Welcome to Seltzer Squad, the podcast about staying sober in the city with your host, Kate Sander and Jess Valentine.

Hey Kate. Hi, Jess. How are you doing?

I'm good. How are you? I'm good. What do you want to talk about today?

Let's talk about friends.

Yes, let's talk about friends. The show?

No, friends.

Actual friends. In real life. I don't have any of those. Friends or no friends in real life, I guess.

Yeah.

Friendship in sobriety.

What should be a happy conversation is actually a big bummer.

It's a bummer at first, right?

I think so.

I think when you're getting sober for the first time.

Or the second or the third or the fourth. Okay. I should say when you, right, let me rephrase that. When you go sober, the first few weeks or months can be very tricky. And I feel like it's very eye-opening as to who your real friends are as opposed to who are just bar buddies. And you have to be prepared to lose friendships. It's just, it's inevitable. It's going to happen. But

for every friendship that you lose, you'll make a better, a stronger connection with somebody else.

But it does suck and you, it is, you know, you mourn those friendships. At least I still am

mourning friendships. And I've only been sober this time around for a few months. But it's sad. It sucks. You know, not everything about going

sober is fucking awesome. A lot of it sucks. Did you kind of realize that right away? Or you knew

to expect it again? I knew to expect it after relapsing because, well, yes and no. I mean,

you definitely notice who kind of pulls back and doesn't reach out anymore. Obviously, this time for me

it was a little different because I made some really, really shitty choices in my relapse,

which resulted in me hurting a friend. And therefore, since we ran in the same friend group,

...