Once upon a time, a sad one wrote on her Facebook page, “Too miserable to ever go out dancing again.”

Then her crazy godmother lent her clothes and made her look beautiful. So the sad one went to a dance and had a magnificent time. She came home late with only one slipper. Sound familiar?

In this story, however, nobody showed up knocking at her door with the lost slipper the next day. So she set out, wobbly on her single shod foot, to find it herself. Or to find a close match. But instead, she found lots of other stumbling people who had also lost a slipper. Or a sneaker, Or a boot.

So she limped around with them. Online. Their names, faces, and stories became familiar to her as she bumped into some of the same ones on several different support-group sites. And soon she discovered they were holding each other up, walking hand-in-hand, talking heart-to-heart. As they traveled, they gathered more and more dazed, floundering, teetering people. There were thousands of them. They held and hugged one another. They grew stronger and steadier. Soon these sad strangers started leaping out from their Facebook pages and into the sad one’s life, and she wasn’t so miserable anymore.

Then she knew they could all journey like this forever, finding new hobbling friends, all over the world. And that one day, maybe, together they might even dance.