This is not a support group

People arrive expecting a circle of chairs. A room where everybody knows the regulars, where you introduce yourself, where there is a subject and you are expected to have one.

There is none of that here, and the absence is deliberate.

This is not a site for sad people. It is a site for people.

Why that matters more than it sounds

If everybody on a site is having a hard time, then arriving is an admission. And the admission is the barrier. You have to decide you are one of those people before you can even open the door, and most people would rather not decide that today.

Mixing in people who are simply having a nice time is what stops anybody being labelled by being here. Somebody photographing their tomatoes and somebody having a rotten month are on the same page, doing the same thing, and neither is the odd one out.

There is no group

No forum, no threads, no room where everybody can see everybody. When you ask for a hug, nothing is announced. It does not go out to the membership, it lands in nobody's inbox, and there is no notice anywhere saying you are having a bad week.

The ask goes up on one page, and the next person along who fancies giving a hug finds it. That is the entire mechanism.

There is no check-in

Nothing here tracks how you are doing over time. There is no streak, no progress bar, no weekly question, no gentle reminder that you have not been in for a while.

You can use this once and never come back. You can vanish for a year and return on a Tuesday. Neither is noted and neither is a lapse in anything.

Nobody has a role

There is no facilitator, no rota, no volunteer on duty, no regulars whose chair it is. Nobody here is on shift, and that includes the person who sends you something kind.

It also means nobody is qualified and nobody is claiming to be. What you get is a stranger choosing to be warm for the length of a paragraph, which is a real thing, and it is not the same thing as being looked after.

What is here instead

Hugs, which are a few sentences from one person to another. Albums of whatever people felt like showing, which is mostly gardens, dogs, sunsets and somebody's lunch. Meeting people, if you switch it on, and plenty of people never do.

Looking at another person's tomatoes on a bad afternoon is allowed to be exactly that, and nothing more is claimed for it.

And what it is not

This is not a helpline and nobody here is a professional anything. A group run by people who actually know what they are doing is a genuinely good thing and this is not one. If today is a serious one, there are people who can help properly.

If you want the plain tour of what this place is instead, how freehug.me works takes about four minutes.