I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello hello.

We're in October.

Am I the only person who's freaking out about how quickly 2018 is like rolling by?

You may already hear it in my voice, but I want to apologize in advance. I have a pretty sore throat.

Not so sore that I'm losing my voice, but sore enough that it is a bit of a strain while talking but I don't want to miss an episode and maybe this is a lesson to

get back into building up a few in advance so that when I have a sore throat I don't have to actually record with a sore throat.

Anyway obviously I have done what I can to try to sue my throat beforehand, you know, self-care and all that. But you know, on way of the show. So what are we diving into today? Well, as some of you know, it is, I guess, what we call friendship season here on the podcast.

And so this autumn, if you're listening in the future, so autumn 2018, I am doing a series of episodes around friendships and sort of every couple of or so, because I really wanted to have sort of an update

on the narrative around friendship, around the expectations around friendship, not because we're

supposed to like lower our expectations expectations but because friendship is one of those

aspects of life that we have just formed habits around we've learned to make friends in a particular way

we behave in a particular way in our friendships. We're drawn to particular types of people. And as is the way with any habits that we have in life,

anything that's not serving us is going to start to feel trickier at some point and when we keep coming up against certain issues

That is a call for us to become very conscious, aware, and present about what we're doing and why.

You know, it's really sort of answering that question of sort of why do we do the things that we do in the way that we've done them for as long as we've done them.

And I would receive so many comments or stories or emails, whatever from people about friendship struggles with it.

And that's not because we're like bad friends.

You know, we don't know how to make friends. It's that friendships that had previously been satisfying,

that had been nourishing, had sort of come under the spotlight because there was a struggle that maybe we were

feeling unappreciated in other friendships that we didn't know how to deal with conflict

that we didn't know how to deal with the feelings that we were coming up with. So I

...