Rats, Hacks, and Other Attacks Monday Morning Check-In Post

How Are You??!!

Sunday Morning Healing

More than once last week my brain would not accept what my eyes were telling me.

After the drama of Sookie attacking Zoey on Wednesday night right after we completed our space clear spell, going to the vet, and finding out that Sookie needed to be in 10-days-at-home-or-always-on-a-leash-jail due to mandated Rabies quarantine protocol, and managing the flow here with the pack as we tend to what are her anxiety-induced behaviors, I was looking forward to a quiet Friday.

“Did she break the skin?”

I answered, “Yes,” honestly, and now I wish I could go back in time and stuff that word back into my mouth. I understand public health and safety and yet if I had said, “No,” we’d only be dealing with treating Sookie’s anxiety and her relationship with Zoey. Apparently, this needed to be this dramatic.

We are amidst a hard reset.

Zoey is healing so quickly that you can no longer tell that anything happened. She even initiated some play with Sookie while on a walk on Thursday afternoon, and Sookie has apologized to her more than once. While still cautious, Zoey is more comfortable with Sookie as time passes. Teddy keeps grooming Zoey’s snout, contributing to her healing.

On Thursday night, I got into bed with Sookie, who, while unattended, is isolated to the bedroom and my connecting office, and snuggled her up. A wave of sadness crashed through me and I cried with her there as I remembered being left home alone so many times as a child and teen due to my abuser deciding I was not welcome to go to the restaurants, movies, outdoor activities, vacations, and all other fun. My mother acquiesced to his edict, shunning me and locking me away, enabling his abuse of me and becoming an abuser herself. The injustice of it all still burns.

I tried to reason with myself that what was happening with Sookie was not the same. This was for her protection and the protection and safety of everyone in our household. She was the aggressor in her altercation with Zoey. Besides, it’s also becoming clear that Sookie enjoys alone time. She also seems relieved not to have to make decisions for herself as she is on a leash even in the house right now except for when she is sleeping. She is the only one of our three who ever liked being in a crate. No matter how many justifications I made I still felt sad and guilty with crushing feelings of failure for locking Sookie away.

I woke on Friday looking forward to an uneventful day. I made my coffee, plopped into my office chair, and opened my laptop to check Facebook, my emails, this blog, and all of the other things that have become a regular part of this weird, weird existence. The adjoining door to the bedroom on my left was closed and the door to the kitchen was open. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it, a wee rodent scurrying across the kitchen floor.

“Nope”, my brain said.

“Maybe I imagined it.”

“Nope. Dammit. There it was again,” as I watched it run under the stove, my brain catching up to what I’d already seen.

I thought about waking Jon who was in bed with all three of the doggies and decided I would rather sit in denial a while longer. I had no spoons left after the emotional drain of the pack dynamics and all it triggered for me. Peace was beginning to establish itself here and I was not ready to wreck it by telling Jon about the mouse/baby rat. So I went back to what I was doing on my computer.

Soon after I got a message from a Facebook friend letting me know they got a weird tag from me in a comment. I assumed my account had been cloned and went in search of the comment/cloner. I posted about it, and this was when another friend let me know he thought I had been hacked.

“Nope, no way was I being hacked. No!,” said my brain again.

“This is just a cloning. Report the fake account and move on.”

Aghast, my brain caught up, “Nope. It’s a fucking hack.”

I quickly tried to change my password and found myself unable to do so. The hacker was one step ahead of me in every move except for the post I was able to make on my timeline informing everyone I had been hacked. Soon after, I was completely locked out of my Facebook account and unable to recover it. I spent most of Friday trying to get it back.

It’s gone to me now. Fifteen years’ worth of connections, conversations, insights, writing, photos, healing- all of it- is not mine now. I don’t know if I’ll get it back. I feel violated every time I think about it, and the complete lack of help and support from Meta/Facebook’s end is infuriating.

In the meantime, I have set up a new Facebook account here. I am currently unable to send out many friend requests due to spam rules. So, if we were Facebook friends, please unfriend and block my old account. If you’d like to be friends with me, please send a friend request to my new one.

On Saturday I met a Schnauzer puppy named Jasper (my childhood dog, Bucky who was a biter and had to be rehomed was a Schnauzer). Jasper was what we named the McNab puppy we had to rehome eight years ago due to him attacking Zoey and me. This Jasper was as sweet as can be and gave me hugs and kisses, for a moment I felt my childhood dog’s spirit connect with me. I loved Bucky and ten-year-old me started packing a suitcase the night our parents told us they were rehoming him. My plan was to take him with me. I stopped packing when I realized I had nowhere to go.

I did tell Jon about the rodent when he got up. We have a solution given to us by Theresa and Vasken, which is the opposite of our Ojai landlord basically saying to us, “You have rats in the house? Too fucking bad. Deal with it yourself.”

I have had some anger come up where he is concerned as a part of this clearing. Word on the block is that he did not move his mother into the house he evicted us from, which is no surprise. He had offered to compensate us for things we had done over the years we lived there and then backpedaled as we were leaving, instead blaming us for his fifteen years’ worth of negligence.

I have to let this all go. Again, it’s the injustice.

I one hundred percent now understand why we waited almost six months to work our clearing spell. The clearing we did brought much more to the surface than I knew was lurking in the shadows.

Holy shit.

I asked The Faeries for help the other night and got the advice to “not be in a hurry”, “to look for the good in the bad and the bad in the good”, and “to prepare for things to begin to move quickly once this time passes”. It’s all excellent advice. I’ve found some gold in starting anew on Facebook and have shifted my perspective on some of Sookie’s behaviors. What I was reading as friendliness now looks like overstimulation and anxiety.

It’s not escaped my awareness that I created my Facebook account right after moving to Ojai and lost it just a few months after leaving. As I created my new profile I noticed that how I define myself has changed a lot in fifteen years. It’s so on the nose as I enter my second Saturn Return.

It took me a couple of days, but I have begun to employ the magic pivot, releasing my attachments to my OG Facebook account and the page associated (you should unfollow and block this as well. (The fuckers stealing the URL “operate from joy” really burns). I am open to the path ahead, however it unfolds.

How are you? Please let me know in the comments below.

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