people. My friend came by this morning and saw my holiday cards
pinned up on a string of ribbon and said, you painted those? or maybe it was you painted those? 😉 in any case, yes. it’s strange, i
still get pretty thrilled when my paintings turn out well – it’s something I’ve
had to cozy up to, work at, come back to.

a few years ago, I’d stopped drawing completely. i had too
long associated doing art with drinking a 40oz – well, whatever the Korean measuring equivalent was (they had 3 types of beer: piss, pisser, and pissest, but, they
worked). It’s funny cuz art was really the one thing my roommates there knew
about me, about my hobbies – besides the drinking – and so each gave me some
kind of drawing or painting set for Christmas.
I lived with two guys, one a Canadian, one a Texan, that
first contract year. Their contracts run February to February because of the
whole Chinese New Year thing; it was October when I got there in 04, and
February of 06 when I left. But that first 4 months, I spent in this smaller
more agricultural town – there was a pig slaughterhouse not far, and the lunch
lady at the school would go into the hills/mountains to get some sprouts and
things for the lunch … the always popular hot dog soup.
My Canadian roommate was the adventurous type, he found the
well of fresh mountain water where you could stand with your jug and some
ancient Korean woman. He also once reported a troop of Korean soldiers passing
by him in the pitch dark one night when he was up the mountains alone.
In any case, when I stopped drinking, I stopped drawing. I
used to sit with my 40 and draw or paint (infrequently) until I couldn’t really
see the lines so clearly anymore, then stop – drawing that is. So I didn’t
know, for a while, how to draw sober.
When I finally did take my things out (the end of my sketch
book is pretty hilarious, lots of fucked up looking women – i’ve always drawn
women, bodies, faces, i don’t know why – maybe cuz it’s what I see most often,
or because there were fashion magazines around when I was little –
but also, women are beautiful. just beautiful, i love drawing them, still). So,
i took my things out about a year and a half after I’d gotten sober and tried to
sketch one of these magazine women. – Utter Fail.
Well, at least, I thought it was at the time. I spent the
longest time trying to get the lines just right, and got so frustrated over and over till i just quit the whole thing
and shoved the sketch pad and pencils back into some drawer. Done.
Then, I started to host parties.
Somehow hosting became the thing that brought out my
creativity again. The first party was a holiday one (Star of David Christmas
Cookie party), and I didn’t do any “actual” art, but I rearranged everything
(moved my bed onto it’s end up against the wall!) and I went to the party
supply store and got some fancy looking sheets of scrap-booking paper and
arranged them on my bedroom wall in a diamond like pattern, and I took all my variously
received holiday cards and taped them in a pattern on the living room wall.
Come to think of it – when I moved into that one bedroom
apartment from the room I was renting in some (very nice) lady’s house in the
outer Sunset is when it all started again. I had all sorts of creative ideas
for the apartment – i got to choose the paint colors, the flooring, and I had a
semi-disaster when I decided to paint half my bedroom a crimson, bordello red,
and left the other half white, as I intended to do a stencil of a damask
pattern in black and white all over the other side … this never came to
fruition, and finally my house painter friend came and painted the rest of the
room red!
The next party was a “Pre-Val Hearts&Stars” and I
created a whole tableau of mushy words in a crossword pattern and cut out each
letter and pasted them on my wall (among sex, lust, and other words, “conceive”
got a few eye-brow raises) ;P But still no painting.
HollerWeen! 2009, I painted. Well, I started with oil
pastels. I did a version of Munch’s Scream
with a jack-o-lantern head instead, and I was thrilled with it. I loved to get
my fingers dirty again, smushing the colors around, messing up, going over, and
just getting in there. It was
wonderful. I did a few other riffs on some famous paintings (“Cece n’est pas
une pumpkin”, and Warhol’s Marilyn with jack-o faces instead. And one in the
kitchen I wasn’t sure was “okay” of Jesus on the cross with a jack-o head…!)
I loved it – and so I intended to do Valentine’s again the following
Spring and I wanted to do something big – really big. I began these enormous
sexy lips with a white flower in between them in oil pastels and colored
pencil. It was daunting, I was frustrated, but I had a party to finish it for.
This was why I had been doing all this
art – I had a party to throw – my party was my muse. And it worked. I didn’t
feel satisfied with that one for some time, it didn’t feel “done” till I got
some good suggestions on it (drawing a flower on a 5 foot piece of paper is
really hard!). But finally, I signed my name on that paper, and it was done
too.
So, then, here I am now (this blog is getting long, and
maybe you don’t care), but it’s wonderful for me to remember how tentative I
was, how frustrated and upset and worried that I’d never be able to draw again.
And now? Over my bed hang 7 sexy paintings of people, body parts, attached to a
garden trellis like a headboard – and like I said, it’s not perfect, there are
things I see that I know others don’t. But I love it. It makes me happy, and
it’s hot.
And now here are my holiday cards, beginning to line my
wall, and they’re silly and fun, and somewhat impressive even to me.
That’s what I love about this work – I continue to amaze
myself especially when I come with a spirit of fun. Creating paintings for a
purpose (a head board, a holiday card, a party) gives me the juice, the north
on my creative compass – and even though, sure, I’m in school for writing, and
I’ve been trying to get in to acting, watching one branch of my creative tree flower
is actually pretty encouraging.
Though, now I drink tea, not Hite.

oil pastel on posterboard 2009
family · growth · poetry · recovery

Excavation: Chapter 3

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

So, it’s been bothering me that I have recently been writing about all this fucked up shit about my family and childhood, particularly now when I feel that I’ve been “doing so much better” and “moving beyond it.” Or rather, truly feeling that it (the past) doesn’t have the same power to inform my behavior and interpretation of the world that it used to have.

And so, I’ve been curious then to see that it’s been coming out so much in my poetry. Then, I had a realization. I had begun a serial poem a few years ago titled “Excavation”, and it has a few “chapters”, Curiosity, and Betrayal, and a 2.5 that I can’t find, But I’d always been curious as to when the next chapters would show up, and, I believe they are. I believe this is the work that is happening right now.

It occurs to me now that “excavation” is not just, dig stuff up and get rid of it. It’s dig stuff up, examine it, and then get rid of it (or lay it aside, or hold it differently, etc.). And so, writing all these poems, I’ve recognized, is the examination. This is what these ancient pieces have to say; there’s a reason they don’t feel current, and that’s because they’re not. They’re like fossils of an ancient emotion or experience, and my work now is just recording them. Acknowledging they exist, validating the experience, and setting them aside with honor, but without the power of tyranny.

I find comfort in this realization; that I am “moving beyond” these old wounds and experiences. But, I actually have to process them (record them) as I excavate them, or else they still have a hold on me, they’re still unexamined, and therefore like the ghosts of souls who still have work left to do on this plane. By writing about them, I am finalizing the work of these experiences. By recording what was written in and on these fossils, I am laying them to a final rest. And so, “Excavation Chapter 3: Examination”, so that eventually, I may come to the next chapter, Freedom.