My Group Chat Got Me Through 2020

Here’s a handful of topics I broached with my group chat in the past 24 hours: Covid-19 vaccine videos that have made me sob; god I’m so annoyed at anti-vaxxers; I think I imprinted on both Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton at age 8 thanks to Mission: Impossible 2; also why is it that months after the fact people keep defending the Zoom dick dude?

If this sounds like my brain is a landfill site of useless information, you are not wrong. Luckily, however, I found a Gemini, a Cancer, a Libra, and a Scorpio whose brilliant, trash-filled brains mirror mine.

I’m fully aware technology mostly sucks. But the constant stream of notifications lighting up my phone day and night has allowed me to stay sane over the past nine months of pure insanity. The pandemic brought a new wave of terror each day, the stress of the election fried my nerves, the brutal violence against Black and Brown bodies broke my heart again and again. But throughout it all I knew I could crawl into the glowing screen of my phone to find comfort in the arms of my group chat.

Being in constant communication with these four women — all older, wiser, and wittier than me, and who will definitely roast me for days after reading this — was the first thing that crossed my mind when asked, “What got you through 2020?” A funnier answer would have been lots of wine and an unholy amount of Criminal Minds, but it wouldn’t have been as honest. Our chaotic chat with its rollercoaster of emotions and topics truly held me together.

This year we’ve been there for each other through a million moments — through niche gossip and inappropriate jokes, miraculous births and shitty layoffs, panicked spirals and full-fledged anger. Knowing this group was only a message away was a stabilizing force, especially during a time that often felt as if the ground magically disappeared from under my feet. I had an anxiety attack? Texted them. People acted like fools despite the pandemic? Revised our plans to start a commune away from civilization.

A TikTok of a child muttering under his breath “I fucking hate people too!” made me laugh? Sent it. Thought of buying a pair of gold hoops that J.Lo owns? Sought out confirmation that it was the right decision. Saw another tweet about how Gov. Andrew Cuomo is hot? Used it to drag the ones in the chat who momentarily agreed in the past because he is absolutely not, for fuck’s sake. Did one of them tell me they kicked ass at work? Reminded them they’re booked and busy, baby.

I’ve never wanted dozens of friends, preferring to keep most people at arms’ length and hold just a few chosen ones close to my heart. In a place like New York, with its transitory nature, it is sometimes difficult to form deep friendships with people after you no longer share the same space. We all worked together until we didn’t, and the chat was born out of not being able to see each other more than a handful of times a year. I don’t know exactly how such different people could build such strong attachments, but I’ll take it. They’ve championed some of my hardest work and cheered me on. They’ve calmed me down and called me out on my bullshit. They’ve given me more deep and vapid knowledge than I know what to do with, and helped me grow more comfortable in my own skin.

Sometimes we got angry at each other while talking about the great racist media reckoning of 2020, and other equally hard shit. Part of it is the constraint of the medium we chose. Coming up in the digital age should have given us a clue that trying to figure out someone’s tone in texts can be awful, but we always came out of it. Is it really a friendship if someone doesn’t dramatically storm off, even digitally, at least once?

These women allowed me to feel joy in a time where joy has been scarce. I’m delighted every time they share pictures of their tiny children, their worst celebrity opinions, and their extremely niche gossip that makes sense to about five other people outside of our group. They’ve made me laugh more than I thought was possible in such a godforsaken year. Often our conversations — whether they’re started at 10 a.m. or 5:30 p.m. or midnight — take weird turns, and our cacophony of idiotic banter makes me feel like we’re all high out of our minds together. I’ll be lying down and cackling with tears rolling down my face, which leads my partner to ask, “What’s so funny?” I’ll try and fail to explain our 20 minutes of absolutely deranged conversation, and he will look at me like he’s a parent in desperate need of a break as their toddler tells the longest, most nonsensical story in the world. “And then, and then, and then.”

Which is all to say, you have to be there to get it. And I hope our chat never gets read aloud in court.

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