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What did Donielle think after hearing her story? Find out as we hop On The Phone with our guest to hear her reaction, answer listener questions, and respond to your comments and feedback.

For more information about The Modern Widows Club or grab tickets to their upcoming virtual event, click HERE.

Stay in touch with The Grief Disruptor, Donielle Young by following the links below:

• YouTube
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Website

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How to be a friend, to yourself and others, when you don't even know who you are anymore. Because grief permanently altered your identity. As Donielle shares it can be really hard to recognized who your friends are anymore. 

"Didn't I lose enough? My husband died, and now my so-called friends are judging the way I grieve?" 

On today’s episode of the Best Friend Project Podcast, we meet Donielle Young, who lost her husband Dwayne to stage four colon cancer at 47, leaving her with a teenage son at home and very little emotional support. In her struggle, she found a space to rebuild herself as The Grief Disruptor, creating The G3 framework (grief, grit, glow up) around the part nobody wants to talk about, how to get to know the new you, when death has changed you. Old you could show up to brunch and be present. New you looks the same on the outside, but you can't sit there and hear normal conversations about husbands traveling or not helping with the dishes after your husband has died. 

Donielle knew some of her friends were judging her, she didn't realize all of them were. She talks candidly about about the day when one of her closest friends admitted she had judged the way Donielle grieved. 

And she names what friends get wrong most, talks about the importance of week three. The casseroles stop but the grief doesn't.

In This Episode 

• Being judged for how you grieve
• Losing your identity and creating a new one
• Auditing your people
• How friends can fumble supporting each other 

Connect with Donielle Young on Instagram,  Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn 

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch—come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Chapters: 00:00 Cold open

00:52 Welcome to The Best Friend Project

02:05 Meet Donielle Young, The Grief Disruptor

02:20 Who Dwayne was

03:00 A stage four diagnosis in 2020

04:10 How Rachel and Donielle found each other

05:00 Losing your identity, not just your person

07:50 The friend who admitted she judged her

10:00 "It's none of my business who's judging me"

12:40 Why G3 is a framework and not a blueprint

16:40 Were her friends surprised?

19:50 What Dwayne would say to her today

21:20 What to say to a grieving friend

23:20 Show up later, because grief isn't the flu

26:00 Rachel's confession about the text she didn't send

30:40 The relative who disappeared

34:20 Auditing your people, explained

36:00 VIP or general admission

41:20 Historical friends and what the survey found

45:40 Colon cancer, screening, and why women have to lead

53:40 The friends who showed up: Tina, Ruth, and Kenya

55:40 Her son, and what he told the counselor

57:00 Rachel's closing reflection

#GriefAndFriendship

#YoungWidowhood

#IdentityAfterLoss

#HowToSupportAGrievingFriend

#AuditYourFriendship

#Grief

#Friendship

#WidowLife

#GriefSupport

#WomensPodcast

#thebestfriendproject

#FemaleFriendship #WomensFriendship #GriefPodcast #FriendshipPodcast #IdentityAfterLoss #ColonCancerAwareness #GetScreened

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Hopping On The Phone with Jen Cote from episode 14, where we talk Friendship and Menopause. On this call Jen corrects a misspeak, shares a text from her friend and asks Rachel the question she has been getting a lot lately, "Have you talked to your friend."

Thank you for listening!

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Menopause is a chemical castration that feels like it is wrecking your body and mind. So how do friendships survive it?

Our original research says women need friends who make them feel safe, who remember the small things, and don't cancel. All of which isn't humanly possible during menopause. (Not for nothing, my former best friend and I were both in it when our friendship ended. I mean, could be something to that?)  On this episode of The Best Friend Project you will meet Jen Cote and Margaret Honda. Friends since middle school who wrote the hilariously witty The Hormonal Hangover Society book about menopause. We talk friendship, writing, melting and more.

In this episode:

Friendship gives, and menopause takes. How do we survive it?
- Women shrinking. Why do we apologize for bold moves?
- How Jen and Margaret have stayed friends for 40+ years through breakups, kids, and bad haircuts
- Co-authoring with your best friend, and why humor was the only way through it
- Jen's answer to the question “What happens when you can't be the glue anymore?”
- And what's Reese Witherspoon have to do with all of this anyway?

Connect with Jen and Marg: 

Instagram @hormonal_hangover , Facebook,  and LinkedIn

Website

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch—come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Chapters: 

00:00 We don't have the energy to keep begging the group to get together
 00:45 Welcome to The Best Friend Project
 01:20 Meet Jen Cote and Margaret Honda
 02:20 The Reese Witherspoon event, and the woman on a mission
 04:35 "Edit your friends" and the letter I wrote about it
 05:40 Cutting the line and handing it over
 07:45 Why we apologize for our own baller moves
 09:15 The book nobody thinks they want to read
 11:00 Senile vaginitis and the naming problem
 12:20 Our mothers never modeled this for us
 14:15 The question at the heart of this episode
 16:00 "I can't be the glue all the time"
 16:45 Did menopause end my friendship?
 19:30 Venting, commiserating, and hijacking the story
 23:10 The naked haddock incident
 24:05 How do you have nine best friends?
 26:15 Roles, thick skin, and knowing each other's trigger points
 28:20 Annie, and the sleepovers that keep her here
 30:35 Unreal upcoming events and the annual gala
 32:35 What co-writing a book did to their friendship
 36:30 Grace for the friendship you did not get to fix
 38:15 Put the check-in in your phone
 39:45 Where to find The Hormonal Hangover Society
 40:50 Next week: Donielle Young, the grief disruptor

#TheBestFriendProject #FemaleFriendship #WomenSupportingWomen #FriendshipMatters #MidlifeWomen #MidlifeFriendship #Menopause #Perimenopause #MenopauseSupport #HormonalHangover #HormonalHangoverSociety #BrainFog #MenopauseAndFriendship #FriendshipBreakup #WomenOver40 #WomenOver50 #GirlfriendGoals #MakingFriendsAsAnAdult #MenopauseHumor #WomensHealth #FriendshipPodcast #WomenPodcasters #ReeseWitherspoon #EditYourFriends

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How often have you heard "Tennyson, C.S. Lewis and Tig Nataro" in the same sentence? Well, if you listened to The Best Friend Project this week - you heard it twice! 

Get Mary's take on our talk in this episode of On The Phone. A 1990's style, kitchen wall phone with a long cord, conversation between two friends to catch up on her podcast episode comments, reflections and final thoughts on what she has learned about friendship from the dead. 

Follow @tipsfromdeadpeople, and @thebest_friendproject to stay in touch with both of us! (Look for a photo of us finally meeting on August 20th, 2026! Can't wait to see her in person. A fun side effect of starting a project about friendship has been the friends I have made along the way. 

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What will you be known for after you die? Your life is so much more than a resume. Will your legacy of kindness live on? Your grudges? Your struggle to forgive? Or will it be hating cold butter, loving salty chips and chive dip, and the time you saved a goat from drowning? The stories that live on are only the ones you dared to share, and the ones you told. Being known, and knowing others, might be the richest human experience there is. One that outlasts the physical, maybe even the spiritual. So why do so many of us hide our real self?

Mary McGreevy runs Tips from Dead People, the account where she reads obituaries most of us would scroll past, and finds the ones that say something true. In this conversation, we talk about the value in exposing mistakes, leaving things messy, living our real true life. Mary walks through what she's learned about forgiveness from self-written obituaries, and we talk about the strange grief of a friendship that dies while both people are still alive, still out there, still not finding their way back to each other.

In This Episode 

• Being known and knowing may be the richest human experience there is
• The stories that live on are the ones you dared to tell while you were here
• Self-written obituaries are often where the deepest forgiveness shows up
• A friendship can end, and still deserve its own honest reckoning, even while both people are alive to feel it

About The Best Friend Podcast

The Best Friend Podcast is where original friendship research meets real-life stories. Host Rachel Joy Swardson, founder of The Best Friend Project, investigates how women find, make, lose, and keep the platonic loves of their lives through original data, personal experience, and candid conversations.

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch. Come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Connect with Mary McGreevy and @TipsFromDeadPeople on:

Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok

LinkedIn  

Chapters: 

00:00 Mary's theory about honest stories

00:52 Welcome to The Best Friend Project

01:20 Meet Mary McGreevy of Tips from Dead People

02:20 The obituary that gave a best friend top billing

04:15 Why the bends in the road belong in the story

05:20 Scorched earth obituaries and the comments they get

06:45 Forgiveness in self-written obituaries

11:50 Bronnie Ware's regrets and the one nobody quotes

13:15 The little things that turn out to be the big things

16:20 What Mary's friends make of the work

20:40 How reading obituaries changed how she lives

24:10 Take that, LinkedIn: the herring factory woman

28:20 Rachel's grandma, the joke, and the empty funeral

31:20 Being the keeper of the stories

33:40 Tennyson took 17 years to write it

36:45 Can you write an obituary for a living friendship?

41:10 Tig Notaro and the end of a friendship

43:20 The loneliest grief nobody has a book for

47:50 The narratives we tell ourselves to keep going

48:40 Takeaway: let yourself be known

49:40 Where to find Mary

50:40 Rachel's reflection

53:00 Next week: friendship and menopause

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Unfortunately I wasn't able to actually record my On The Phone call with Robyn. However, I did have a painful epiphany in replaying her episode. Some high school ghosts have come to haunt... And I think I need to face them, at some point. 

Also note to self, holding a cell phone up to a microphone doesn't really work well. Live'n and learn'n - thanks for being here!

Nest week hear an incredible conversation with Mary McGreevy from Tips from Dead People. What we learn about friendship from the dead is very interesting!

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Every friendship has a story — and Robyn's started at a locker in ninth grade with a snap judgment she almost let cost her everything. 

In this episode of The Best Friend Project, host Rachel sits down with journal creator and author Robyn Liechti to talk about the girl she assumed was mean because she was pretty, and the 26-year best friendship that followed once she got out of her own head. 

Together, Rachel and Robyn dig into the loneliness epidemic and the $500 billion industry built around it, why society hands us language for romantic love but not platonic love, the Harvard happiness study linking long-term friendships to living longer, inconsistent effort and mismatched values as the top friendship pain points, being used as an alibi by a friend, why walking away quietly can be healthier than a blowout, and how Robyn turned grief over her grandmothers into 15,000+ self-published journals. 

If you have ever misjudged someone on sight, struggled with adult friendship, or wondered how to find, make, and keep friends as a woman over 30, this conversation is for you.

In This Episode

• The worst first impression that became a 26-year best friendship
• The friendship question almost no one asks
• Is ghosting easier than telling the truth?
• The secret to lifelong friendship? It might be adult sleepovers.

Connect With Robyn

Website

 Instagram @robyn.liechti

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch—come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Chapters: 

00:00 "I Assumed She Was Mean Because She Was Pretty"

01:00 Welcome to The Best Friend Project

02:00 How We Met: Trader Joe's Muffins in the Trash

03:00 The Harvard Study on Friendship, Health & Longevity

04:00 Loneliness Is Now a $500 Billion Industry

05:00 Connected on Social Media, Still Disconnected

06:00 What Taking the Friendship Survey Revealed

07:00 Why We Never Ask New Friends About Their Friendship History

08:00 The Locker Story: Grade Nine and a Snap Judgment

09:00 Insecurities, Assumptions, and What We Almost Miss

10:00 Different Lives, Same Best Friend: Toronto to the Country

11:00 Adult Sleepovers and Why People Stop Having Them

12:00 Friendship in Departments: Soccer Moms and One-on-Ones

13:00 What It Means to Have "Enough" Friends

14:00 Postcards in Bathrooms: 7,000 Miles of Survey Data

15:00 The Five Friendship Archetypes and the Keystone

16:00 The Skill You're So Good At You Don't Notice It

17:00 From Losing Her Grandmothers to Her First Journal

18:00 Seven Journals, a Kids' Book, and a Part-Time Job

19:00 Picturing the Woman on the Other Side

21:00 Stealth Mode: The Art of the Bathroom Postcard

22:00 Why We Ghost Best Friends Instead of Talking

23:00 Inconsistency: The #1 Friendship Pain Point

24:00 Effort, Values, and Actions That Don't Match

25:00 When a Friend Uses You as an Alibi

26:00 Time Will Either Expose or Promote

27:00 Not Being the Fixer — Walking Away Quietly

28:00 What Robyn Would Say to Her Best Friend

29:00 Look Past the Pretty: Read Their Energy

30:00 Rachel Reflects: Judgments That Stick With Us

31:00 15,000 Journals and "On the Phone With"

32:00 Next Week: Mary McGreevy and Tips from Dead People

#TheBestFriendProject #FemaleFriendship #AdultFriendship #FriendshipPodcast #WomenSupportingWomen #BestFriends #LonelinessEpidemic #FriendshipBreakup #HowToMakeFriends #MakingFriendsAsAnAdult #FriendshipGoals #PlatonicLove #WomenOver40 #JournalingCommunity #SelfPublished #GuidedJournals #KeystoneFriend #FriendshipAdvice #PodcastForWomen #MeaningfulConnection

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Wait, did she really say she manifested a best friendship with Weird Al Yankovic? She said it, and more.

In this 1990's-style phone call series, we check in with our featured guest of the week to hear what they thought of their episode. 

Tune in to this bonus episode where we're On The Phone with Melanie Curtis, getting her thoughts about Episodes 7 and 8, where she appears with her "other" best friend, Shannon. 

This is a quick, fun catch-up where Melanie and Rachel reconnect to reflect, reframe, and add a last dose of seriously good friendship wisdom. Grab your headphones and eavesdrop while we are On The Phone.

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What does it actually take to keep a friendship for 20 years? In Part 2 of this conversation, best friends Melanie Curtis and Shannon Lee show us — through wine, tears, ayahuasca, and a whole lot of radical honesty.

In this episode of The Best Friend Project, host Rachel Joy Swardson sits down with lifelong best friends Melanie Curtis and Shannon to unpack the real mechanics of a friendship built to last. They get honest about the moments most of us hide: the small confession over a bottle of wine that could've quietly become resentment, the hard conversation in the back seat of a car when heartbreak made one of them pull away, and the shadow parts of ourselves we'd rather no one ever see.

Together they explore the difference between putting yourself first, putting the other person first, and the reframe that changes everything — putting the friendship first. You'll hear why coming forward with an uncomfortable truth builds more trust than staying silent ever could, how deeper healing work in one area of life can quietly make you a better friend in all of them, and why so many of us were never taught that platonic love deserves the same intention we pour into romance and career.

In This Episode: 

• The wine bottle confession how one small moment of honesty ("that was me") became a 20-year lesson in choosing the friendship over your ego
• What "shadow work" really means and why looking at the parts of ourselves we'd rather hide is the secret to showing up as a better friend
• Putting yourself first vs. putting the friendship first 
• Why coming forward builds trust like nothing else — Shannon on how plant medicine and deep inner work helped her see her own patterns, own her part, and find peace when a letter went unanswered
• Why friendship breakups can hurt more than romantic ones 

Connect with Melanie and Shannon:

Melanie on Linkedin

Melanie on Instagram @melaniecurtis11

Website MelanieCurtis.com

Shannon On Instagram @luacheialuminosa and @greatspiritfarm

About The Best Friend Podcast

The Best Friend Podcast is where original friendship research meets real-life stories. Host Rachel Joy Swardson, founder of The Best Friend Project, investigates how women find, make, lose, and keep the platonic loves of their lives through original data, personal experience, and candid conversations.

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch—come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Chapters: 

0:00 Previously On: Have I Loved My Friends Fully?

1:05 Do You Have a "Friendship Type"?

2:30 Becoming the Safe Container for Each Other

3:20 The Wine Bottle Story: Honesty Over Ego

5:20 Shadow Work: The Parts of Us We Hide

7:00 Pulling Away During Heartbreak

8:30 The Backseat Conversation

10:30 You Can't Cry With a Closed Heart

12:10 When You Need to Put Yourself First — and Say So

14:40 The Reframe: Put the Friendship First

15:20 Red Flags & Why Coming Forward Builds Trust

16:40 Ayahuasca & Healing the Friendship Wound

18:40 The Letter That Got No Reply

21:00 Why Friendship Breakups Hurt More

22:00 How Deep Healing Made Me a Better Friend

24:00 Society Deprioritizes Friendship — Let's Change That

26:00 Childhood Friendship Trauma & the Survey Data

27:00 Connect With Melanie & Shannon

29:20 Rachel's Reflection: Always Put the Friendship First

#TheBestFriendProject #WomensFriendships #FemaleFriendship #FriendshipBreakup #BestFriends #FriendshipGoals #AdultFriendships #HealingTheFriendshipWound #ShadowWork #EmotionalHealing #Vulnerability #FriendshipAdvice #WomenSupportingWomen #PlantMedicine #Ayahuasca #PersonalGrowth #Boundaries #IntentionalLiving #Podcast #FriendshipPodcast

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