“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Tammy continued, her eyes glowing psychotically from the computer light. “Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” She paused here for effect. “Oprah said that.”
Tammy’s talking points flowed zippily along from reassurance to damnation to jubilance. I could practically feel the collective psychic weight of a hundred relatively gullible women trying to hold so many contradicting truths in their brain at one time: everything they had to succeed was already inside them, but also they needed to pay this woman in order to succeed, and a truly successful social media sales cycle should happen effortlessly, it should happen in our sleep, and yet we needed to start reclaiming some of our own time from our families so that we could commit ourselves to the effort, and the point of this course was to remind women to sink further into their own Divine Christian Feminine, and also, it was time to develop some hard masculine skills, ladies, it was time to learn some math!
I glanced at my computer screen. We were only eight minutes into the session, and already a few women were crying openly. As Tammy rolled neatly into a thirty-minute monologue about harnessing the power of the Divine Christian Feminine to drive sales online, I tried to mirror the expressions of the other women at all the appropriate times, discomfort and awe and unbridled delight. I was having a hard time organically intuiting the correct response for any given moment. I resisted typing my own questions into the chat:When are we going to learn about hashtags? Can someone explain the analytics dashboard on Instagram to me? Why do some of my photos get a hundred likes and only one comment? Why do my cheeks itch when I haven’t checked my phone in the last hour? Why are you better than me at this, Tammy Lane? Why am I here?
Two years had passed since the disastrous visit with my family. In the time since, I had given birth to Stetson, our new darling littleboy. The day of his delivery, I actually leaned forward in the hospital bed and caught him myself, guiding the crown of his head out into the world. With Stetson, there had been no postpartum period, no miserable few months, because I had almost immediately gotten pregnant again.All praise to the Highest!I’d written in the caption of the pregnancy announcement. Our fourth, a little girl, was due in a few months.
As for my family: Abigail’s divorce had been finalized a few days after she gave birth to her fifth child: an underweight little girl named Kaitlyn. I thought the metaphorical significance of ending theB’s was embarrassingly heavy-handed; my mother was openly relieved about it. Abigail and her fourB’s and her oneKwere living with my mother now. Two adults, four children, and one infant crammed into a three-bedroom home. What was my sister doing for money? Well. I had been right. She couldn’t find a job, and so she was bagging groceries with the teenagers in town.
We weren’t speaking at the moment. Which was fine. Arguably ideal. Though it did mean I had to drive fifteen minutes farther to the grocery store on the other side of town to avoid seeing her; it also meant I’d been freed from the obligation to witness my sister slowly destroy her own life. I was too busy for that! Too busy managing Caleb and the children and my burgeoning social media account, which documented the day-to-day events of our sweet little farm. (Per the emailed paragraph of analysis on my page that I would eventually receive from Tammy Lane as one of the deliverables for paying full price for the course, referencing Yesteryear Ranch asour sweet little farmwas a good decision. Specifically, it was “Approachable, Intimate, and Creative!”)
Now the Instagram account for mysweet little farmhad just over a thousandsweet little followers.Only half of them, it seemed, were actually human—and none of them were interested in telling me what they thought ofmy sweet little farm.These followers never commented on my pictures. They never sent me private messages. Only a small handful of them were even willing to take the meager step of pressing like on the photos. Sometimes it felt like I was standingon my front porch, staring out at a silent army.What do you want?I wanted to say.How do I activate you?
I had no clue. Before long, the account felt less like an interesting errand and more like a necessary chore, a constant itch I needed to scratch. If Tammy’s social media ad had never reached me, I might have given up on the account entirely. I certainly wouldn’t have realized on my own that the account could become profitable. But the ad did find me. More importantly, it found me at the perfect time: only an hour or so after I finally had the phone call with Doug that I had been dreading for months. He was pulling back on funds, he said, in advance of his presidential run. Our annual disbursement would be cut in half. “That’s the thing about running for president,” he said amiably. “It’ll bankrupt you if you’re not careful!”
WANT TO MAKE SIX FIGURES A MONTH OF PASSIVE INCOME FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT???
Yes. Yes I did. In fact I needed to.
Hence the class. Hence my willingness to give Tammy Lane $1,500 for a course that could’ve been designed by an eighth grader. Hence my patience as Tammy launched into her fifth monologue about divine inner light. No matter how grating or generic she seemed to me, I had to admit: there was something she was doing right. Something she had figured out that I, for some reason, could not. After all, no one would have paid $1,500 to get Instagram advice from me.
After Tammy’s big Zoom speech (she promised we would get intohard numbersat next week’s meeting), we split off into breakout rooms of ten and twelve, where we would give one anotheropen feedbackon our accounts. In my Zoom breakout room, ten of the twelve women were from Idaho, and everyone lived on a farm. For an hour, our Assigned Mentor, a young woman named Cassidy who had twenty thousand followers and who was, I would learn manymonths later, Tammy Lane’s niece, ran us through a series of spiritual exercises to unlock the Lioness within.
The first thing we did was share, round-robin-style, some details about our social media presence. A woman named Robin went first. “Hiiii, I’m Robiiiin,” she said in chirpy singsong. “And I run a cattle ranch.”
A chorus of women replied in unison, like the Greek chorus for a play about pyramid schemes. “Hiiii,Robin!”
Cassidy pulled Robin’s Instagram up onto the shared screen, and we collectively went through her photos, telling her what we liked and didn’t like. Like: the spontaneous photos of her children.Authentic!Dislike: the captions where she talked (jokingly!) about hating the future wives of her twelve- and thirteen-year-old sons.Cringe!Like: the picture of a thunderstorm sweeping over the flatlands, combined with a Bible passage about the Lord’s power.Appropriate!Dislike: the picture of Robin smiling next to her local butcher with a big grin, both of them covered in blood.Nightmarish!
“You’retotallyon the right path,” Cassidy said passionately. “You just need tonarrow inon your specific message. Know what I mean?”
The distraught expression on Robin’s face indicated thatno,she didnotunderstand what Cassidy meant—but already we were moving along to Ashley Ann, a woman from—you guessed it—Idaho, who helped her husband run—you guessed it—a cattle farm. “I’m just really struggling todifferentiatemyself.”
Cassidy, our fearless teenage leader, nodded sagely. “It’s the hardest and most important part. You need to digdeep, deepdown and ask yourself: What makesmeso special? What can I offer that other people can’t?”
“Right,” Ashley Ann said, nodding fervently.
“I meanright now,” Cassidy said kindly. “Tell us right now what makes you special.”
The Zoom call was silent.
“Um,” Ashley Ann said.
It was very apparent that everyone on the call had realizedsimultaneously that they were interfacing with their direct competitors. Everyone had some kind of farm. Everyone was trying to sell their farm products directly to consumers online.
“I’m … funny?” Ashley Ann said. “And kind?”
“Perfect,” Cassidy gushed. “So now you just have to show those things on your account!”
“But—”
“I have a question, actually,” another woman said nervously. “Does anyone ever call y’all a … breeder?”
Cassidy looked confused. “Like, cattle breeder?”
“No, like, breeding humans?”
There was an undulation of discomfort. I thought of the one comment I had received in the last week, from an anonymous user without a picture:Ur giving off major cult vibes fyi
