A Million People Watched Her Cry Online

CeeCee - a white woman accidentally went viral by crying on Facebook and raised $85K in five months.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

CeeCee

“I am scared.”

CeeCee can barely get the words out of her mouth, as she looks into her camera phone, Facebook Reels open. She’s not even sure why she’s recording. She’ll probably just delete this later. But she can’t just sit with these feelings. They are too big.

“I am scared for every single human in the cities right now.”

She pauses, even longer this time, her face twitches through a number of expressions. Fear. Rage. Love. Sadness. And then again, that look of resolve.

“I know we have a lot of fight in us, but this is heartbreaking.”

Her voice cracks on the word “heart” so she stops to take a breath, eyes closed, before looking directly into the camera to continue.

“If you don’t know, ICE shot another person in Minneapolis, a black man.”

She stops, pushing her fingers to her lips as she takes another breath.

“I just watched a video where they were holding a gun to a woman’s head that was sitting on the ground.”

She takes a heavy breath, sobs openly, for a few breaths and then looks right at the camera.

“They are intentionally brutalizing and terrorizing us, and nobody’s helping us.”

She sobs again, and pushes her hand through her hair.

“We’re on our own, feeding people, walking the front lines.”

She looks away from the camera, for longer than a second, and then back.

“It’s just us. . . normal people. . . who really just want to be sitting on their fucking couch watching TV.”

A small broken laugh escapes her, because it’s true.

“But instead,” she inhales a stuttering inhale as a tear falls out of her left eye, “some madman decided that we’re the fucking problem in this country because we care about people.”

The laugh is gone now and her voice has turned even sharper.

“And the rest of you that voted for this that are still saying. . . well. . . ‘they should just follow the rules.’”

Her voice drops as she feels that familiar churn in her gut. It always churns like that when she gets angry.

“What fucking rules?! They canceled all the rules! THERE AREN’T ANY FUCKING RULES!”

She pauses to think. How do I even say this next part? What am I even saying here?

“I don’t actually know what’s going to happen to us.”

She says this quietly, more quietly than anything she has said so far. “For the first time since this happened, I do not know what’s going to happen to us.”

She needs a second. Am I crazy for making this video? Sure. But I have to put this out there, or it will make me sick inside.

“I live five blocks from where the third precinct burned. . . I stood on my steps and watched it burn. I sat up night after night as proud boys went back and forth trying to cause a bigger problem in our city. . . I know what that feels like and this is way, way worse. . . Way worse.”

She sniffles, blinks, and leans slightly toward the camera. I need them to hear this!

“People need to understand what the fuck is happening here because it can happen to you.”

“They’re trying to make an example of us.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re a good fucking city, that’s why! Because we care about our people. Do we have crime?”

“Yeah, all cities have fucking crime. But we love our immigrants in our city. We love them.”

She rubs her chest with her free hand, like something hurts there. She gazes off camera a bit as she takes a moment to remember hugging the mom she delivered to just yesterday.

“Their food, their culture. We’ve adopted them into our city because we love them.”

She pauses again, smiling to hold the memory again for a moment. But then the smile fades and her face gets really dark and heavy.

“Everybody needs to be very careful tonight. Nobody come to my home tomorrow until you hear from me or you’re in the neighborhood and know it’s safe.”

She swallows, hard.

“We have a lot of contacts that we need to check on and make sure they’re okay. I have people that need to have food delivered tomorrow and some of them in North Minneapolis, actually the majority of them.”

She pauses again to sob openly for several breaths until she regains her composure enough to speak again.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. We need to wait because we need to all be safe too. These are all lose-lose situations that we’re doing nonstop. Everything we do right now is risky.”

She stops to think about her next words. She can feel them on her tongue, but they don’t feel real.

I can’t believe this is our world right now! What I’m about to say is just to surreal.

“It’s risky to get food to people.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment.

“Nobody understands what’s happening here. . . They’re trying to kill us and nobody gets it. . . They think we’re just making it up and we’re not.”

One more breath. Long and slow.

“I am sorry.”

She stops the recording, hits publish, puts the phone face down on the nightstand and curls up into bed.

---

CeeCee wakes up the next morning to her phone dinging every few seconds. She has more text messages and Facebook messages than she’s ever had before.

“You’re everywhere!”

“CeeCee! OMG, are you okay?! Your video…call me!”

“CeeCee, I didn’t know you were on TikTok.”

What does that even mean? I’m NOT on TikTok!

She lay there staring at her phone lighting up over and over in her hand. Her Facebook video had nearly a million views and had been copied to multiple platforms. She had thousands of new followers and friend requests. And comments. So many comments from all over the world.

“We’re here. I’m holding you all the way from London.”

“You’re not alone. How can we help?”

“I’m here, in Vermont. I grew up in the Twin Cities. I want to help.”

“What can I do? I’m in Denmark.”

She tried to read through more of the comments, but there were too many. After a few dozen, all the words just blurred together. So, she turned her ringer off and put her phone facedown on the comforter. But she could still see the light peeking out from the edges, so she tossed a pillow on top of it.

Oh shit.

What did I get myself into??

CeeCee shows her wife her phone, and her wife looks at her in disbelief.

“What are you gonna do?”

“I need to post our Venmo,” CeeCee says, staring her wife in the eyes. Her wife knows that look.

“What about taxes?” her wife asks.

“If we still have a federal government next year, we’ll figure it out. People need help NOW.”

“Go Help.”

Okay. I guess I’m the face of this.

CeeCee gets back onto the bed and lets out a deep vocal sigh, and her dog lifts his head to look up at her from his crate.

I’m doing this.

She sits up, and with bleary eyes and bedhead, she hits record.

“Okay. . . Hi. . . So, it’s Wednesday morning, I think? What time is it? Is it still morning? It doesn’t matter. And, I don’t really know what happened.”

She exhales a nervous laugh.

“I don’t — I don’t really know what to do with this. I’m not gonna lie. I posted that video last night because I was broken and I needed to say something and I thought maybe fifty people would see it and I almost deleted it three times before I fell asleep. And now it’s — (exhale) — yeah. Okay.”

I’ve got this.

She looks directly into the camera.

“Evidently a whole heckuva lot of you saw that video last night, or this morning, or whatever. And I’m feeling really exposed and vulnerable right now.”

Deep sigh.

“I need to say something first. I am a white woman. I am also LGBTQ. I am also disabled. So I am part of marginalized communities. I know what it feels like to be the person people are coming after. I am not a delusional human. I know how this shit works.”

She pauses for a slow breath.

“Right now, I don’t lead with being gay or being disabled. I lead right now with being white. And I am really aware of that.”

Did I just say all that?!

“Here’s what I keep coming back to, I have a community that shows up when I ask. And evidently, last night that community just got a whole heckuva lot bigger. . . Thank you for that.”

She looks up, and her face makes a half eye-roll half gratitude gesture and she chuckles to herself a bit. She pauses, and her eyes narrow.

“But I’m not the one being hunted, and I’m sure it feels really scary to be hunted.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment. Her eyes are red.

“Right now, I’m just feeling all your love. And it’s softening all my edges.”

She stops. Presses her lips together. Collects herself.

“I just — I need to say thank you. I went to sleep last night thinking maybe fifty people would see that video and I woke up and you were — you were everywhere. You showed up. From New Mexico. From Canada. From places I don’t even know yet. You saw these humans and you gave a shit and I just —”

She shakes her head slowly, almost laughing at the size of it.

“I don’t take this lightly. I want you to know that. Every single comment, every single share, every single person who said I don’t know what to do but I’m here — that matters. That is not nothing. These families are locked inside their homes and a six month old baby went to the hospital last night because tear gas was deployed underneath the car carrying a whole family! And the world just keeps spinning like nothing happened. But you stopped the scroll and you said something and I am just — I am so grateful. I am so grateful for every single one of you.”

She pauses to openly cry. Then she shakes her head a bit, slow-blinks, and comes back to that resolved look in her eye.

“Okay. Here’s what I know. I know that there are families in North Minneapolis who are really really scared right now, and they are waking up to the aftermath of their neighborhood being a warzone last night. They have tiny humans with asthma, and they need groceries, and rent, and snacks, and toys. And they might need some humans who are not black and brown to help them figure out how to get their babies some medicine.”

She takes a long slow breath, staring directly into the camera the whole time.

“And apparently a gazillion of you humans watched me cry last night and so many of you are telling me that you want to help. So. Okay. Let’s do something with that.”

A small laugh. She pauses again and sits up a bit taller, changing hands holding the phone again, takes a breath and continues again. Then quieter:

“I want to be clear, we are NOT saving them.”

She waits.

“They’re very, very capable. They’re very brave. They’re very resilient.”

She waits again.

“I feel like we need to be in service to all of these immigrant families, to all of these people that are struggling, because other people that look like us are the ones causing a fuck ton of harm here.”

She looks directly into the camera the whole time, that resolved look in her eyes getting stronger.

“So yes, you can help. I’m adding my Venmo to this post. These families need rent money, and grocery money, and money for diapers and formula.”

Her voice gets a notch deeper.

“Here’s my commitment to you, I promise that every single penny goes directly to the humans in need. I keep a spreadsheet. I track every transaction in and out. I don’t keep any of it. Not one cent. You can ask me anytime where the money went and I will tell you exactly where it went.”

A breath.

“I have a crew of humans coming to my garage to pack delivery boxes. If you can’t donate and you live in the Twin Cities, come pack. If you can donate, even five dollars helps. I promise, what you donate will be helping one of these families today or tomorrow, cuz that’s the kind of turnaround I do.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment, her eyes filling up with wetness again.

“If you can help somebody, anybody, in your community today, I really really hope you do.”

Then, she pauses a long pause before she whispers, “thank you,” and hits stop on the record.

She puts the phone face down on the nightstand.

Almost instantly her phone starts dinging two distinct sounds.

One for Facebook notifications and one with Venmo notifications.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜