SoulStirred: Stories of Growth And The Human Experience

Episode 7 Transcripts

Welcome lovely listeners to SoulStirred, Stories of Growth and the Human Experience. I'm Emily Garcia and I'm Kasey Clark. We will be your guides on this journey.

We are so glad you are here. Each week, we'll come together, sometimes with other incredible thinkers, creators, and adventurers to generously share stories of self-discovery, recovery, triumph, and what it means to live a life on purpose. No matter where you are in your own journey, connection is here for you at SoulStirred.

Settle in, take a deep breath in, and let's inspire each other. Welcome to SoulStirred. Hello and welcome to the SoulStirred podcast, stories of growth and the human experience.

I'm Emily. And I'm Kasey. Hi, everybody.

Welcome. Kasey, what's our topic today? Yeah, right. Today, we are talking about friendship, the stories of friendship that have come and gone throughout our life.

We were just talking before we came into our channel with our listening audience about how it seems like the nature of friendship almost follows like nature, the natural world, you know. I'm learning that friends seem like they want to come and go like the wind, and much like the trees show us every fall, there's a lot of lessons involved in friendship with letting go. But there's also a lot of goodness and gold in staying in and learning that friendships are one of those things, I think, that want to sort of expand their elasticity over time.

Sometimes it can seem like a person who's really mattered to you that you maybe believed you couldn't live without might leave and that hurts. And then years pass, and they come back for some important reason. And so today, we want to share some of those stories with all of you.

And we'd love to hear stories from you about what you've experienced with regard to friendship throughout your lives. I think, Emily, you and I are a great example of that, of to, you know, talk about to lead into this topic today, because we first met so many years ago. It's been, I think, almost 20.

And when we were first in each other's life and met and found one another in a work setting, when our jobs changed, I think it felt like our friendship ended. But little did we know the universe had so much more in store for us and that it would bring us back together, you know, some 20 plus years later. And today, I can tell you that you matter very much in my life, that you've been like a gift from God, that you've come back into my world and stood by my side while I've built and expanded and grown my business.

I'm just so grateful for you. So, we're a good example of how things move and how that energy wants to come and go and how sometimes that can be a painful thing. And sometimes it can be a joyful thing.

As you hear me blathering on about what we're talking about today, what stories pop for you, Em? There's so many stories in my mind about friendships. And I just want to say, we, it's so often that we, or I should say I want to control, like, I don't want someone to leave and I want to be able to control it. And I want to be able to, in a way, manipulate that friendship.

And that sounds terrible, like I'm doing something bad, but I want, I want to do all the things that pleases someone so they won't leave me. That's the manipulation. And you have come back into my life because there was not a manipulation of the friendship that we, we had a beautiful friendship.

And as often happens when you work with someone, the job ends and you go to new jobs and then you don't talk anymore. So the things that are coming to my mind today, I had a friend who I have a friend who I met in kindergarten. She was a very pretty girl.

And I remember the very first day of kindergarten, I walked right in and was like, all right, see you later, mom. And she came in sobbing. She was so sad to leave her mom.

And so I remember her from my very first day. She, throughout the year, we had lots of experiences when I would go, I don't like her. I'm going to call her Erin today.

And Erin would tell the other kids, Emily hit me. And I would be like, I didn't hit her. Don't just say that.

And I was so mad, but it's just part of what little kids do. They want, they want to have a connection with you or get attention from people. And it was the thing that happened later on in elementary school.

We were the first two girls, at least that we knew of who got our period. We were connected because of it, because we both were like, oh, what are we doing? And we were so embarrassed about it. We became really close throughout middle school.

We were close. And when we went to high school, she was gorgeous and boys liked her and other kids wanted to be friends with her. And she kind of got in with like this group of kids who were cool.

And I did not fit into the group. And I suddenly was on the outside and it was a really hard time because I remember thinking, well, I'm just not a part of the group. There were some of the kids actually that were pretty mean to me.

Well, we were still friends here and there on the side. And her parents actually said that I was one of the few people she was allowed to hang out with because they were very conservative Catholic family. And I seemed innocent enough.

I think they would send her brother to hang out with us. And so it would be her, her brother and I, and we would, you know, we would hang out and it was a really nice thing. But when we were 16, she snuck out of her bedroom window one night and got pregnant.

And that's when our paths diverged. Yeah. Previous to that, we had talked about going to college together and after college, traveling the world together.

And I remember us saying we're going to be 28 when we get married and we're going to live all of this life before then. But she was going to have a baby at 17. So her very Catholic parents said, you're going to get married.

She is an outlier because her and her husband are still married to this day. And they waited a long time before having another child. They have three kids together now.

And we are still friends. I see her maybe twice a year, but when we're together, it's like no time has passed. We'll get together for lunch or she'll come over to my house or I'll go to her house.

And we just naturally go back right to that beautiful place of friendship where it's exactly what you need. I'll tell you now we have conversations where she talks about high school and, you know, our 14 year old selves. And she will apologize to me for the way that she treated me in high school.

And it makes me so sad because we're adults now and I know I'm not hurt by it. And my adult wisdom can look back on the child, the 14-year-old girl who just wanted to fit in. And so I hope I harbor no hard feelings about that time in our lives, in her life.

But it makes me feel a little sad when she does ask me or when she does apologize to me because I don't want her to carry that with her throughout life. And I'm sure I mean, I don't know her. I'm not sure, but I would imagine that her come from place is like you're a person that I care about so much and you matter so much to me in my life.

I'm sorry for not treating you that way back then, you know, and I so appreciate the lesson of that. And I, too, have learned from friendship because of painful points, you know, that's like I care about this person. I love her.

I maybe didn't know in my child self how much this person meant was going to mean to me or even meant to me then. But now my adult self knows well aware of how much meaning that has. And I'm just sorry that I was a person who would ever treat you that way.

I have some friends I would like to go back and apologize to as well. I'm with Erin on that is what I mean. Oh, me too.

And isn't that the thing that happens? We sometimes are on the end of being a friend who's feeling rejected and sometimes knowingly. But I would say most often unknowingly we are the rejecter. Yeah.

Yeah. So true. And it's such a great example, too, that you give because of that elasticity I was talking about in friendship.

Right. How often when there's a person we're attracted to, especially when we're a child, the event or the relationship can begin with kind of a clunky opening. Right.

Her saying that you hit her. Right. Something I know that you would never do hit another human being.

Not even advise. Exactly. It's like, why is our human instinct to reject what we know we want to be closer to, you know, in in the first meeting? But to go from there, to becoming close and sharing something so vulnerable, like getting your periods together and not wanting people to know and feeling embarrassed to sort of the ins and outs through high school and then coming back together as adults and actually being people that are so that you really matter to each other so much.

I think that just shows the seasonality, if you will, of what friendships can mean. But you said the true tell line. This is what I've said to so many people who matter so much to me.

It's as if a day has not passed when we can pick up right where we left off with the connection, not with the circumstances of our life necessarily, because, of course, things change over time and decades. But with the relationship and the connection, it's as if not a moment has passed. We can just dive right back into the epicenter of each other's hearts.

Right. What a lovely. Yeah, it is a beautiful thing.

Do you have anything coming to mind for you about a friendship that has its own evolution? Oh, yeah. And there are so many. And I'd love to talk about a handful of them today.

But my Aaron, if you will, is about my one of my best friends going all the way back to first grade for today's purposes. Let's call her Faith. Faith came into my life.

It was somewhere around in our first or second grade year of life. We were six or seven years old and we were each other's besties. We did everything together.

Her parents at the time were going through a divorce. And so I think it was a traumatic time for her. Something we didn't know then, but that I know now looking back on it.

The result being she spent a ton of time with me and my family. We had sleepovers every weekend. We got to, you know, stretch the rules.

And she even got to sleep over on a school night. She would take trips with our family. We were we were two peas in a pod.

And she was really my person, you know, like she has a different orientation to life and the world than I do. So she's much more introverted and where I'm, you know, extroverted, obviously. But the way that I would describe us together in friendship based on that is like if I were a big bouquet of balloons, she has her hand around my strings.

You know, holding my feet sort of on the ground. And our friendship, too, was an evolutionary thing, I think partly because we were so tight and so close when we started developing through our middle school and early high school years. I kind of matriculated into another friendship group.

She got a new best friend and then a boyfriend. I remember there was a day I'm not proud of this story, but there was a day in our 10th grade year where some conflict arose between me and her new best friend that had me punching the new best friend in the face in the hallway of our high school. And I can't even tell you what the reason why was that I punched the girl in the face, except to say that I think I probably felt threatened because there was another person trying to come into the space that had previously belonged to me next to my friend Faith.

Anyhow, high school, we sort of diverged because I think of the shift in friendships. And then after high school and college, we came back together. In our early 20s, I had had a baby and she was around for that and developed a close friendship and relationship with my son.

And then due to marriage and life, we diverged again. And what's interesting is I'm going to fast forward for the sake of time and space here to today, this now moment, we both find ourselves living alone and single in the world and we have come back together just like we were when we were six years old. We spent our Thanksgiving holiday together this year.

She's coming over this Friday night to bake Christmas cookies together. And now without knowing what the future holds, we're dreaming up maybe being those two little old ladies together with our canes when we're 90, living next door to each other in houses where we'll always just know that we at least have each other, even if no one else. So like your story with your friend, I think it's just fascinating to notice how sometimes those people who can mean the most to us have to go off.

And so do we to live life and have the experiences that make us us. And when they're really meant to be in your life, there's always a return. You know, we come back to each other like a boomerang.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

The wind blows just right. Or you know, and you know, it will come back. I mean, it's such a cliche term.

If it's meant for you, let it go. But it really is a thing. Yeah.

Well, who are meant to be in your life will come back. Yeah, it's cliche and also the truth. Yeah.

And I think it's, you know, more our humanness that wants us to be attached. And then that can bring out that what you were referring to the controller, the manipulator. I think when those parts of my one of the things I have learned from friendship is when those parts of my personality want to surface to control or to manipulate.

It's because I am too tightly attached to whatever is on the other side. And if I could just loosen my grip a little and allow things to flow like the wind, what's meant for me finds me. Yeah.

Yeah, it's true. What about the times in friendship when you have kept too tight of a grip on someone or some situation? Is there anything that you can think of like that? Oh, boy. What comes to mind as you say that is is really sort of a circle of friends I've I've had since my adult life and in my adult life, people who, you know, I believed in the in the midst of those relationships, I absolutely could not live without that.

But now I am absolutely learning how to live without, you know, those kind of ride or die type people. I what's coming up for me is remembering being in the presence of these folks like these are the kind of friends where you call each other every day on your way to work. You call each other on your way home every night to talk about how was your day.

They're your drinking buddies, your go to football game buddies, your travel buddies like friends. We did everything together, attended one another's weddings, became godparents to each other's children, etc. And in my case, a lot of those folks who were in those circles with me were also people I worked with.

And so I think there was a lot of reason for holding on tight. In fact, when I think about it retrospectively, it occurs to me that we were because of the nature of the kind of work we did, as we've already talked about in another podcast. Many of us were involved with the child welfare system.

I think we were probably, you know, helping each other to navigate a lot of trauma without recognizing that that's what we were actually up to, working through and with, you know, being trauma bonded. So it's interesting to think about it in this context, because I've had some of those friendships have gone away now. The wind has blown those people out of my life.

And there's so much more to say about that. And I think that could be a whole nother podcast episode about what sometimes has things wanting to end or shift or change or die in some way. Those losses come with incredible pain.

And at least in my case, left me sitting for a long time with questions like, is it me? What did I do? Or how could I have been different or better in some way? When really, I think that's the hurt voice that you just heard speaking. And then the healed voice is what we've already talked about, that friendships are an evolutionary thing that want to come and go and change like the seasons, and that it's really not personal. It's just life.

And what is. And there's a lesson in all of that, right, that I want to say out loud for myself and others. Which is knowing even though sometimes things have to end, it doesn't necessarily change the beauty that was there when the thing was alive.

So often a whole story wants to be written just based on the last chapter. When there's multiple truths that want to be held all at the same time, those friendships can have ended and those friendships were beautiful things while they were alive. I love that.

As you were talking, I was thinking about a friendship I had that ended and the friendship was linked to a relationship that I was in. She was associated with the relationship. And when the relationship ended, I thought this friendship is going to go on.

And it couldn't. It had to end because the relationship with someone else ended. And I was so angry and hurt.

I truly was heartbroken. I was, I think, more heartbroken about the friendship ending than the relationship. Because I didn't anticipate it.

And I thought, this is a person who's going to be in my life forever. And it took a long, a long time and a lot of healing for me to see it as a blessing that it ended. And as you were saying, a blessing for what it was, while it lasted, because it was wonderful and it filled my soul in the way that friendship should.

I got a lot out of it and I think I gave a lot to it. And there are times with people in our lives that we have to let go of them and they have to let go of us because it's the right thing to do. Mm hmm.

Yeah. It makes me think about loss and grief and death and how I don't want to say that it's almost easier. And yet, somehow to the human mind, it's like I may have been more easily ready to accept if you had died.

Then I am the fact that you're still alive and I have to let you go. And sometimes the difference is if someone dies, they didn't choose to leave you. Right.

One chooses to not be your friend. Mm hmm. It is such a hurtful experience and can be so shame ridden.

Mm hmm. I'm a bad friend. I did something wrong and now someone has chosen to reject me.

Yeah. Being rejected and still alive. That's exactly like where the pain is coming from.

Right. Right. Talk about your choice to have to do that.

Or was it your choice or her choice based on the relationship that it ended? It was a little bit of both. It was initiated by her. The protector part of me went, you're not, you're not going to tolerate this.

Emily, get out of here. And I just said, okay, fine. I'm cutting you off.

Which wasn't the healthiest thing to do. Yeah. It was the part of me that was like, well, you're not going to be hurt.

So get out of this situation. Stop talking to her. Yeah.

And we have to think those parts of ourselves too. Right. For keeping us safe, even though they may have us behaving in a way that we're not completely proud of.

Right. I can be proud when I have let a friendship go, but I'm not proud of every time how I've behaved in the process. Right.

That the friendship needed to end. And I wish I could have done it in a way that might have been more conscious and whole. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. What would you, how would you do it differently if you had it to do over again? And I see that it's coming to an end and I'm not the person that I've been made out to be by other people in your life.

And you were, you were still going to be a good person and a good person in my heart. And I wish I had had that conversation. It could have just been one conversation, but I didn't do that.

Yeah. You know, I have said so many times to folks, I wish in our world, in our culture, in America, here in my life, I wish that we knew how to handle endings as beautifully and generously and abundantly as we do beginnings. Right.

When, when two people decide that they want to get married, there's often a wedding and a celebration and everyone shows up. To celebrate the love and the connection in the beginning. And then when it comes to endings, I think we pretty much suck.

Yeah. There's like no ceremony around it. We struggle even to have conversation around it.

And what we can know for sure is that if we're not communicating with each other, we're probably both left making up stories. Correct. About each other.

Right. And about what's really happening here. And at least in my case, when the story making machine starts churning, it almost always lands with me as the villain.

You know? Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think or what, what do you want to say about that? Because I think what you just said is so beautiful.

And I would love if we could infuse a little bit of that medicine into our community. About how we could, you know, what's, what's the opportunity for handling endings in a way that maybe doesn't have to come with so much harm. I have such a good example involving good about that.

And I think part of the reason that we are so good at beginning celebration is because it's a positive emotion. It's happy. It's joyful.

It's hopeful and endings can be hopeful. But they also can be sad and grief stricken.

my, the example that's coming to mind for me is when my dad died earlier this year, my friend, I'll call her Cora.

She was so good at sitting with me in the grief. She was so good at letting me tell stories and laugh and then sob. And I'm going to cry now just thinking about it.

She just showed up and she would sit there. And part of what helped in that end time is that there was no expectation about how I was supposed to behave or feel. It was okay to just be how I was and who I was in that moment.

And she brought, she brought food for my family and I, she brought flowers. She would reach out and say, is there anything, do you want me to come over and be with you? Do you want me to bring something? And she just kept texting and calling and showing up. Yeah.

She kept showing up. That is the, the ceremony that needs to happen for people and through friendship, through gathering, through community, when something ends that we need people with us just to be there, just to allow us to be. Yeah.

I'm so glad you have her. Oh, me too. You feel your feels.

This is, this is her impact. This is the impact of that person on your heart. Right.

You know, it, but I too have a friend who showed up for me during that time. And in a way like yours, that is it. I want, I want to put it up against another friend, not to do a comparison, but just to make this point that I had a best friend, a lifetime friend who really, you know, my mind was, she was my person that I remember getting very angry at when I was in the fog of grief after my dad's passing.

And all I remember is saying to her one night, like, where were you? Where were you? And the response was, I didn't know what you needed. And I remember feeling, well, I didn't know what I needed either. That's the trouble with when you're the person in grief, you're in grief, you don't know what it is you're feeling or what it is you need, let alone how to ask someone for it.

Right. And I had this other very dear friend, and I, I love this story so much. We'll call her Alex.

When my dad passed away, I remember vividly, we had three funerals for him. And I can talk about that more on our other podcast, but we were on our way to funeral number two, which was being held at a church with about 250 guests. And I received a text from this girlfriend, Alex, that said, I know you're at the church for your dad's funeral.

And I just want you to know my husband and I are at your house with a case of beer and sandwiches. And we will be here waiting for you when you're done, no matter how long it takes. Do exactly what you need to do.

Don't feel any need to rush home. We just wanted you to know that when you get home, you won't be there alone. Yeah.

And same impact. Like that was everything. Know that I am in pain and suffering and not even aware or conscious of myself and my own suffering and just show up, show up and stay and don't have any expectations of me.

Whatsoever. Just say that you will be there and you will be beside me. No matter what it meant everything to me, I will like that person will have a piece of my heart for the rest of the days that I am breathing for that one day and that one act.

Because I didn't know what I needed, let alone how to ask for it. And what I needed from friendship was for someone else to anticipate that the one thing I really needed was to not feel alone. Yeah.

I love that. I also have to tell you, I feel personally attacked because I was the friend who, when another friend had a loss, a death in her family, it didn't show up in the way that I could have because I hadn't yet experienced the kind of grief that makes you go, this is what you need when someone's right. And I didn't show up for her and she was angry with angry with me.

And for good reason, for good reason. And I mean, I feel the need now, both for you, myself and that other friend I was talking about to bring in the voice of compassion. Because I think grief is one of those really tricky things.

There's so much dynamic, like packed into a can called grief. But part of it is pain. Like I think part of the reason why we don't do endings very well in our culture is because we also don't do pain very well.

What we want for ourselves and to give freely to each other is some broad-brush paint stroke that puts rainbows on top of things. And as a result of that, I carried around a story for many years of my life that went something to the tune of people don't want to be with me when I feel pain. They only want me when I'm happy and full of joy, which had a very huge resulting impact on many of my friendships, especially during the last like five to six years of my life in the wake of my divorce and my dad's death and my children leaving home and the huge transition in my career.

So many endings, so many endings, so much pain, and not much friendship. And I know how in service of me that is now. Like I needed to get into a space where I was very alone, I think to see and be with my own pain.

Um, to start to listen to and hear the sound of my own voice and really to strengthen my relationship with myself. And so from that point of view, I can say what a gift it has been to have this sort of time in solitude. Um, because I know myself and have strengthened my relationship with myself so significantly throughout it.

And, um, it was also a source of pain to let go of friendship and what I thought, you know, many circles of people really meant to me for so many years. Yeah. This thing called life, it's an evolutionary thing.

It is, there is something about the way that we show up and the level of vulnerability that we have to allow people to see and be with all of the parts of us allows them to be okay with it. And so in friendship, if, if we let them see, I'm not happy all the time. Yeah.

Sometimes I'm stressed out and I can be a bitch struggling. Sometimes I'm just angry. Sometimes I want to celebrate.

And so it goes both ways. The friends where you can, they will sit with you in your pain and the friends where if something exciting happens and you're like, I'm so excited about, you can call and they'll celebrate with you. The people who can sit with you in pain and celebrate with you in the good.

Yeah. We need all of that in order to attract the kinds of friendships that we deserve. Yeah.

Now we'll add in there's no joy without suffering, right? So we're not joyful all the time. You're not supposed to be happy or joyful all of the time. And we really only understand joyful celebration, excitement, happiness, hope when we've experienced the opposite.

Exactly. I so get what you're saying. I mean, I, I feel that I'm a person who was like made from joy.

I was cut from the joy cloth, if you will. And stay with me here because this is relative to friendship. I think where I think where I, what I want to say about it is it turns out a lot of the responsibility and oneness was on me, you know, because I carried that story that other people didn't know how to be with me in my pain when the truth was, I didn't know how to be with me and my pain.

And then I projected that onto friendships in a way that was, you know, destructive. Yeah, I just, what I want to say to the point that you just made that I think is so important is joys come from place feels different now, where before pain from loss, there was joy, what I would have called joy that I would now describe as more like a excitement that occurs almost like three feet off the ground, right? Sort of fleeting and fluttering and where you sort of vacate your own body for the sake of the joyfulness. And joy, when it lives in concert with pain, now feels like it comes from such a more deep and rich place, almost like below my feet from the roots of the earth that spring up through me, right? Now, this kind of joy, I don't get to feel it as often.

Because I think what's happening is a much more authentic version of me. But when it happens, and it feels like it comes out of the roots of the earth, it's such a different thing than that fleeting three feet off the ground kind of excitement. My point is pain isn't something to avoid in yourself and or in others.

I heard Brene Brown speak one time at my church in Lakewood. And it stuck with me so loudly, because this is who I was. A person who's sitting in a room full of dark, the last thing that they need is for you to come in and flip on all the light switches.

What they really need is to know that you are someone who will come sit down with them in the dark. And that even touches me right now. Because I think that had I known then what I know now, what I would have asked that one friend for, the one I was mad at for not showing up, is to just come sit with me in the dark.

Yeah, yeah, isn't that what it all comes back to is knowing yourself enough to ask for what you need. Yeah. And when I was talking about that friendship that ended, if I had been directed and said, here's what it is, this is what we both need.

This is what I need. And in those moments with, with friends, if we can connect with ourselves in friendship, I am my first friend. Yeah.

I can turn to myself and say, what do you need right now? Yeah. And allow it. Yeah.

And I can allow other people to sit with me in the, in that moment in whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah.

That's so insightful. I love that term. You just, did you just coin that or did that come from somewhere? My first friend, I want to be my own first friend.

I'm not sure. I hope I coined it. It's to belong to you in my book, woman.

It's like my own first friend because, and for me, the questions are like, what am I feeling? And then what do I want? And then what do I need? And I guess what's here for me now is there was a time in my life where I didn't have answers to those questions in any given moment of my life. And so how could I have ever given answers to those questions away to a friend when I didn't even know what the answers were for myself. And so I love, I love this, that first friend where friendship begins is with you, right? Me, you, ourselves, um, before each other.

And, and I think what I've learned is the better friend I am to myself, the better friend I can be to you and to everyone else. Yeah. There's the self-care word that people associate it with, you know, go to the spa.

Yeah. Pedicures and bubble baths, but that's not what we mean when we're talking about self-care. Self-care truly is showing up for yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. Showing up for yourself first.

Yeah. Here, I'll give you an example from my life. This was my self-care this weekend.

Okay. My weekend was very social being, being around people, including you that I love that I enjoy being around getting out. And the other half of my weekend was doing nothing.

I sat around and did nothing. I didn't change out of my pajamas. I read.

And that is like, I've gotten to that place. I used to fill every weekend, every minute. And then by the end of Sunday, I was grumpy and I was like, Oh, I just, I'm not even ready for the part of my friendship with myself is going.

I want social time and I want alone time because I need both in order to feel good and to feel like my most authentic self. So what's your, do you have an example of how you're a friend to yourself? I love everything you're saying about that for you. And for myself, I love do nothing time.

And I too, like you used to just fill every minute of every day with a plan. And I called that connection, you know, because you wanted to go out and be out and about in order to connect and see people and play and have fun and whatever. And yes, it leaves you eventually completely taxed and totally exhausted and not at all in right relationship with yourself.

And so now boy, has that changed? I mean, overall, the whole pace of my life has slowed way down. In fact, I so enjoy the days on my calendar when I get to look at my calendar and see no appointments versus full with appointments the way that it used to be. Just for the sake of having a do-nothing day, like what you're talking about.

For me, those are days to restore when I can wear my pajamas all day and just read a book. Those are how I stay in connection with myself. Like it's interesting.

I would have never said to you five or 10 years ago that I needed to plan a whole day just to like listen to the sounds of the voices inside my own head. But I absolutely need at least a day every week just to be with the voices inside my own head. Right.

And be choiceful about which ones I want to listen to and which ones I want to let guide my life and my decisions and the choices that I make in the coming week. Yeah. And to me, that is what we mean when we say self-care is like I am in right relationship with this being physically, mentally, spiritually, and even socially.

You know, my quiet and my talking are in leveraged balance so that I know before I go out for human consumption that I am ready to receive love and to give it back in a way that no person has to be harmed, including me. Yeah. Because the world is a mirror of our self.

So if you are taking care of your number one friend. Yeah. Be a friend.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and the world is a mirror and we attract at the level that we're at. Right.

And so the absence of that kind of centered and grounded space that you and I are both describing right now, I think, had me seeking out things from friendship, um, putting expectations on my friendships that maybe were not fair or right for the friendship to have to hold all of that. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It was like I, I think I turned to friends to be my everything. Um, my place for play, creativity, release, venting, connection, intimacy, exploration, travel, um, all of the things I expected to get from friends. Um, and boy, is it Buddha? I think who says the point of all suffering starts at the point of expectations.

Like if you want to end your suffering, change your expectations. Right. Um, it's just another example of that.

I think friendship, just like any other relationship is an inside out job and they, those relationships can only be as healthy as you are. Um, and no, no one person can ever be anyone's everything. We have to all learn to get into a practice where we meet those needs for ourselves.

Um, so that I think the expectations can stay sound in relationship. Um, and you can get what you came for without putting so much pressure onto the relationship to be everything that you need it to be. Earlier, you said the attachment to it and not the attachment that another person has to take care of everything.

Yeah. For me, I think there's a combination of being my own friend and getting what I need from myself and not expecting any one person to be every kind of friend. Exactly.

Many friends that fulfill different needs in my life. You know, I have like the, the personal development friend where I call her and we're like, we share quotes and we get excited about things and we're like, and then I have, I have the friend where I'll call if I'm having a really hard day at work and I'm like, Oh, I just need to be able to vent. And then you have the friend where you're like, you're just wild.

And if I, if I go with you somewhere, we're going to spend the entire night laughing. And so they're not all the same person or the same person at all times. So allowing yourself to be open to different kinds of friendships.

Amen sister. Yeah. And it takes me to the, to another past place with other friends where I remember feeling quite threatened by that idea that you just talked about, you know, like, why is she better friends with her than she is with me? Or why does she get to go on trips with her and why didn't they invite me or all of those kinds of, you know, the spinning and the story making that goes on inside your own head when you feel like you're on the outside of something rather than on the inside of it.

And I think the recovery, if you will, for me came from really right, you know, being my own first friend, knowing that I'm not getting left behind or missing out. I can let my FOMO rest, right? Because the truth is the truth really is there are a lot of times I'd rather be home alone on my own couch than taking a trip with that group of people. Right.

But I had to settle and satisfy this story. I told myself that I wasn't fitting or wasn't being included for some reason. This story about not being enough when the truth is you're okay with not being there, being honest with yourself.

Exactly. It's not about not being enough. Exactly.

Exactly. So, yeah. Yeah.

And now I can feel this sort of release of that incredible pressure I talked about that I used to really put on friendships. And I think, you know, probably behaved badly in some of my relationships in a way that I want to send an apology out just as we're having this conversation, you know, because of coming from that place of, I don't want to be left out, which is such a human come from place. Oh, yeah.

But the truth is belong here. I belong here with myself in myself. And now that that relationship feels right, like it's in integrity.

I actually can see so much more opportunity in all of my friendships for what I can give to them, what I can receive from them. And, you know, there's a lot of discernment and a lot of healing and a lot of self-discovery and reflection and radical honesty, I think, that paved the path to get from what I'm describing how I used to be to how it feels now. And unfortunately, or fortunately, a lot of friendships had to change and evolve and dissolve in some cases in order for me to learn and walk that path.

Yeah. Yeah. And in order to make room for you and your friendship with yourself.

Exactly. All of your time is full of other people and connecting, as you said, there's no time for yours truly. It is just out there.

You're out there. And so it gave you the space to be you. Exactly.

It's there's another cliche that goes right along with that, right? Like now, instead of asking, why did they go? I ask, what will I create in the space they no longer occupy? Yeah. Well, I think that that is a good place for us today. I think this is there has been a lot of value and we went to places that I didn't originally think because friendship is such a rich topic.

Yeah. So much more than just another person. It's so much more than just another person.

So true. Right. Well, thank you for taking the time to spend your spend your day with us, spend your hour with us or your half hour.

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