One of the first memories I have of my childhood is creating the character of Ms. Glindy. I can’t say that I know for sure how I came up with her name. I only remember the day I tied a yellow scarf around my five-year-old head, slouched forward, pulled my Lisa Frank underpants up well over my belly button, took on my best “old lady” voice and shuffled my feet across the linoleum floor to introduce myself.

“I’m Ms. Glindy,” I squawked, adding whistle to the end of the Ms. At this, my sisters erupted in fits of laughter. Ms. Glindy made other appearances over the years, eventually evolving to carry a yard stick as a cane for shaking at my sisters during some more animated performances.

It’s one of the mysteries of childhood, I suppose, exactly why my performance as an old woman was so funny to my siblings and parents. By the time I was 10 or so, Ms. Glindy had overstayed her welcome. She no longer brought forth the laughter she once had, so she all but disappeared into the great anthology of our family goof-offs, only surfacing in memory time and again for an occasional reference when someone is acting a little too old for their age.

She was birthed in a simpler time- when there was no technology aside from an occasional Fisher Price tape recorder or pull-string talking PeeWee Herman doll to entertain us. A time when a kid could pull their underwear up over their belly button without fear of a “Like” harvesting livestream or becoming an unwitting and embarrassing TikTok sensation.

There were no rainbow puke photo filters to brighten up a dreary winter weeknight. We had to make do for ourselves.

I know.. This is all very “back in my day,” but hang in there. I’m getting to a point.

Soon, I wasn’t developing characters to perform for my sisters at all anymore. We got our first computer in 1995, when I was 11 years old, and we were one of the first families in our town to get internet access. I discovered Yahoo! Chat rooms and made myself a regular participant, even making “friends” online- some of whom I now look back on and shudder, realizing they were certainly not the similarly aged children they assured me they were. Back then, people weren’t aware of the dangers of the internet. My generation was left to find the landmines that existed in a new terrain where a five-year-old girl who pretended to be a sweet old lady somehow transformed into a pre-teen girl who would learn the hard way that other people also pretend to be people they aren’t. I spent years in those chat rooms, thinking I was safe and making interesting new friends across the globe.

But one day, one of my “teenage friends” somehow acquired enough information from me to figure out my phone number and, when he called, I knew he was no kid. It scared me. I told my mother and she handled it from there.

But I stayed off the internet for a while. Pretending was no longer something done for fun. It was scary.

It was my little sister who first told me about Myspace and I loved the idea of connecting with people you already know and having a new way to stay in contact. Together, Myspace and I grew up. I went through my sparkly GIF phase and my emo music phase and I experienced the stress of pairing your entire social circle down to a top 5. Then, when Myspace gave way to Facebook, I was part of the migration.

My youngest, born in 2005, has had every photo ever taken of her posted on Facebook. I’m talking about hundreds- no- thousands of photos. There are videos of milestones in their lives- first orchestra solos and first time catching a fish and that entire awkward goth phase that all pre-teen girls must endure. The blue eyeshadow phase. The braces. The first date.

God, how I loved Facebook. My kids are my everything and, thanks to Facebook, I could show them off to all the people I cared about most.. My aunt in Georgia. My childhood best friend. My sisters. My stepmother…

And a guy I worked two shifts with at a gas station job I had for less than a month when I was 20?

Hold up.

Don’t get me wrong. I accepted his friend request. I even liked some of his posts and I always felt a little happy to see him drop a like on one of mine. He doesn’t give those out freely. It was like winning a prize.

In fact, all of them were like winning a prize. I remember clearly the day I posted a photo of my daughter posed next to the dog on her first day of Middle School, side by side with a photo of her and the same dog on her first day of Kindergarten and it got over 100 likes. I felt like I’d really accomplished something that day.

And I had.

I’d raised a smart girl who was kind to animals and loved the family dog into his twilight years. That was the prize that day. Not the likes. But, in hindsight, I missed that.

This epiphany struck only recently. Something happened on Facebook that upset me. Actually, lots of things happened on Facebook that upset me. People I love have fallen apart from each other. I’ve watched politics and a pandemic draw deep lines in the sand that have set friendships adrift, cracked the roots of once-strong families, and forced a non-stop and exhausting conversation- no- vocalization about where we each stand between those lines. In conversations, you have to hear each other. On Facebook, you yell and mute the feeds of those you don’t want to hear from.

I don’t want to read one more “Let’s Go Brandon.” I don’t want to see my friend, a doctor, beg her own family member to get vaccinated. I don’t want to feel awkward about not deleting either friend when they’re both very publicly pointing fingers through their ugly divorce.

So, a little while ago, I left Facebook.

It was horrifyingly lonely on the first day. I felt cut completely off from all of humanity. I found myself absent-mindedly reaching for my phone only to stare down at it and remember the app is gone. There was a sense of not knowing what to do. There was a sense of having nobody to talk to.

Then my daughter sat down beside me and started telling me about her college classes and it reminded me of a story from when I was younger, so I told her and we laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time we laughed. Probably because I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a real conversation. A short conversation about a frustrating encounter at school gave way to a talk that lasted well into the night.

The next day, I went to the store and I took my time. I can’t quite explain it, but giving up Facebook somehow makes me feel less rushed in life. Maybe because I’m not tracking the lives of everyone else by the minute. Maybe because I don’t feel the constant pressure for my life to measure up to someone else’s. I decided I was going to do some baking. I bought what I needed to make a chocolate cake with banana pudding frosting and a salted caramel apple pie and some sun-dried tomato bread. I went to the craft store and bought a wood burning pen to replace the one that broke years ago on the day I gave up the craft. And, while I was there, I found some cross stitch patterns, too.

My grandmother taught me to cross stitch. I hadn’t done it in years.

I went home and cleaned my house. And, on Monday, I worked without distraction and thoroughly enjoyed my day and drove home with a greater sense of accomplishment than I’d felt for I don’t know how long.

I started reading a book on my Kindle that night, then realized I didn’t like how it felt to stare at the screen anymore. I went out the next day and bought the physical copy. I’m almost finished with it now and I have another book on the way and a note prepared for the inside cover of this one for when I leave it for someone else to find when it’s finished. I used to do that with books when I was young. I forgot.

And today, a friend from work commented that she missed me on Facebook. I responded, “You see me every day. How about we go see a movie this week?” And she agreed. Because the other thing we’ve all forgotten is that in-person socialization has always beat that which takes place through a screen.

I’ve become a houseplant tending, cross stitching, wood burning, book reading, baking marvel.

I had a laugh with my sister about how good I feel since remembering all the “old lady hobbies” I enjoy.

“I’d say I’m evolving, but I’m not,” I said. “She’s been in there all this time, waiting for me to come back to reality. I guess Ms. Glindy was always meant to be my final form.”

I Quit Facebook. was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A little more than fifteen years ago, my ex-husband pulled the car to a stop on a pitch dark stretch of gravel road in the middle of a snowstorm. He proceeded to beat me as I sat in the front seat. When he stopped to catch his breath, I crawled to the back seat, unbuckling my infant daughter from her car seat, and stepped outside of the vehicle. There was a light on at a house a quarter mile away and I thought I could get me and her to safety in fairly short notice. I started screaming for help as I ran toward the house and he fled in the car.

When I got to the house and knocked, there was nobody home. The doors were locked and there wasn’t another house around for at least five miles. I carried the baby to the shelter of the barn and sat with a friendly gray horse for about an hour, hoping someone would arrive. They didn’t, but the snow let up. Fearing we’d freeze, or that he would come back, I took my coat off, wrapped it around my daughter, and walked five miles to town. It took hours. Fortunately, I knew a couple that lived right on the edge of the small town I arrived at. I knocked on their door and they called the police.

This was not the first or the last time I’d be attacked by him, physically. I have stab scars in my legs. I have 2 collapsed vertebrae. I have a burn scar under my hairline at the back of my neck. That’s just the start.

But, by far, the worst of what he’s done has been the psychological abuse.

Eventually, based on the physical abuse, I was able to get the court’s permission to take my daughter out of state. We moved to Tennessee, where I have family, to get away from him. Shortly after arriving in Tennessee, though, I started having issues with cyberstalking. My picture and pictures of my daughter were being pulled off the now-defunct social media platform of Hi5 and winding up in ads on Craigslist claiming I’d kidnapped her, that I was abusing her, or that I was a prostitute.

An unfortunate legal requirement was that I had to provide him my phone number at that time so he could call and check on his daughter- the one he’d never paid any attention to.

I started having midnight callers from all over the country wanting to talk dirty to me. When I’d hang up, they’d call back angry. Every time I’d change my number, I was required to give him the new one and every time the calls would pick up again.

Eventually, he lost his parental rights and I was no longer required to provide him my contact information. I moved from the house with the address he had into a different home. Things settled down for a while, but when my first book was published, things started up again. Every time my book would be featured on a website, the comments would fill with his usual lies about me in an attempt to assassinate my character.

As I stopped advertising the book and doing interviews, that round of terror fizzled out.

In 2015, I posted a Facebook comment on a popular page’s post. There was an online discussion going on about children who don’t know their fathers for varied reasons. I explained that I have always answered my daughter’s questions in an age-appropriate way, but with as much honesty as that allowed. The post went viral because the advice resounded with some other mothers. Then, as it became popular and a screenshot of the comment started surfacing on various other pages, the comments again filled with his hatefulness- lies about me, personal information, and vile, vulgar stories about our former relationship. My dignity will not let me repeat them, but you can imagine the things a hateful man can think up to say about a woman he has previously been intimate with and now seeks to ruin.

At the age of 13, our daughter came out as a lesbian. Part of her coming out was launching her own social media campaign to bring awareness to anti-LGBT bullying she had endured. She received a lengthy message to her campaign page almost as soon as it opened from an “anonymous friend” who told her they were concerned that she had been tarnished by her mother’s “neo-liberal” beliefs. They told her that if she’d been allowed a better relationship with her father, she’d be “normal” and that they were “so very sorry” her head had been “warped.”

Now, let me explain something here- I am very much a liberal on many subjects. However, there are certain policies I do find myself leaning more to the right on. I am married to a man who considers himself a conservative. I am the daughter of a man who considers himself a conservative. Many of my friends are conservatives. I have never had an issue with opposing beliefs. I only ask that opposition is met with kindness and intellect.

Recently, a false post was created and circulated on the internet. It was created to look like I had posted it at 12:50 a.m. on March 21st (when I was fast asleep- I assure you). The post is written in a syntax that is not mine claiming that I was proud to have broken the law to ruin the business of a conservative white man.

Not something I’d do. Not something I’d brag about. And the business described in the post does not exist where I live.

The photo accompanying the post does not exist where I live.

It was not me. But in the online storm that followed, the post was shared to multiple forums where someone discovered the name of my former employer. Not only did I suffer dozens of emails and comments on my articles and posts found across the internet, but a very good and respectable business was caught in that crossfire. They have had to remove their social media because of the aggressive way in which people responded to a fake post.

It is not fair.

Unfortunately, though, after speaking with officers, there isn’t a whole lot that can be done about it. At worst, it’s a misdemeanor here, and to charge that, there needs to be a significant reason to believe that someone wishes to do me bodily harm.

In short, abusers have a new way to abuse without repercussion.

When your job is to be online, you can’t hide, either.

All you can do is this:

The internet is wonderful. The internet is awful. The internet is a tool and a weapon.

You have to decide which side you wish to be a part of for yourself.

Would you hold a stranger down while someone kicks out their teeth? If not, why would you blindly share a post that you don’t know to be true? A post that is so damning it could ruin someone’s life or business?

You can be anyone you want online.

Be someone good.

You can be anyone you want online- that apparently includes me. was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m a bit of a history nerd. I am particularly interested in the parts of history that are often forgotten: odd stories of where certain phrases or inventions originated, “lost in history” heroes who did remarkable things we no longer talk about, and things of that sort..

Recently, I was reading through several online articles and found a study that was completed by a couple of sociologists regarding the Holocaust. The study focused primarily on Holocaust rescuers.

The Rescuers

The rescuers are a part of that “often forgotten” subset of heroes that we don’t necessarily find in textbooks. These are people like Paul Gruninger, a Swiss Official, who disobeyed the government by allowing thousands of Jews to cross the border into Switzerland illegally to flee Nazi grasp.

Rescuers were also people like Andree Herscovisi, a teacher, who heard her Jewish students were to be taken soon and helped them and their families flee to freedom.

And they were people like Ellen Nielsen, a widow who supported herself and her children by taking over her husband’s fishing boat. When approached by Jewish children looking to flee Germany, she used her fisherman connections to find them a boat ride all the way to freedom. Realizing she could help others the same way, she organized a team of fishermen who would work together to save hundreds more before she, herself, was caught by the Nazis and tortured in a concentration camp.

Study Findings

The study I mention above compared the non-Jews who risked their lives to save the persecuted class to those who did not. In the end, the sociologists discovered that there was a stark differentiation in how the two classes of people were parented- particularly in how bad behaviour was disciplined.

While the parents of the non-rescuers disciplined and focused primarily on punishment, the parents of the rescuers were focused on explaining and understanding cause and effect of actions.

For example, let’s pretend we know a couple of girls who are best friends. We will call them Kate and Shannon.

Kate and Shannon decide one night that they are going to sneak out together and explore the woods behind Kate’s house. When the parents discover the girls missing, they go looking for them and ultimately find them.

Shannon’s parents sternly punish her and tell her that she is being punished so she will always remember not to ever try something like that again.

Kate’s parents also issue a stern disciplinary action and explain to her that she is grounded because she broke a rule that was meant to keep her safe. They tell her the woods are a dangerous place at night and she could have easily gotten lost or fallen and hurt. They tell her she can’t go outside to play all day tomorrow because she took advantage of the ability to do so today.

At the end of the discipline, Shannon understands she was punished for breaking the rule and that rules are meant to be followed.

Kate understands that her discipline came because she risked her safety. She understands that rules should be complied with voluntarily when they make sense, but she has also learned to think about rules and why they exist. In the future, she will question rules that don’t.

The study also found that, when parents used verbiage that focused on the children as people rather than verbiage that focused on tasks, kids were more likely to listen and feel positive about the communication.

“Christopher, help me set the table,” for example, was seen as less inviting than, “Christopher, be a good helper and set the table.”

Conversely, “Don’t cheat at cards” was less effective than “Don’t be a cheater.”

What it Means

What works for children can work for adults, too. Whether you are a parent, a non-profit organizer, or a manager at your company, the way you address discipline and rule sets in your environment can greatly impact not only how those rules are adhered to, but how the people who follow those rules think outside of just adhering to responsibilities.

If you want your children, team leaders, or employees to be thorough thinkers, explaining the reason for your rules and allowing them opportunity to question your policies is a good thing. You might just find that some of your own policies are outdated or not working or that there are better ways to maintain order.

The Holocaust Rescuers were normal people who had been taught to understand why rules must exist, question those that don’t, and boldly do their best work to preserve the humanity of the way others were allowed to exist around them.

How to Raise a Rescuer was originally published in Thrive Global on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.