To Mask, or not to Mask, it is not a Question.
How I lost a friendship in 2020
In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the titular character contemplates life in the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
In translation, Hamlet is basically asking if it is better to suffer and live or to die. In 2020, this speech gained new meaning for me as I navigated the precarious waters of online discourse. Did I want to suffer through the outrageous claims of my online friends or fight for the truth and consequently lose them?
It was a question one particular online friend pushed.
This is that story.
My online friend and I met through Camp NaNoWriMo, an offshoot of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which allows people to gather in “virtual cabins” to encourage each other’s writing. We started with a larger group of people, but through the years we dwindle down to just the two of us.
The last two years, I began to struggle to connect to my online friend. I wanted to talk about writing, the thing that brought us together in the beginning, but all she wanted…
