Meet the Group Chat Collective!

Plus a mini-update from Emily.

Kia ora! It’s Tam again! 

For any of you who missed the last newsletter and don’t know who I am, click here: Oh no, Emily is Sick!

Emily Update: “They are thrilled with my progress because I am the best patient i am going to make the nurses love me theyr the best.” I visited Emily today (including dropping off cupcakes for the nurses) and it was so good to see her. She’s improving but she’s exhausted and there’s a long way to go before she’s well.

Emily wanted me to pass on her thanks to all of you for the love and support you’ve shown her. She was especially thankful to all of the Honorary Group Chat Girlies who have bought paid subscriptions or donated via her Kofi. It’s a huge weight off her mind which means I’m grateful to you all as well cos the less stress Emily has, the more she can concentrate on getting well!

Emily has instructed us that the Group Chat Collective ought to introduce itself: 

Jodie: I’m the oldie in the group and I suspect the most sensible (boring?). Every now and then I get very ranty about something like people trying to pretend that cauliflower rice tastes like rice when we all know it tastes like cauliflower, and while I like cauliflower, you cannot convince me that it tastes like rice. Or pizza bases. Or ice cream. [TAM: Jodie IS very sensible but she's NOT boring. She's hilarious and 100% correct about the cauli ice cream.] 

Becka: I’m the one who moved to Canada and has the crow/raccoon intel. I’m a doula and kind of a farmer so I am usually messaging the chat with either “look at these beautiful seeds, I am one with the dirt” or “look at this weird chocolate that looks like a crowning baby.” Vee once said they imagined my home would have drying herbs hanging everywhere and I am pleased to say I have manifested this, if only because I get distracted and move on to something else. Being in Canada is helpful time zone wise cos if someone is having a late-night crisis, that tends to coincide with my wakeup time. Crises include both bad brain days and “help I fell in a Wikipedia rabbit hole and I am simply not sleeping tonight."

Vee: I’m the one who magically manifests black tie event wear for Emily with 24-hours’ notice (I might have a new career as a niche celebrity stylist). Everyone in the chat calls me a human rights lawyer so I’m practically Amal Clooney except I don’t work for the UN, I’m not married to George Clooney, and I’m not actually a practising lawyer. In every other respect though we’re exactly the same. I never left Tumblr so I provide the key group chat service of “mining for unhinged meme content.” A new friend recently described me as “insanely charismatic” and I will be living on that compliment for the rest of my natural life.

Tumblr is still the best place on the internet aside from the comment section of a cute wee newsletter called Emily Writes Weekly.

Gem: Emily and I have been banned from travelling to Auckland together because we always forget to pack our common sense. I’m the one sitting next to Emily at horny movies and I'm also the one giving her smut recommendations (you have me to thank for A Forbidden Rumspringa). I like books and art and weird stuff about estates and leaving parties early and sports movies (I’m secretly a jock). I’m scared of marshmallows.

And lastly, I’m Tam! I’m growing pink oyster mushrooms out of a plastic bag in my bedroom, I pepper everything I say with swearwords and I love health and safety legislation. I once told the group chat that I was lying naked and spreadeagled in a sunbeam and it felt so amazing that I wondered if Gwyneth was onto something with her whole vulva steaming thing. 

I need to show off my mushrooms to more than just my Insta friends

The thing about a good group chat is that it takes time to develop. You can be friends with someone for ages but not truly know them until you join a chat together. Emily was initially friends with my (now-ex) husband, or perhaps they’d just followed each other on twitter for longer, so the invitation to her birthday party (Theme: 90s Bogan) came via him. I applied a lot of brown eyeliner and dark lipstick and we went along. That night was almost 10 years ago now and it was when Emily and I went from being online buddies to actual friends, but the Group Chat (and its associated intimacy) came along way later. 

Every group chat has a genesis event. Mostly, they’re for keeping in touch with the cat sitter or coordinating halftime oranges for your kid’s soccer team, incidental and humdrum. The best group chats, the ones with a real chance for longevity, start because someone gets a bee in their bonnet about something and has to share it. 

For us, the genesis event was that Emily found a holiday home in Wellington that was three shipping containers stacked on top of each other. It was built into a cliff, had a spa, and Emily immediately knew she had to stay there. She emailed the owner, charmed her way into a last-minute booking, and then started a group chat, inviting people who, crucially I think, mostly only knew of each other. She told us about the house and insisted we come along.

So we went, cos who can say no to Emily when she’s decided something has to happen? There was heaps of food, too much wine, and way too many cigarettes. We crammed ourselves into the spa and compared tits and scars and terrible tattoos. At the beginning of the night, I knew one person there other than Emily. By the time I woke up hungover the next morning, I had a brand-new support system. 

That was coming up six years ago now, and the container house chat has morphed and changed. It’s survived a shift across platforms, people leaving, people joining, a member shifting to Canada, and the breakup of three marriages. The chat holds many-layered grudges on each member’s behalf, all gossip is subjected to close analysis, there is group chat lore. A good group chat is a blessing I wish for each and every one of you.

Guidance on Maintaining a Good Group Chat:

• Ideally the members should have something in common but not necessarily know each other super well. The chat will grow the intimacy.

• “Can I just be really mean for a second?” is a beautiful phrase but it comes with a price. If you want the gossip, there needs to be a well-maintained Group Chat Cone of Silence.*

• It’s not necessary that every member of the group chat attend every brunch or movie night. Stop trying to find the mythical weekend where everyone’s free and accept that sometimes there will be FOMO.

• Make sure your chat has a distinctive icon so weed gummy reviews or spicy nudes aren’t accidentally shared to the School Mum Chat. 

• People are gonna have other group chats. Some of them will involve you, some won’t. Don’t get pissy about it, just start your own if you feel left out.

• A good group chat shouldn’t be too big but it must be big enough that there is always someone not going through it who can support the people who are going through it. These roles must rotate. 

• Support comes in many forms. Support is agreement that your mum was being a bitch, support is a trophy emoji when you heroically do the laundry. Support is gently insisting that someone could perhaps wait till tomorrow to send that furious email. 

• The group chat is a judgement-free zone where there’s no such thing as too much information. Tell the group chat if you shit your pants. Tell the chat when you have erotic dreams about a government minister. Tell the chat about your successes and failures and let them celebrate and commiserate with you.

• NB: Not every group chat is the full-on experience, nor does it need to be. I’ve got another one that’s solely for posting content about geese, so you know, be flexible with your expectations.

* Sometimes, if the gossip is really really good, it can transcend the cone of silence in one group chat and be shared in another. You should still try and anonymise your source though. Use your common sense.

So shout out to my Group Chat Girlies, I love you! And mega shout out to those of you who have donated to Emily or upgraded your free membership to a paid one and thereby attained Honorary Group Chat Girlie status. We’d love to hear from you in the comments - tell us about yourself and your group chats!

May Piss Shark bless and love you all

Tam.