AW, 2020. The year of unfulfilled expectations, broken vacation plans, and video call Happy Hours. The year we traded in dive bars for our own back yard and added masks to our list of things that we check our purses for before leaving the house. Meeting places are now Zoom, FaceTime and Facebook. If you are anything like me, this pandemic has given us a lot more time to think, and then over think about things we might not have considered before time slowed down. Things like what we like or don’t like about the current state of society.
Hell, we have so much time why not consider what we like and don’t like about our individual lives?

While on the subject, it might be interesting to point out that a lot of our new lives are lacking the in-person social niceties that polite society requires. Before social isolation, if someone’s opinion was offensive, we often let it go, I mean, people suck everyone knows that, besides calling someone out at a party, or in a work meeting, is awkward and difficult. What if our voice shakes or our face goes red? Better to just let it be right?
To be honest, I rarely let anything be, but in the before times I let a lot slide due to time. My time was tied up with commutes, and after school activities, my calendar was packed so tight that I was forced to choose my battles.

The pandemic has moved a lot of reality online. The internet has its pros and cons, one prominent complaint I have heard in recent years is that kids growing up in the social media generation have discovered crueler methods of bullying. By taking their abuse online means that the torment the bullied endures doesn’t end at the end of the school day. Social media makes it possible for the bully to come directly into the home of the victim. Unfortunately for me I personally experienced this when my company forced all employees to work from home in March, I went from being bullied at work to being forced to allow my work bullies directly into my home. It was traumatizing to have that energy inside of the place I thought I was safe. Eventually I realized that this intrusion was a double-edged sword, the bullying was magnified online, but so were the consequences. If someone is bullying through online means, that leaves a clear, undeniable paper-trail, a lesson my boss will likely not forget.

Hiding behind a keyboard and screen can make us feel unaccountable for our words or actions, that is the appeal for bullies and those of us who stand up to them. Which raises an interesting question, who benefits from this new online existence, bullies who are allowed to enter spaces they were previously uninvited or the victims who now can collect written evidence of torment?

Perhaps both.

Either way, the election has lit up social media with divisiveness so vile and hostile it kept me offline for most of June, July and August. Logging on to Facebook used to be like waving to friendly neighbors while taking a stroll in a familiar neighborhood. Now it feels more like traveling to the run-down part of a post apocalyptic city to purchase necessary swag from a sketchy character that we’ll later regret. People I used to love and respect are politically aggressive, I found myself becoming antagonistic a few times before self-imposing Facebook time outs. The energy feels dangerous, electric, and ready to explode at any moment.

I knew this happen eventually. I have some pre-pandemic experience in this arena.

Idle hands+the uncertainty of life=uncharacteristically strange online activities

Five or so years ago I entered into an online advertised essay contest to win a BnB in Maine. I wrote my heart out and was proud of my entry. I was poor AF, single mom, chef dying to be successful, and that property would have been my ticket out of what I felt was a shit existence. I was recently divorced and was desperately trying to start a business purely on my talent and force of will. I had ventured out into the dating world and had my heart crushed. In a nutshell, I was depressed, isolated, and needed human contact.

The biggest factor in this era of depression in my life was that I was also dying of cancer.

At the time I didn’t know.

Not that I hadn’t discussed the mountain of symptoms I had learned to live with for years with my doctor, it was that my doctor didn’t care. I digress.

When the essay contest ended the winning essay was posted on the Inn’s Facebook page. After months of dreaming and anticipating, we now all got to read the winning submission, and it was garbage. A lot of people were mad.

It was a show of shit so beautifully played out on social media I couldn’t help watching.

Eventually, I joined the conversation. I couldn’t help myself. My real life was going nowhere and misery loves company, right?

Besides, I didn’t know any of these people. They were all over the country watching strangers start tearing each other apart over voicing their opinions about an essay contest was the liveliest thing I had ever seen on Facebook. The Inn’s public business page turned into a battleground of accusations, name calling, threats, and the occasional peacekeeper stepping in to mediate to no avail. The elderly Innkeeper deleted the Facebook page suddenly just things really got interesting; I was disappointed. Until all of a sudden new a new group formed to keep the conversation going. I joined of course. Once in the energy in there was intoxicating, the group administrators were high on their new authority and kept booting anyone they disagreed with which caused more dissent and more groups to pop up.

Two enemy camps formed, the people who thought the essay winner deserved to win and then the other side that was like- DUDE! It’s an essay contest and that essay was trash! There are grammar mistakes, plagiarism, not to mention it was uninspiring.

Since the previous weeks were filled with fantasies of moving to Maine and pretending to be a Gilmore Girl (I never watch the show but the friend I entered the contest with was a fan and told me it would be great) I needed something to refocus on and I could not stop watching this bizarre display of human nature in its raw uninhibited online form. At first, I joined all of the groups, each had their own reason for becoming a tribal enemy faction. I wasn’t sure who to throw my support behind.

So, I did what I always do in situations where I have to choose a side, I watched the leaders, and more importantly I identify the power behind the leader. On one side there was a guy who I pictured as an older gentleman who lived with his mother and collected Hummel figurines, the power behind him was a woman who made Nurse Rached seem maternal.

The other group had the same electricity pulsing through, but the leader was someone I could identify with, younger, fiery, attractive female who took no shit. Her very existence infuriated the Hummel figurine crowd passionately. I found my tribe.

I intended on being a quiet observer in this group but Kelley was not having any of that, she had an amazing way of drawing people out in the open to judge their character, intentions in being there and then putting them to work. Including me. A few days later I was Kelley’s right-hand administrator.

Kelley and I clicked, loudly. She had this revolutionary leader vibe going and I was like gasoline on the fire. Kelley was not a placeholder leader, she was combustible but undeniably magnetic and instinctively knew how to turn ideas into action, and quickly. I was not the Nurse Rached VP who undermined a weak leader’s authority, no, my role was there to balance a steady burn on the fire so it wouldn’t get out of control. I was there for Kelley, and her alone. Validating her, backing her up, using my ability to crush the souls of assholes with my carefully chosen words when needed. We made a kick ass Facebook admin team.

We didn’t manage to change the outcome of the contest we regretted entering, but we turn annoyance and disappointment into a brief and fiery revolution that stopped more unregulated pay-to-play essay contests from gaining steam. Our group uncovered the potential to use this crowd funding format to cover up fraud with the sweetest carrot any con man or woman can yield- hope.

That was an accomplishment, had we let it go a lot more suckers would have been tricked out of time, hope, and money. Plus, I met the greatest leader I have ever followed, Kelley, her Facebook profile picture immortalized in oil as the featured image attached to this article.

Last year I watched the documentary “Don’t fuck with cats,” the Netflix original is disturbing on a multitude levels, but it reminded me of the power that collecting people together into a Facebook group for a common purpose can have.

I started seeking out new groups to join. Art groups, support groups, anything. I’ve met a few amazing humans here and there but all of the groups I found seemed to lack the passion I was seeking. They were dull. Too much structure and not enough fire. Stale. Controlled.

If the group is not specifically labeled feminist or leftist misogyny runs rampant. If misogyny is banned then the group is entirely humorless, as if the only joy men find in the world is objectifying women, making fun of women, and/or normalizing commentary that leans suspiciously into the realm of sexual assault. Which is everything I loathe about “real life,” but online.

What. A. Waste. Of. Time.

Then, like a bolt of lightning, someone tagged me in a tag group named:

Freyja, fetch your cat chariot. This man demands to be blood eagled.

There it was. The churning electric energy of like-minded people gathered in one place. Here was a collection of thousands of people ready to roast any man who dares to express his archaic beliefs online for all to see. I found my people.

Before finding this group, I had never heard of a tag group, I had to google it. The group names are cleverly worded to use as a canned reply to something upsetting that is posted on Facebook.

These are also great places to find the most relevant memes on Facebook for whatever cause, ideology, or sense of humor we possess. I had ventured into a tag group or two prior Freyja’s cat chariot of awesomeness, but I didn’t realize that there were so many dedicated to support fellow women being treated poorly online. There is a tag group for nearly every occasion from a discussion group about the objectification of women to a tag group to find more tag groups.

What I liked about these groups is that it boils down membership to like-minded people only. If someone comes in instantly offended, they get blocked. Once I collected a respectable 10-15 tag groups to be a part of I was curious how old these spaces of discussion were, particularly the ones with overwhelming feminine energies, and the average age of the groups are one year to six months old. Which supports a theory I have been cultivating for almost that long, things are changing.

Women are growing more and more impatient of being treated like less than. Less than our male peers at work. Less than our masculine family member. Less than the man on the street corner asking us why we don’t smile. Less than the old “friend” who blows up our DMs when our relationship status changes from in a relationship to single. Less than, simply put, human.

It would be a shame to waste the momentum and energy that these online places have collected. Is it possible to wrangle that energy? Unite the tribes, stop bickering, and integrate under a common cause? Is it possible to channel the anger into a real force of positive change and activism? USE the spirit of the times to change the future. For all of us, for our children and their children. Put down our preconceived notions of what the world is and see if we can, collectively, make it into what WE want it to look like.

I do not have the answers yet, but I do intend on finding out, in the meantime I created a tag group with just that intention, if you find yourself intrigued and looking to hang with some fiery ladies come check us out at, let’s try this interaction again, but this time treat me like a person.