I'll Be There (But I'll Be Wearing Sweatpants)

Finding Unfiltered, Real-Life Friendships in This Crazy, Chaotic World

Amy Weatherly, Jess Johnston

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781400226795
• Subtopic: Religion

Is it just me? Am I the only one who's lonely? Am I the only one without friends?

If you've ever asked yourself these questions, Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston, founders of the widely popular "Sister, I Am with You," community, are raising their hands to say, "Yeah, us too." And they want to encourage, equip, and reassure you that you have what it takes to build the kind of friendships you want.

Loneliness doesn't care what age you are, how many Instagram followers you have, or where you call home. It doesn't care how "put together" you appear to the outside world. We have a collective wound that only authentic sisterhood can heal.

With real-life vulnerability and "I’ve been there, too" wisdom about building deep and satisfying friendships, Amy and Jess unpack the lies we've been told about friendship and show you how to:

• break free from unhealthy habits that keep you from experiencing real connection
• find the confidence to live freely and without fear of rejection
• be a good friend even though you can't be a perfect one
• heal from a friend breakup--and find the courage to try again
• intentionally pursue friends in everyday life

 

You deserve a community of loving, supportive, there-for-you friends. If you're ready to change the way you think about friendship, let I'll Be There (But I'll Be Wearing Sweatpants) be your new go-to guide for navigating the ups and downs of everyday life with your nearest and dearest. Let's start making friendship a priority--together.

1
When You Really Need a Friend (Yeah, Us Too)
love, Jess and Amy

Oh hey, we’re Jess and Amy. We want to talk about friendship, but we’re not just talking about the kind of friendship that puts on lipstick and pants with zippers and orders something fancy at a nice restaurant (although that’s fun sometimes). We’re talking about the kind of friendship that gets raw and gritty. The kind of friendship that is built for real life and running errands. The kind of friendship that is safe for big feelings, deep secrets, and laughing so hard you snort. The kind of friendship that stays through for sickness, health, anxiety, and announcements like “Hey, something is hanging out of your nose.”

We’re not talking about the kind of friendship that means being with the “in” crowd or being on the VIP list for a party. We’re talking about being on the VIP list for the hospital when your friend is having a surgery. We’re talking about being on the VIP list for kid birthday parties and movie nights in your sweatpants. We’re talking about being the VIP in someone’s real, authentic, and true life. We’re talking about the kind of friendship that holds up under pressure, the kind that withstands a whole lotta heat. We’re talking about the kind of friendship that has an open-door policy when laundry is covering the couch, the sink is full of dishes, and your hair hasn’t been washed in a week. Thank goodness for dry shampoo.

We’re talking about belonging to each other—like really, really belonging. We’re talking about a friendship that isn’t just good for the freeway but can pop into four-wheel drive and go off-roading too. A friendship that doesn’t have to strive or perform but is comfortable to curl up next to and share your whole truth with—no filters needed.

We’re talking about the kind of friendship that makes you actually want to pick up the phone.

We don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of friendship we’ve wanted our entire lives, with our whole hearts. We wanted it. We dreamed of it, and yet it felt so far away, so unattainable, especially now as adults.

We felt like we had shown up to the ball in our nastiest pair of sweatpants. (You know, the ones with the hole in the crotchal region. They’re not the prettiest, but they’re real, worn in, and oh so comfortable. Plus if it’s hot, no biggie because you’ve got that sweet breeze coming in.)

If you’ve ever walked into a party and instantly felt like the outsider; if you’ve ever wanted to disappear, sneak away, moonwalk out of the room, or casually park yourself next to the host’s pet with a plate of cheese and crackers for the rest of the night—we get it. Us too.

If you’ve ever become best friends with your barista or your Instacart delivery person because you literally didn’t have any other adults to talk to—yep, Jess is raising her hand here. Sister, I am with you. Their names were Anna and Leslie, and they were fantastic listeners. To all the people who were waiting for me to move out of the drive-through line, excuse me. Anna needed to know that I’d been having a very hard time lately. Anna got it. Anna cared. Anna also made a mean caramel latte. We were having a moment, and your honking wasn’t going to stop us.

If you’ve ever walked away from meeting someone new and collapsed onto the steering wheel the second you got back into your car because you were pretty sure you’d ruined things with your big fat mouth—yup, Amy’s turn to raise her hand. I did this just last week. And I was annoyed at myself the whole way home. Why did you say that weird thing about finding half-eaten CHEETOS in your bra? This is not normal chitchat. This is borderline disgusting. She is never going to want to hang out with you again.

If you’ve ever felt like you weren’t enough, like you were too introverted, too boring, too awkward, too average to make any kind of lasting impression, yes, uh-huh, been there. And then we spent the next day thinking of all the witty things we “should” have said. We’re very good at conversation after three to five hours of careful planning.

Also, PS: nineties movies really led us to believe we were going to have a Rachel Leigh Cook moment in She’s All That, only no one ever showed up to take off our glasses and transform us into someone cool. Never mind the fact that we don’t wear glasses; we could have bought fakes, you know?

If you’ve ever felt so bulldozed and blindsided by a friend breakup that you struggled to put your heart out there again, ouch, we’ve been in that same position a time or two. Losing a friend is deeply painful, gut-wrenching even, and it causes you to question yourself, stop trusting others, and put up walls so high and so thick they are almost impossible for anyone to climb over.

We hope it gives you courage to know you’re in good company with your feelings. When we think of certain friendships that we lost, our hearts ache like the breakup was just yesterday.

If you’ve ever felt like you were too much, too extroverted, too prone to overshare, and too likely to overwhelm everyone like a golden retriever that didn’t get her fetch time today, us too. Does everyone talk with a girl they literally just met at the park about how many stitches they got giving birth to their firstborn? Yes? No? Okay. Us either. Is it odd for said hypothetical girl to know this information before she even knows your name?

If you’ve ever put your foot so far down your mouth that you thought your best plan of action would be to move to a new town or, better yet, a new country—yes, yes, and yes. New Zealand sounds nice. Let’s pull up Zillow and see what kind of houses are available. Whew . . . kinda pricey. Scratch that. Canada, anyone?

If you’ve ever felt so busy, so overworked, so chaotic that you couldn’t imagine how you could possibly make time for friendships, um, yes. Speaking of which, can someone come over and take our kids to the dentist? They have appointments scheduled, but honestly, we don’t know exactly when. Whoops.

If you’ve ever had someone introduce herself to you even though you’ve met her ten times before, we are your people.

“Hi. I’m ___________. I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

We have actually met, multiple times, and we go through this exact cat-and-mouse dance every single time. It is so nice to have made such an impression on you. Doesn’t hurt at all.

We know the sting of being forgettable, invisible, and completely unseen. Sometimes adult friendship feels exactly like being picked last for dodgeball, and it makes us want to go home and cry too. Your tears are not lost here.

If you have absolutely no idea how to even begin, if you have no idea where to look, and if you can’t seem to make the plunge and dive into a friendship with your feelings, yep, we get it. It is scary. You desperately want to invite people in, but what if they turn up their noses and run for the hills the second they see the real you? We’ve been there, and it’s terrifying. Your heart is your most sacred possession. We want to guard ours too.

If you’ve ever been scrolling through social media only to have your eyes go wide and your stomach jump straight into your throat when you see a picture of everyone together at an outing you weren’t invited to—again, yup, we know that feeling. We feel sick just thinking about it.

If you’ve ever wanted to scream, “But hooooow?!” when someone tells you to “find your people,” or if you’ve ever panicked while filling out a form and realized you don’t have an emergency contact, then girl, you’re speaking our language. Been there.

If you’ve ever felt so insecure and so unsure about putting yourself out there that staying home with a bag of barbecue-flavored LAY’S and pajama pants seemed infinitely safer than risking being rejected, same.

This book is a personal invitation into our journeys, our joys, and our discoveries in friendship.

It’s our confessional. It’s our tell-all. It’s our let’s-do-this-together. It’s our love letter to our daughters, and it’s our love letter to our younger selves. We needed this book back then (even more than we needed to lay off the white eyeliner, CK One perfume, and plucking our eyebrows into smithereens), but the truth is, we still need it.

Nobody gave us a handbook on how to deal with friendships when we became adults, so we decided to write our own.

More than anything else, though, this book is our love letter to you.

* * *

We (Amy and Jess) met three years ago. Our messages to each other started with things like “Girl, those earrings on you though” and “Have you ever had a Chick-fil-A sandwich with cheese on it? Because it’s life changing FYI.” After a month or so we started chatting on the phone. Jess was usually on a run, breathing like she was about to pass out in a ditch (and telling Amy to maybe call 911 if she went silent), and Amy was usually putting on her makeup and telling her kids to please not pee in the cups anymore. Our friendship moved easily from the goofy, the mundane, and the surfacy to the deep, the raw, and the authentic.

Sometimes we’d sit in our cars, Amy in Texas, Jess in California, with our orders of coffee and iced tea after dropping the kids at school. Amy would sing a little Taylor Swift for Jess to hear, and then we’d just talk. We’d put our feet up on the dash and pick at our chipped polish. We’d talk about everything in our lives, but we’d often come back to the topic of friendship.

We agreed that friendship was, and always has been, among our deepest desires.

Friendship has been the cause of some of our lowest lows, but it’s also been the cause of some of our highest highs.

We talked about how we’d struggled with it through the years. How we’d both moved and been the “new girl.” How we’d found genuine friendship and how much it meant to us. How we’d been hurt and left out. How we’d felt like we were the only ones not given the map to sisterhood.

How we didn’t know why it was all so hard.

One day Amy called and said, “Jess, it happened again. I was the only one uninvited to the party, and I’m just sick. I’m sitting alone in my closet crying like I’m thirteen. Why does this still happen? Why does it hurt so much? What is wrong with me? Why don’t people like me? It hurts now, but it also hurts because I’ve been hurt in this exact same way before. Why do I keep getting bumped from the A-list to the B-list to the nonexistent list? It brings me right back to grade school. I hate it so much.”

Another day Jess called and said, “Amy, I don’t belong. I feel like an outsider when I walk into that room. I just feel like they don’t like who I am. It makes me feel so small and unimportant. It takes me...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: When You Really Need a Friend (Yeah, Us Too)
• 2: When You’re Alone and It All Kinda Sucks
• 3: When You Can’t Amazon Prime Your Friendships
• 4: When Insecurity Reigns Supreme
• 5: When You’re Pretty Sure You’ve Been Duped
• Ten Qualities in a Really Good Friend
• 6: When You Wonder Why No One Likes You
• 7: When Fake Makes You Want to Hurl
• 8: When You’re Stuck on the Outside
• 9: When You Cram All Your Junk in the Closet and Slam the Door
• 10: When It All Feels Like High School 2.0
• 11: When You’re a Bad Friend
• Five Friendship Revelations
• 12: When You’ve Been There, Done That, and Had Your Heart Break
• 13: When Your Mouth Gets Sticky and Words Get Hard
• Conclusion
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Back Ad
• Praise for I’ll Be There (But I’ll Be Wearing Sweatpants)
• Copyright