You probably don’t know this about me. I’m in a cult. I never mention it. I try to keep it on the down low. It’s been almost 10 years now since we formed. We do call ourselves The Cult. My son Oliver is the one who coined the name. He saw this photo of a woman in our group and she was in an eerie graveyard with drapey, Indian-type clothes. A mist hung in the air. Each day, as he saw us passing hundreds of emails back and forth he said, “So, that’s your cult leader?” It just stuck. We all thought it was hilarious.
Here is how we found our way to each other. Sometime around our 30-year reunion from high school there was an AOL online group of 50 or more peeps from our school chatting away about our upcoming fiftieth birthdays. Some were just observers and some were the ones doing all the talking. I was in the latter group. I know, surprise. The bigger group was getting annoyed at how much we liked to communicate. They might express it directly or they might say something like “take me off the list.” Yet, there were still the lookie loos. One day, the cult leader grabbed our core group of 10 or so and formed a smaller group. You had to be tech savvy to move over, and I wasn’t, so she did the work for me. Now it was official, we were a cult. Trendsetters that we didn’t know we were, we may have been the original social network. (more…)