You Can’t Make Old Friends

🎤 We had a band once.

We called ourselves lamonic, a mashup of Lauren, Monika, and Nicole.

Hush. It was CLEVER! 💁🏽‍♀️

Steve Sudeth is still waiting for our vocally ambitious rendition of Ben Harper’s Forever from the one "gig" we totally bombed at UM.

There’s a saying that you can’t make old friends.

But you can make a college band that follows you into adulthood… and that’s basically the same thing.

The thing about old friends? They don’t just know your stories.

They are your stories.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lauren (right there on the left) didn’t think twice.

Three days after learning I would be starting chemo, she left the Scottish Highlands 🚂, crossed time zones and oceans ✈️, and made her way into Auburn, California 🚗—just to spend a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with me and Monika before chemo started.

That kind of love is not everyday love.

That’s “drop everything and fly across the Earth” love.

But I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

A year earlier, I had flown to Antarctica, literally the end of the world, just to see her in her element.

Because that’s the friendship we have 20 years in: ends-of-the-Earth energy, in both directions.

After treatment, when I set my heart on taking a wild 10-country trip to feel like myself again, the very first stop I made?

Her home in the Highlands.

Walking into her house was my first moment of “I’m not sick anymore.”

My first exhale.

My first feeling of my mind and my body being mine again.

And through it all, Monika has been our steady, hilarious, big-hearted third harmony, the one who’s been there since before LaMoNic’s very first “rehearsal,” loving us both through every season.

So no, you can’t make old friends.

But if you’re lucky, you get a few who become the soundtrack of your life, the kind of people you’d cross continents for, and who cross them for you.

From Florence to Malibu to New York to the San Juan Islands to Texas to California (and back) to Sydney to Scotland...

And here’s the obligatory work tie-in:

No job, title, or milestone will ever matter more than the relationships we build along the way.

In careers, and in life, connection is the real competitive advantage.

The people who show up for you, who challenge you, cheer for you, cross miles for you, they are the reason you can keep showing up fully.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for my girls, my bandmates, my ride-or-dies.

The ones who remind me that success is sweeter, resilience is stronger, and every journey is easier when your people are close, even when they’re an ocean away.

Here's to us. 🥂