I just love it when the land of social media is bursting with joyful karma, like when I wrote about The Bloggess and her Red Dress Project, and in the last week or so there have been a couple of delightful feel-good social media items, so I thought that I’d share them.
I don’t know if any of you follow Glennon from Momastery, but she is this woman who looks gorgeous and super-together who started writing almost by accident with radical honesty about how not-together she was due to bulimia and alcoholism and what-not, and now she’s evolved into this lovely Force of Nature for Good in the Universe. Most recently, she held a Love Flash Mob in which she introduced her followers (called Monkees) to a woman who works at a shelter for homeless teen moms and asked folks to donate up to a maximum of $25, and they raised $85,000 in five and a half hours. I mean, that’s pretty incredible, right? Don’t you just feel all warm and fuzzy now?
Meanwhile, did you hear about this local happy karma social media story? The Times Union reported about a Facebook page called Shaker Compliments, a Facebook page that’s hugely popular and has spurred similar pages for other schools. The TU explains, “an anonymous student serves as a clearinghouse for kind words. Students send their praise to the site’s creator, who screens it and posts it with a link to the mentioned student’s Facebook page. The person sending the compliment is not identified.” After a brief explanation, they quote several students gushing about how good it feels to get a random, anonymous compliment. All of which offers hope that perhaps adolescence in the age of social media isn’t entirely the complete shark tank that I’ve been fearing it could be. Plus, it’s just a wonderful idea, and so simple.
Actually, as I was writing about this, it reminded me of a post I’d written about how sometimes I wish that I could pass out Maternal Merit Badges to spread encouragement to other mothers, because so often we feel judged or we read these ridiculous articles pitting mothers against each other. So, if you feel like sending an anonymous compliment to a mama who’s on Facebook, you can message me via my Capital District Fun Facebook page or send an email to capitaldistrictfun [at] yahoo [dot] com, and I’ll put it on the Facebook page. Is that just way too high school? I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to buck someone up, but we’ll see if anyone is inspired.
And for what it’s worth, let me just say: I think you all rock.
