Look! SHINY!!

January 23, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I downloaded the book yesterday, It’s Just a F***ing Date, by the same people who wrote He’s Just
Not That Into You and It’s Called
A Break-up Cuz It’s Broken.

One of the first things the introduction says is, you’re
obviously stuck in something you don’t like doing, or you wouldn’t have picked
up this book.

I love their books. I first picked up Not that into you when I was living in South Korea. It was a lark,
there weren’t that many books in the English-speaking section of the bookstore,
and I thought it would be more funny than anything to see the stupidity of
these women who didn’t get that these guys just weren’t into them; that these
women needed a book to spell it out for them in order to stop knocking on the
closed, booty-calling door.

And yet. Of course, I got to see that I was one of those
huddled women justifying all kinds of behavior (theirs and mine) in the hopes
of romance. 3 a.m. text = he’s just not that into you. Not able to hang out
sober = he’s just not that into you. Has a girlfriend? Sweetie, come on, where has your self-respect gone?

When I broke up with my last serious boyfriend in 2011, I
was wrecked. Walk into the house and stand inside the front door empty for several minutes wrecked. It felt like every day I was hit by a Mac
truck. And yes, I was the one who ended
it. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t love there, that I didn’t care about
him, about us, it’s just, we weren’t meant to be an us.

My brilliant friend Katie once told me the following: The
thing about grief is that something is broken, but you’re not, and you’ve got
to keep going.

I had no idea how. So I picked up Cuz It’s Broken. It gave some practical advice, funny anecdotes, and
a great dose of compassion. And in time, it healed.

I love their books. So, having read an excerpt from their new It’s Just a F***ing Date book
a few weeks ago, prior to this new dating thing, I thought to look at it again yesterday, considering that my manic phone checking was probably not what the
gods of serenity have in mind.

And here’s some interesting intel I’ve gathered. One of
their questions is, When was the best period in your life, and What was going on
that made it great? My answer was surprising and heartening: the best period of
my life is happening now, the last few months of my life. What’s happening in
it? Playing in a band, signing up for acting classes, going on auditions,
planning a trip to the sea shore with my cousins, buying a new (to me) car,
upgrading my wardrobe, going on a meditation retreat, eating well, seeing live
entertainment, working the steps.

Also, I was using the Gratitude Journal app on my phone that
dinged twice daily to remind me to pause & write something in.

When did this change, it asks? When I was asked on a date by someone
I’m interested in. That’s when.

Suddenly, my center of focus has veered sharply toward
someone else, what they think of me, if I’m approved, if my life activities are
good enough, if my success is enough, if I’m prudent but sexy enough.

In short, what changed is that all the things that attracted
someone to me in the first place, all the things that were bringing me joy, and
self-esteem, and hope, have been tossed in favor of what you think of me.

This is a terrible
recipe for self-love!!

This is not the first time that my eyes have wandered off my
own music chart onto someone else’s in the orchestra of life and dating. I’d
explained to someone once that if life were an orchestra, the most important
thing is that we stay on our own page, with our own notes, listening to
what’s happening around us, but focusing actively on what’s in front of and important
to us. It would be a disaster if the oboe began to play the notes of the viola.

But, that’s what has happened for me before; I get worried, I get crazed.

Not attractive to me. Or to you.

So, what can I actively do to get back to that place, the
book asks next? Well, for starters, I can type some things into my daily
gratitude app. I can choose two photos from my portfolio to send to this
modeling agency that may be a dead-end, but I was stopped on the street for. I
can go back on Theater Bay Area and find another casting call, and I can find
another monologue and start on that.

There are PLENTY of things that I can do to get back to that
place, because in that place I was simply doing what fed me, was important
to me, was fun, and enlivening.

And one of the changes can be to remember, it’s just a
f*cking date and was never meant as the end
goal – the whole “meet you on the way to meeting me” DOESN’T WORK if I stop
trying to actively meet myself, you know.

It’s time for me to allow the mass rush of thinking about
this, the boy, etc., recede into just one part of the array of my life. I have so
much else I was doing that created now as the greatest period in my life—and, really, it is.

affirmations · change · healing · health · love · self-love · spirituality

Synchronici-wha?

January 22, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

When I got sick, my friend Aimee brought a photocopy from a
book she owned to me in the hospital. I told her recently how much this piece
of paper changed my whole experience, and she said she simply didn’t know what
else to do. How else to show up or help, or what to say; she didn’t know if I’d
snarl at the message it had to offer or get mad with her.

It was a page from Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, though I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t
know who Louise Hay was, and certainly didn’t know about that sickeningly sweet
title.

The page had on it a list of ailments and diseases and
physical symptoms. Next to them was a column of negative beliefs that the
author had associated with these symptoms. In the final column were a list of correlated positive
affirmations.

She’d circled, “Blood Problems” and “Leukemia.” Blood meant
joy; a problem with the blood meant, in this cosm of beliefs, “Actively killing
joy,” a “What’s the use?” mentality.

During the time I was sick, another friend brought me an
audio CD of Dr. Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles, which, in part, tracked the general life pattern those who develop cancer have had. As I listened, I tracked with it–to a T. The
final period before cancer, he’d discovered, usually consisted of a period of success, a major
disappointment, followed by hopelessness.

I had just graduated with a Master’s in Creative Writing.
The photo on my graduation day shows me nothing short of radiant, beaming,
joy-fueled. I spent the summer hustling from a temp job to job interviews,
trying, demanding, aching, to get a job in a creative field. Grateful as I am
for the job that I received and am currently in, I felt broken in the weeks
following my full-time employment. I cried as I waited for the always-late bus
to take me home to a dreggy existence.

Three weeks after I was hired, I got strep throat; four
weeks after I was hired, I was told I also had Leukemia.

Call that whatever you want, but when Aimee handed me that
photocopy, and I saw that my life and symptoms were spelled out by someone who
saw this as a commonplace pattern, I also saw that there was a third column
that could help me to reverse it, or to heal it.

I showed that paper to everyone who came in (well, those who
were of the more witchy variety). Some people squawked that it sounded like I
was blaming myself for cancer. But,
that’s not what my understand was, or is. Simply, we are sending ourselves
messages all the time. We can choose to listen and alter our behavior, our
patterns, as best we can; or, we can, like me, continue to shove aspirations,
dreams, life, underneath a
mountain of I can’t, it’s not working, it’s not for me. Who cares.

At any point along this path, we can choose to listen to
what our heart is saying. And listen though I sometimes did, I didn’t heed. I
was too scared. Too scared to fail, to trust, to try thoroughly, to invest, to
change. This isn’t to self-flagellate, I don’t feel it that way; it’s simply to
objectively look at how I was treating myself.

If we don’t listen, these folks’ theory is that our body
will respond with physical messages. And sometimes, those messages will become
billboards, and sometimes those billboards will become atomic bombs.

Thinking about my cancer this way while I was in treatment
gave me hope. It gave me a foundation, a cosmology, a system of belief that I
was already attuned to anyway. (I’d personally always thought that cancer was
calcified resentment, and you can hate me for saying that and disagree if it
doesn’t jive with your own cosmology.)

But this thinking gave me a life-line, literally. If these
were just thoughts, beliefs that I’d harbored, a pattern of self-abandonment
that I’d worn so deeply into myself that my self revolted, then … they could be
changed. I could change. And, the theory
could follow, I could get well.

I needed that so badly. I still do.

There wasn’t anything more scary that I’d ever faced,
because there was no face on it. These theories gave me a name, a focus, a
target. And the target was Love.

“New and joyous ideas flow freely within me.” “I move beyond
past limitations into the freedom of the now. It is safe to be me.”

When I was home sick with a cold in October, one year past
diagnosis, I needed something to do. During treatment, someone had given me a DVD version of
the Louise Hay book, You Can Heal Your Life. I’d shoved it away, thinking it sounded like utter twaddle and too
saccharine, and much too California woo-woo for my taste. But, I was sick
again, and I was scared, and despite all the work I’d done in the past year, I
needed to re-up, reinvigorate my life-line. So I watched the film. Which was a
lot of twaddle-speak, and also a lot of what I believe. It was positivity on
steroids, but, I watched, and I wished that I had the actual book they were
talking about, since it had the full list of ailments in it, and I wanted to
diagnose everything else, and counter it with love.

I walked outside my apartment building that day to go buy
eggs. Outside the building next to mine was one of those moving-out boxes of
free stuff people leave, boxes I love to
sift through.

In it… was a copy of You Can Heal Your Life. Pristine, with the Amazon receipt still in it,
ordered in 2011, likely, by some girl just like me who in a fit of, Yes, I can heal my life, bought it, received it, and shoved it
away, thinking it twaddle.

I picked it up, bought my eggs, went home, and devoured the
rest of it.

Again, you can call it whatever you like. You can agree,
disagree, roll eyes, think I’m anything you might want to call me. But, I used
those affirmations, and I survived a cancer that kills most people. It may not
be causation, but as I continue to use the type of thinking prescribed, I am
happier.

Period.

compassion · dating · fear · isolation · love · self-love

Cookie Monster

January 21, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Otherwise, who would eat the blackened one?

This single line is the first poem of my first chapbook, back in 2010.
The essence of its meaning is the idea that I must eat the blackened cookie in
order to save others from having to eat it. In fact, it meant that I would choose that cookie above others on the savory plate just so
no one else would have to touch it. I would throw myself on that sword before
you even had to see it was there. I would do this for you.

That was 2010. I revisited this question a little while ago,
and asked myself, if not me, then who would? No one, came the answer. No one had to eat the rotten,
blackened thing. No one had to throw themselves on a sword. There is
enough that we can all have a chewy,
chocolate chipity experience. There is enough that none of us have to be
a martyr and I can let others choose around the thing (or choose the thing) if they want.

Today, in my new dating world, I find myself, per metaphor,
rushing to knock others over on my way to the hearty cookies. I am not patient
to wait for the tray to be passed around the table—if there’s a way to get the
good cookie, I will elbow your ribs to find one. In the process, I will annoy
or anger you, or I will eventually upset the whole tray, and no one, including
myself will get a cookie.

Because this way, too, the belief is there is not enough.

Call it cancer, age, healing, I am
not willing to eat the blackened one anymore. I am not willing to drink the
dregs, settle for less, diminish my worth, stand silently… or, apparently, be
patient. In an effort to reverse years of sour cookies, I am finding myself
clawing my way to the better ones. But only here, in this dating world. Only
here, am I getting to see where I have long-harbored ideas of lack, and so
perhaps one could call me “grateful” (gag,
sputter, gasp) to have the experience now
and the perspective on myself to see what is happening.

I WANT CONTROL. I am so attached to an outcome (the good cookie), I think
that I can poke or wink or smile or demure or hearty laugh or intellectual
conversation or sex or heavy or shared interest my way toward that outcome. Yet, see above: upset
tray.

In many ways, it’s the same as
diving for the blackened one. It’s a manipulation of the results. The belief
follows that if I eat the blackened one, you are saved, and you are able to
love me. The belief was that if I ate the sour cookie, I am the silent, steady
rube whom you will reward for my sacrifice with accolades.

Both manners of being are born out
of the fear of lack of love. Fear that I will not be taken care of.

It does not surprise me that a
monolith of emotions and emotional backlash and predatory fear have arisen as I
step into the dating world. It simply confirms why I’ve stayed away as long as
I have. I know there is work to be done here, and avoidance is a great way to
not have to feel those feelings. To not have to look at the monster and,
perhaps, Hulk-like, calm it down until it reverts back to a normal, California
girl.

If you stay out of the dining
room, you neither have to eat the blackened one nor cut a path through to
the full ones.

But, eventually you get hungry.

My object now is to whisper in
that girl’s terrified ear, There is enough (love).
If you wait and allow the tray to be brought to you, you can have one. If you allow yourself to focus on the rest of the meal, the chicken and potatoes and brussel
sprouts (cuz you know you love em), the tray will come to you. If, instead you focus jealously on
GETTING A FUCKING COOKIE you will miss the bounty that’s in front of you.

Which is another way to say that
my being so singularly focused on the outcome I want around this (or any) situation, I’m actually making myself miserable. I notice that calculating all the angles to
my end-goal (through poking and winking and sexing and making you see
me) is taking me out of the joy of the
experience. It’s removing me from my center, my self, and from the fucking
thing I wanted in the first place: to date.

I certainly am learning things!
And I am going to try to eat my potatoes, and TRUST that I can be present in the
moment, and let all the other moments follow in their own order and time. I
will try to trust that I can relax into the moment, into the joy, into the newness and the awkwardness and the hilarity and the growth, because there is enough.

And, who knows, if
the cookies do run out, maybe there’s a Junior’s Cheesecake in the kitchen.

love · relationships · self-love · vulnerability

The Corollary

January 13, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

The thing about yesterday’s blog is there is a corollary
between how I have felt about money and debt and how I feel about love and
relationships.

I’ve surely written about “Romance and Finance” before, but
it’s worth repeating, for my own sake.

If, as I stated yesterday, the belief has been, If I have
debt, I can’t enjoy nice things, the (my) logic continues, If I have “work” to
do on myself, I can’t enjoy relationships. The belief in both cases is that if
I am not “fixed,” then I am not allowed to engage in the world. Or, another
way, if I am not perfect, or my vision of what that ever-moving target of
perfection is, then I am not allowed to receive or have good things.

Because, to the logic brain, it makes sense, doesn’t it? You
have debt, you can’t buy the nicer shampoo that doesn’t fry your curly hair. If
you have … let’s call it “intimacy issues,” you can’t be in relationship. BUT,
as we saw yesterday, and I’ve seen in these last months, I’ve been eroding that
belief around money, and allowing myself to enjoy things, even though I have debt. So… shouldn’t the corollary continue,
that even though I have work to
do on letting myself trust others, I can still allow myself to exist with them?

Eek. As a serially single person, I can’t tell you how hard that is to even hold on my
tongue for a minute. Because it brings a challenge, a “put your money where
your mouth is.” It means, that if I really am trying to believe that I can be
imperfect and still enjoy life… it means I have to start … trying. Trying to be
in relationship, not dating, not sex, not flirting, relationship. The kind where you say, You know what, I’ll commit
to you for an undetermined period of time. I’ll commit that I will attempt to
be as transparent as necessary, and as soft toward you as I can be. To me, to
be in relationship means that I will not duck out at 2 in the morning, I’ll be present during sex, I won’t
throw barbs or use sarcasm to keep you away. To be in relationship means
sitting through the discomfort of softening into another person — and HELL if
that’s not the scariest thing!!

I have and continue to do work that is helping me to soften into
myself, and surprisingly, I’m actually
having a good time of it – this “loving myself” thing. I’m actually getting the
hang of it, and becoming habitualized to it. So, it follows, that I am situated
to extend that love, that softness, that vulnerability outward. To someone else. Who I don’t know.

And trust that they won’t use this access they’ve been
granted to my heart as a pass to do damage, to infiltrate me and plant a bomb,
to establish trust and then usurp it, tragically.

Because it’s always been tragically. That’s the story,
that’s the history, but it doesn’t have to be.

That’s the same with the money. I’ve always earned less than I’m probably worth. I’ve always worked in jobs that don’t fire my faculties. But,
it’s meaning less and less to me; it’s goading less and less of me into
self-flagellation.

So, just because my love story has always been one where I am
left kicking myself for trusting someone… well, it doesn’t have to be. It
doesn’t have to mean as much.

Letting go of the story doesn’t invalidate my past experience; but it
doesn’t have to determine my future
anymore either.

I am sure I’ve said it here – that with the pattern of
awaiting perfection, which perhaps here may have meant perfect immunity to
hurt, to betrayed trust, to love– Ha! I’ve been waiting for immunity to love in
order to actually let someone love me and vice versa. Nooot sure how that logic
works!

But, if I have been waiting for some illusive “fixed,” and
an ever-changing target of it, then I will never be “ready” for a relationship. (Strangely, most people [I hear] look for a relationship to fix them, whereas I look to be fixed before I get into a relationship.)

So, the idea, then, is to change the goal. The goal, now, is
to not be fixed, but to be human. To allow myself to try to trust someone else
with the soft content of my heart, and believe one millisecond at a time that
they’re not a suicide bomber.

cancer · humility · self-love · surrender

The Clatter of Swords.

February 7, 2013August 26, 2017 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

There is a vacuum that happens when one admits surrender. When you have finally laid down your sword, all your fight, all your shaken fists at the sky. You let it all drop, all of it, knowing you can no longer fight, that you are defeated.

In that moment, when your armor clatters to the ground, and you look up toward your opponent with your empty, calloused and bloody hands, you experience relief.

There is nothing more to do. It is over. You may not have won, but no longer are you fighting either.

If, in that moment of surrender, you are able to hold that place of vulnerability and uncertainty, it has been my experience that newer, better ideas and actions, and strange serendipities, come to fill the void left by my own tenacity and fierce determinism.

If, in that moment, I admit defeat and then subsequently draw up my arms again, thinking, wait, no, there’s something else I haven’t tried, I can still will this thing, then I am lost, again.

I am in that moment. That moment of choice, when I will either say, no, this can’t be right, I still have a few ideas up my sleeve; or I will say, you know what, I give up, I have no idea what I’m doing, I need help, and I am willing to sit here in the discomfort and uncertainty of change.

This place is what some people refer to as hitting bottom. Many of us hit bottom around many different things: relationships, sex, food, debt, shopping, television, even reading can become an addiction at the expense of engaging in real life. Anything that we think we can out-master by the sheer will of our mind and will-power, anything that keeps proving to us that we can’t.

I am at a bottom, of a whole cornucopia of things. I think it’s what all the breakdowns have been lately, the bedframe one, the one in the hospital last week, the impossibility of me being able to do on my own what I have been doing on my own. The impossibility of continuing to struggle forth in single-handed combat. I don’t know any better. My best ideas have led me to being single, broke, and existentially agitated for years. And I can’t will, wish, pray, or beg my way out of it. I have come to the bottom.

The end of my resources, the end of my ideas. I think it’s part of the calm of yesterday’s blog, the realization that I’ve come to the end of the fight, that relief of the end of a battle. Recognizing I’m not the force that will rescue me, I’m just the conduit. I’m just, in some way, the pawn.

And, please don’t misunderstand that; I have free-will, I just mean that in the end (to tragically mix metaphors), there is a stream, and I can follow its course, or I can fight against it, because I still think my answers are upstream. If I allow myself to float, to let go, to be taken by the river, to stop resisting that which is true, then I have the chance to gain some of my power back. Supported, strengthened, and aimed in the right direction this time.

I think my soul-weariness has been this end of the battle. I know I have “better ideas” lurking in my mind, ways where I can “figure out” how to get out of the jams that I’m in. But, perhaps just maybe, I have learned that I’d like some other ideas, please. Perhaps, just maybe, I’m willing for today to sit in the serrated uncertainty of surrender, let myself rest in the fullness of that ease, and allow myself to be open to floating downstream.