Hi everybody, you came back. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are proving that we can do hard things by talking for significant amounts of time about things we know nothing about.

That issue this week being, do-do-do-do, friendship. Friendship.

Why?

What?

What?

I mean, it's just such an interesting thing to discuss right now because wow, is this a doozy of a time in human history in terms of

everything, one being connection, and like how if connection we were talking so much in the last episode, if connection is what we need in order to be happy and healthy, if there's no question about why we're so freaking unhappy right now.

I mean, we have, have we ever been so isolated from each other and more just enmeshed with just like the people we live with if we are living with anyone in an unhealthy way probably right just to be totally solely dependent on a few people.

And then just so isolated from friendships we're used to from community.

How are you doing, Sissy? What do you think of all of this?

When everything started in 2020, there was a little bit of like a kind of, it was horrible and sad, but you had like some energy.

You had some like Rosie the Riveter situation where you're like, I can do it. I can pull through and and gather my resources and my people and we can find a way and like a bazillion teen years later and we're still going through it.

It just feels like surrender Sarah. It's just like, it's just like, it's just like, it's just like, it's just like, what even why?

No, this is just life now. It's just like a wall, man. It's a wall. And I think that I think that actually the social isolation has been this kind of creeper that we haven't.

Really registered. I mean, obviously it's been the overwhelming stress. It's been that having to reinvent and invent our lives. It's been fear for our families. It's been all of this. But I think a silent player in this has been.

What we didn't recognize was fortifying us through the other times, you know, these connections, these kind of everyday interactions and also the reliance on these ritualized connections with friends, the disappearance of that because we culturally don't value it.

It disappeared silently and we don't connect the kind of serious anguish that, you know, speaking only for myself. We're going through right now. I think a lot of it is attributed to that.

That's so interesting. And especially as someone who, I mean, I think on the introvert scale and probably attend.

Being most introverted. I can tell myself. And I hear a lot of people saying this in my little, you know, highly sensitive.

Introvert community of people. We really believe that this is the, these are the conditions that we actually need to thrive.

And I really think that even me, even an introvert 10, I have not been doing very well lately, just psychologically, daily.

I think I have finally proven to myself that I actually do need other human beings in some form, not just in pages of books, right, just on my computer.

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