Friendship – Are You Finished Yet?

Imbalance, Worth, and the Moral of a Sober 21st Birthday

Published on September 8, 2020 by Kelly Suellentrop4 Comments

My 21st birthday was underwhelming.

It’s one of the milestones many of us look forward to, usually because it involves a night of debauchery, free drinks, and funny stories to relive for years to come. And that is how it went for the majority of my friends.

I spent my 21st with just one of my friends, my little sister, and my mom. We went to TGI Friday’s – not a bar – because my sister was in high school. I had two mudslides then pretended to feel tipsy because I didn’t want to let on to my mom that I had already illegally built up a solid tolerance over the past three years of college. The wait staff tied balloons in my hair and sang happy birthday to me just like they did to the 7-year-old a few tables over. My mom did pick up the tab, so I at least had the free drinks thing going for me. Continue reading “Imbalance, Worth, and the Moral of a Sober 21st Birthday” →

The Power of Presence

Published on August 16, 2020August 16, 2020 by Kelly Suellentrop2 Comments

I’m about to say something I never thought I’d say.

There is something more powerful than the written word.

Writing is important to me. It helps me process. I’m funnier, smarter, and more expressive on paper than in real life. I communicate my feelings and opinions more clearly and freely when writing because my brain seems to work more harmoniously with my fingers than with my mouth.

But over the last few months I have also come to appreciate that the written word has its limitations. It can never really be a substitute for the messy, awkward, and sometimes uncomfortable power of presence. Face-to-face presence.

Now, I love being around people. Spending time with friends, laughing and having fun. Commiserating. Talking about big ideas and small nothings. But when it comes to deep feelings and hard topics, I have trouble with the face-to-face. I don’t trust myself to say the right thing. I worry about not being in control of my emotions, good or bad. It’s so much easier to retreat behind a keyboard where I can have more confidence in what I say without the embarrassment of whatever raw emotions I’m feeling being on display. It’s super uncomfortable being real in person.

But sometimes, that is exactly what you need, as I found out a few days ago.

I have a friendship I’ve been struggling with. The details of the struggle aren’t really important to this story, but it’s a classic case of two people having different experiences over a shared commonality. Neither of us were wrong, but everything about it felt wrong. And it has been weighing on me. I’m pretty sure I have been letting it take up too much real estate in my brain, instead of focusing on all the relationships in my life that have been so amazingly on point lately (big thanks to all my on-point people!). But there is a reason the good shepherd left his 99 sheep in search of the one he lost.

The funny thing is I thought I was doing a better job handling this situation than how I normally deal with conflict. That is to say, I didn’t avoid it. I didn’t say what I thought I was supposed to, then pretend to move on until it ended up poisoning either the relationship or myself. I didn’t let my feelings go unsaid. In fact, I not only said my feelings, I practically vomited the entire contents of my emotional bank. Then I went back and vomited more. And then again one more time, just to make sure I had finally reached the point of dry heaves where there was nothing left to say. And I did it all through my preferred method of emotional transaction: I wrote it in emails. On paper, I was a fierce lioness, unafraid to say what she thought, willing to risk whatever consequences came of it.

But in reality, I was terrified. To hit the send button. Then after hitting the send button, of what my friend’s reaction would be. If I would get a response. What that response would say. Then when I got a response, of what was being said between lines. Or if I was creating something between the lines that wasn’t really there. If I was supposed to inflect more or less emotion on that sentence. If we were ever going to get past this. If my friend even cared if we got past it or not. (*This has been your all-inclusive pass into seeing how the sausage is made in Kelly’s brain. There will be a performance review suggesting that she chill the eff out.*)

It didn’t matter how grammatically sound our sentences were. It didn’t matter if we nailed the perfect word choice for the occasion. It didn’t matter if we thought we were being as crystal clear as we possibly could, and said in so many words that things were resolved. Something was missing that left me completely unsure about where I stood with my friend, and very likely, where he stood with me.

But I found what was missing a few days ago. It was his face.

After months of only communicating through the written word, we finally sat down together. It took some courage on both of our parts. Because neither of us really knew what we might find on the other side of that, which wasn’t how it used to be. It used to be an easy thing that didn’t involve uncertainties about how you’d be received once there. But suddenly it wasn’t that easy thing anymore, which made it weird.

Until we were actually face to face. It took me only a moment to know we were okay. Was some of it still awkward and uncomfortable? Yes. But I also finally had all the information I needed to know it was worth working through it to get back to that easy place.

For everything this beautiful language of ours can do, with its limitless combinations of letters and syllables and semantics, it can’t take the place of looking someone in the eye and seeing what you really need to know. I try to only use my words for good, but words can lie or be misinterpreted much easier than eyes. And what I saw allowed me to finally stop worrying. It gave me permission to stop being weighed down. And – probably much to the delight of my friend – it made me realize I didn’t need to keep sending long ass emails explaining my feelings.

So now I am sitting here, on the morning of my 43rd birthday, adding another deposit into my wisdom bank. And I am feeling grateful that I get to begin a new trip around the sun a little more enlightened than before, blessed with all of the friendships that have come to be so very important to me. It is the only gift I really need.

And that gift was made possible by the power of presence, not the power of my beloved words.

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“PRESENCE Daan Roosegaarde Groninger Museum” by Studio Roosegaarde is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Edges of the Brownie

Published on June 23, 2020July 4, 2020 by Kelly Suellentrop1 Comment

“Are you a middle-0f-the-brownie person, or an edge-of-the-brownie person?”

I was having breakfast several months ago with some of my ladies, and my friend Kathy decided to turn the conversation to dessert…because sometimes it’s fun to talk about food you’re not eating but want to eat while you’re already eating other food. Though I can be indecisive about most things in my life, I definitely had a stance on this topic.

“Edge. All the way. I’m the reason why they make those special pans where every brownie is a corner piece.” Continue reading “The Edges of the Brownie” →

“That” Pitcher

Published on January 16, 2014June 2, 2015 by Kelly Suellentrop26 Comments

This week for the Remember the Time Blog Hop we are talking about our first day of school. Any grade or stage will do. AND I have a guest co-host this week, Rob from Growing Up On Prytania. Rob’s blog is a perfect fit for the blog hop, as he has a very distinct “Wonder Years” feel to all of his writing. In fact, I can practically hear Daniel Stern narrating his posts as a grown-up Kevin Arnold. So please make sure to visit Rob’s blog here, and give him an RTT high-five!

After reading Rob’s blog, head over to see my usual partner-in-crime, Continue reading ““That” Pitcher” →

Imagination Could Not Have Created a Better Friend

Published on November 14, 2013November 23, 2013 by Kelly Suellentrop23 Comments

For this week’s Remember the Time Blog Hop, we are writing about imaginary friends. A big thanks to That Cynking Feeling for the suggestion! Seriously. Last week, Emily and I stared at each other over Skype and pulled one of these: What do you want to write about?…I don’t know, what do you want to write about?…I can’t think of anything. I’ll write about whatever you want to write about…I don’t care either…Do you see where I’m going with this? We’re not idea machines, people. So we welcome your suggestions. Continue reading “Imagination Could Not Have Created a Better Friend” →

A Girl Needs Her Friends…Just Ask the Fish

Published on January 25, 2012November 23, 2014 by Kelly Suellentrop14 Comments

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” – Irina Dunn

My friend Karen made reference to that quote the other day, and I smiled when I read it. I immediately had a flashback to my sophomore year of college when my dorm mates and I adopted it as our unofficial slogan, since all four of us had hopeless crushes on guys who either barely knew we existed or were masters at mind games. We were even going to make tee shirts emblazoned with the phrase, complete with a drawing I had made of a fish riding a bicycle, toting the four of us along in a side car. We never actually made the tee shirts which, in the long run, probably helped my future dating life, lest I be branded a man-hater.

And I have to admit now I sure need my husband a whole lot more than a fish needs a bicycle. In my case, maybe I could change the analogy to “A woman needs a man like a fish needs that little snail who eats all the crud off the walls of the tank and makes the place a little less lonely.” But the spirit of sisterhood the original statement implies is still something I believe in…probably now more than ever. A woman needs her girlfriends. Period.

I have amazing girlfriends. Funny, intelligent, big-hearted, supportive, do-anything-for-you amazing girlfriends. And I am lucky to not just have a few of them…I have a lot of them. For some reason, I must have been at the right place at the right time on several different occasions to acquire all these groups of women who at any given point in my life fill my bucket when too many things have been dipping into it. And they can each do it in a way that is special and unique to the certain bond that we have, be it our nostalgic high school or college experience, having kids in class together, our family ties, our shared love of music, all being married to fraternity brothers, or having worked side by side as colleagues. But they can also do it in a way that can not be matched because they are women, and we all share bits and pieces of a larger conscious, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s over-soul: a conscious that allows certain things to go unconditionally understood.

Yet that does not keep us from sitting around a table of margaritas and Mexican food, talking about anything and everything for hours on end. My average girls’ night out dinner runs about three hours, and probably would go longer if we did not get such dirty looks from the wait staff who are trying to close up and go home on a Tuesday night. My husband has said on more than one occasion, “What do you talk about for that long? How do you sit in one place? I’d shoot myself in the eye.” Well, that’s how I feel about football, which is equally as long, not nearly as funny, and no one is wearing anything that I care to know where it came from so I can go get one for myself.

So yeah, girlfriends rock. To all my girlfriends, consider this my love letter to you. I thank each and every one of you for being in my life, for making me laugh way too hard, for talking me through things, for listening me through things, for having my back, for making me feel normal, for making me feel special, for inspiring me, for giving me role models to look to, for loving me for who I am, and for letting me know who you are. Because you are all beautiful. I feel honored to swim in your schools.

And to my husband, lest he feel slighted by this post: This fish may not need a bicycle, but I have never been a strong swimmer, and I much prefer the ride offered by your wheels.