Hi friends! Megan (Goering) Mellin here, your friend from the internet, rekindling this newsletter after almost a year.
This weekend my longtime bestie Caitlin came to visit our house in Carnation, Washington, nestled in the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington State near Seattle.
Spending time with old friends is one of life’s greatest and truest treasures. There’s something about sitting on the couch with a friend you’ve loved sharing homes with in multiple cities - clutching cups of tea or coffee, laughing raucously, sharing tears and knowing their backstories well, and losing it over inside jokes that are now almost 16 years old.
When we’re with our best friends, the weirdest, zaniest, least-sensical, least-mapped comments from the annuls of our brains don’t land sideways, they land spot on.
Our friends find us hilarious when we’re tussled by feelings of unlovability or the impossibility of every truly feeling seen or understood.
Caitlin tolerated me looking up my favorite poem today (“The Onion,” by Wislawa Szymborska) on a phone screen (which she hates), and reading it aloud again, just because I love the way it sounds.
I’ve loved Caitlin since our third year of undergrad at Grinnell College in a tiny town in the center of Iowa.
We met on the third floor of the political science building, at the end of the semester of International Relations class with Professor Wayne Moyer. The carpet in the hallway of that floor was blue, and that class in a 300-person amphitheater was one where I regrettably spent most of my time knitting scarves defiantly or quietly tapping on the drug dealer game on my legit 2006 palm pilot while only partly paying attention to the diplomatic and meticulously moderated wider conversation on perceptual satisficing.
Our mutual friend Christina Reynolds introduced us in the hallway after class. I immediately thought Caitlin was gruff, aloof, and better or effortlessly cooler than me. Her big curls, cool glasses and sharp wit were unmatchable. She swears she was intimidated because she thought I was potentially too cool, when really I was excessively enthusiastic from the get-go, and failed miserably to rein it in.
I felt that I knew in that moment, in the swift sadness of my bones, that our friendship would never work - the sense of amygdalic dread, a kick to the femur from your lizard brain, insisting mercilessly from its Intel Process that yes, in fact, we’ll never be deserving of ANYTHING cool that we want.
This was especially devastating in that moment since part of the context of the intro was that I’d be living on Caitlin’s floor the following year, where she’d be serving as the Student Assistant (somewhat like an RA). I’d be running the college’s overnight student host program (and stewarding a double room that had space to host up to 4 prospective students in bunk beds all at once). There’d be nowhere to escape the shame of not being likable enough to her, since we’d be trapped on a floor together, and I was sure I’d be found unfit.
That summer we never talked, as most new acquaintances don’t, which seemed to my lizard brain to confirm all initial reports of Definitely Not Cool Enoughness.
But in August, we both came back to campus early. And within a week we’d sat cross-legged on the mauve-gray carpet in the hall of “James 1st,” the first floor of James Hall. The “first-years” (Grinnell’s gender-free term for “freshmen”) who were coming to populate the rest of our floor were only just arriving for new student orientation. The bulletin board outside of Caitlin’s room had a pinned-up version of the US constitution and some strangely calming sketches of fairies - she’d spent high school participating in a US Constitutional convention activity called “We The People,” which she didn’t seem to think was any more “too cool” or untouchable than my deep nerdism about Model UN and Student Congress in high school where I’d grown up in Kansas. She had a plaid couch in her room and a novelty lamp alongside it, which I’m pretty sure featured a series of monkeys. She drank coffee every morning, and before then could not be trusted to talk to anyone, lest she feel and behave in an incredibly grouchy manner. I swooned. I used to run in her room before coffee time, shouting, “Caitlin, WAKE UP!” - and she’d groan and yell, “Get out of here! I’m an introvert! I’m no talking to ANYONE until I’ve had my coffee.”
I wouldn’t leave, and she would complain, and then she’d have her coffee, and we both smiled, feeling we were each truly loved and accepted as exactly who we were.
Over the next two years, I at 5’10” and Caitlin at 4’10” became a sight to behold. We’d both grown up loving horses. My favorite horse pair from Girl Scout camp growing up was a duo named Slim and Woody - Slim was a short Bay Arabian mix and Woody was a tall, lanky chestnut gelding whose legs seemed to reach Slim’s withers. The two of them would just stand out in the field for hours and days. If one came back covered in ticks, the other would too. If one wanted to stand near the watering trough, or in the middle of a muddy field, or by the fence for some reason, the other would stand there also, for hours on end.
We’d sit on the field (or stand), and discuss the constitution, laugh about boys and politics, cry about boys (and eventually girls) and politics, lament inhumanity and genocide, tell dark stories from our childhood and add in a twist of levity at the end, and conspire to remind the other again and again how hilarious they were.
Caitlin, in charge of our floor’s community, hated to plan study breaks - so I’d plan her study breaks. I, in charge of the campus’s prospective student room, hated to clean rooms (which Caitlin loved) - so she’d put the room back in order while I ordered nachos or made a sign to advertise an event or found a copy of the Muppet Christmas Carol to pair with the event’s festive theme of Nachos Navidad.
It’s been 16 years this year since Caitlin and I first shared a floor together, standing in our own version of Slim and Woody’s field.
We’ve moved all around the country. We’ve each been married, and one of us divorced.
We’ve seen each other through incredible, transformational expansion. We almost lost our friendship over Caitlin getting cats (I’m allergic.) We’ve weathered our own relational and attachment storms where we felt our friendship rupturing for a looming tangle of reasons we couldn’t quite name yet, a few times over the years - then, after each of those episodes of overwhelm, we found that each of us separately went to tons and tons of therapy, dug deeper into our own wounding, then navigated our way back with great love once we had the words to say what we needed and where we were sorry.
We both choose to guide our boats back into the river of this relationship again and again, with no “should”-ing.
This morning I waved Caitlin off as she left Carnation to return by flight to Western Massachusetts. There, she’s - perhaps less surprisingly than we might have originally thought, given our friendship’s ancient roots in the cornfields of Iowa - ended up in a strangely parallel valley of rolling hills and rural beauty, planning her new community garden plot in another relatively liberal state, in an area where being queer or believing in the worth, value and beauty of all beings also puts you in good company, rather than oppositional relationship with neighbors. We both long to put down roots.
It was effortless to fold her into our life here with new baby, and it was a familiar sort of cleaving inwardly to watch her pull out of the driveway in her rental car, to head away.
Before she left, I said Caitlin, I want to form an Institute - something about either systems change or compassionate futures. Joe said, “Then I can say my wife’s been institutionalized!”
We cackled. And Caitlin affirmed my plan and added that I’d make a great soulful YouTube channel if I ever wanted to.
“But what would it be about?” I whined. Constantly awash with too many ideas, it’s always impossible for me to pick just one or to find a specific place to start.
Of course, before certifying as a therapist, Caitlin ran the communications department for an ethically stalwart Breast Cancer advocacy group - she’s great with media - and my kryptonite in choosing a starting point and naming a wish with specificity is her seemingly native superpower.
“Oh, everything!” she said. “Transforming our wounds.”
She said a few more things after that, truth be told, but my brain knew it had already heard the answer.
What I realized again today, from my oldest friend, is that transforming our wounds is at the root of what I’ve been digging toward and noodling over for the past 16 years.
Our friends know us. They see us. They want what we’re fussing toward.
After 16 years they can name it more quickly than we can. You can take a million branding or instructional design workshops, a million design thinking sessions, or a million hours of coaching, but getting truly seen by someone who actually loves you and the awkward quirks of your spirit is still the absolutely best way to name what you’re up to and move forward.
Transforming our wounds.
Like a dog preparing the perfect place to sit, I wish to acknowledge that this is what I’ve been doing for ages, and this is what I’ll be doing (and writing about) more on this mailing list (and everywhere else). The why, the what, the how, the so what, the what now, the yes-because, the so-now-we-musts, the like-this, with-whom, so-thats, and heretofores.
When we know who we are, we can release who we’re not.
Hug or write your bestie today, my friends. Ask them what you’re inevitably going to do next. Whether you hem and haw about it or not, thank them for the very best they’ve given you across multiple decades, then write down what they say.
Thank them for their wisdom.
And stop being anybody else but you.