An Unsanctioned Ceremony
I should introduce Celeste, because by the time the unsanctioned ceremony happened Celeste had been, for almost four months, the person on the Discord whose name I knew, and the person in my life whose role I had not yet had the spine to name.
Celeste Amaya was forty-one, lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been, until the previous December, a senior UX researcher at a software company that made scheduling tools for dentists. She had taken a sabbatical in January, which had become, in practice, a resignation, and she had subscribed to *Thoughts From the Barn* the week before my essay went viral, and by March she had become, without my asking and without my stopping her, the chief moderator of the Discord. She did this voluntarily. She did this well. She wrote the community guidelines, which were, I had to admit, better written than my community guidelines would have been. She banned, with quiet efficiency, the three men who had shown up in the first month to argue about Ayn Rand. She instituted, and then enforced, a policy against the sharing of my address, which is how we began to address one another by email, which is how, over several weeks in April, she became the person I wrote to when I did not know what to do about any of the rest of them.
Celeste was not a grifter. I want this noted. Celeste believed. Celeste had lost her mother in September and had been, when