Mindful Takeover

Recently, I did something that surprised even me. A year ago, I never would have considered doing this.

One of the writing websites I'm on has groups, and they can be for anything from fiction genres and tropes used to discussion groups for various subjects to groups for finding critique partners and beta readers to special interest groups. There are groups for writers from various areas of the world, different LGBTQ+ identities, and different types of writing, like short stories, novels, articles, micro fiction, or even blogging.

A year or so ago, someone formed a group for people dealing with mental illness, and I joined right away, probably one of the first ten people to join. I loved the group from the jump and helped the founder behind the scenes to focus his ideas because he started it in a manic episode and he knew he was all over the place. He didn't organize the group well, also due to the mania, and then a few months later, he crashed and slipped into a deep depression. Within a few more months, he'd disappeared from the website. That was about six months ago.

I've been working to run the group in his absence since October, but it was hard without the controls available to group leaders, and I started wanting to take it over around then, but he'd only been gone a couple of months and I wanted to give him time to come back. I waited for four more months, and I tried several times to contact the founder with no result.

Last week, I emailed the site admin and asked to take over the group. I spent a couple of days reorganizing and making changes to establish things the founder should have originally but didn't because of his mental state. I've had the group now for about ten days, and I'm pretty happy about having it. It wasn't very active and didn't have many members, but I've advertised the group in a few different places around the website and we've gotten a few new members, some of them bringing up the activity in the threads, which I'm pretty excited about.

I'm hoping the trend will continue. It's been fun so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how something like this will help me grow as a person.

One thing I'm expecting to happen from this is learning how to better set boundaries. I'm going to have to enforce rules, be firm when they're broken, and even eject people from the group if they refuse to respect the rules. I'm pretty nervous about that because I hate conflict, but I'm looking at it as a learning opportunity.

It's an exciting prospect, and I can't wait to see where it leads!

Photo Credit: Suzy Hazelwood