On the last full moon, my Facebook and Instagram social media accounts were hacked. The pages, community, and content that I’ve been curating for decades literally disappeared overnight.
I’ve spent countless hours attempting to access my accounts again, to file an appeal, or get help, only to hit one wall after another. Because my Meta account was connected to PayPal, which was linked to my bank, the hacker’s tentacles reached into my finances — although I’ve been able to get my money back.
Chaos. Erasure. Disruption. And it all falls down.
I’m frustrated, angry, sad, and incredulous. I’ve seen this happen to other friends and colleagues, but watched from my glass house on “That Won’t Happen To Me” Street. Now I regret that I wasn’t more sympathetic. Mostly, I offered some version of “Sorry! Hope you get better soon,” and kept my distance for fear of catching whatever they got.
I haven’t given up hope that some human being inside the Meta-verse will stumble on something and say, “Well, clearly this is not right,” and push the buttons that will restore things to the way they were. But there does not appear to be a way to make human contact. Instead, it’s a maze of AI rabbit holes, dead-ending in error messages or looping me back to the beginning.
After the initial shock of violation and the ensuing scramble, something quieter emerged. The awareness that the world of social media that I’ve suddenly been excommunicated from isn’t the real world I want to live in. I had to repeatedly step away from my laptop and go outside. Feel the soft green clover under my feet. Hear the geese honking across the sky. Smell the cold air and the smoke curling from the chimney. Orient myself, alive on the earth, in my beautiful life.
As a wise and deeply empathic sister reminded me at the beginning of this ordeal, “Lisa, you have not been erased. You are still very much here.”
I’ve also been thinking about this poem by 17th-century Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide:
Barn’s burnt down,
now I can see the moon.
Then I remembered another thing. A couple of days before that full moon, I was having a conversation with one of my besties about my lack of enthusiasm for Facebook and Instagram, confessing that it was increasingly not a place I wanted to be. I wondered what might be next, and we talked about the wisdom of making a fresh start.
On Substack.
You can’t make this stuff up. If this were a novel, you’d roll your eyes and think, “Oh please.”
And yet, here we are.
It occurs to me that I could choose to be in awe over the efficiency of my own wo-manifestation skills — or take this as a rousing endorsement of my new plan from Goddess Herself.
And then there is this part. The bigger part.
The timing of the hack coincided with a rare visit from my 86-year-old dad, who was staying with us that week.
He was so broken-hearted about this happening to me.
As I am reeling from this erasure and trying to make sense of it, I can see that there is a bigger disappearance going on — a fundamental and existential one: the slow but steady decline of my dad. My father has been such a physically strong and capable man his whole life. On a very practical level, I am tending to his increasing needs and dependencies. Steadying him at the elbow. Orienting him to what day it is, what is real, in this moment. “It’s time for your toast, Dad, so you can take your morning pills.”
As I am watching so much in him fade, something else is simultaneously growing. It’s a blooming luminosity. I see a light of sweetness, surrender, gratitude. The easy flow of tears from being touched by something unexpected. His profound wonder at the sheer miracle of being alive for another day.
I’m aware of how precious our moments are together, which makes me more conscious of my impatience with him. The tedium of having to slow down, to have too-long chats with every person on the street walking a dog, to listen to the same story for the hundredth time, to explain again that the red bubble with the number on your iPhone means you have voicemails you haven’t heard.
I am being confronted with imagining the impossible: that soon I will have to walk on this earth without hearing his laugh, without feeling his arms around me, without seeing the love sparkling in his eyes. That this man I love so much will be gone, and I will have to subsist on his memory.
I feel myself on the threshold of stepping from daughter to orphan elder — and how radically ordinary this is. It is the natural order of things (if we are lucky, which I most certainly am).
What’s true is that all of it gets erased. Everything is impermanent. And love remains. We all know this in our bones. So I am watching my very human self and cultivating compassion for her — clinging to what she knows, holding fast to the roots on the shore, and resisting the pull into the wild current of the fast-flowing river.
I’m contemplating what’s next in this threshold moment, listening. Probably migrating my writing and work to Substack, but we shall see. The end of the Year of the Snake clearly required some skin shedding, some stripping. And the new lunar year of the Fire Horse is here, with energy for transformation and temperance. Will we burn it all down — or make soup on the hearth?
What is this touching in you, Dear One? Maybe drop the expectation of answers and instead invite yourself to live into the questions. Here are a few from your Shakti Coach to contemplate or bring to your journal:
Where in your life have you experienced an unexpected erasure — something gone suddenly, without ceremony — and what did it touch beneath the surface?
What are you grieving right now, and what would it look like to give that more attention or space?
What feels like it’s dissolving or disappearing in your life — not as failure, but as a natural ending?
If you didn’t rush to replace what’s been lost, what might arise instead?
What threshold are you standing at, even if you don’t yet know what’s on the other side?
We don’t cross these thresholds alone, even when it feels that way. I am so grateful to be walking with you.
With love and blessings,
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I am Lisa Schrader and I coach high achieving, spiritual women who are done being driven by pressure and ready to be powered by pleasure. Learn more here.
