Old Friends

An ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 10949
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2026-08-07 19:36:01
    [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-07 19:36:01
    [post_content] => 

As my siblings and I become our own people, it'll be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given. 





Since my maternal grandmother’s unexpected death last fall, the legacy of her life has weighed on me. She was authoritative, opinionated, and very close to everyone in the family, especially my mother. In my hometown, she was a hero—a city council member of the second largest city in New Hampshire, a school board member, and an advocate for civic engagement. In many ways, she was the best role model of leadership and independence I could have asked for. 





Concurrently, my grandmother was a complicated figure whose strong morals and beliefs shaped the foundations of our familial dynamics. She always encouraged us grandchildren to be outspoken, smart, and strong-willed. But she also modeled emotional inconsistency, porous boundaries, and a pattern of partaking in conflict cycles without resolution or repair. 





As I continue to grieve, I’ve been reflecting on how all of this has affected me in both obvious and quieter ways. But more recently, I’ve also started to wonder whether her influence is a part of why I’ve struggled so much to bond with my siblings. 





My grandmother had a rough life, and sometimes, that trauma spilled over onto the rest of the family. She grew up one of eight siblings in the projects of Hartford, Connecticut, to a single mother. She had her first child at 16, married at 18, divorced at 27, then joined the military with three small children in tow. It’s likely she was never given the tools to cope with all she lived through, and when she was alive, her temperament was everyone’s responsibility. Whether she was sad or angry or anxious, it was our collective duty to manage her emotions and transform them into something better. Within my family, this form of enmeshment has now been passed down from my maternal grandmother and her siblings, to my mom and hers, to me and mine.





As with many eldest daughters, I was raised to take responsibility for the needs of both my siblings and my parents, consequently becoming hyper-independent at a premature age. This has continued into early adulthood: At 26 years old, if something were to suddenly happen to either of my parents, I am likely next in line to take care of my two siblings. My sister is 22 years old and disabled, and my brother, 13, is still a child. There’s no immediate reason to worry about imminent parental loss, but as I’ve been contemplating death more frequently, it’s a possibility I’ve chosen to prepare for. This has spurned thoughts of how atypical my relationship is with my siblings, at least compared to what I’ve seen between others, and whether it’s possible for these dynamics to change over a lifetime, especially now that my sister and I are both adults. 





Theoretically, sharing the unique experience of being raised by the same two parents should be an unbreakable bond. At its best, it can mean having a built-in BFF with whom trust, history, and emotional depth are a given. But at its worst, even kin can become strangers: Regardless of age gaps or favoritism or birth order or familial dynamics, sometimes, two individuals just don’t click.





With four years between us that felt larger when we were younger, my sister and I would get into physical altercations over the smallest things, like who got control of the TV remote or my refusal to share my video games with her. Of course, most siblings bicker, fight, and get jealous of each other at some point, and none of these things have to adversely affect the totality of a relationship. But in our case, it often felt like they defined it: We never really played together, just fought. 





Then, almost a decade after my sister was born, my brother arrived. I was resentful, already subconsciously anticipating my role as the family’s emotional sponge would expand, and knowing the age gap between us would mean, at least in part, that I would be responsible for his care. 





As Canadian author, physician, and childhood development and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté asserts—no two children have the same parents. I can attest to this with my sister, a sickly child who required more attention, and with my brother, who has received a more laissez-faire style of parenting as the youngest in the family. 





Perhaps partly due to my quiet nature, I had always been the child that my parents felt they never had to worry about. Frequently called “mature for my age,” this also meant I was expected to put everyone else’s emotional needs before my own. Sharing my feelings in any given situation was discouraged, and I was often called “selfish” for not considering how they might affect the family. I learned early to keep the peace by avoiding high-conflict subjects, and while we maintained a superficial relationship as children, my sister and I always shared a silent understanding that due to our mother’s sacrifices on our behalf, we had no right to complain. (I suspect this is my brother’s experience, as well, despite my mother’s insistence that “boys are just less work than girls.”)





This was especially difficult for me because, unlike my siblings, I was perceived as the responsible one, who therefore didn’t need additional support or care. While my physical needs of shelter, food, clothing, and even entertainment were comfortably met, my emotional needs were not. I was bullied at school for most of my childhood, and although sympathetic, my parents and siblings both regularly chalked it up to me being “too sensitive,” rather than actually listening. 





This label—being “too sensitive”—became a recurring one throughout my life. It was also frequently reinforced by my grandmother, which eventually led me to hide more and more of myself from my parents and my siblings, and to rely on them less and less. Soon after graduating high school, I got as far away from them as I could. 





Living away from home for the last eight years—with strangers, friends, other families, and romantic partners—has allowed me to connect to my own emotional needs and wants for the first time in my life. It’s also fundamentally changed the lens through which I see sibling friendships for the better, and changed the way I look at my own. I’ve learned that siblings can and do take an interest in each other’s lives and rely on each other for support, out of genuine interest rather than familial duty. I’ve also learned that conflicts can be addressed and resolved in healthy ways, rather than ignored and left to fester, eventually turning into resentments. 





These lessons evoke a desire in me to do better for my younger siblings: I yearn for this kind of “elevated” relationship with them, where we can talk about our struggles and our interests, our shared and diverging upbringings and the ways we see the world. Above all else, I just want us to be able to be ourselves around each other, to free ourselves from the roles our family has given us, and to become genuine friends. More importantly, I want to be able to confide in them and for them to see me as a safe person to confide in, too—not as a part of an unspoken eldest daughter imperative, but because I am someone they can genuinely trust. 





I’m still struggling to form this deeper connection with each of them, and to break the ice of emotional superficiality that everyone in my family seems to be comfortable with. After all, we are the outcome of a multigenerational combination of emotional detachment, dysfunction, and our respective and sometimes clashing individualities. But even if the adults in my life—from my grandmother to my parents—were most culpable for the conditions that produced this emotional environment, ideally, it’s my siblings and I whose lives will succeed theirs. And it’ll eventually be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given. 





Of course, my perspective is just that—mine. My siblings and parents have their own readings of our relationships, and maybe someday, we’ll find places where they intersect. It’s entirely possible that as a sensitive child who has become a sensitive adult, I’ve been too hard on them. And despite the origins of my sister and I’s discontentment, there’s a sincerity with which she relates to me today: When I ask about her day, she tells me in earnest, and genuinely wants to know how mine is, too. 





I make every effort to actively listen to her when we speak, because I truly want to know about her and her life. But I still struggle to share my emotional truths with her in return. No matter what day or week or month I’m having, as far as she knows, I’m fine. I don’t want her to worry, and besides, my grandmother would have encouraged me not to share those feelings, in order to protect the family’s peace. 





But in my grandmother’s absence, there’s also no longer anyone here to manage how everyone in the family should feel, or what they should share. So, despite grieving her—or maybe because of what this grief has afforded me—I’m gaining more courage in facing my family: in standing up for myself, in choosing to remove myself from discomfort, in refusing to absorb my family’s emotional dysregulation. I’m also choosing to be hopeful about what sort of relationships I want to forge with my siblings, and choosing to be hopeful about the person I can still become. 





With this new courage comes new insight. Just as I am doing now, my younger siblings will one day become their own people. Amid pondering about how this one death has changed our present, and how subsequent ones may change our future, there’s no guarantee that my relationships with my siblings will get any better. What if we’re never able to overcome the emotional barriers that were formed early? What if the only way to maintain our individual emotional health and change our family’s future is to build and preserve strong boundaries between us that might keep us from ever being truly close? 





I hope not. But, maybe the best eldest sister and friend I can be to them is in maintaining my own developing boundaries as I understand them and myself better. Maybe the form of courage I can work towards is mirroring a sibling friendship built on healthy communication and respect, and taking chances, little by little, in trusting them with who I am. That way, as we all grow, we can truthfully see whether it’s possible for us to become closer, or whether it’s healthiest for all of us to care for each other as best we can from a distance.


    [post_title] => Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends?
    [post_excerpt] => As my siblings and I become our own people, it'll be up to us to determine whether and how our relationships will thrive or crumble from the foundations we were given. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => friendship-week-can-siblings-eventually-become-friends-family-dynamics-relationships-childhood-upbringing-grief-personal-essay
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-07 19:36:03
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-07 19:36:03
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10949
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of two siblings in a treehouse, while on the ground, an older sibling holds a ladder and looks up at them.

Can Siblings Eventually Become Friends?

by Niya Doyle

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 10830
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2026-08-06 16:30:55
    [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-06 16:30:55
    [post_content] => 

There’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness that comes with befriending someone a few decades older.





We’ve all had a friend crush before. You meet someone and immediately feel that special spark and a deep desire to get to know them better. Suddenly, you want to know where they grew up, what their childhood was like, what neighborhood they live in, and what recipes they’ve been cooking up lately. Your friend crush pulls you in with their shimmering light, and the next thing you know, you’re imagining future hangouts together. Maybe you even feel some nervous butterflies, hoping they might want to be your friend, too.  





For me, that person has often been three or four decades older. Sure, I’ve had plenty of friend crushes with people closer to my age, but there’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness of an intergenerational friendship. Befriending someone older can provide a certain steadiness, almost like they’re reaching out a soft hand and saying, “I’ve seen it all, darling. Come sit with me and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”  





When I first moved to New Orleans, it was Jeanette. I met her through my job at the time in the food and farming space. She’d walk into our warehouse with bundles of basil and bouquets of zinnias and “shrimp flowers” (named such because they resemble—yep, you guessed it—boiled shrimp!). It was hard not to smile when Jeanette entered a room, beaming with sunny energy and greeting us in her charming Southern accent.  





Then 72 years old, Jeanette spent most of her days gardening in her signature wide-brimmed hat. But for her, this wasn’t just a fun retirement hobby (not that there’s anything wrong with that). She was growing flowers and food on vacant lots around the city—including land that had been overgrown and neglected since Hurricane Katrina—both to enjoy at home and to sell to local businesses. You could find her basil in a fresh pesto at a neighborhood Italian restaurant and her rose petals in a fragrant body oil made by a New Orleans skincare brand. In her free time, she taught neighbors how to grow their own herbs, veggies, and flowers, too, demonstrating what was possible in their small backyards and on their windowsills. 





Jeanette has that go-getter gumption that’s inspiring at any age, but especially for someone in their 70s. This was immediate friend crush material for me, and inspired me to channel my own go-gettery-ness to take the first step and call her. After I dialed her up, we ended up chatting on the phone for over an hour. Within a few days, I was walking through her garden as she proudly pointed out every plant she had grown, as if they were her children.  





Flash forward to our many hours together in the car running errands, pulling weeds in her gardens around the city, shopping at Costco (often with matching items in our baskets—great minds!), and assembling bouquets for my wedding. Jeanette was in my regular friend rotation just like anyone else. She also modeled to me what healthy aging could look like. Whether she was planting a new round of shrimp flowers, or teaching another gardening workshop to a new group of students, she reminded me that you can always keep learning, dreaming, and reinventing yourself no matter your age; that you can always nurture and sprout new seedlings, even if they don’t all blossom. 





During times of transition—navigating new jobs in a new city—Jeanette was an especially important friend. She always picked up the phone when I called, and always provided a refreshing levity that reminded me not to take life too seriously. This felt especially remarkable coming from someone who’d already lived 70-something years of challenges, grief, ups and downs, and all the juicy life bits in between.





This ability to keep showing up and her commitment to getting to know her neighbors was also what first drew me to Ava, another New Orleans friend crush.





Also in her 70s, Ava posted on a neighborhood message board that she was offering sewing lessons. This was a few years after meeting Jeanette, when I was pregnant with my first child. I’d wanted to sew a quilt for my future baby (and maybe some cute rompers, too), so I decided to send her a message. 





Learning to sew with Ava wasn’t anything like watching a how-to video on YouTube. She invited me over to her house to sit beside her at the sewing machine and watch her do basic stitches, then had me do them, guiding me through each tangly thread and unwieldy bobbin.





We’d sit together and stitch while sharing stories about our families, religious journeys, and favorite recipes, interspersed with quiet moments of just sitting next to each other at our sewing machines. This was another season of transition for me—preparing to enter motherhood—and without my mom nearby, I appreciated Ava sharing her nuggets of maternal wisdom, and her understanding on a deeper level that everything was changing for me, but somehow still staying the same. 





I knew our friendship was really reaching a deeper level, too, when Ava and I started going on our own Costco trips together, which seems to be a trend in all my closest friendships. (Is it just me, or do those wide aisles and free samples create the perfect space for meandering conversations?) 





More recently, both of these friendships have evolved. When I moved from Louisiana to Rhode Island a couple years ago, I also moved away from both Jeanette and Ava. While we no longer have regular in-person time, we still text and share photos; and whenever we do get on the phone together, you better believe it’s going to be at least an hour-long chat, since there’s always so much to cover. 





I’ve been lucky enough to make new friends in my new neighborhood, often at the playground with fellow parents around my age (or at least within the same decade), and I’m starting to feel more settled. But while this has been a blessing, it’s also been a stark reminder that I’ve been lacking in the intergenerational friendships department. This hole has felt even bigger when I think about my daughters growing up without their grandparents nearby. I knew I’d have to be more intentional about seeking intergenerational friendships if I wanted to share their magic, and show my daughters that friendship has no age limit. 





Our weekly neighborhood potlucks—a tradition we had in New Orleans that we brought up to Providence—are a natural place to meet folks of all ages, and Nancy has become a recent regular. She has two daughters, born in the 1980s like me, so there was an instant familiarity when we met. She seemed to get me on some level, knowing what it was like to raise daughters around my age, and I seemed to get her on some level—she was a nurse just like my mom. We bonded over the challenges of weaning your last baby after years of breastfeeding, our shared love of recycling, and our having spent time in the same small town in Ireland coincidentally. On top of that, her sesame noodles at potluck were SO good—all enough to spark a new friend crush. 





Like me, Nancy had recently moved to the neighborhood. She had grandkids about an hour away but wanted to deepen her relationships with nearby neighbors. I texted her the next day inviting her to go for a walk. She accepted with a purple heart emoji, so I knew we were off to a good start. We’ve been on a couple walks since, and our conversations continue to flow.





In 2021, Jeanette and I were featured in a beautiful book called Collective Wisdom by Grace Bonney, which spotlights intergenerational friendships and life advice from women over the age of 50. After speaking with over 100 women for the book, Bonney reflects that “while age brings wisdom, it rarely offers closure or perfection.” We’re all still evolving. We’re all still curious about ourselves and the world around us. That curiosity doesn’t expire with age.





The best kinds of friendships create a safe space for listening, sharing, and learning, but in an intergenerational friendship, it feels like unlocking another dimension. Almost like time traveling forward and back, weaving between decades, getting a glimpse into the future and remembering what it was like in the past. It’s a refreshing reminder that we’re all just figuring it out as we go, and very little in life is actually linear. 





In our interview for the book, Jeanette said I changed the way she approaches young people about gardening. “I’ve learned from how Erin just walks up and starts talking. There are young people I probably wouldn’t approach because I would expect them to not be receptive. But Erin doesn’t see it that way; she just moves forward.” 





I was surprised to learn that I had taught her something, let alone almost the exact same thing she had taught me. That you’re never too old (or young) to make new friends, to put yourself out there, and to keep feeling those nervous butterflies, whether you’re meeting a new friend crush, or planting a new seed in hopes of watching it grow.


    [post_title] => Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship
    [post_excerpt] => There’s something magical about the comfort and interconnectedness that comes with befriending someone a few decades older.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => everyone-needs-an-intergenerational-friendship-week-old-friends-age-gap
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-06 16:30:57
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-06 16:30:57
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10830
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of a group of trees, with one of the tallest watering one of the shortest.

Everyone Needs an Intergenerational Friendship

by Erin Zimmer Strenio

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 10821
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07
    [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-05 17:41:07
    [post_content] => 

How a shared love of soccer transformed my long-distance friendship.





On a rainy and unseasonably cold summer night last March, my friend Mendes and I walked the long way around the stadium of a fourth division soccer team in São Paulo, Brazil. Neither of us had ever been there before and we’d gotten out of the taxi on the wrong side of the grounds. But even though we were cold and a little lost, we were determined to make it to this game. 





Mendes and I have been friends for more than 15 years, although going to soccer games has only recently become a staple of our friendship. We met when he switched schools in the fifth grade, bonding over our shared love of Batman, Black Sabbath, and Scorsese films. As kids, we’d go to the movies and the bookstore together, and at the time, it felt like we were the only two people in our class who liked doing either. We’d talk about girls, study for tests together, and go looking for good burgers after late-night movie screenings. 





After I went to college in New York and he stayed to attend film school in São Paulo, we remained friends. Back then, we’d find time every other week to catch up via the old video call app, Skype. But there was still physical distance, and as the years passed, there rose a feeling of a wall between us, keeping us apart.





I felt as if I was leading two lives that didn’t quite get to meet. There was the life in São Paulo I shared with my family and my old friends, filled with all the experiences that had made me who I was up until that point. Then there was my new life in New York, which I could only tell people back home about—a new school, new friends, and new experiences in a new language—that felt completely my own. Whenever Mendes and I would talk about it, I felt like I was translating a movie for him that only I got to see. 





Maybe it felt the same for him. Back in São Paulo, he ran around shooting films and became a regular at old-school bars that I’d never even heard of. He fell in love with Carnaval and the hidden charms of a city we hadn’t gotten to explore fully as teenagers. But in some ways, I think it was easier for me to feel tethered to his life in a way he couldn’t be to mine. Every summer break, when it was winter in Brazil, I’d fly back home and we’d go back to our old ways. I’d meet his new friends and go to parties or ride in their cars listening to Liniker, Guilherme Held, or Baco Exu do Blues, the music that was bopping in São Paulo at the time. For about three months each year, the wall between Mendes and I became porous, and we would pass through it together. Then the summer would end, and I’d hop on a plane and go back to my other life, and the wall would turn solid again.





Soccer entered our friendship during the pandemic, which I spent back in Brazil. Though I’ve long been almost unhealthily addicted to the sport—I’ve woken up at 5 a.m. to watch random league games in different time zones, and more than once cancelled plans after my team lost a big game—Mendes had a more off-and-on relationship to it. We became fans of the same club in 2005, a few years before we’d met, when our dads introduced us to the soon-to-be champions of South America: São Paulo FC. Neither remembers much—we were eight years old at the time—but our dads have told us different versions of a similar story. Whenever São Paulo won, they’d show off the cover of the next day’s newspaper at breakfast, reading the recap of the match out loud. As São Paulo advanced in the knockouts, our dads would let us watch more and more of the games during the week, even though they came on late at night after our bedtimes. At the end of that year, São Paulo beat Liverpool FC to become world champions. I remember putting on my little uniform—shirt, shorts, and socks—and going out with my family to eat a burger and celebrate. São Paulo fans filled the streets of the city that day, dressed in their own uniforms, waving flags, wearing crazy hats, blowing horns and lighting red, black, and white smoke flares.





After those glory days, São Paulo went through a dire cold streak in the 2010s. Mendes and I would catch the occasional game together, but even then, it would be a European champions league game, or a World Cup match on TV. Then, when professional sports came back at the end of 2020, São Paulo made an improbable run at the Brazilian title. Though it ended in abject failure in the last weeks of the season (let’s not talk about that), it was enough to get Mendes and I talking about the team for the first time since I can remember. 





After the end of lockdown, Mendes spent weeks at my house with me and my brother Thomas, who also lives in New York and had come home during the pandemic. If we weren’t watching a movie, the TV would be tuned to a game, or the sports channel, or old São Paulo highlights on YouTube, often on mute so we could talk over them. And it’s probably because of us specifically, but at the beginning of 2021, São Paulo won the state championship for the first time since we started supporting them.





Later that year, I left Brazil for New York again, this time for grad school. Our video chats now came through Zoom, but it didn’t take long for Mendes and I to fall into the traps of my previous years abroad—weekly conversations that turned monthly, texts that became more infrequent as we got busy with school and work. The only difference this time was our shared befuddlement with São Paulo FC (the good times were few and far between), which brought us together after every game. We’d found a way to share the same experience every week, thousands of miles between us. 





By 2023, we started going to games together whenever I was home. Sometimes we’d go to cheer on our team, which desperately needed our help, but often, we just went to hang out and talk about what was going on in our lives while the match played in the background, as if we were back in my living room.





I have told Mendes many times that I have a problem: if I could, I’d go to every game, no matter the weather or the opponent. I have dragged my dad to matchdays when there were storm warnings in effect; I have taken Mendes and my brother to games we were sure to lose. And so it was again, in March of this year, a couple of weeks before I was due to fly back to New York for work. São Paulo was playing a league game in the stadium of a fourth division team because our homegrounds had been rented out for a series of AC/DC concerts. It had been raining for days and the weather was dour. The stadium was on the other side of the city; it had no roof and none of the modern amenities and infrastructure you’d find in the home fields of higher division teams, including ours. 





Mendes met me after work, unprepared for the rain, and I lent him my dad’s rain jacket. After we made our way around the walls of this stadium we’d never been to before, we were caught in a wave of fans trying to enter through the small entrance on the side of a highway. Because the stadium didn’t have metal detectors, the military police were patting down every fan, and we only managed to get in halfway through the first half, just as the rain got thicker. The pitch was muddy, the play meager, and we spent most of the match squinting to avoid the water flogging our faces, as the stormy winds teased the smell of barbecue from the restaurant next door, making us half-wish we’d stayed back to watch the game on TV. 





When the final whistle blew, we’d won: two-to-zero. Mendes and I went back to my place, drenched, ordered a pizza, and talked about things I don’t even remember. The food, like the match, was an excuse to spend more time together before I left for New York again. The season carried on in unsurprisingly mediocre ways, but every other week we’d connect over watching soccer before opening up about moments with our partners, our friends, and our family that we couldn’t share in person.





Over a decade into this long-distance friendship, we’ve grown used to looking for the openings in the wall. They may not always be there. Sometimes the rain, or the military police, or losing our seven-point lead in the national championship with a handful of games left in the season only to capitulate into agony and a fourth-place finish, slows us down. But we keep looking. 





Not long ago, during one of those times when I was back from school, I remember overhearing my mom on the phone with a friend, telling her I was home. “He’s seeing his brother tomorrow,” she said. “He has a brother in New York and a brother in São Paulo.”


    [post_title] => Friends from Far Afield
    [post_excerpt] => How a shared love of soccer transformed my long-distance friendship.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => friends-from-far-afield-adult-friendship-week-soccer-sao-paulo-fc-brazil-long-distance
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-05 17:41:08
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-05 17:41:08
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10821
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of two people passing a soccer ball between them from atop two trees.

Friends from Far Afield

by Francisco Attié

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 10817
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07
    [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07
    [post_content] => 

Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back.





A mirror might be an innocuous part of your life, but for most of mine, it was filled with the unknown. Each accidental glance meant confronting abstract shapes that filled me with dread. I knew my real reflection was buried somewhere underneath. But I feared if I looked too closely I still wouldn't be able to comprehend what I saw; a fear equal to the tales of Lovecraft. 





I wasn’t born afraid of my reflection, but instead, taught to bear witness to my incongruence by the world around me. As a child, my gender was irrelevant to me until people started telling me how it was supposed to be; how it was supposed to look. I’d never wanted to wear a dress, had never liked the color pink, and had never cared for unicorns. But I chafed at the obligation that I had to be something at all.





Growing up, I found an unconscious comfort in a digital social life, where I was freed from those gendered obligations. I recessed into this world, filling my days with hours-long voice calls while playing video games with strangers online. I felt safe from the abstract fear I’d always carried. In the digital world, it didn’t matter what I looked like, or what body I was born into. I had full agency over how others “saw” me. This is the reason so many young trans kids find comfort in communities online: a separation from the physical. But I wasn’t ready to look inward yet. 





My connections became tethered to a screen. Even when I did get together with neighborhood friends to play video games or watch movies in their families’ basements, the chances that I'd catch myself reflected were limited. The screen acted as bait so we wouldn't have to look at one another. For a kid who would put a blanket over their bedroom mirror, this was a pretty nice situation to be in. It was only when the monitor shut down that I could see the unknown looking back at me again. 





This abstract discomfort I’d always felt finally took shape as I entered an all-boys high school. Standing in a hallway amongst a jungle of teen boys for the first time, I had only one thought: I’m not like them. Maybe every mirror I'd encountered before that moment was unfocused, and this one epiphany corrected my vision, revealing what was always buried on the other side of the mirror: myself. And now, I could see that she was suffocating. 





As realization and panic set in, I recessed further online. My only gasps of air came from my growing digital social life. Unlike the grand stage it often feels like today, the internet of my adolescence felt like a town square, where I could meet people I’d otherwise never would. Slowly, my digital circle expanded. Along with select friends from previous school years, I began building a community of trusted people across the country, picked up in different virtual lobbies. I’d spend hours on Skype calls with dozens of friends late into the night, talking about gaming and politics and movies. Much to the certain dismay of our parents, these strangers became some of my closest friends. 





After I left the jungle, I was ripped away from the safety of that digital circle. College revealed that my digital life was just a band-aid on a much deeper wound. It was there I finally understood that I was trans, and that hiding this would not only leave my reflection suffocating, but leave me suffocating, too. This urgency forced me to find trusted people around me, and begin to transition socially—online and off. I changed my name to Allison across both worlds, and slightly altered how I dressed offline to feel more congruent with who I wanted to be. I became recognized at school and at work as myself.





In the process, something surprising happened: other people saw the woman in my reflection before I could. I began relishing in my newfound community, many of them other queer folk on their own identity journeys. It was healing to see, in living color, that I was not alone. They encouraged me to celebrate milestones; hormone anniversaries became an additional birthday worth celebrating. The thoughts and feelings I’d hidden my whole life became open conversations. Panic slowed, and the tightness in my chest and the weight on my shoulders began to ease. 





To be accepted was like a breath of fresh air on the first warm day of spring. I wish it was simple enough to say this solved all my problems; I still feared my reflection and would flinch whenever I accidentally caught a glimpse. But occasionally, I’d recognize the woman looking back at me, and even be able to meet her eye.





What I previously thought impossible and out of reach was suddenly right in front of me. I wasn’t born loving myself, but I was taught how to. And the people who taught me this—the people who allowed me to be myself—are who I consider family now. 





During the pandemic, I traveled across New York visiting state parks with two of these friends from college. We’d take long hikes together, and whenever we’d reach the top of a mountain, I’d finally feel untethered from a screen. On one of these hikes, I decided I didn’t want to make it to the peak. I let my friends go off as I clambered up a small boulder, two-thirds up the trail. For the very first time, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe. I was unburdened by the weight of my own fears, and my body relaxed, allowing me to take a nap on top of the comfiest boulder in central New York. 





Those dear strangers online are now family, too. A year ago, we all traveled across the world to meet for the first time in Tokyo, Japan. It's a beautifully strange experience to finally meet people you’ve spoken to through a screen for around a decade in the streets of Asakusa. Yet it never felt like we were “meeting” for the first time; instead, we were celebrating our collective friendship. With roughly a dozen of us, we explored a new country together, visiting shrines and possibly every 7-Eleven in Tokyo. They even helped my now-wife plan her proposal to me on that very trip. (They were also the first to know about our engagement, almost a week before our blood families did.) 





This community pulled me out from the other side of the mirror. Each person was a hand stretching out. Without them, I likely would not be here. I cherish my community so deeply, and even though life has taken its grip, we still find ways to talk and to see each other; we find ways to make time.  





These days, I don’t cover the mirrors in my apartment. I’m not immune to the fears I once had, and will probably always harbor some form of self-reproach. But mostly, I am living with enthusiasm, despite how hellbent this country is on targeting people like me. With each new policy enacted, any moment of fear I have is quickly assuaged by a friend sending support or a loving message. At a time when I have less protections than ever, I somehow feel the most safe. 





You don’t notice healing, you realize you’ve healed. Walking on the street used to require the mental anguish of shutting my peripherals off in fear of catching a distorted reflection of myself in a car or shop window. Sitting in a subway car meant closing my eyes to not see a blurry reflection in the glass on the other side. Until one day, it didn’t. 





I wish I could go back in time and tell younger me to not look away. I know if she ever did look for long enough, she would’ve seen herself with a now common smile, surrounded by friends who love her. Just because she didn’t know who she was looking at didn’t mean it was some Lovecraftian horror. Sometimes, it’s just your reflection waiting to be recognized, waiting to be freed.


    [post_title] => Befriending My Reflection
    [post_excerpt] => Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back at me.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => befriending-my-reflection-adult-friendship-week-old-friends-identity-mirror-personal-essay
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10817
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of a person leaning over water and looking at their reflection. A large tree behind them looks over their shoulder and a bird stands at the edge of the water.

Befriending My Reflection

by Allison Baker

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 10823
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25
    [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25
    [post_content] => 

Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.





A card arrived in the mail last week, my name written in a cursive I know well. It had been a couple of weeks since her last letter, and I eagerly sat down on my couch to read it. She told me how everyone at home, “both human and animal,” was doing well, how many cats she was currently fostering (thirteen), and yet, that she didn’t mind the label that came with it. “The Crazy Cat Lady is definitely somebody I identify with,” she wrote, and of course, that made me giggle. Her playful way with words paired with self-deprecation have always been uniquely hers. This I’ve known since long before we became friends.





My penpal and I met one morning more than three decades ago, when I walked to the end of a high school hallway full of lockers and into her classroom. I can only imagine how confused I looked to everyone on that first day of school: Shy and slightly awkward, I spoke no English and was dressed very differently from my peers. I’d only landed in that small New Jersey town a couple of weeks prior, from my home in Caracas, Venezuela. I was fourteen years old, and had attended the same school for most of my life. Suddenly, I was one of the “new kids,” and only one of three in the high school who spoke Spanish, who had the great luck of being assigned to Mrs. Boutin’s English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) class.





I don’t remember her being a Cat Lady in those years. In fact, in one of her many letters this year, she told me she used to be a dog person until she’d helped a neighbor trap, neuter, and return a bunch of feral cats, then decided to keep doing it. She found the work humbling. It made her feel useful. I guess it wasn’t much different than teaching English to a bunch of deer-in-the-headlights scared and somewhat feral adolescents who had come from all walks of life and many corners of the world, including Vietnam, Argentina, India, and China, in my class alone. Some of us had experienced trauma, others came from families seeking work, but no matter how we ended up in that New Jersey high school, every one of us took refuge in her classroom. I’d like to think we all needed it.





We all looked up to Mrs. Boutin because she was patient, laughing off our teenage drama and championing us as we uttered our very first English words, thick accents and all. Like many of my classmates, I’d often swing by after the school bell rang just to talk. She would ask me about my old life. Did I miss it? Would I get to visit home again, and if so, what would be on the top of my list of things to do? Who did I most want to see? She listened intently to my melancholy answers like few others did. It kept me emotionally present at a time in my life when it would have been much easier to push my complex feelings under the rug and simply do whatever I could to fit in (which I did anyway).





Within a year, I was able to defend myself in English; in another three years, I graduated and left for college. I discovered journalism, moved around—within the U.S. and abroad—got married, and, almost twenty years after leaving high school, had a kid. Now that I think about it, becoming a parent must have prompted my search for her: caring for a new life made me appreciate the old ones all the more. I found her through social media. When she responded a day or two later, she insisted that I call her by her first name: Juanita.





In Sister Outsider, poet and essayist Audre Lorde says that being a teacher means learning to talk to students to get “through to them” so that “their own processes would start.” She likens it to a fire, something you could “literally incite, like a riot." By the time I found Juanita again in 2014, I’d been teaching storytelling for a few years, trying my best to incite my students like she had me. Until then, I hadn’t realized how teaching could be political, both an act of kindness and of rebellion. How, beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship could be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.





After a few email exchanges, we realized snail mail was much better for us both. Juanita would often finish her letters with an invitation to visit until, four years ago, I decided to accept and travel to Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, dog, and a rotating crew of at least a dozen former street cats she’s trying to find homes for. She was the same Juanita I remembered—with her Puerto Rican Spanglish, her hair short and her skirts long—except both she and I were a few decades older. She insisted I stay at their home and sleep in a hot pink guestroom she’d dubbed the “Pepto-Bismol.” That first night, I dreamt I was back in high school; it was a good dream. 





Even though she’s long retired, Juanita still works most weekdays as a volunteer for local trap, neuter, and release efforts, which are few and far between in Mississippi. The morning after I arrived, I came along as she drove us around town to all the spots where she knew there were feral cat populations. I watched as she counted how many cats were in each, gave them food and water, and took note of any new litters or sick animals. Most of the cats scampered away as soon as they saw me. But they knew and trusted Juanita, just like the workers we ran into at the University of Mississippi campus, and the man at the gas station where she and I grabbed “the best fried chicken on a stick in all of Mississippi” after her volunteer shift. And just like me and my fellow classmates who used to seek her out after school. 





I left Mississippi feeling grateful and whole. In just three days, we’d visited three art museums, ate obscene amounts of delicious fried food, went on long sightseeing drives, discussed religion and politics and race, and visited her friends who seemed delighted to hear that I, Juanita’s former high school student, was now her friend, too.





Sometimes I think the term “friend” doesn’t quite do our relationship justice, though. Not because of our age difference or the deep respect I continue to feel for her as my former teacher. Juanita knows me like a parent; her gentle yet no-nonsense life advice has always reminded me of my late grandmother whose Spanish-language proverbs were just as funny and true. But she also continues to be a source of comfort, like she was many years ago. “Be at peace,” she texted recently, when I told her I needed to put our beloved cat to sleep. “You will know what to do as each moment arrives.” She was right. 





Can a fairy godmother be a “friend”? Absolutely. We are lucky to find (and keep) even one such friend over the course of a life, and I believe Juanita is mine. Her letters arrive in the mail with printed out poems or books I haven’t yet read that seem to address my moods in ways that sometimes spook me. Like the Mary Oliver poem, “How Would You Live Then?,”  which she’d cut down to a four-by-five piece of paper and slipped inside a card that arrived last week. “What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and became your advisor?” its third line read, which I happened to scan early one evening while I sat on my bed, listening to our resident mockingbird sing in the front yard. 





I am still drafting my latest snail mail response to her, in our now-customary English mixed in with Spanish, following our thread, asking about summers in Mississippi, her garden, and her foster cats. I am also planning another visit, already knowing which room she’ll insist I stay in when she replies, in that playful way that’s uniquely hers, and never fails to make me laugh.


    [post_title] => Friendship as a Second Language
    [post_excerpt] => Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => old-friends-adult-friendship-esl-english-second-language-teacher-student
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10823
    [menu_order] => 0
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of two people sitting under a tree, surrounded by cats curled up napping.

Friendship as a Second Language

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 9206
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-08-07 16:43:47
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-07 16:43:47
    [post_content] => 

How one woman's friendship helped guide me to myself.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





I met Maryam at an Egyptian dance class in 2009, just outside Boston. We ended up on the same train ride back into the city afterwards, and got to chatting, about dance, about life. I was immediately at ease in her presence. Maryam’s big green eyes peered owlishly at me over wire frame glasses as we talked, and I was struck by the sensation that I was speaking to an elderly cartoon wizard who had transfigured, comically, into a freakishly gorgeous human woman. We also learned we were both students at the same college, and when she got off at her stop, we agreed to meet up on campus the next week.





I’m still not sure why Maryam wanted to hang out with me back then. At 21, I’d arrived to our friendship a myopic, self-centered mess of youthful immaturity. Unrecognized neurodivergence and unaddressed teenage trauma had glazed over my entire life, until everything was blurry. I was totally disconnected from myself beyond whatever my current fleeting hyperfixation, which often included chasing after some dehydrated headache of a man. I had no internal compass or intrinsic motivation to carve a deliberate path forward for my life.





In contrast, Maryam was poised, self-expressive, and independent in ways that awed me. Several years older and light years more adult, she moved through life with an enigmatic grace. Her home was full of art, films, perfumes, and books. Meanwhile, I still lived with my mom, and my room was full of…laundry.





I so desperately wanted to be like Maryam. A trained historian, herbalist, doula, and certified babe, this woman had it together. She taught me about feminist geopolitics, which plants would be good for my period cramps, and how to take care of my skin. She kept her fingers and toes manicured (red, always), and had a standing appointment at the nail salon for a polish change every Friday. It was the first time I’d met someone so devoted to herself; not in an egotistical way, but as a practice in self-respect.   





“I never leave the house without at least a little makeup,” Maryam told me once. "My mother taught me that.” 





Wow, I remember thinking. What a cool mom. 





I haven’t spoken to my own mother much since middle school, but at 21, I was a full-time student who couldn’t yet afford my own apartment. Home, then, was a source of constant anxiety and stress; a gulf of silence, punctuated by unpredictable bouts of my mother’s wrath, a pattern that still defines our relationship today. 





I cherished having an elder femme take me under her wing. I was a shy, only child, and my living situation had left me feeling pretty isolated. Time with Maryam often felt like an escape; like an alternate plot line where I felt a sense of belonging. Over time, I started to realize that I could actually live in that plot line, if I wanted to. 





In the early years of our friendship, Monday nights were ours. Nearly every week, we went dancing in Cambridge, the notorious college town next door. We both had to be up early on Tuesdays, but that didn’t stop us—Maryam may have been responsible and mature, but we were both in our early 20s; still able to party all night and get up at 6 a.m. the next day. Whenever men would try to talk to us, we would start “joke dancing”: lurching and flailing our bodies around to scare away the would-be suitors, purely for our own amusement. When the night was done, I would drop her off and make my way back home in my mom’s Scion.





Maryam quickly became a mother figure to me, and helped me grow strong in ways that I needed, especially when I later stepped into sex work for the first time at 25. Through her, I was also able to see the ways my own mother had inadvertently taught me to hide from myself. My mom, a white woman who adheres to the principles of second wave feminism, raised me to believe that femininity was something that weak women performed for men. She was loud about her disdain, both for men and for femmes. She kept her hair short, never wore makeup, and still rarely wastes an opportunity to let me know she thinks my own femininity is frivolous. 





But for all her convictions, my mother has also never been a confident woman; not when I was growing up, and not today. She is direct, entitled, and bossy in the ways that whiteness allows, but, when presented with everyday opportunities to disrupt things like misogyny, racism, or classism, she often stays silent, choosing decorum over the values she believes she holds. 





The first iteration of my womanhood was steeped in the same temerity as my mother’s, something that required me to subjugate large swaths of my personality. I am, at my core, a belligerent lesbian with a smart mouth who capitulates to no one. I just didn’t know all of that yet at 21, and Maryam’s friendship helped guide me to myself.





In many ways, just meeting her was a revelation. She embodies a multiplicity that my mother’s idea of feminism can’t compute; a multiplicity that, though different from mine, allowed me to better understand my own contradictions, not as shortcomings, but as evidence of the shortcomings of the patriarchal culture around me. Maryam is brave enough to speak her mind, especially when it comes to standing up to men—even though as a mixed race, high femme, feminist hijabi, she faces a unique set of risks that often compound when she does so. Once, as a new mother, she noticed a man following a woman down the street, harassing her. With her infant strapped to her chest, Maryam began loudly heckling him, and he panicked and ducked into a store. She followed him inside and continued to roast him in front of shoppers. 





I wonder if she gets this ferocity from her own mother, Karla, who died suddenly, shortly before Maryam and I first crossed paths. I wonder, too, what it was like for Maryam in the early years of our friendship, to guide me so thoughtfully and patiently through life as she grappled, mostly alone, with her monumental loss. She, like me, is an only child, and she lived with her mom until she died.





I also wonder what it was like to be raised by someone so tough. My favorite story about Karla, who was an artist, is the time that she was working in her studio and accidentally slashed her flesh. She cauterized her own wound with a cigarette, because, according to Maryam, “She couldn’t be bothered with the fuss of the ER.” 





So unlike my own mother’s lip-service, Maryam taught me to hold my ground, go with my gut, and never let a man push my boundaries. Wise, wise advice for anyone to heed, but especially for a young person heading into the sex industry, like I did, just a few short years into our friendship. I am 36 at the time of this writing, and I have been in various types of sex work for over a decade. I started out as a stripper, and Maryam was one of my most supportive friends. She immediately understood the complex web of reasons why sex work may be the best choice for some people; even people like me, who have a college degree and other potential career options. Her steadfast support helped me keep my head on straight when others, including my mom, tried to make me feel bad about myself for dancing. And her support never wavered. During our brief but glorious stint as roommates, she would perform parody dances for me in the living room, twerking in a handstand on the wall to strip club classics, like T Pain’s I’m in Love (With a Stripper). Once, during one of my shifts at the club, the bewildered bouncer came inside to let me know that Maryam had tried to come visit me at work—with her new baby asleep in the carriage. 





In stark contrast, when my biological mom found out through the grapevine that I had been dancing, she lost it. Even though we barely spoke, she used any contact as an opportunity to let me know she was mortified by my choices. She tried to shame me out of my job, eventually using her own mental health as a manipulation tactic, blaming my stripper status for her anxiety and depression.





I don’t resent my mother for this, I don’t hate her. But I also don’t feel known by her. And when I was younger, I needed to feel known, to feel understood—to feel mothered. 





For an off-the-wall autist, pinballing through her early adulthood, Maryam’s care was a lifeline. Her lessons in self respect also helped me shift paradigms in my personal life. Eventually, as I matured, I started to put less attention into toxic relationships and instead focus on building a relationship with myself. I have my own apartment now, full of my own art, music, perfumes, and books. (I’m still locked in a chronic battle with my laundry, though—some things don’t change.) Gradually, as I grew up, my friendship with Maryam changed, too: In the 15 years since we met, she’s had kids, I’ve figured out I’m queer, and we’ve both begun to contend with the ways that time takes a toll on the body; the ways that life shapes the spirit and the mind. 





Part of me will forever feel like a clumsy little kid, chasing after Maryam with a lollipop tangled in my hair, but, in general, I feel pretty well equipped to take care of myself. Now, I’m also someone Maryam calls in a crisis, someone she vents to when she has a problem; not just the other way around. I feel rewarded by having earned her trust over the years; a kind of trust that I still don’t get from my own mom.





I’ve also had my own experiences now, mothering younger friends and relatives, and in those situations I often find myself emulating Maryam, trying to strike a balance of grace and leadership; trying to teach my little ducklings to be strong and brave.





It took a long time for me to see just what it meant for Maryam to show up for me like she did in those early years, especially as she was learning to navigate life without her mom. She was attentive to me in ways for which I previously had no barometer; she validated my dreams, recognized my hard work, and showed me care in simple ways, like learning which foods were my favorites, or reminding me my worth every time some dingus broke my heart. On the other hand, my own mother has asked me twice in the past decade what color my eyes are, refuses to believe that I am autistic, and, just before I started grad school for journalism last fall, decided to tell me why she thinks I’ll never be a good journalist.





Since my own mom is mostly a stranger to me, it’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to lose a bond I never had. But through mine and Maryam’s friendship, I have caught glimpses of Karla, and have come to love her through Maryam’s eyes—to recognize the woman who mothered the woman who mothered me. 





When I look back at the ways that Maryam helped guide me in my lost, immature years, or when I reflect on what a spectacular mom she has become to her own children, I am awash with the strange sense of missing someone I never had a chance to meet. I can feel Karla’s presence in so much of Maryam’s life, and, by extension, so much of my own. 





It’s been over ten years since Maryam and I lived in the same state. She’s raising a family with her husband in the Midwest, and I’m running around, a gay, sex working journalist in New York. I miss her so much. I keep photos of her and her kids in my studio, along with a pair of Karla’s old boots: a reminder that my best friend is always with me, and of the multigenerational blessings she brings to my world; and of the many mothers, here and gone, who continue to watch over me.


    [post_title] => The Cycle of Mothering
    [post_excerpt] => How one woman's friendship helped guide me to myself.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => old-friends-friendship-mothering-growing-up-self-understanding-personal-essay
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2025-09-19 12:32:12
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-09-19 12:32:12
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9206
    [menu_order] => 2
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of a laundry line, with white sheets billowing in the wind. Behind it, we can see the shadows of two women holding paper cut-outs of shoes on sticks, and the silhouettes of the New York skyline. In the foreground, there's a plastic chair with a pair of red cowboy boots.

The Cycle of Mothering

by Delilah Saul

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 9098
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22
    [post_content] => 

As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.





“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.





I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel. 





For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones. 





As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home. 





At the time, we had only known each other for four months. 





~





I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.





Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts. 





In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do. 





Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too. 





Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.





“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”





Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared. 





I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.





When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.





But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen. 





A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.





“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.





I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots. 





At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home. 





Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners. 





In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things. 





The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.


    [post_title] => Emergency Contact
    [post_excerpt] => As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => immigrant-friendships-migrant-friends-relationships-home-emergency-contacts-shared-language-culture-latin-america-immigration-personal-essay
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-01-15 19:22:16
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-15 19:22:16
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9098
    [menu_order] => 3
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
Illustrator of the silhouettes of two women, one braiding the hair of the other. They are in shadow, standing in front of a window with a sunrise, while the rest of the room is shrouded in darkness.

Emergency Contact

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 8116
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16
    [post_content] => 

In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





“You don’t seem like an only child,” people often tell me after I reveal to them that I was raised without siblings. Unsure if this comment is a compliment or a backhanded remark, I usually shrug and reply with something like, “Well, I grew up with cousins…” But what I don’t often say is my cousins didn’t quite feel like siblings, either. They felt like something else. 





The truth is I don’t have an unusual amount of cousins. Five first cousins in the U.S., and one in Estonia, who I’ve never met. A growing number of second cousins once removed (the children of my first cousins). And a scattered few second cousins twice or three times removed (my parents' cousins and their offspring, respectively). It’s my first cousins, though, that I’m closest with—in large part because, as is true for many immigrant families, they were also my first friends. 





As new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, my parents relied on the built-in community of care provided by our extended family: an old-world-style network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But while the adults in my family did play a role in my Los Angeles upbringing, it was my cousins who did the majority of the caretaking. 





Only seven years older than me, two of my cousins in particular were somewhere between my babysitters, part-time siblings, and friends. Together, we would spend long sun-soaked summer days playing outside my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We’d make up elaborate games based on movies we rented from Blockbuster or 20-20 Video, where an older cousin worked. Sometimes, we were the “karate family,” influenced by none other than The Karate Kid. In silent agreement, we’d transform into a group of vigilante karate enthusiasts, climbing parked cars and saving stray cats from danger; cats that my uncle would rescue and bring home from his job as an LAX cab driver. Sometimes we would write our own Nightmare Before Christmas-style songs, practice obsessively, and perform them for the whole family. OOOo spooky, oooo spooky….I see a big fat moon…in the skyyy….a very big fat mooon. Sometimes, we’d be aspiring horror film producers. We would borrow my dad’s precious camcorder and record over family home videos with our very own renditions of the Blair Witch Project, nostrils and all. We even made our own version of the movie Hocus Pocus, which we titled, “The Heart of a Little Girl.” I was the little girl.





Then, the sun would set and my aunt would come home from her job as a cashier at the local grocery store, and my mom and dad would pick me up after a day of English and bookkeeping classes at the community college; or after a day of driving rich kids around. And I would always, without fail, break into tears, grabbing onto the leg of one of my cousins as they would obediently lead me to the door. 





Only other only-children can relate to the loneliness. The pit of despair that formed each time, as a child, you were plucked from a social event and brought back to your parents’ apartment where you were forced to find creative ways to entertain yourself. Before we had the internet (and even after), I would spend long hours talking to the bathroom mirror, pretending my reflection was someone else. When I was with my cousins, the loneliness disappeared. When I left them, it would come back heavier than before. 





The research is shoddy, but it is believed there is a correlation between only-childness and loneliness. In fact, studies have found that, compared to adults who grew up with siblings, only children often become adults who have significantly less interaction with their relatives. This may be true for some onlies, but not for me. I still, to this day, have remained close to my cousins. Even the older ones who had no interest in me when I was a toddler and they were teenagers. The ones who acted more like older siblings than friends by simply ignoring me, or making fun of my unibrow because it would “build character.” The ones who drew sharpie tattoos on my favorite doll’s face in between shifts at the video store, and made up for it by buying me a coveted “Diana’s Parking Only: Keep Out” sign for my bedroom door. And I’m still close with the ones who played “karate family” with me, too. 





Cousin in Russian translates directly to “once removed sibling”; but often, the term is just abbreviated to brother or sister. Same goes for other Eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Korean. This must have something to do with Western Individualism vs Eastern Collectivism. The cultural values placed on the community, rather than the individual, have slowly been eroded from Western society, leading to recent phenomena like the loneliness epidemic. But many immigrant families never fully abandon the cultures they came from, including mine—and ultimately, cousins have an important role to play in keeping it that way. They are role models. They are siblings. They are caretakers. They are friends. They preserve family traditions, like avoiding the aspic and playing Monopoly on Thanksgiving. They step in and help out when a family member is in the hospital; and when you get in a fight with your mom, they are one of the only people on earth that truly understands. Because that’s what families are for. 





Of course, not every American family looks like mine. We are apparently in the middle of The Great Cousin Decline, coined by Faith Hill for The Atlantic. This is due to the usual suspects: U.S. population decline, women choosing to have children later in life, and parents having fewer children in general. As of 2022, about 55% of Americans live an hour away from their extended families, while highly educated Americans live even further. Immigrant families remain the exception. My own very American husband has little interaction with his cousins, mostly due to their geographical distance. But there is much to be lost in living apart. Hill reminds us that the often overlooked reason why cousins are especially important is that “they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.” Growing up, that’s why the loneliness never stuck around too long: I always knew that my cousins were only a phone call away.  





In the Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain (2024), a pair of cousins, Benji and David Kaplan, embark on a journey to Poland funded by their shared grandmother’s inheritance. It is meant to be a cathartic trip to both honor and witness where she came from and bear the weight of the concentration camp she survived. But the cousins could not be more different. David (played by the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to settle into modern society and accept that life is suffering, while still doing what he can to enjoy it. Benji (played by Kieran Culkin, who won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance) is the more nostalgic feeler, who cannot seem to settle down and process pain in a modern sense. He is overwhelmed by his grandmother’s loss, and, as it’s revealed later in the film, even tried to overdose on sleeping pills a few months before the trip. In Poland, Benji cannot stomach the juxtaposition of privileged American Jews riding first class on a train to tour concentration camps, and lashes out at the group. Eventually, David reaches his limit:







David Kaplan: ...I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him... and I wanna be him, you know? And I feel, like, so stupid around him, you know, because he is so fucking cool and he just does not give a shit. And then... just, like, being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It's just baffling, 'cause it's like: How did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?







Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells Hill in an interview that, “Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.” In A Real Pain, we watch this play out: Once inseparable as children, the two cousins have since drifted further and further apart. But the cousins are also connected by their shared ancestral trauma and their unique perspectives on how to survive in modern society despite its contradictions. No matter their differences, neither will ever abandon the other. 





My own relationships with my cousins have shifted over the years. I’ve become closer to some and drifted apart from others. There are religious differences, socio-economic differences, and the fact that we are simply in different stages of life. But when times get tough, we always reconnect. Like when my second cousin was diagnosed with Leukemia at a young age and I would visit her at the children’s hospital, or when our maternal grandmother who survived WWII died a few months before the pandemic, or when the most recent wars in the region broke out. 





Cousins have our backs. They are our built-in friends. And from an evolutionary perspective, they have a biological stake in our survival. Our cousins are our companions for all of life’s curveballs. And while sometimes, we don’t get along, like siblings, cousins share both our family secrets and genetics. They share our lives.





I recently got married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at the famed Little White Chapel. This wasn’t an elopement, although that was our original intent. Once we started telling our friends and family about our plan, however, some insisted on coming. 





Our wedding happened this past January, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that almost burned down my high school and destroyed so many homes of friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost count. My cousin, who was supposed to make a speech at the wedding, was evacuated from her home the night before her flight to Las Vegas. In a last ditch effort, she ended up driving with her husband, young son, and mother-in-law with nothing but the clothes on their back to make it in time for my ceremony, like a true cousin, sister, or friend, or maybe, something even better.


    [post_title] => First Friends, Once Removed
    [post_excerpt] => In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => first-old-friends-cousins-immigrant-families-los-angeles
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:15:08
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:15:08
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8116
    [menu_order] => 24
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration in colored pencil showing photos taped to a wall. The background photos are muted, but the center photo is in vivid color, showing three children of different ages sitting on top of a white car. One is a young girl wearing a blue shirt and pink socks, and next to her is a boy with a backwards green cap with his arm around her. On the hood of the car, a girl with blonde hair in a pink shirt and green shorts holds a black cat.

First Friends, Once Removed

by Diana Ruzova

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 7869
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2025-02-14 18:19:28
    [post_date_gmt] => 2025-02-14 18:19:28
    [post_content] => 

Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





The first signs of our friendship’s death appeared when she did not win a poetry contest for which I served as a judge. you have humiliated me, she texted when the results were announced, each word on the glass screen as furious as a finger-jab. you have embarrassed me in front of my press. I was driving across the country with my husband when I felt my phone vibrate. We were on our way to a poetry conference, where I would give a talk on the craft of writing poems about trauma. how can you be so cold, she wrote. how could you do this. I wept as I read each new text out loud.





After that first near-death, the air between us felt colder. She began to drift away, becoming increasingly gauzy like a piece of silk sliding through my fingers. She stopped reading my poems and essays, stopped even asking about my work. This support was, she knew, what I treasured most about our friendship, all those evenings when we read one another’s writing and offered suggestions. Maybe you should break the line here; this metaphor could be more precise; I think you could expand this image of the trapped sparrow.





We would talk for hours on the phone. “I’m making my favorite beverage,”she might laugh, and I could hear in the background of her call the sputter of coffee brewing or a pitcher of milk being frothed, that shhhhh-shhhh-shhhh from the steam. Sometimes we spoke so long that I would have to say, “Hold on—I’m almost out of power.” I would plug the charger into the nearest outlet and sit on the floor with my back against the wall, placing the cellphone in my lap like a small, delicate animal that needed comfort.





But once our friendship began its dying, there were fewer and fewer conversations. When she did offer to read my work, her critiques were harsh and tearing. Or else, she was indifferent. “This looks fine,” she would say. The withdrawal was her punishment. Already, she was becoming spectral.





Almost two years after the dying first began, my friend finally chose to become a ghost. Over the stretch of a summer, she theatrically disappeared. Her silence was ostentatious and immense. My calls and messages went unanswered for weeks. I texted her, asked what had changed. Her answers answered nothing. I’m just so busy, she would say.





In a ghost story, tension is created through uncertainty. Is the ghost malevolent, in need of help, or simply lost? Those who encounter a phantasm must fill in the narrative on their own. During our last conversation, she complained about her most recent rejections from several literary journals. “I suppose you’re still getting as many acceptances as ever,” she said, her tone scraping like a querulous violin. I don’t know what I answered. But I remember thinking, when the call ended, that I would never hear her voice again.





By the time summer passed, I knew our friendship was a thing that should be laid to rest. I had waited too long already. In the Jewish tradition, we bury a body within 24 hours of death. When a loved one dies, we say the mourner’s Kaddish for eleven months minus a day. After that, the bereaved are expected to reenter their own lives. They must only reexamine grief on the anniversary of the death, the yahrzeit, lighting a candle that burns on the kitchen table for 24 hours, the flame like a flimsy, wobbling soul. It was time to reenter my life without her in it.  





Then, in late fall, my friend decided to visit me from beyond. Ghosts are said to haunt the sites of their deaths or the places to which they once felt most attached, battlefields, creaking houses, cobwebbed alcoves. Because we had never lived in the same city or state, much of our friendship resided in the ether of texts and the internet. So, it seemed fitting that her arrival came in the form of an email on the evening of my 49th birthday.





I was sitting with my family in a restaurant. I felt the delicate buzz of my phone and looked down. Best wishes for a Happy Birthday, she wrote. My eyes slipped across her words, the accusations of arrogance, that I thought too much of my own accomplishments as a writer. People talk about how, in a moment of shock or desolation, food can become ash in the mouth. Something vicious occurs and the tongue responds with cremation. Everything it tastes turns to cinders. But—as I held the poisonous, green glow of the phone in my left hand, a fork still gripped in my right—the food tasted like choking smoke.





Later that evening, I wrote to her:





Your birthday message has given me the closure I so needed. I feel able to move on now. Thank you for that. 





Good luck in your future endeavors.





Is it possible to escort a ghost from one’s life in such a crisp, businesslike way? My email had the detachment of a rejection letter; but, to me, it felt like a door held open as I spoke to an empty room. Go, I pleaded, please, leave now.





Still, I’ve allowed myself to mourn. There was a story I used to tell whenever people asked how my friend and I first met. “I was a young grad student,” I would explain. “And I wrote her a fan letter—an email saying how much her first book meant to me. Have you read it?” I would interrupt my story to ask. “It’s a wonderful collection. And that was how we became friends!”I would turn to look at her, waiting for a grin or nod in confirmation. But over the years, the story must have lost its shimmer. She stopped smiling back. Sometimes, she would say, “Oh, I can’t recall how we met,” and flit a hand, as if to clear away the thick lilies of a perfume from the air around her.





Sometimes friendships between writers are less spectral than they are ghoulish. Envy. Competitiveness. Insecurity. Every writer is a host to such creatures. And it is always difficult to confront that which horrifies the self. Looking back, I see what was hidden from me before—that my explanation must have struck her as cruel and self-congratulatory. When we became friends, I was very young, still discovering the voice of my poems and just beginning to publish, and I couldn’t believe that someone so gifted would want to make space for me in her life. My friend, two decades my senior, was further along in her career. By the time things ended between us, however, our positions had changed—and perhaps this haunted her, too.





And, yet—“Here, take half of this sandwich,” she would say, sliding the plate across the table toward me. “Do you want a taste of this cake?”she would ask while holding out her fork. Whenever we spent time together, she fed me, gave me a jacket to stay warm, even offered the lipstick from her purse. She was generous like that.





Still, I can admit too that exorcising her ghost was a relief. The morning after the birthday message, I woke to find the constant pain in my back was gone. For months, I had felt a sharp stone near the base of my spine, as if someone had lodged it there. It often hurt my sleep so that I twisted for hours in bed, unable to find a restful position. Some nights I barely dozed. But the email from my friend had dislodged, at last, the rock from its pointed place.





In a Jewish cemetery, we don’t lay flowers on the graves. A bouquet is too brief; blossoms wilt in a week. Instead, we put small stones on the headstones, leaving our grief behind us when we go. After we have cried, after we have kneeled beside the carved letters and let our fingertips follow each deep groove in the granite surface, we stand. We walk away. The pebbles stay where we have positioned them. The weight of our loss becomes lighter. The pain disappears from our spines. Those little, smooth stones pin our dead—at last—deep under the earth. Let them rest, I say. Let her rest and never return.







    [post_title] => Ghost Story
    [post_excerpt] => Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => old-friends-friendship-ghosting-breakup
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:22:58
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:22:58
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7869
    [menu_order] => 28
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of a woman sitting in the dark of her home on a red chair next to a burning candle. There's a folding paper screen next to her with the shadow of another woman behind it. In four insert boxes, there are two women on opposite ends of a phone conversation, an image of red flowers, and a pile of pebbles.

Ghost Story

by Jehanne Dubrow

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 7098
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2024-07-30 06:57:58
    [post_date_gmt] => 2024-07-30 06:57:58
    [post_content] => 

Don't just touch grass. Befriend some. 





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





The first time a tree talked to me, it nearly knocked me over. I was walking in my neighborhood when I felt a pull toward a Chinese elm I’d seen countless times, and stopped to put my hand on its trunk. I closed my eyes. Instantly, everything that tree had ever felt, known, relished, and endured rushed through me. I saw flashes of images of the people and animals and plants that had lived and died there before us; at once flooded with energy and sense memories that predated the tree itself. When I opened my eyes, I was woozy. 





If you had told me this story several years ago—that I’d one day believe I’d conversed with a tree—I would’ve laughed in your face. Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.





There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind. 





It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.





~





I wasn’t always so isolated. Like all of us, I was born with an innate capacity for connection. As a kid, I remember desperately trying to save ants from the eager shoes of the other kids who delighted in stomping on them. I would cry as I tried to steer them to safety; feeling deeply for the ants in my body; each stomp chipping away at a greater whole I didn’t yet understand. As I got older, I’d feel this same connection to the squirrels searching for food in our yard, and the quahogs my family would dig up from the salt marsh to cook and eat. In high school I was swept away by transcendentalism and did my senior project on the benefits of being in nature. I knew there was something sacred going on there—that nature was sacred. But into my 20s, jaded and weighed down by the expectations of a certain kind of adulthood, I found myself communing with non-humans less and less. 





The severing of this connection wasn’t conscious, but it wasn’t accidental, either. A capitalist, colonialist society relies on separation and hierarchy to maintain power. We’re indoctrinated with dualisms of human/animal, society/nature, us/them—all of which teach us to fear and loathe the “other.” We become beholden to violent state apparatuses under the guise of safety, and comfort at the expense of our neighbors. We learn to believe that our heartache is not a craving for community and reciprocity, but for more things to buy and other perceived measures of status and power; for the newest iPhone, or more followers. The cult of individualism continues to do its job of isolating us from one another at the expense of the whole, eroding our relationships to other humans and rendering relationships with non-humans almost unimaginable. 





In 2020, we were offered a portal into a new world—one that slowed us down, showed us the flowers on our block, and recalled the visceral truth that what happens on another continent, even to those we’ll never meet, still changes us. For a lot of people, this spaciousness was also painful, allowing old wounds to surface and new versions of self to grow. In my corner of the universe, alongside the blooming jasmine and bottlebrush, I was blooming, too: confronting unearthed trauma in a process that scrubbed me clean and made me new. When I came back up from the underworld, I found myself attuned to another frequency. It must have been what Persephone’s first return felt like: I was vibrating on a cellular level with awareness of the animacy, importance, and interconnectedness of every leaf, root, rock, and worm around me. 





Surrounded by divine love, I was eager to reciprocate, to let these new friends know I was interested in them, too. In introducing myself, I tried to learn the names of those I’d once passed without a thought. This meant holding up my phone between me and a tree to take photos for iNaturalist then looking at my screen to memorize the results. It didn’t take long to realize that this logocentric, colonized approach was actually impeding our relationship: I wasn’t spending meaningful time with my potential friends, I was acquiring information. I realized they probably didn’t even care what I called them, anyway. It’s not like they chose those names for themselves; we imposed them. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, “The divine has never seemed very worried about us getting [their] exact name right.” So neither would I. 





In these early, experimental days, I also took to heart what the scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says about speaking of “the living world as our relatives.” She offers the pronouns “ki” and “kin” as replacements for “it” when referring to plants and the like; with this as a guide, I settled on they/them/their. To me, this shift is an expression of the philosopher Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which recognizes someone’s individual subjecthood, as opposed to “I-It,” which reduces them to an object, an other. By practicing this basic respect, we begin to dismantle our imbalanced relationship to the world around us, instead entering a new one as equals.





After these shifts in consciousness, friendship came easily. Each time I stepped outside, I opened myself up to whoever was around, extending an invitation to engage. Sometimes I’d feel a tree or bird call for my attention and I’d meet them with curiosity and an offering of my heart. One morning it was a hummingbird, floating and feeding at the bottlebrush. Instead of glancing and moving on, I stopped and attuned all my energy to them, and they stopped to look at me, too, holding my gaze for probably five seconds but what felt like lifetimes. A few weeks ago, I sat with the eucalyptus tree up the hill behind my house. Our bodies touching, we soaked up the sun and I sensed a mutual ease and tenderness. On a recent hike through a gorge, I met granite and moss that wanted to tell me what they knew, and I returned their gifts with a gratitude that vibrated through me and sung out in a silent echo.





These friends and I didn’t share a spoken word, but we did share a mother tongue, and the more I practiced listening and speaking to them with body and spirit, the more fluent I became. In my efforts to communicate, I thought of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” in which a scientist wonders whether humans will ever understand plant language: “Let another century pass, and we may seem… laughable. ‘Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say…, ‘that they couldn't even read Eggplant?’” I was trying to learn.





We also don't need to fully understand one another to build radical affinities across scientific kingdoms. To survive ecocide and genocide; to imagine lives beyond a fascist, imperialist death cult; we have to liberate ourselves from dichotomy and practice interdependence with all of our neighbors. This looks like mutual aid, kinship, care, fluidity—wisdom that rings revolutionary against the values of neoliberal empire but has always been embedded in indigenous practices and political affiliations. Despite what colonial capitalism sells us, the only option is collective vitality. We either all survive together, or perish.





This is notably different from the (white) saviorism of mainstream environmental movements. It’s what Kimmerer calls reciprocity over sustainability; I consider it empathy over pity. I used to see the environment as a flat thing humans acted upon, something we extracted from and damaged and were thus morally obligated to save. I’d failed to consider that the environment, in all their agency, was also acting upon me—that, if anything, they were the ones doing the saving. (Insert tree bumper sticker: “Who rescued who?”) My belief that humans were a scourge upon the earth was rooted in shame, a state of being that prevents us from taking accountability and building connection. Plants helped me understand my value, both to them and to myself. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose articulated this experience well:





“Westerners… find ourselves embarrassed at the thought that country might really be addressing us… I have from time to time encountered real discomfort around the idea that any nonhuman being really gives a darn about me and my projects, outside of the obvious contexts of, say, hunting—as predator and as prey. However, the corollary to the idea of nobody giving a darn would be that what I do doesn't matter, and that is clearly not true.”





It’s a reminder that it’s not all about us, but it’s also not not about us. My relationships with the Chinese elm on my block, and with the ocean, and with the crows that congregate in front of my house, are an antidote to toxic individualism and its shadow, loneliness. They’re a font of political power, a rooting into the past, and an orientation toward the future. Other-than-human entities showed me I was part of an ecosystem, already and always loved. Now, when I need community, I reach for the leaves of the pepper tree in the front yard. Sometimes I ask how they’re doing in English, but usually it’s a wordless greeting, an exchange of energy. We meet in reception and response and in affirmation of our shared aliveness. We both know neither of us could ever be lonely when surrounded by so much life.


    [post_title] => Have You Made a Non-Human Friend Today?
    [post_excerpt] => Don't just touch grass. Befriend some. 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => non-human-friends-trees-nature-animals-plants
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 16:57:18
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 16:57:18
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7098
    [menu_order] => 51
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of a woman with long dark hair with one arm around a tree; her other hand is cupping her ear as if to hear what the tree is saying to her. They are surrounded by colorful leaves.

Have You Made a Non-Human Friend Today?

by Silas Savard

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 5345
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2023-01-23 09:00:00
    [post_date_gmt] => 2023-01-23 09:00:00
    [post_content] => 

How confessing my grief over my grandad's death allowed me to become a part of the human world again.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





When my grandad first told me he was dying, I didn’t tell anyone. 





He had first told me he was sick a week earlier. My fiancé Karl, now my husband, had come home to find me sobbing. It was as far as the news got. When my grandad called a little over a week later to confirm that there was nothing that could be done, he asked if someone was home with me. As I cried he cried with me, telling me how he had dreaded telling me most of all. We’ve always been kind of spooky, he and I, wrapped up in each other’s lives. I was born soon after my grandma died and he poured his grief into raising me, giving me space when I needed it and nurturing the things I loved to do.





Simply put, I was his favorite. I knew that. He made sure I knew that.  My grandad was the first person to love me unconditionally. I had been let down by a lot of people whose job it was to care for me, but never him. He wanted me to believe that he would never leave me, and he felt as if dying was breaking a promise.





The first thing I did when he told me he was sick was walk into the sea, paddling up to my thighs in the icy May water. An hour later, when I was walking home from the beach, he called to tell me he had good news “for both of us”: He was getting treatment. He promised to live to see my wedding a few months later, a promise that felt hollow when I went to see him a week later and he could barely eat soup. 





The dying was a painful, tricky limbo. Nobody could support me the way I wanted them to, by twisting the realities of time and space and death to make him well and keep him with me. I wanted to forever eat lunch with him, drink with him, yell at him over FaceTime to put his hearing aids in. He never answered his phone anyway, but now, he wasn’t ignoring me to hang out at the golf club or eat dinner at his neighbor’s house. He was in the hospital. I half-tried to live my life. Knowing he wanted me out in the world, that he waited in a hospital bed for my stories, was all that got me out of the house.





So, for weeks, I told only my fiancé. Then, in a moment of tipsy grief, I told a friend at a wedding, because I knew she would give me what I needed, a kind of maternal care, the enveloping you get from friends a few years older. I started telling other friends and colleagues when I had to: to say we might rearrange the wedding, to ask for forgiveness when I missed a deadline or canceled a trip. I retreated, keeping my circle small. I spent days swimming in the sea or out on a small boat, nights often at shows where I screamed and cried and sometimes confided in the person I was with but usually didn’t. In hindsight I think that maybe I believed that if it wasn’t spoken, it couldn’t become true. 





In June I was told not to cancel a trip to Barcelona: Nothing would change and I couldn’t visit him anyway. Then, everything changed. He was admitted to the hospital for the last time. A family member texted me the words “he’s dying” for the first time, and I burst into tears, surprising a friend who had no idea anything was wrong. She confided in me that a close friend of hers had died recently and she hadn’t had a second to process it. We cried together, holding hands, walking around Barcelona scaring tourists and talking about the people we loved so much. I felt her soft hand in mine and with it the first time the closeness that grief can bring. Before then, I’d felt for a while that nobody could understand what I was feeling. I was walking around the world as a ghost, one foot in his hospital room. By confessing, everyone else’s grief poured out, too. By confessing, I became a part of the human world again, tangible and alive.





My friends would check in, asking how he was, wanting the minutiae beyond “still dying.” In an airport restaurant later that summer, my best friend asked for an update and burst into tears at the table, telling me that it had been a year that day since her own grandpa had died. She apologized for “making it about her”—but I felt only happy that we could reach each other through the thick walls grief had built. 





Sitting by the water drinking mojitos, we talked about our grandads, the special men they were. The people they continued to be for us. When I checked my phone I saw updates from a group chat with my family, sharp changes in health. Sometimes I shared them. It was our first vacation in four years, and different from the ones before, but it taught me the ways our friendships change when we age, the ways death and disability and illness shape us and make us new. The way grief can either isolate us or create a cocoon in which to understand and support one another. I had shut myself off, not wanting to ask for anything, not believing that anyone would care or understand that the shock of grief can come even when someone is 92 years old. That the bargaining with death never stops. That you can be closer with a grandparent than your own parents.





He died in late July. The first thing I realized in those busy, sad first days and weeks was that it had become impossible to cut myself off from the human world and the living bodies in it as I would once have done when my grandad had first called me just two months ago.





First came the texts. Not just saying “sorry for your loss”—nothing so easy to ignore as that. No: reams, essays about my grandad, his role in making me, the man he seemed to be to friends who had never met him. I was responsible for his image in the eyes of strangers, and I had painted a noble one. My friends, their parents, too, let that be known.





Whether I responded or not, the check-ins came daily. If I replied, I lied or sent memes, wanting to try and live and avoid making eye contact with the depth of my loss. The first person to love me unconditionally lay cold, and I felt suspicious and undeserving of the love flowing so freely from my friends. But still, they came, and in those weeks, I learned uneasily to accept it.





Then came the flowers.





I couldn’t leave the city, the country, go into hiding as I once might have done. Not when boxes of bouquets were arriving at my door daily. Snapdragons, roses, lilies, hypericum berries. Not just grief flowers, but my favorites, chosen for the modicum of joy they might bring me. They filled the vases we had and then some. They came from Birmingham, from Glasgow, from Atlanta, from Los Angeles. With notes and without.





Then came the bodies.





To my flat, to my sofa bed, to my stretch of beach, the one where I’d spent most days hiding and swimming. Sometimes we talked about it, mostly we didn’t. But they didn’t flinch when we did. One friend dreamed of me, tried to meet me somewhere safe while practicing lucid dreaming. Whether it worked or not, whether they filtered through my nightmares, I don’t remember. My friend Zoe and I opened a suitcase of my grandad’s diaries for the first time since I’d lugged them all home, since he had sat up in his hospital bed to tell me where they were. We laughed at the way he wrote, the things he remembered. Zoe shivered realizing that his handwriting was the same as her own grandad’s.





When I was much younger, I had asked my childhood best friend Joe if he would walk me down the aisle. My father wasn’t, and isn’t, in my life, and I feared that my grandad might be gone by the time I actually found someone to marry me. When I got engaged, my grandad was still healthy, and asked if he could take on the job. My friend took it graciously. When my grandad died six weeks before my wedding, I asked Joe if he would consider stepping back into the role. He took it on with honor, crying on the day and giving a speech that night about what it meant to him. He raised a glass to my grandad, the man who raised me. I felt then the warmth of my friends in that room, warmth my grandad taught me I deserved.





Three days after my grandad died, Karl bought me yet another copy of Joan Didion’s grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is my favorite of hers, and when my own book was released, Karl bought me a signed first edition. This one was cheap, flimsy, begging to be underlined and re-read in the bath. In the hotel after my grandad’s funeral, I highlighted Didion recalling the way her house filled with bodies after her husband John died suddenly. “How could I deal at this moment with company?” she asks.





I have learned that good company, the kind you need, doesn’t ask if you can or not. It just shows up without asking, arms full of flowers.


    [post_title] => "Then Came the Bodies"
    [post_excerpt] => How confessing my grief over my grandad's death allowed me to become a part of the human world again.
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => closed
    [ping_status] => closed
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => old-friends-column-grief-friendship-healing-essay
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 19:39:56
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 19:39:56
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5345
    [menu_order] => 98
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of two friends lying on the floor, one wearing a light blue, short sleeved collared shirt, her hands clasped over her chest and her eyes closed; the other woman is wearing a pink blouse and is leaning on her shoulder, looking up at the sky. Behind them there is a checkered blanket and bouquets of flowers. In two inserts, we see the woman in the pink shirt alone, clearly in pain and grieving.

“Then Came the Bodies”

by Marianne Eloise

WP_Post Object
(
    [ID] => 4677
    [post_author] => 15
    [post_date] => 2022-08-31 21:11:05
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-08-31 21:11:05
    [post_content] => 

In order to gather the people you love, sometimes you have to make a plan.










Listen to this article on The Conversationalist Podcast. | 12:57 min









“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





It started as an aspirational text between buddies: "I want to run away somewhere for a month and just disappear." I'd sent it to my friend Matt in a fit of pique. I was on my fourth daily hour of Zoom fatigue, my twentieth month of consistent burnout. The text was an ice pack to the soul, a delusional light at the end of the tunnel, completely untethered to reality. So I was surprised by the speed of his response: 





"OK but yes. Let's do it." 





Matt's and my platonic love story was born in proximity, forged in the fires of our twenties and a New York media office. At first, we were just wallpaper to each other's daily lives. It was in the commuter crush of the Q train that real love formed. We'd talk about our flailing twenties, our pasts, and what we were working towards. There was a through line for us both: a steadfast commitment to creativity, to love in its many forms, and to making space in which we could become our best selves. At the time we were young and broke, stealing bananas from the office kitchen for sustenance. But we dreamed of growth, of room to write and play—and of travel. Before long, our commutes turned to regular walks around Gramercy Park, to writing dates, and to my first ever trip abroad: Matt, my roommate Brittney, and I absconded to Paris for the ultimate Friendsgiving. 





Eventually, as these things go, I moved across the country. The structure of us shifted. Matt and I would FaceTime, send voice notes and TikToks and check-in texts, but it wasn't the same. Proximity in friendship is a privilege that rarely lasts forever; we were used to this. Distance became de rigueur, especially as the pandemic raged on. Both Matt and I were run down. We felt boxed in. I battled panic attacks that had become commonplace at work. I craved the metaphorical wide open spaces Matt and I had daydreamed about years before on the Q. I needed something. 





Luckily, Matt and I were the kind of buds who frequently exchanged travel fantasies. Our long distance love language had taken the form of links to hotels and Airbnbs in far-flung places. These plans were always both serious and unserious—part aspiration, part ambition. It was impossible to tell when a flight of fancy might go through chrysalis, willed into existence. We'd aged a thousand years since that first trip to Paris. The world had changed a thousand times, too. 





A month after my text, Matt was in town for a conference, and he and I experienced something rare: the opportunity to sit on a couch together. We binged a season of Bridgerton in one sitting. That night I sat with him and another friend on my balcony, each of us balancing glasses of rosé, knowing very well we only had 48 hours to catch up on each other's lives. There was an undercurrent of energy to this visit, too: Over the weeks preceding it, our fantasies about running away had taken on a tone of reality. On his last day we brought out our laptops. Matt sucked in a sharp breath and breathed out excitement, his octaves climbing: "It's happening." The only way to make this trip real, we'd realized, was to actually book the damn thing. We'd figure out the rest later. 





We had until a month before the reservation to change our minds. But we knew once we hit “book” that it'd be done. So we did it.





Our place for August would be a villa in the Chianti Hills of Tuscany, with four bedrooms and five beds. After years living paycheck to paycheck, we were finally at a point in our lives where we could front the initial costs before the details were all ironed out. We were burnt out enough—experience-hungry enough—to just fucking do it already. But we also had our limits: Though Matt and I would have been happy wandering the Tuscan countryside just the two of us, if we were to be financially responsible, the plan would rely on filling the place with friends. People who could cut the costs into thirds, fourths, eighths—but who would also enhance this ambitious escape from our daily realities. The more we thought about it, the more people we wanted to invite into our world away. 





We started contacting people. Friends we knew were itching to travel. Friends who shared the same fantasy of disappearing, even if only for a week. Friends we missed, who lived in different states or on different continents. Friends of all economic realities to whom that round trip ticket felt necessary to their very spirit. 





It was not an all-encompassing effort, nor one that yielded only positive results. Some passed, some flaked, others yearned but couldn't pull together the PTO or funds. As time to takeoff inched closer, Matt and I weren't sure we were going to have much company at all. Anyone who's tried to gather the whole group chat for dinner knows the feeling. 





We blinked and months passed. Three weeks from when our villa would welcome us… and still, almost nobody had confirmed. We worried about the costs. Mentally, I calibrated what this month would be like in relative isolation. 





But then, the tide turned. A friend from New York told us she'd be there for one of the weeks. A confidante from college followed shortly. A newer buddy, from Chicago, tiptoed onto the reservation. Her time would happily overlap with the friend from New York—who she happened to be close with from their days in college. Soon we'd hear from a friend in London, and one in Los Angeles. The latter would bring her long-distance best friend from Miami. 





We'd wrangled eight people to join us, spread over twenty-four days. Friends from all different eras of our lives, and multiple who were strangers to either Matt or me. Another function of what we were doing became clear as we gathered the confirmations. We had always intended to create space, to go to a beautiful place where we could breathe and recoup. What I hadn't taken into account was the thrill in my chest seeing who'd be there. 





For me, the trip had originally been a haggard Hail Mary, a desperate attempt to escape burnout that had stopped me in my tracks. Those texts with Matt had been a temporary escape; now we were building a tangible one. My therapist's grin spread to her eyes when I told her: This was a chance to rebalance, she said, to center myself. That I could be some small part of helping friends find their space to recoup, as well, only aided in that journey. 





I know I'll see these friends in other places eventually. I'll see two of them at upcoming fall weddings, if only for a few hours here and there. If we're lucky, work or family will take us to each other's neck of the woods within the year. We'll have dinner, or spend a night on each other's couches. Then, inevitably, one of us will get on a plane and disappear back to their own time zone. 





This trip will have a similar ending, but the very body of it will be different. Realizing the kind of time I'll get with these people changes the shape of the whole experience. Our time, now, is a kind of summer camp, an adult friendship retreat—for some a recreation of a time where we were all living in the same space, and for others the first ever opportunity to do so, with fewer deadlines and pressures to boot. We will find space for ourselves. We'll take our breaths. We'll also commune with each other in ways we haven't before, reshaping our friendships in a whole different kind of proximity. 





In preparing for the trip, I scoured the aisles of Target. Into my cart I dumped a pack of Uno cards and 2009 favorite Cards Against Humanity. I bought a watercolor kit and a sketch pad. As I was checking out, I made a mental note to gather recipes that worked for groups; ones we could cook together while drinking and yelling and laughing. 





Friendship changes shape in adulthood. They don't warn you about that. "Your friends will move away!" they should say as they pass out caps and gowns. "They'll scatter, find new partners and jobs and put their roots down far away from you." They should tell you that when you do see these people it’s likely to be at a wedding, or at a funeral; through elusive FaceTimes or on brief holiday breaks. They should warn us early so we can shield our hearts. So we can know the reality: that in order to see these people you care about so much… you’ll have to make a plan. A deliberate, unfortunately expensive, frustrating, ever-shifting plan. But if you can make it happen, it will be worth it. 





There's a dull ache that comes with realizing you've lost track; the intricacies of intimate friends' day-to-days become, at some fuzzy point, no longer automatic knowledge. It's just natural. But in that villa forty minutes outside Florence, Matt and I will be roommates for a month. One friend will be there for fourteen days, another for nine, another for six. There'll be plenty of bickering, plenty of long nights holed up in our individual rooms, the craving of quiet time. Alongside all that, though, will be friendships that have lived and changed over years—and friendships that haven't even yet begun—colliding and congealing into something new. 





As I write this, most of us are packing. Here are a few things I'm looking forward to: the drifting of eyelids as someone I haven't seen in two years falls asleep before the movie's over; the crick of a brow as they judge the cheese I chose for dinner; long, long walks, talking till we're hoarse, finally saying out loud the nuance of a feeling we had months ago but are just now working through. The effort, financially and physically, that we all made to be there, and the ache I already feel for when it will be over. Friendship, when done right, is not fleeting. Time, however, is. What a relief then, to have made this space.


    [post_title] => The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat
    [post_excerpt] => 
    [post_status] => publish
    [comment_status] => open
    [ping_status] => open
    [post_password] => 
    [post_name] => the-healing-power-of-the-friendship-retreat-culture
    [to_ping] => 
    [pinged] => 
    [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 20:33:17
    [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 20:33:17
    [post_content_filtered] => 
    [post_parent] => 0
    [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4677
    [menu_order] => 116
    [post_type] => post
    [post_mime_type] => 
    [comment_count] => 0
    [filter] => raw
)
An illustration of five friends, arms linked, exploring somewhere new.

The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat

by Alanna Bennett

Sign up for our newsletter