Returning to Facebook: What happened when I came back after 5 years of absence

My favourite part of returning to Facebook after 5 years is becoming friends with my friends.

Of starting fresh and new and more or less only friend requesting or saying yes to those who ARE my friends.

Given how much I’ve moved, constantly leaving behind communities in Whistler, up & down New Zealand, and now Squamish, it’s so heart-warming to see all my favourite people and feel their journeys in my feed again.

Yesterday, in a session with Roswitha Herman, as she ‘read’ my system, she picked up a ‘3km thick wall’ around my heart. Unprocessed emotion.

I was like – whaaaaaaaat?

Do you have any idea how much emotion I’ve felt/processed in the last 20 years?

Do you have any idea how committed I am to fully feeling whatever arises in the moment?

How is that possible?

I remember the closing ceremony of NZ Spirit North Island 2024, a week before we flew out to Squamish.

I sobbed my way through the entire ceremony, whilst everyone around me celebrated and danced, feeling invisible and unseen mostly – except by Raghava Simha, Silas & Logan Danger Tottenham. 

I couldn’t stop these heaving sobs as I prepared to leave my beloved community of 10+ years to return to Canada – another beloved community I’d left 20 years prior.

Leaving.

Leaving.

Leaving.

How can there still be tears?

But of course there can – because I am also very good at compartmentalising, getting on with what needs doing and weaving narrative to hold me steady in the doing.

I can be so good at doing it, I don’t even know I’m doing it, meanwhile underneath the grieving continues.

This summer, prior to returning to Facebook. I’ve also allowed my heart to be broken – twice – by men who appeared very interested and keen, yet weren’t at all committed and ready to show up.

I don’t mind. 

I’ve come to enjoy the heart being broken, again and again. Every time, it cracks a little wider, right?

Embrace that, enjoy that, savour that.

Only – see how that can be a narrative in and of itself?

Allowing a certain amount of grieving, and unconsciously compartmentalising the rest?

How sneaky the mind is. 

Perhaps my heart still grieves for the relationship that isn’t, that steadiness to stand by my side through the ups and downs, as we walk our separate paths, alongside. 

Perhaps my heart still grieves the family and father experience my son never had, forever robbed of knowing what it’s like to ‘be fathered’.

Perhaps my heart still grieves this for myself, as I too experienced total lack of ‘fathering’.

I know my heart grieves for the world when my feed dishes up genocide and ICE raids and intolerance and hatred.

I pause, let the tears come, feel them, and know that they are but the tip of an iceberg of grief for the suffering of the world.

Then there is the grief I felt yesterday when the sessions revealed the impact of my grandfather’s judgments against business & profit on my psyche.

I remember how harsh he was, how judgmental, how righteous, and yet I loved him so because he was also a good man, an upright man, a providing man and my heart broke again yesterday, remembering the yearning as a child to be seen and loved instead of judged and admonished.

Ai yi yi yi.

There is much to grieve. Which means there is much love to be be.

Because they are one and the same – the depth of our grief revealing the depth of our love.

I no longer deny either – at least consciously. And now, today, after being told that my heart is protected by a 3km thick wall… I pause to go in and ask:

Is that true?

What is needed?

Is that true?

What is needed?

In love, with love, by love… 

To you all. 

I’m glad this marks my returning to Facebook, and I am curious to see what unfolds.