The Phone Call Test

How the women who saved my life became the architecture of everything

Like every millennial, my phone is permanently on silent and I basically never pick up my phone—with the exception of my parents and a very small number of people I consider friends. Some names show up only if there’s something terribly wrong and I know I have to pick it up and there are others that I know when I pick up, they’ll say something like “I saw something and was thinking of you. How are you?”

I've been thinking a lot about friendships lately, particularly the women who have shaped my life: the friend who literally saved my life many times when I was teenager, the ones who helped me remember who I was after I thought I lost myself in motherhood, and the ones who celebrate every messy, contradictory part of me without trying to fix anything.

Like every teenager, I thought friends were people you got ready to go out, snuck into parties, and drank underage with—that the core premise for a friendship was how much happiness (and happiness alone) you could experience with this person. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that the deepest friendships are about more than that: they’re about experiencing heartache and sadness together, being held and seen for every broken part of you, and being allowed to change and grow without apology.

Ironically, the first person who made me feel seen was not a girl friend but a guy I was seeing romantically. He encouraged me to seek out better opportunities outside of Vegas and he told me to never let go of my curiosity and love of reading. In retrospect, I was probably too immature to buy into this way of thinking at the time but now I’m grateful. I didn’t ever truly feel that the quirky parts of me were accepted by my friends until my 20s, when moving across the country refined my friendships, burning away what was surface-level to reveal what was truly precious.

I apologize in advance (not really) for any inside jokes but they’re little breadcrumbs for everyone who’s mentioned.

Friends Who See You

As someone who literally has a background in and makes a living on social media, I firmly believe that social media can be so dangerous and awful sometimes. Well, most of the time. But I have made some of the most wonderful friends from social media—I’m that person that still keeps in touch with people from MySpace days. The person I’m thinking of, though, is more recent. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I connected with her but it had to be something about Disney. The friendship started as any digital relationship: we followed each other, liked some posts, reacted to some stories.

Over the last two years, she’s become a cornerstone in my text messages. Granted, when I open them, I don’t know whether to expect some home renovation, a dog photo, or cartwheeling into a hole 🤸🏻‍♀️🕳️ over something that’s happened—in real life or in a book.

There's no single moment I can point to where she “saw” me—instead, it's been built through thousands of small exchanges.

What makes her friendship so precious is how naturally we hold space for all of what makes us “us”—the silly, the serious, the contradictory parts that don't always make sense together. In the last month, we both said some version of “I really value our conversations like this,” and I realized that's what being truly seen feels like: having someone who can move seamlessly between your surface and your depths without making either feel less important.

Being seen is usually a gift that unfolds over time. Being saved, though—that's often instantaneous and life-altering. But when I think about the friends who literally kept me alive, those stories are more complicated—some of those relationships survived, and others didn't.