Tag: healing

  • Fear Is Not a Teacher

    Fear Is Not a Teacher

    As I have said before, I have been watching The Bear.

    Not quickly.

    The show is often too intense for me to sit through all at once. I watch for a while, feel the pressure building in the room, and eventually step away. Sometimes I come back later that evening. Sometimes another day.

    There is much about the show I admire.

    The food.

    The discipline.

    The quiet beauty of people trying to make something precise in a world that rarely is.

    But there is one thing I continue to struggle with.

    Why are so many of the people who are supposed to be good at their work also written as though cruelty is part of the uniform?

    Why does talent so often arrive shouting?

    Why must skill enter the room convinced it is a god?

    Perhaps this is only television. Perhaps the writers believe conflict is more interesting than kindness, and humiliation makes better drama than patience. Maybe Hollywood has decided that every great kitchen must be run like a battlefield, every chef must carry the emotional habits of a tyrant, and every young cook must first be broken before they can be trusted to create anything beautiful.

    But I do not believe people have to be broken to become better.

    I believe broken people often spend years trying to recover from those who claimed to be helping.

    I know something about that.

    I suffered abuse as a child.

    I experienced abuse in the military.

    I knew some of it in marriage.

    The settings changed. The language changed. The uniforms changed. But fear has a familiar shape.

    It teaches you to be afraid.

    It does not teach you how to grow.

    That distinction matters.

    Some people will tell you fear made them stronger. Some will say the shouting sharpened them, that humiliation prepared them, that being treated like garbage was the price of excellence.

    I do not doubt their experience.

    But surviving a method does not prove the method was good.

    A person can learn while being mistreated. Human beings are remarkably adaptive. We learn in war zones. We learn in broken homes. We learn beneath bosses who mistake intimidation for leadership.

    But that does not mean the abuse was necessary.

    It means the person found a way to keep growing despite it.

    Too often, we give the cruelty credit for the strength that belonged to the survivor.

    That is one of the oldest tricks in power’s playbook.

    It wounds you, then takes credit for the scar tissue.

    I keep returning to a simple question:

    How do you teach someone who is constantly afraid of you?

    Not how do you make them obey.

    How do you actually teach them?

    Fear narrows the world.

    It makes the mind concentrate on survival. A frightened person is not free to be curious. They are not free to experiment. They are not free to ask the question that might sound foolish but lead somewhere useful.

    They are watching you.

    They are waiting for the next explosion.

    They are trying not to become the day’s example.

    That may produce compliance.

    But compliance is not mastery.

    Fear can teach a person how to avoid mistakes in front of you. It does not always teach them how to understand the work when you are gone.

    Real teaching requires safety.

    Not comfort at all times. Not lowered standards. Not endless praise.

    Safety.

    The kind that allows a person to say, “I don’t understand.”

    The kind that permits them to make an honest mistake without wondering whether their dignity will be taken as payment.

    A good teacher can be demanding.

    But there is a difference between demanding excellence and demanding submission.

    One develops the student.

    The other feeds the ego of the person in charge.

    I think we often confuse the two because arrogance photographs well.

    The shouting chef looks powerful.

    The patient teacher looks ordinary.

    There is nothing glamorous about that kind of instruction.

    It is slow.

    It requires restraint.

    It asks the person with authority to remember that knowledge is not a crown. It is something passed from one pair of hands to another.

    That may be the harder discipline.

    Anyone can humiliate someone who knows less.

    It takes no genius to make a beginner feel small.

    They have already entered the room uncertain. They already know they are behind. Their hands may shake. Their timing may be wrong. Their questions may expose how far they still have to go.

    The easiest thing in the world is to use your experience as a weapon against them.

    The better thing is to use it as shelter.

    To say: I remember not knowing.

    Let me show you again.

    That does not make the standard weaker.

    It makes the teacher stronger.

    I sometimes wonder how many gifted people walked away from their calling because the first person entrusted to guide them decided cruelty was tradition.

    How many cooks stopped cooking.

    How many artists stopped drawing.

    How many children stopped raising their hands.

    How many soldiers learned to hide pain because someone convinced them that being human was a defect.

    We count the ones who endured and call the system effective.

    We rarely count the ones it drove away.

    That is the trouble with cultures built on abuse. They display the survivors as evidence and bury the casualties in silence.

    We see this in kitchens, offices, homes, schools, locker rooms, military units, and marriages.

    The setting changes.

    The wound remains familiar.

    Someone says they are only trying to help.

    Someone says this is how excellence is made.

    Someone says you are too sensitive.

    And after enough time, you begin to wonder whether dignity is something you must surrender to improve.

    It is not.

    You are allowed to learn without being degraded.

    You are allowed to be corrected without being crushed.

    You are allowed to stand in the presence of someone more skilled without kneeling before their ego.

    We should not reward people merely because they are brilliant at the visible part of their work.

    A chef can prepare a magnificent plate and poison the room around it.

    A leader can meet every target and leave everyone beneath them diminished.

    A teacher can know everything about the subject and nothing about the people sitting in front of them.

    Skill matters.

    But skill without humanity is incomplete.

    There is no meal so beautiful that it excuses contempt.

    No achievement so great that it makes cruelty noble.

    No level of expertise that turns another person into something disposable.

    Perhaps that is what I wish more stories understood.

    The most remarkable person in the room is not always the one who can do what no one else can.

    Sometimes it is the one who knows more and still chooses gentleness. 

    The one who remembers that the person standing in front of them is not raw material to be broken into shape.

    They are already a human being.

    The work is to help them become more fully themselves.

    I still watch The Bear.

    I still admire the craft.

    I still want to see what comes out of those kitchens.

    But I find myself hoping for something beyond the perfect plate.

    I want to see a room where excellence does not require casualties.

    A place where the lesson is not carried on the back of fear.

    A kitchen where people are expected to learn, but are not required to suffer for the privilege.

    Because fear may make someone move.

    But if what we want is for people to grow, to think, to create, and eventually to teach someone else, then we must give them something fear never can.

    Room to become good without first being made to feel worthless.

    That is not softness.

    That is instruction.

    Fear can make a person obey.

    Love, patience, and dignity are what teach them to become.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • What’s the Best Way to Deal with Negative Thoughts?

    What’s the Best Way to Deal with Negative Thoughts?

    The best way to deal with negative thoughts is not to pretend they are not there.

    I know that because I have tried.

    I have tried to push them down.

    Tried to laugh them off.

    I tried to tell myself I was fine when I knew I wasn’t 

    It worked for a while.

    Until it didn’t.

    It could be anything: a word, a look, clutter, anything 

    A moment that should not have mattered as much as it did.

    And suddenly all those buried thoughts, all that hurt, all that anger, all that disappointment came rushing out at once. Sometimes toward someone who did not deserve to receive what I had refused to deal with.

    That is the danger of burying things.

    They do not stay buried.

    Negative thoughts are not always the enemy. Sometimes they are messengers. Sometimes they are telling us there is something we have not faced, something we have not grieved, something we have not forgiven, something we have been carrying too long without admitting how heavy it has become.

    The first step is to deal with them.

    Not while you are in the middle of the fire.

    Not while your emotions are loud and your judgment is clouded.

    But when you can sit with yourself honestly.

    When you can ask, Why did that hurt me? Why did that thought come back? What am I afraid of? What am I still holding onto?

    There is strength in being able to sit alone with your thoughts.

    But there is also wisdom in knowing when not to sit with them alone forever.

    There is nothing wrong with talking to someone.

    For me, it took A counselor.

    Someone safe enough to hear you without making you feel small.

    I know sometimes that sounds like a lot. Especially when you are used to keeping things to yourself. Especially when silence has become a kind of armor. But silence can also become a prison if we never let anything out.

    Negative thoughts are like poison when they stay trapped inside you.

    They change you

    They make love feel suspicious.

    They make peace feel temporary.

    So the best way I know to deal with negative thoughts is to stop pretending they are harmless just because no one else can see them.

    Name them.

    Sit with them.

    Let the emotion pass long enough for you to think clearly.

    Then deal with what is underneath.

    And when it becomes too heavy, talk to someone.

    That is not a weakness.

    That is maintenance of the soul.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Body’s Revolt  

    The Body’s Revolt  

    Today, the rebellion didn’t come from outside. It rose in my own chest—cough first, then that raw-edged scrape across the throat, the slow ache that spreads like a rumor to joints and fingers. My body filed a complaint in every language it knew: fatigue, pressure, heat. It felt less like illness and more like a verdict. Maybe this is what happens when you dare the air to touch you after years of letting walls do the holding. Perhaps some older part of me—the cautious archivist, the keeper of soft corners—finally stood up and said, Sit down.

    I am home. Not the heroic threshold of a parking lot or a panoramic windshield, but the quiet geography of a kitchen table. The Green Tea with Lemon & Honey steeped too long. Honey pools at the rim of a jar like a promise I don’t believe in yet. A pile of tissues sag with the weight of their job. The notebook lies shut under the pen I’d placed there with good intentions, the cover warm from the light but stubborn in its silence. The window stays closed, the sunlight pressing its face against the glass—proof enough, I tell myself, that the air out there can’t be trusted. The room hums softly with my own confinement, the kind of silence that sounds like waiting for permission to move.

    This is not the scene we celebrate. No triumphant shot of road and horizon. No clean moral in which discomfort becomes courage becomes motion. Instead: the stall. The human stutter. The gulp of disappointment that tastes like metal and old plans. I keep waiting for the narrative to break in my favor, for the part where resolve conquers symptoms, where I lace up shoes and walk straight into the weather. But the boots sit obediently near the door, a small sermon on readiness I haven’t earned.

    It would be easier to call this a cold and let it pass without comment. But the body keeps secrets only when we ask it to. Today, mine is talkative. It says: You have learned to love the museum of control. Measured light, predictable temperature, the still life of comforts arranged just so. It says: Maybe cowardice is the name we give the tenderness we don’t yet know how to carry. That one stings. Not because it’s cruel, but because it might be true.

    I take a sip of tea and the heat climbs my throat, then lowers a rope into the hurt. I pretend that counts as bravery. I inventory the tools: steam, citrus, ginger, honey, patience. Each one is a small citizen in the fragile republic of the body. Each one is voting for me to stay. I listen for the old voice—Everything you need is here—and hear its new clause: â€¦for now. There’s mercy in that ellipsis. There’s also a dare.

    People talk about transformation like it’s a door you stride through, a hinge that swings, a sky that opens. Sometimes it’s closer to the slow rotation of a dimmer switch. Sometimes change is a cough you stop resisting, a nap you refuse to shame, a page you agree to leave blank until your hands remember how to hold a line without shaking. I want to be the version of myself who chooses outside as a reflex, not as an achievement. Today I am not him. Today I am a person sitting at a table, watching light lose its patience across the floorboards, trying not to mistake stillness for surrender.

    There’s a particular disappointment that comes from failing your own promise. It arrives with the officiousness of a hall monitor: Weren’t you the one who said— Yes. I was. I am. I will be again. But today the body votes no, and the mind—traitor or guardian, I can’t tell—counts the ballots twice. That, too, is information. Maybe growth isn’t the victory lap; maybe it’s the audit.

    I catch myself reaching for explanations —little alibis to hand the reader on my way past: allergies, the season, the stress that’s stacked up, and finally, asking for rent. But the truth is plainer. Stepping into the world costs something, and my pockets are light today. The shame isn’t that I don’t have the fare; it’s that I keep checking the same empty pockets and pretending I’m surprised.

    So this is what I can offer: witness. The ordinary, unbeautiful courage of not pretending. No conquest narrative, no panoramic proof. Just the still life of a day that didn’t go. Steam thinning above a cup. The honey’s slow gold. A pen that will write again when it’s ready and not a minute earlier. 

      Failure, I am learning, is a translator. It renders ambition into a tongue the body can understand. It says: You want to move? Then rest as if you mean it. It says: You want the world? Then take this room seriously. Practice gentleness here until your hands remember how to carry it outside. It says: Cowardice is a story; try another draft.

    If there’s a lesson in the ache—beyond fluids and sleep and the quiet arithmetic of recovery—it might be this: I don’t have to be the hero of my own day to be its honest historian. The page will forgive me for showing up without a conclusion. The sun, which has shifted now to the other end of the room, will rise again with or without my approval. Some mornings, it will find me on a trailhead with lungs like bright bells. Others, it will find me measuring ginger and watching dust fall through its light like notes on a staff.

    I look at the shoes by the door. I do not put them on. I look at the pen on the notebook. I do not force the line. I lift the cup and let the heat speak through me. The body is still lobbying its case. I am still listening. Between shame and mercy is a small table where I can sit for as long as it takes. The world will wait. The door is not going anywhere. Neither am I—until I am.

    Maybe tomorrow the hinge swings. Next week, the sky opens. Or I could learn to honor the days that don’t move, the ones that teach me how to carry silence without dropping it. If that sounds like cowardice to someone with stronger lungs, so be it. I know what it costs to breathe.

    When the tea is gone and the light snuffs itself along the baseboards, I open the notebook just enough to hear the paper sigh. No sentences come, but the page no longer feels like a closed fist. It feels like a palm.

    That will have to count for progress tonight. And if it doesn’t, I will learn to count differently.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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