The Best Friend Project

"In the end, I don't know that we were friends at all."

Jackie Kashian is known for being funny. Really funny. But in this conversation, we get to know the woman behind the comedy as she shares her experiences with friendship, and how her own family influenced her social life, or lack thereof. Jackie opens up about her journey to making friends and the people who helped her understand how to truly connect with others, on stage and off. One of the most surprising stories takes us back to high school, when her track coach told her to "put the book down." What followed was a lesson about friendship that Jackie says "saved her life."

About Jackie

Jackie Kashian is a nationally touring stand-up comedian who has appeared on Conan, After Midnight, The Late Late Show with James Corden, HBO, Netflix, Comedy Central, and Dropout TV, and has been heard on NPR, Audible, and as a voice actor on Bob's Burgers and Strange Planet. Her latest comedy special, Alter-Kashian, was named by The New York Times as one of the year's five best comedy specials. She also hosts the long-running podcasts The Dork Forest and The Jackie and Laurie Show.

In this episode:

- Jackie’s experiences—or lack of them—with friendship growing up
- The coach who taught Jackie how friendship actually works
- The danger of “compare and despair”
- What happens when one best friend becomes your only best friend
- Jackie’s experience losing an intense friendship
- One unforgettable piece of advice from Jackie’s stepmother

Connect with Jackie Kashian on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok

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 – Introduction
02:49 – Being a Woman in Stand-Up Comedy
10:30 – “I Had No Friends as a Child”
11:29 – ***The Coach Who Taught Jackie How to Make Friends***
15:48 – Learning How to Accept Friendship
23:02 – Do Women Really Tear Other Women Down?
24:38 – Mother Trust, Betrayal & the Best Friend Breakup
32:11 – “In the End, I Don’t Know That We Were Friends at All”
36:31 – What Gone With The Wind has to do with The Best Friend Project
41:10 – 20 Years of Podcasting & The Dork Forest
44:24 – Final Thoughts

Coming Next Week

Rachel talks with Allie, an adult who is now no contact with her mother, exploring what led to that decision and how that complicated relationship has affected her ability to make, maintain, and understand friendships.

Content note: The conversation includes references to sexual abuse, violence, and domestic assault. Nothing is graphic, but listeners with sensitivity to these topics may want to skip this episode.

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As I dig into my recent friendship break-up, I realized in order to understand "how I got here," I have had to go back and look at where I came from. 

On this episode of "On The Phone," I call up Paige Parranto, one of my oldest childhood friends, to ask her what she remembers of my house growing up. It sparked a memory for both of us. Paige describes sleeping on the floor of my parents' bedroom, because it was the only room in the house with a window air conditioner. The very same air conditioner that kept my parents from coming downstairs during countless wild keg parties I would have without them ever knowing.

Hear more about this, and about the time just a few years ago when she and I met up with our other friend Emily Sellergren in San Diego. We had grand delusions of dressing up like Marilyn Monroe, only to end up looking like "sexy" (if you are blind) George Washingtons.

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One text message ended my longest, closest friendship of 12 years. No fight. No warning. Just "Friendship with you is like death by 1,000 cuts." Then ghosted. Before I started the Best Friend Project, I was a private investigator and TV journalist, so when my closest friendship blew up I went into full decode mode. I had to figure out what I had done wrong throughout my life in my friendships. In this solo episode, I tell the real story behind the project, the wedding she skipped, the golf tournament that broke us, the months I spent putting postcards in bathroom stalls across the country, gathering data from hundreds of women as I tried to figure out how others find, make and keep their friends. This is not a tidy story. Nor one I am proud of. I own my part in it too.

Mentioned in This Episode

• How one text obliterated a friendship
• What does Reese Witherspoon’s Instagram post have to do with all of this
• The Cry-Fecta of an empty nest, best friend break up and a move to Dallas
• Also weddings are hard on friendships, I am right

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While there, take the Friendship Survey and discover your Friendship Archetype. I'd also love to stay in touch, come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook I'll follow you back! (That's what friends do!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at [email protected].

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Rachel and The Best Friend Project 

02:03 Rachel's personal story of friendship breakup and its impact

03:45 The research and survey process behind The Best Friend Project 

04:51 Aftermath of the friendship fallout and the backstory

11:47 The emotional toll of friendship fallout and mental health effects

17:33 The story of how Reese Witherspoon inspired The Best Friend Project

21:47 How sharing stories helps heal and build understanding

27:45 Rachel's reflections on her friendship journey and lessons learned

34:00 Moving forward: hopes for better friendships and self-improvement

Tease next week:

Comedian Jackie Kashian joins the show to talk about being one of the only women on the lineup in a world of male comics, and why women in competitive spaces can be harder on each other than men are.

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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

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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

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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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