3 months ago my personal Facebook account was hacked and deleted, leaving me without access to the 'Stay Inspired by the Wild' and 'Coast to Coast Mermaid Festival' business pages. Since I started speaking up about this, people have shared similar stories from their friends and accounts they followed. Including myself, I currently know of 6 cases of Meta accounts being hacked and deleted, hacked and taken over, or content stolen. There are 2 things that each of these account-owners have in common: female-owned & operated, and the lack of support from Meta when they filed complaints. In my case, the hackers were able to install spyware on my phone, and I mention this to illustrate how severe the consequences can be.
I have chosen not to rebuild a business page or group on Facebook because after seeing how they handle - or moreover ignore - situations such as this, I no longer feel like it's a safe place to be. Knowing that, I can't invite my audience to find me there either. The account violations extend to Instagram; IG is not the alternative that we've been looking for. While I still have my business and personal accounts there, I am wary about the time I invest and the content I'll share because the trust is gone. This entire experience has inspired me to challenge myself to transmute and elevate the situation through the alchemy of creativity. After 3 months of deep soul-searching, I've finally created something I'm proud of out of something that really hurt.
I'm now hosting a membership through my website which functions as a social forum for intentional content. The membership is hosted within an exclusive forum to filter out the riff-raff of social media, allowing us to have the conversations that we've been censored from having.
One of the first topics of interest that came in from a recent poll of my audience is women's health and hormone support, because this has been such a grossly under-served area of healthcare for too long. As we move away from a disease paradigm into one of prevention, I want to see herbs infused into daily life in every way possible. I believe an herbal practitioner's role in this day and age should be about supporting wellness in order to avoid chronic disease, whereas allopathic medicine is created for those who are already sick. Under that model, there is no profit to be made from wellness, and unfortunately we are in a time where we have to face the reality of what drives profit margins in our current model of healthcare. Half the population of the United States is living with some form of chronic illness, and these are all life-style related. It is critical that we shift our focus onto prevention, which means adjusting our entire lives.
The Sorror Mystica membership provides education, tips, recipes and resources for women's health from a variety of healers with different areas of expertise. There are categories dedicated to each phase of the female monthly cycle, making it easy for readers to locate the support they need throughout the month. Hormone-balancing products offered here through the Inspired by the Wild apothecary are coded with a corresponding moon cycle so it's easy to see which products are most beneficial at each phase. There is an entire forum dedicated to Q&A and one for requests & referrals.
In addition, I'll be hosting regular speak-easy pop-up cafe's where I'll be high-lighting new herbal products and sharing my figurative art installation called "In the Flesh". Pieces in this collection have never been shared publically, and have never been shared online. These pieces are meant to be viewed in person only, and photographs are forbidden without prior permission from the artist. This is in explicit conscientious objection to the rise of artist's original works being stolen and used to train AI. This installation is about boundaries and access to the female form. The paintings were created 20 years ago with no intention to share. They are perhaps the only piece of myself that I have been able to keep to myself, and after completing a month-long trauma release program, I finally feel empowered to share these life-sized self-portraits.
Art, like sex, should be consensual, and never stolen.
Commentaires