How I Got Through This

My Group Chat Got Me Through 2020

The world fell to pieces, but I knew I could crawl into the little glowing screen of my phone to find comfort in my friends

Andrea González-Ramírez
GEN
Published in
4 min readDec 23, 2020

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Here’s a handful of topics I broached with my group chat in the past 24 hours: Covid-19 vaccine videos that have made me sob; god I’m so annoyed at anti-vaxxers; I think I imprinted on both Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton at age 8 thanks to Mission: Impossible 2; also why is it that months after the fact people keep defending the Zoom dick dude? If this sounds like my brain is a landfill site of useless information, you are not wrong. Luckily, however, I found a Gemini, a Cancer, a Libra, and a Scorpio whose brilliant, trash-filled brains mirror mine.

I’m fully aware technology mostly sucks. But the constant stream of notifications lighting up my phone day and night has allowed me to stay sane over the past nine months of pure insanity. The pandemic brought a new wave of terror each day, the stress of the election fried my nerves, the brutal violence against Black and Brown bodies broke my heart again and again. But throughout it all I knew I could crawl into the glowing screen of my phone to find comfort in the arms of my group chat.

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Andrea González-Ramírez
GEN
Writer for

Award-winning Puerto Rican journalist. Senior Writer at New York Magazine’s The Cut. Formerly GEN, Refinery29, and more. Read my work: https://www.thecut.com/