May 2022 be the Year of Healing

Addressing old wounds can set us free in body, mind, emotions

The New Year is always a time for reflection, and I’m dealing with an issue stirred up by my past: childhood bullying I experienced fifty years ago that’s still affecting me today.

Three years after Freckled: a Memoir of Growing Up Wild in Hawaii came out, the best selling of all my bestselling books is still causing a ripple effect. That can't help but happen when the story is of my first 18 years of life, but I keep hoping the waves will settle. 

Bonny and Toby, hippie kids in the jungle on Kauai.

It seemed like those waves were, for a bit, until something weird and alarming happened. Kira Yoshimura (not her real name), my childhood nemesis, found me on Facebook and sent me a “friend” request.

This girl bullied me in an extreme, ongoing way from first through fifth grade as a kid growing up on Kauai in the 1970s. Her actions went from “small,” like naming me Haole Crap (a nickname I never shook) keeping me isolated and despised by others, pinching me viciously and pulling my hair, and i…