Notes on Life

For the first time in two years, I attended my first large-group work gathering. While meetings had been back to normal since the start of the year, I have often begged off attending. I have not had COVID and it is still something that I am very careful about. 

My boss had been trying to convince me to attend meetings, telling me that people have been looking for me constantly and everyone wants to see me. I have been able to dodge a major convention recently but because the recent meeting was coinciding with a visit to the wake of someone that I respected a lot, I had no choice but to finally attend a meeting.

This month marks another year since my father died. Even after all this time, his passing still feels like it happened yesterday. The events of that day and the weeks after that felt like a huge blur, like a dream that you faintly remember once you wake up. You cannot remember the details, but you could never forget that it happened at the same time. I wish it were all a dream, but sadly the death of my father was very real.

All these years in but I still feel the loss of my father. There have been so many times when I have said out loud or thought in my head that I wished he was still here. I have repeatedly wondered or imagined his reaction to the things happening in the lives of me and my sisters if he was still with us.  Sometimes, in my most vulnerable moments, I still shed tears thinking of him. 

In October of 2020, once people started filing their Certificates of Candidacy for the coming elections, I decided to deactivate my Facebook. I was starting to see people taking sides and posting their political opinions on the app and I felt overwhelmed by it all. I decided that it was time for me to take a break from it, at least until the elections were over. It has been nine months since then and if not for the fact that I still actively use Facebook Messenger, I would have deleted my account already. The only times I have been back on Facebook were limited to around 5 minutes at most, and were only to try to transfer the accounts where I used the app to log in to the more traditional username and password format (as well as to update my profile photo, which you apparently cannot do via Facebook Messenger).

How do I feel right now without Facebook? Surprisingly calm and fine with it, actually.