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Hallelujah Chorus

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I know that usually plays on Christmas, and this is New
Year’s Eve, but I guess my letter to G-d’s comment box really worked, because,
guess what, my cancer is NOT back, and I am going on my trip to Maui tomorrow
morning.
I am a terrible last-minute packer, and I realize with all
the emotional wear and tear of today, I’m more tired than usual. So…. At least
I cleaned out my fridge. Got the cat taken care of. The clothing thing? … Well,
let’s just say, it’ll be a mighty busy 4am wake-up call.
I can’t, honestly, believe this is happening. Nothing like
this happens to me, as well, I suppose, like something like cancer doesn’t
“happen to me.” But, I guess these things do; the “good” and the “bad;” reading
a lot of Pema Chodron right now, the attempt to not label things as good or
bad.
I can’t tell you how much this past weekend embodied the “one day at a time” thing; I have honestly never
felt that kind of “Be In Today” as I did this weekend, so perhaps it was a
“good” thing… if I were to label it.
But, it also showed me how I did (mildly) beat
myself up for the caffeine and sugar implosions I’ve been allowing myself, even
though I know they’re active cancer supporters. So, now I get to watch that, so
I can really say, if anything does (or doesn’t) happen, I really tried my best.
I really did my best to do what was within my ability and control to control.
I’m not exceedingly pleased about the caffeine reduction/elimination, more than
the sugar, honestly. (I keep on saying “honestly,” as if I’m not otherwise
honest, or am emphatically MORE honest!)
I’m a little all over the place, which I think an excited,
over-tired, nervous-about-tomorrow’s-packing person would be in my position.
Therefore, I will say this. Someone said to me this week,
You must be glad to see 2012 end after everything that’s happened. And, you
know? I don’t consider it that way. I mean, the cancer is a clusterfuck and I
would totally give it back if I could, but here’s a list of other things I did
in 2012 that were awesome:
~ Graduated with a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in Poetry
~ Wrote, cried, abandoned, picked back up, and edited a book
of poetry that is my thesis
~ Auditioned for plays and a musical
~ Played the piano
~ Painted
~ Went bowling with a girl who’s become one of my best
friends
~ Online dated, not altogether disastrously
~ Got into recovery around relationships (the above is not
so tidy as it seems!)
~ Hosted my Creativity and Spirituality Workshop for MONEY!
(and twice for free!)
~ Got into the Bay Area Modeling Guild
~ Quit the Bay Area Modeling Guild
~ Live modeled for private artists
~ Quit live modeling for private artists
~ Wrote morning pages nearly every day
~ Wrote an increasingly popular blog, sometimes frequently
~ Babysat for some little girls, and introduced them to the
woods when they were scared that it was “dirty”
~ Hiked in Tilden Park and all over Piedmont
~ Rode my bike. Once.
~ Walked on Ocean Beach
~ Went camping and built a fire
~ Got a job with some amazing people
~ Performed my poetry at school in a nude suit
~ Performed my poetry at open mics with noticeably more
clothing
~ Celebrated six years of not drinking or using drugs, and a year without smoking cigarettes
~ Went to farmer’s markets & baked my own tofu, for crying out loud

~ Did and am doing significant work around self-esteem,
receiving, trusting, relationships, boundaries, responsibility, and openness.
This has not been a year that I am voraciously eager to see
end; I feel neutral about it. I’ve never been someone who loves or hates the
New Year change – it just is. I am curious to meet it as it comes. 
Although, at the very least, it begins with me, on a tropical island. 😉
May you have a safe and happy new year, folks. Honestly, you have no idea how much it’s meant to me to have
you in my life. Cheers!!!

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Questions? Comments? Please Write. …

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How
strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping
him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How
many would there be time for…?
Slowly, very slowly, he sat up, and as he did so he felt
more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he
never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?…
He stood up. His heart was leaping against his ribs like
a frantic bird. Perhaps it knew it had little time left, perhaps it was
determined to fulfill a lifetime’s beats before the end.
~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Dear G-d,
First, I want to thank you for the jumping dance moves that
candle flames do, and the curvaceous languid movement of smoke. I want to thank
you for the subtle colored ring that sometimes encircles the moon at night. And wind turbines and the impressive horizon they mark over miles and miles of
American landscape.
I want to thank you for anything that even feels like it
resembles velvet, and for tissue boxes.
I want to thank you for doors, and for my awesome yellow
rainboots that allow me to walk directly into the several-inch deep streaming
gutter and splosh in the fresh rainfall and smile gleefully and with pure
pleasure.
Next, I want to call you into question. For holocausts, with
the big and small “H.” For that child who got killed in Les Mis, but who really represents all the children who have died fighting oppression.
I want to call you into question for Aaron, again, even
though you’ve told me his overdose was necessary to bring him out of his
suffering.
I want to call you into question for my lab counts today.
Which told me that my white blood count has gone down when it shouldn’t have.
Which told me that my immune system is failing for reasons
that are plausibly explicable by a recurrence of my cancer.
I want to call you into question for the challenges that
turn ordinary people into fighters, and inspirations, and martyrs.
For the challenges that
create the monk in Tiananmen Square.
I want to call you into question for the challenges that
demanded the untimely death of Alexander McQueen. Really.
My doctor has told me to come into the lab on Monday to check my counts again, to follow the trending of my white cells, if they are indeed
going down or if it was a fluke somehow. So, there is nothing for me to worry about
now, except that I can’t help but allow the intruding thought of “Recurrence” to frighten
me, and to empower me – once a-goddamned-gain – to say, I’m not ready to die. I’m
not fucking nearly ready to die.
I would perhaps here again praise something pretty, like the
fern, in order to create the proper “compliment sandwich” appropriate for professional feedback, but I’d like to assume you’ve run directly from reading this letter to correct
this fluke in my blood as quickly as possible.
Because, as you know, I have a plane to Hawaii to catch. 
Yours, in admiration,
Molly 

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The Bardo.

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My best friend from New Jersey is in town this week, and
I’ve decided that, unlike when my brother was in town, I’m going to try my best
to stick to my morning routine, despite the guest (as I know it made me a
little less serene without it when my bro was here!).
My dad wrote me back from my email asking for less rather than more contact, as I’d asked for space to work some things through. His email was pretty harsh, manipulative, and angry. I read it on Christmas night, as I
sat with my best guy friend from SF (well, originally from Philly) at Chinese
food, after seeing a movie (the perfect Jewish Christmas, as per our usual 4- or
5-year standing tradition).
I’m, well, a) reaching out for help around it, and b) not
letting it dictate how I feel about myself. He wrenched out a whole bunch of
ugly things I did before I stopped drinking, as if to say basically, here’s
what a fuck-up you’ve been, see how much you need me. Ahem. No.
Then again, maybe that’s not how he meant it, but… really, I
think it is.
What occurred to me, though, was that it is nearly exactly
what happened with an old friend of mine a few years ago. He’d come to visit me
in SF, and hadn’t told his girlfriend that he was actually staying in my
apartment (on the couch, in the living room). Later, after he returned home,
she found out and confronted him about it, he’d asked me to lie. I told him I
wouldn’t. And he got very argumentative, and texted me that, “Everyone was
right – you are a bad friend.” …
He’d known that had been a sore spot for me was about how good or not
a friend I’d been in the past and, master manipulator, he sought to gouge that
sore spot to guilt me into doing what he wanted me to do. – I saw it exactly
for what it was: a cheap shot intended to get to me to feel badly enough about
myself to say, huh, you know what, I am a bad friend, I better do what he says,
so then of course, I’m a good friend. 
The problem with his plan, and with my dad’s, is that I actually don’t feel bad about those things any more. Yes, those had been places of shame in the past, but guess what?! I’m healthier now! Check that shit out. I don’t think of these as places of shame anymore; they’ve lost the power they had to wound me anymore (or to dictate how I then tried to counter-balance, or numb, them).
Needless to say, I did not lie to his girlfriend, and he and
I have barely had contact in these intervening years.
When I read my dad’s email, I remembered this incident with
my friend so clearly – it was like a complete duplication of events. “Hey
Molly, let me rake over the coals all the ways in which you have been a fuck-up
in your life, so you can feel bad about yourself, and then realize that you, of
course, need me, and need to cow to how I think this relationship should go.”
Um – not going to happen buddy. A) how hurtful and unkind.
B) how lame.
In the end, of course, as always, it’s just sad, you know?
It’s just sad that we don’t have the relationship that works for either of us.
It’s sad that we’re at such cross-purposes and communication. It’s sad that the
love that we want from each other is not the love that we’re getting.
The other thing that occurs to me about it is that I’m not
toeing the party line anymore, and that’s fucking with him. When you have a
relationship based on a certain dynamic of dependence, and one of the people
begins to not play that game anymore, the system begins to fail. Because I am
not content any more to play into the game of “wayward daughter needs benevolent
father” what happens to the (ahem) “benevolent” father? The game doesn’t work.
The system falls apart, and because he’s needed these roles to be as they are,
just as I used to in the past, he loses his footing and he retaliates.
I get it. I get that he does feel confused about my asking
for more then less contact, but none of it excuses his subsequent, or previous,
ill behavior. There will be time for me to assess what my part has been in
maintaining and feeding the system of dependency, and potentially for me to
admit my part (I’m not an innocent, I know – but nor is it necessary for me to
think that owning my part means putting my tail between my legs and admitting
some kind of guilt or mea culpa to the grand judger of all).
It’s in-between. As my friend tells me, there’s a concept of
the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism, it means the state of being in transition, in
the middle, in between. All of our lives are filled with these liminal states,
and indeed, life itself can be conceived of as a bardo between birth and death,
a pause between the states of “non-being.”
And so it is with me, with you, with us all. In a state of
in-between, with how I relate to myself, my dad, the world. I’m in between who
and how I was and who and how I want to be. But at least that means I’m moving,
yes? At least it means I’m alive.

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Movie Wisdom.

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In the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main character asks his English teacher why good
people go for bad people, romantically. He replies sagely, “We accept the love
we think we deserve.”
This line is later repeated by the main character, so you
know the writer thought it important enough, this nugget of truth, to repeat,
to imprint indelibly in my mind, at least.
I’ve been thinking about this line, and think we can
extrapolate the concept to just about anything.
We accept the love we think we deserve.
The dishes we think we deserve (mine were almost all chipped ’til recently).
The job we think we deserve.
The friends we think we deserve.
The excitement we think we deserve.
The handsoap we think we deserve.
We accept the car we think we deserve.
The commute we think we deserve.
The cleanliness we think we deserve.
The responsibility we think we deserve.
We accept the family we think we deserve (if you can stick
with that one).
We accept the time for art we think we deserve.
The space for art we think we deserve.
We accept the salary we think we deserve.
The savings we think we deserve.
The books we think we deserve.
How are these all in your life? How are they in mine?
We accept the vacations we think we deserve.
Because in the absence or meagerness of these things, mantra becomes, “Better off that I
don’t have…”
Better off I don’t have love, responsibility, savings,
friendships, vacations, persistence, self-esteem.
Better off that I don’t have clean dishes, organized closet,
pens that work.
Better off, leave me here, I don’t need, I’m not worth,
Don’t bother, won’t help, leave me be, leave me alone. Leave me alone. Better
off alone.
Better off not trying. Better off not risking. Better off
not having. Better off not laughing. Better off not exploring. Better off not
acquiring. Better off not enjoying. Better off not living.
We accept the life we think we deserve.
The problem arising is that the distance between what I
have thought I deserve and what I think I deserve now is becoming great enough
to cause discomfort. And the discomfort is becoming great enough to cause a
challenge to former ideas. And the challenge to former ideas is becoming great
enough to cause action.
At least, that’s the idea.
The life I think I deserve is changing. To what, I don’t
know. 

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You know you have cancer, right?

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Arghh. My body says,
**YAAAwwwNNN** My brain says, Are we done resting yet, huh huh, Are we doing
something, going somewhere? Why are we on the couch again, huh? Huh? It’s LIGHT
out! Look, there’s even SUN! Are we going outside, huh?
Mother.
Apparently other people are much more compassionate to the
fact that I’m recovering from my third round of chemo than I am.
Even the question, as posed by my nurse this morning, “If I were going through chemo, and said
I was tired a lot, what would you tell me?” gets my response of, “Well, I know I would tell you to take it easy, but for me…”
It’s hard to let myself acknowledge that I am tired, that my
body is not working up to the speed it was, and even simple things (like being
awake) make me tired. Especially when I’ve withstood the actual treatment so
well, and don’t have any major physical repercussions, I feel like I should
(ahem SHOULD – watch word for nonsense and perfectionism) be able to do what I
used to.
I used to take hour-long walks; after my last rounds of chemo,
I was able to take half-hour, and that was fine, acceptable. Now, I can take 10
minutes, really, without needing to sit down and rest.
Because of this development, however, I have firmly made my
plans for my next chemo treatment – I’d been asking my doctor if I could move
the next round earlier, so that I could ensure that I would be healthy enough
to go on the annual New Year retreat I go on in mid-January. She got back to me
today saying I could start on Wednesday if I wanted …
Seeing, or feeling rather, how I’m feeling, I realize that I
need more recuperation time. So I asked my doctor if I could wait to start
until after the retreat, this way I know I can attend the retreat as my best
self, and I get to re-up a little more before the 4th round. She
said something I felt was funny, if not mildly insensitive, “Objectively, your
body is ready for the next round (i.e. blood counts up, etc.), but I can
understand that subjectively, your body
feels tired.” Um… yes, does that make it less true?
I’m not that bristled by the comment; I
mean, it’s technically true, et al, but it doesn’t make my body feel any more
“get up and go” just because objectively it has all the red and white cells it
needs!
So, I will wait. Recuperate. Rest, if I let myself.
It felt like a good decision for me, to choose to take care
of myself, rather than play by an agenda that doesn’t work for me, and on that
note, I will update you on the “dad situation,” since I know several of you
have asked me about it.
Well, after I emailed my dad last week to ask him to be in
more touch, and getting a marginally increased amount of contact, with no more depth
to it than ever, I decided I can’t do this. These conversations may be longer
now, but of no more substance; they’re not really conversations at all, but more like monologues at each other. Nothing has really changed. And every time he
calls, my chest constricts, and I am either exasperated at the timing of the
call, or hesitant to pick up because I don’t really like the man
much. And so, I wrote him an email yesterday after talking with a woman I
trust, and let him know that although I’d just asked for more contact with him, I’d actually like to ask for a
break from contact. That I’m “going through some things” (HA!), and will keep
him updated as to my treatments.
Yesterday, I also ended a relationship with a woman I’d been meeting with
weekly to help guide her through some of the same “self-help” work I’ve done.
I’ve been wanting to end this relationship for a while, as it EXHAUSTS me, but I also felt that, “we’re in the middle of
the work, how can I let her go now, can’t I just get to the end of
this little bit with her?…”
No. Finally, no.
So, yesterday was a big day for me. I asked to have no
contact with my dad for a while, and I told a woman that I can’t work with her
anymore (because of the cancer… she
says, not altogether truthfully – but kindly). “Trimming the fat,” is what I
called it to my friend. Trimming the fat of relationships that don’t work for me.
Another friend asked me today how I felt in the wake of these
moves, and I said… I don’t really know. I feel a little at sea, honestly, which
I think is a good thing – to let what will form in the absence of negativity
form. I don’t really know how I feel,
except perhaps relieved. I think it’ll take a few days to let it settle in that
I’m taking time for myself, that I’m putting my needs first, and allowing for
them to be met by people who are actually able to meet them.
It’s the end of the year, the time when we settle up the last
twelve months; I’m glad I don’t have to go into the new one carrying the burden
of relationships that don’t work for me. 
Merry Christmas Eve, everyone. 

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The Origin of Motion

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments

“What would you be doing if you weren’t eating,” she asks.
“Crying,” and I begin to sob, burying my face in a tissue between my palms.
I’m 25, sitting on my therapist’s office sofa, occasionally hearing a streetcar clang past on Market Street.
I’ve just told her that throughout the new self-exploration writing I’d been
doing as part of an effort to heal, I’d been eating. A lot.
This story occurs to me tonight, as Pema Chodron’s When
Things Fall Apart lays open in front of me,
and I spoon melting heaps of an ice cream-and-brownie sundae into my mouth.
I’ve been crying a lot this week. It began before my brother
came out to visit, began in the form of anger. Which I think is good. It isn’t just anger at
my getting cancer, or at the jobs I’ve taken that make me feel small, or at the
drug- and alcohol-addled past that caused me to find myself in tragic
situations and that much further behind on achieving rites-of-young-adult-passage. It isn’t just anger that my mom was chronically depressed, or that
my dad was alternately rageful and neglectful, or that I thenceforth find myself unable to maintain an intimate relationship, or a truthful and esteemable vision of myself.
It is anger at all of it. Anger at what feels like
injustice, cruelty, and callousness. Anger at what feels like abandonment, and
misuse, and a vicious turn of the wheel of fate to the left instead of the
right.
Anger that smothers the entirety of my internal landscape like
a permanent solar eclipse.
I discovered this anger as I contemplated all this “Let it
in” mentality everyone’s been telling me lately. I watched in meditation as I
screamed myself hoarse against this insistent “Let it in” mantra that’s being shoved
at me from all angles, feeling closed in by it, pressured by it, suffocated by
this hippie, Buddhist, Berkeley bullshit. “Let it in.” Ha. No.Fucking.Way.
Don’t you know how __(insert: angry, hurt, abandoned, untrusting)__ I am??
Don’t you know how __(insert: hurtful, cruel,
apocalyptically vicious)__ You/Life/G-d/Love has been??
Let it in, my ass.
I was amazed at the vehemence of my refusal. My defenses. And it made a
boatload of sense to me why I’ve pushed back so hard against all the “Love is
the answer” teachings, even as I’ve purported them myself. I cannot let it in. There’s no room for Love — there’s already a bus in the
station, and it’s called resentment, hurt, rage; deep, calcified rage.
So, I actually have a different task in front of me: before
“letting it in,” I need to let it go.
I need to sit with letting it go, and not try to make it different or better. I have come to believe that my ideas don’t work. That my story is old, and tired, and false. I have come to believe that there might be better ideas, if I can sit in the discomfort of waiting for them to coalesce. 
And so, this week, that looks like crying, a bowlful of ice
cream, and an understanding that experiencing the grief (what’s left when rage
subsides) as I am, is a good thing. It’s there. It’s always been there. And
it’ll be there until I let myself feel it. And release it.
I’ve said it before, and I will again: I have always been
afraid that if I allow myself to experience emotions like these, like these power chords of sadness or anger, that they would overwhelm me. That they would
never stop. That these emotions would be like a tidal wave, and simply drown me,
and I would never recover.
A friend told me, around the same time as my above therapy
experience, that the wells of grief and anger are finite. That eventually, they
will tap out. That there is only one infinite and true well, and that well is
of G-d. So, let myself start, even if I’m scared; let myself put my rage and my
grief on paper, or soaked into another box of tissues. It will end, and I haven’t drowned yet.
And so, I start again, at a deeper layer, I believe,
experiencing these emotions all over again.
The only way through is through. And if I ever want to get
to the “Let it in” stage, which (despite my vehement eye-rolling and gut-tensing resistance, defiance, and avoidance) I really do want, then I have to
begin to let it go. To let go. 

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(F)orcibly (U)nadulterated (N)onsense

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“Eponymous.” Elfin. Golf. Statue. Hindrance. Place-mark. Dorsal. Evident.

It came to me backwards. I had to catch it by its tail and write it down in reverse.


The Ultimate Have-Nots and the Willy Nillies. Caracticus Pots and the Merry Weathers. Formidable convictions and antipathy. The humours ran golden with bile, stacked on the rug like melted sand. An uproar in the warehouse led to roaring in the streets and tempered glass maligns. Invented for the sole purpose of having a middle finger. Two wasteful benches, settling. Over an understated little number, like two-point-seven. Miraculously, Spats Malloy and the Uptown Goslings. Hugo Bones, himself a wanton eruptor. Ordinarily and eventually fastidious, this currency of autumn patios. If there were to be a farce, the audio would play in tomes of three.

Make the force of it indent upon the soul, the stricture rent open by a tornado of invention. 

Playful wicks of dynamite, we offered a sacrifice of melted crayons and Q-tips doused in Pine-sol.

Mostly spotted but slightly pale, the hairs fell out in patches shaped like Denmark.

Ultimately blue and occasionally gaseous, we injected the slotted spoon into the roiling cement. How can you be so callous and jacquard? How can it become sequestered and imminent? There is no need for the hypocrisy of movement or the icicles of stagnation.

I haven’t the clue(!) or the hourglass! Don’t tell me to orchestrate the revolution, the turning has happened seven times before. How can it be so materialized: the mechanics of a starfleet optioned for two sequels and a hairshirt? For it isn’t often that the employer will birth an oval or subdue a square; it isn’t in its nature.

Quietly alarming and sensitive to a fault, the crack lay bare, a salted wound in the painted landscape of verboten. It follows, naturally, that it wouldn’t bend, for in so doing, it would necessitate learning the downward dog of joy, that feckless horsen youth.

Orchard games and a penny hat offered under the watchful roof of birth and the vaulted ceiling of disuse.

Be open!, it screams, through the pinhole of time. Be open, says the pansy and his syllabant “S.” Have mercy, intones the gizzard and its wrapping, avoiding the factory line toward integration and osmosis.   Its fist stands up, out of the plaid and plaintive oracle. Have mercy, to the ownership of the least visited oxen and the shearling plucked clean of their bark.

Haven’t you seen enough?, shouts the earthen sponge, itself a copy of a copy of a do-over. Itself the image of obstinacy and cool-hearted musings. Go forth unto the juicy rectangle of glorious disguise and effulgent harlequin patches. Argue with the intimacy of gated illusion, embolden the woolen sock of Time to its Vesuvian arguments. If it hasn’t the lateness or soggy artifice of neglect.

Go. Amber eyes of tabled journeys and sunken ordinances. Go. Turnstyles of hope and silken bodies. I haven’t the wormhole to stop you, nor the pageantry of resistance. Bastille yourself from the chains of undergrowth, the moss of stoplight madness.

I haven’t the gaul to malign you today, so step forth to the ultimate gaiety. 

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Molly 2.0

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Yesterday, I got with the digital age. After some time of
researching, drooling, and envying, I bought a smart phone. Thanks to those
generous folk who donated to my Holiday Wish List, I got a new toy.
In addition, I feel that my decision to reach out and let my
dad know how I was feeling about things between us was part of a new behavior.
I haven’t heard from him yet; don’t know if I will. But, the significant thing
to me is that I was honest about how I was feeling, and specifically stated what
I wanted and needed. Coming from a woman who is usually circuitous about asking
for what I need (this way I won’t be “really” disappointed when or if it
doesn’t happen), this is a new and advanced thing.
Letting myself have a new toy is a new thing. Allowing
myself to believe that there is “enough” in the world, that I’m allowed to have
nice things. That I’m allowed to have fun, just for the sake of fun.
The same night I wrote the last blog, and wrote to my dad, I
called up my friend who’d offered me flight miles to Hawaii. I told him that,
damnit, I was going to Hawaii, even if it meant postponing my January chemo
treatment by 10 days. … My friend was not thrilled to hear that my doctor
wasn’t totally on board with this, and it made me pause long enough to talk it
out.
Although I was feeling all “New Molly; New Behavior” about
the trip (allowing myself to have nice things), … it really falls into the same
behavior I’ve always had around money. Constrict, constrict, constrict, then
blow a big wad of cash because I can’t stand constriction anymore. Then I feel
bad, and constrict again. Rinse, repeat.
Because the reason I’d want to go to Hawaii NOW is not as a
reward or a treat, it’s out of scarcity mind. The belief that I can and will
never let myself have nice things at an appropriate and planned out time, so I
better DO IT NOW, because I can’t guarantee that I’ll ever let myself later.
I can’t guarantee that when my chemo treatment is done in
February that I’ll allow myself to go on vacation. After all, I will have to
return to work when this is all done – won’t I?, asks my brain. After all, I’ve
been off work, but certainly not on vacation for the past 3 months. I simply can’t afford to let myself have a
vacation when this is done – I owe
my employer. I owe somebody something first, before I can let myself have what
I really need.
I wrote a poem once that most people in my class didn’t get,
but when I repeated it to my mom a few months ago, she got it perfectly.
Otherwise, who would
eat the blackened one?
That’s it. The perfect sentiment of a martyr. The mindset.
The set, and stance, of my mind.
As I spoke to my friend on Wednesday night, I started to cry
as I talked through why I needed to go
to Hawaii now – the realization that I still do what I’ve always done – the
realization of how stingy I am with myself, and too, that I don’t believe that
it will change.
Luckily, I don’t live in a vacuum, and was able to talk
myself calm with my friend, and accept the possibility that when this process,
when these treatments are done, I might actually let myself have.
This all came up yesterday too, when I had “Tea and Tarot”
with a girlfriend of mine. The idea that by reaching out for help, I will be
able to hold abundance. That in reaching out for help on how to organize myself
differently, things will work out beyond my wildest dreams.
My wildest dreams right now are pretty stingy. What would it
be like to perceive or conceive of something different? But, again, I can’t do
this alone – if I try to “figure it out” on my own, I will end up creating the
same structure of scarcity that I’ve always had for myself.
So, my friend with the cards yesterday suggested I have an
Action Group. An action group is a tool whereby you meet with two people, and …
create an action plan. I had one of these meetings with two women over the
summer when I was looking for work, and it was very helpful. Far from it being,
“check this job board,” we came up with actions like, Play the piano every day.
Start blogging again. Ask my friends to give me an asset to add to a list about
myself. Things that seemingly have
nothing to do with how to get a job.

It was uncomfortable to listen to these women tell
me that I would or could find work or joy by doing these hippie things. And
where I have discomfort is usually where I need to work the most. It’s not
comfortable to allow myself daily time for fun. It’s not comfortable to ask
others to help me form actions that might take me to a new level of a
profession or career. It’s not comfortable to start to believe that I deserve
more than I’ve ever given myself. But this is where the work is.
Over and over, I am told, by cards, friends, teachers,
meditations, to allow myself to receive. To receive help, to receive love. To
be open to new ideas about how to hold myself and the world. I believe that
allowing myself to use the funds that friends donated to buy myself a phone is
part of this allowing – I’m still
uncomfortable with it – I still feel that old “hoard”/constrict mentality (Don’t
spend this money! You will need it later because of your low income!) The belief that comes along with this mentality is
that there is not enough and there will never be enough.
My mom offered to send me some make-up for the holidays. She,
being a once-certified make-up artist, gets a discount on MAC products (the
beauty line, not the Apple product!). I told her that I’d rather she save the
money she’d spend on make-up for me to help fund her next trip out to visit me,
or to fund our imagined/hoped-for trip to Paris. She said something startling.
“Why can’t I do both?”
What can’t she do
both? Send me some make-up AND visit me? Why can’t I do both? Buy a new phone with GIFTED MONEY and be in the reality of my situation?
So, I did. It wasn’t the “blowing a wad of cash” that my
brain wants to tell me I did (It wasn’t my money!!! It was a GIFT, stupid stubborn brain!!). I am having to sit,
today, in the discomfort of letting myself have. To have needs, to ask for them
to be met, and to meet them. To allow my needs to be met.
It’s time for an upgrade. 

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Talk to me about anger.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

For the second time in a week, a certified medical professional has asked me about anger, seemingly out of thin air.
Last week, my therapist asked me how my anger was. We’d been
talking about other things, and she asked it without anything that felt to me
like a segue. I laughed, Well, if you want to talk about my dad, then I’m sure
we could talk about anger. And then we didn’t.
Today, at my chiropractor visit, he said to me, Tell me
about anger. He’d been poking and prodding various things, checking and making
adjustments, talking about nothing emotional whatsoever. I replied, well,
there’s stuff up with my dad not showing up during this time. My doctor said he asked because “it is showing up.”
Even though emotionally, I’m not conscious of feeling it, my
body is.
Like a good girl, I replied to my dad’s text from the other
day with a short email update about my treatment. Very short. Very, what I
would interpret as, curt. His text message said that he and his fiancé were so
busy with their move to Florida, they’d been up past midnight unpacking. His voicemail
to me last week, a call that once again came after dark, after a time I’ve
told him I would be unavailable, reported that his whole weekend was a hellish moving process.
I listened to this voicemail … while I sat in a hospital room
receiving cancer treatment.
I’m just so sorry
that your move to your retirement house in Florida isn’t going according to
your plan. It really must be so fucking hard to have boxes to unpack. Asshole. Insensitive. Inert. Asshole.
So, yes. I’m angry. I’ve been “doing my best.” Trying to
“let go of it,” to “work through it,” to remind myself that it’s not about me
or a reflection of my self worth. And finally, today, after this question from my
doctor, I had it.
This evening, I was listening to a book on tape my friend
gave me by Dr. Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine, and Miracles. In it, he speaks mainly about cancer patients. What
links them, what qualities they have in common, and what events or
circumstances typically precedes cancer.
I was listening to this tape as I was finally gluing together my teal project.
For many weeks during the summer, I began cutting out chunks
of teal from magazines. All shades of Mediterranean and Bahaman. I had a
project concept to collage them all together, not sure on or of what, but
together, a wall of teal.
Eventually, absent of inspiration of where or how to glue
them, I put all these snips and scrolls of teal in a drawer.
Today, I took them out. I dug in my closet, looking for
perhaps a wooden board to glue them on, and instead found this large
rectangular picture frame I’d found on the street a year ago. I popped the Ikea format out of it, and began to
collage on the frame’s inner matting (see photo, it’s hard to explain, and I
assure you, the teal comes out better in real life).
The point is, I was engaged in finally doing something that
I’d wanted to do for a very long time.
The point is, I heard Bernie Siegel say, “If a person deals
with anger or resentment when they first appear, then illness need not occur.
When we don’t deal with our emotional needs, we set ourselves up for physical
illness.”
I paused the tape and rewound. I wrote the rest down:
“Depression is a partial surrender to death and it seems that cancer is despair
experienced at the cellular level.”
Fuck. That.
I went to my email, and brought back up the draft I’d
composed to my dad when we got into our fight on the phone almost a month ago
(the “conversation” when I’d again asked him to call me earlier in the day, and he told me plainly,
“This is how it works.”) We’ve had one phone call since then, maybe
a minute long. I’ve sent one short email in response to his “moving dilemma.”
That’s been all, till today, when I sent him off that second short, curt email.
So, I brought back up the draft, the one where I tell him
that my asking to speak to him earlier in the day is not about the time we speak, but rather, I’m asking that we speak at a
time when we can have more quality conversations, ones that don’t have to be cut
short, because he’s calling me a few minutes before he has to leave to eat dinner, or after dark, when
I get the most tired and can’t talk.
The draft says that I want to have more of a relationship
with him, if he wants it. If he’s available for it, “I look forward to the
opportunity to enhance our relationship.”
I deleted the several and many paragraphs I’d added today
which told him how unacceptable it was that his moving is a priority over my
having cancer. That he can’t talk any other time during the day. Unacceptable that his time table is a priority
when his daughter is facing a life-threatening illness. I took out all the
parts that said how hurt I was. That I felt like I wasn’t a priority. Because I will not be that vulnerable to him.
I am so terribly hurt. I am. So, I’m giving him the chance to
make it up to me.
Advice from friends had been to let it go, to accept what is.
To not go to the empty well again. But I’m not going to the empty well with
this one, I think. I’m saying, Look dude, this is what I want. You can show up,
or you can’t. I feel like I am giving an ultimatum, and maybe if it doesn’t work, I can or will wash my hands forever, or for a while at least. Tell him to stop giving me his pittance. To stop contacting me right now. To stop telling me about his vile, vomituous new wonderful life. Because, do you know how
painful it is to have a father who can’t — No, Won’t — make time for his ill child?
?
It might backfire. I might be setting myself up for
disappointment again. But, I’m taking what Dr. Bernie says to heart, what my therapist
and my chiro are telling me – Anger is burning me up inside, and I can’t have
that anymore. “Accepting” it, isn’t working right now. Being in contact with him like this isn’t working right now. 
Better that I should tell him? Better that I should give him the chance? Better that I should be the “good daughter” one more goddamned time??…. 
Maybe it’s not the “right
thing,” the “enlightened” thing. Maybe it’s not the “recovered” goddamned thing. But right now I don’t care. Choosing to swallow my anger isn’t working.
The most common character, says Bernie, of a cancer
patient is the compulsive giver. The person who puts others’ needs before their
own.
Fuck That. I’m not going to be part of the statistic. !!!!
I’m not going to be part of the statistic. 

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Does this ever happen to you?

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Do you ever decide to make a change, like deciding, okay,
now I’m going to eat well and be healthy, and as a show of a last hurrah or a
good-bye to your former ways, then binge eat something terrible?
No? Yes? Well, that’s precisely what I did yesterday, and I
find it mildly amusing. A friend brought me by a juicer; I’ve been reading this
Kick Cancer in the Kitchen book; I’ve
been contemplating cooking again. And so yesterday, I did indeed cook. I went
to the store and bought organic quinoa and broccoli and an avocado, some happy
chicken breasts, and peanut sauce that didn’t have things I couldn’t pronounce
in it. I brought it home, and delighted in making something that I hoped would
work, but wasn’t sure. (I mean, put peanut sauce on anything, and I’m pretty
sure it’s golden.)
I ate this wonderful, and surprisingly fabulous meal. It was
really quite good. Then I went out … and bought three slices of chocolate cake.
Three. I came home and ate them all.
Once, I’d decided to go vegetarian, and so the day before I
was “to begin,” I went and bought some steak. It’s as if I have to get in my
last taste of this thing, as if it’ll be off limits forever, or I need to
ingest enough to carry me through the rest of my lifetime. I kind of think it’s
hilarious and ridiculous at this point. But, it happens.
And, luckily, there’s a chapter in the cancer book called,
“It’s Okay to Eat Chocolate and Cry.” We could call that the title of
yesterday.
I felt really off yesterday, knowing how wonderful it was
outside, but having met a friend at my house in the morning, I hadn’t left it,
despite the near *70* degree temperatures outside. So, it was nearing noon,
nearing one, and I still hadn’t left, and I was starting to almost panic. There
was something fiendish in the way I wanted to leave the house, but didn’t know
where to go, or how long I could be out, and didn’t have anyone to play with,
and I sat at my computer cursing that there were no zipcars available, and
almost started to cry.
That somehow having a car would give me a direction or a
purpose for where to go with the rest of my day. I’m in such this limbo right
now. I don’t have the energy of a normal person, but I certainly have energy,
and CAN’T keep myself cooped up at home.
That said, I’m all immuno-suppressed right now, and shouldn’t really be in
public too much – but then WHAT THE HELL am I supposed to do all day. I didn’t
just want to “go for a walk,” I go for walks all the time – I wanted to do
something fun and different, and just couldn’t manage to get out.
Finally, I did. I got myself out of the house despite having
no idea where I was going or what I was doing, and my mom called, and I ended
up in a heap on someone’s stairs crying about how anchorless and lost I feel
and how aimless and lonely and purposeless right now.
I knew how over the top it all was, but that’s how I felt,
and I didn’t know how to change it, because I didn’t really know what was
wrong, except that I felt off, and not right, and lost.
She started to suggest something about taking a bus to a
different part of town, and my brain got in the way with, but I have to be at
the doctor at 3pm, and I shouldn’t be taking the public bus, and I don’t know
how long it’ll take, and where will I go anyway. …
And a bus crested the hill, and with tears still leaking out
my eyes, I ran down the street and caught the bus. I told my mom I’m taking
this bus, and I didn’t know where I’d go on it, but I was going.
I ended up where I actually really wanted to go yesterday
anyway, before my brain got a hold of me – at the arts reuse depot. It’s a junk
shop basically, with everything you can imagine to use as art supplies. I’d
been wanting to go to buy a wooden frame that I want to paint a la these frames
a friend has in her house.
And, voila. I ended up at the depot, and actually found a
frame. I bought a veggie sandwich and some coffee, and caught the bus back to
the doctor’s in time.
It all worked out as I’d wanted it to – with the crazy
intermission of my brain eating itself.
I simply need to get up and out when I need to. Not hem and
haw about where or what. Maybe I’ll end up somewhere stupid, or somewhere
bored, but it’s got to be better than staying at home feeling like a
self-imposed prisoner. It’s enough to feel caged when I’m in the hospital; it’s
unacceptable to cage myself when I’m at home.
With that, I’ll leave you. I have to go meet some folks now –
outside.