[00:00:00] Nina: Welcome back to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badzin. I’m a writer in Minneapolis. I’m having a really fun week coming up. We have Zibby Owens coming to Minneapolis, coming to ModernWell. ModernWell is where I co-lead writing groups and co-founded the writing groups there, and Zibby is coming to be part of her book tour for her novel, Blank, and I’m moderating the book events.

So that will be really fun. I’ve done a couple other moderating of book events before. I’ve had a couple other people ask since seeing that I’m doing the Zibby one. And that’s just kind of a fun side thing. I’m a huge reader. Before I was a podcaster, even before I was writing about friendship, which I’ve been writing about since 2014. I did a lot of book review stuff, and people still come to me and come to my website for what I call my pithy book reviews. They’re about four sentences at most. I actually have written longer reviews for like actual websites but I don’t love doing those and I actually don’t like reading them either.

Moving on, I wanted to mention that I changed my name on social media both on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. So it all matches, and it’s all @Dearninafriendship, because that is what I’m doing. And I realized that I needed to have a name that matched what I was doing. I mostly did this because of Instagram, because I had an Instagram name that was dear.nina.b. It was impossible to say that when I was a guest on podcasts, I couldn’t remember like where the dots were, where there’s, was there two dots? Was there one?

Anything with a dot is not ideal if you can avoid it. If you are thinking of making a new account at any point on any platform, if you can avoid underscores and dots, I never did just plain Dear Nina cause that’s already taken.Lots of forms of it are taken. And so I was like, okay, well I’ll add the B. for my last name, which is Badzin, or I will, add the dots. That was all I could do. I didn’t really have a choice. I mean, I had a choice, but at the time I wasn’t only doing friendship stuff. I was doing a lot of book reviews too.

I had made a bookstagram account at one point. So that kind of seemed to work, but it was hard to say it was hard to remember. You can change your Instagram name, but it is not that simple. Because when you change the name. Every link on my website, every post, every time I’ve been a guest somewhere on another website or I have, been on a podcast or anything, the links to my Instagram will be to your dear.nina.b. That is to say, when you change your Instagram name, the old one is like dead.

So if you go to that one. At least right away when you change your name, it just says, Oh, this link is, doesn’t work. the good news about changing your Instagram name is all your followers come with you. Like none of you needed to know I changed my name and just mentioning this now is like a public service announcement that if you’re ever thinking about changing your name, I have a friend in town, Emily, who thankfully taught me what to do.

She said there’s a two week period where you can’t. use the old one anymore, where no one can use it, which is nice. Like, no one can just, like, scoop up your name, but only for two weeks, and then it goes back into the, you know, Instagram. Anyone can use it. Not that anyone’s dying to use it. Dear.nina.b, but you never know.

She said put in your calendar two weeks from now, grab that name back, and then you’re just gonna make a page there that says I’ve moved. And I did that. It’s actually kind of cute. You want to look at it? I made like a nine grid. It’s my logo, but at the top of the logo, it says I’ve moved to Deer Nina Friendship.

I still get an occasional follower there, and then I have to tell that follower, Oh, that’s not where I am anymore, but all this to say, I am now Dear Nina Friendship anywhere you want to connect with me, except my newsletter, which is still, dearnina. substack. com.

Moving on to the purpose of today’s episode.

If you listened to last week’s episode, I ended the episode by saying that Next week we will have not just my droning voice and that is partially true on this feed right now on this episode You’re listening to it is just my droning voice, but it’s very short I mostly just here this week to tell you that I was on two episodes Recently that I just wanted you to know about one of them dropped yesterday.

And I really loved both of these conversations so much. If you’re interested in friendship, I think you will too. And it’s fun for me to be on the guest side.

Love to show up and just have a conversation and not have to think about any of the editing, the graphics, the show notes. I mean, that’s a joy, but also it’s just really great to have someone else leading the conversation about friendship because it ends up going in ways that I did not plan that I would not always be comfortable doing on my own podcast.

Not because they’re not good avenues to go down. It’s just maybe a little too much about me. when I bring a guest on, I try not to make it too much about me, so the one for this week that just dropped yesterday is on a podcast called, we’re not fine, W E apostrophe R E, , We’re Not Fine. It’s two therapists that have been friends for 20 years, Dr. Talia Jackson and Doug Jensen, and their friendship its own interesting thing. We didn’t get much into it. There just wasn’t time. I’d love to have them on my show. They’ve been friends for 20 years. They’re both therapists

I mean, there’s a lot of, cool aspects of just their connection, we had a topic in mind and we spent some of the time on it and then it kind of flipped and they became my own therapist, which was awesome. I don’t. think they meant to do that. It’s not like they literally were trying to give me therapy, but it felt like I was having a therapy session, which I loved.

It was fun. I was like, yeah, Hey, yes, I do need to work on those things. So it was good to have me in the, in the hot seat there. That’s episode 89 of we’re not fine. The title of their episode with me is called your friend hurt you. Is your friendship salvageable or do you need to move on?

So we did spend some time on how you can confront a friend who has upset you, whether it’s worth doing it or not. How do you decide if it’s worth doing it? The difference between, you know, romantic betrayal and a friendship betrayal what I told them, When they were wondering what kind of betrayals I hear about, the first assumption was much more dramatic things like, your friend slept with your husband, something like that.

And I actually don’t really hear stuff like that. I mean, that, those are so black and white. Those aren’t the materials I hear about.

I hear about and if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a long time, you know what I mean. It’s the more subtle stuff that makes friendship difficult sometimes, not the big things. That isn’t usually what gets in the way of the friendships.

That’s not confusing, at least. I mean, if there are big things, it’s not confusing about whether you should stay friends. It’s these little things, the not showing up, not including, or that kind of stuff at all ages. It’s an ageless, timeless, topic. So we really delved into that. We laughed a lot.

We had so much fun and we’re going to do a live event together probably this summer. They’re in Minneapolis. So I went to their studio. That’s part of why it was so fun to be honest. the three of us were in person like basically sitting on top of each other because there’s no podcast space that isn’t tiny.

And then a couple of weeks ago I was on my friend Hallie Sawyer’s podcast. Her podcast is called The Awed Life. A W E D, that was episode 54, called Expanding Our Friendships in Different Stages of Life. I thought it was like a beautiful conversation.

We really were talking about Hallie herself and some of the issues she’s having at this point in her life, She has two kids. The oldest is in college and the youngest is a senior in high school. So she knows she’s about to be an empty nester. You know, obviously the college kids come back and forth a lot.

So it’s not the same as when your kids truly, truly move out, but it’s still a new stage and her kids in particular, very involved in sports. So Hallie has spent a lot of time. probably more than anyone I ever know in bleachers, traveling to tournaments. And obviously there’s a lot of parents in that position.

And so then all of a sudden your kid graduates high school and it just feels very different. And she also herself has gone through a lot of her own evolution of her interests and just a lot of things in her life.

we talked about ways. she could be making new friends. And it wasn’t just like basic. I actually felt that she was looking in the wrong direction. And I gave her some advice on that. So that again was episode 54 of The Awed Life, expanding our friendships and different stages of life. just wanted to update you on where I’ve been.

I still have a lot of great guests coming up. And so yes, next week, this time for real, I will be back in my own feed with my own episode that I recorded on my own podcast. But for now, for this week, there’s those two episodes. If you are feeling that itch for nuanced and nuanced. In some cases hard conversations both in both episodes.

We have a couple hard conversations about Friendship because it’s not always easy. So thanks for stopping by today I’ll see you back here next time. Hope you have a really great week and thanks for listening.