I told them to wear clothes they could move in and asked that they show up with an open mind.

They arrived and found me in the kitchen, where we passed around lemon ginger shots. I watched my communities coalesce - people from the climbing gym, from Fuckup Nights, from dance floors - all coming together with a bit of nervous energy as we prepared for this new shared experience.

We moved to the rooftop and put on our headphones to a set I had built just for this day. I took a deep breath and turned on my microphone as I prepared to guide my friends for the next hour. As I began to speak, I could hear my breath shake, broadcast to everyone on their headsets - if I could hear the nerves in my voice, surely they could too. But I reminded myself that I was held and safe, practicing in a community that was there to support me, curious enough to show up for this thing their friend was so excited to share.

The session began, and as our bodies started to move, I felt the nerves start to dissolve. Guiding my friends through the shaking pulled me into that same presence I was trying to hand them.

For a week beforehand, I’d practiced alone, just me and the sound of my own two feet on the ground. None of it prepared me for what an entire rooftop sounds like, stomping to the same beat.

The sociologist, Émile Durkheim, coined the term for what happens in a moment like that: “collective effervescence,” or that feeling of passion, energy, and unity that emerges when people come together around a shared experience. We sure as hell created some collective effervescence as we moved together on that rooftop.

It all went by so fast but I still smile as I think about that sound - twenty people, one rhythm. This was a night I won’t soon forget.

I am proud to share what I’ve been deep in study of for the past five months: the practice of SUCO.

“SUCO is a guided ritual of movement, breathwork, visualisation, and electronic music - designed to move you out of disconnection and into presence, joy, and vitality.”

I discovered it while living in Barcelona as part of a team building exercise for our newly acquired business. I was hooked before the session even ended. I remember being shocked by how accessible it was to even a corporate environment. It didn’t require experience, flexibility, or rhythm. Just a willingness to move and feel.

As I began to formally study SUCO, it became apparent that this is the practice for me. On one of our first calls, Jamie, the founder, said something plainly that resonated deep in my bones: “SUCO is solving for chronic disconnection.” That sentence is the verbatim mission statement for my business.

The language on the SUCO website names the thing I’ve been circling in every post I’ve written on here:

“The world is more connected than ever - yet people feel more disconnected than ever before. Loneliness, stress, and emotional suppression are driving a global wellbeing crisis. SUCO is your reset button. A return to what’s real. A ritual to remember who you are.”

Looking in the rearview mirror of the little life that I’ve had, it feels like everything I’ve slowly created has been building towards SUCO, without me even knowing it.

Years ago, when I was living in New York and working at WeWork, I was hollowed out in almost every part of my life. The job wasn’t what I had imagined, I was in a long-distance relationship with my ex in DC, and I was chronically and painfully lonely.

I thought of the advice I had received in college from my holistic doctor to plan one thing every week that I could look forward to. I needed something anything to occupy the space where a life was supposed to be.

I tried ceramics for a month and quickly realized I lacked the patience and attention to detail to bring the images in my head to life. Then I tried DJing.

Thanks to the encouragement of one of my WeWork members, Todd, I started taking weekly 1:1 vinyl classes at Rock and Soul to prep for my first real gig: Todd’s birthday.

It was a start and I booked a few more gigs at Juke Bar in NYC and then moved back to DC to be closer to my ex and open the WeWork market down there. Eight months in, I left for a new job at Sparkfund, and got my biggest DJ booking yet just a week after starting: ladies night at Flash, a serious high-fidelity venue that booked epic talent.

The set was a total flop. I had just started my new job and didn’t have the time to prep for my set the way I would have wanted. I had made the call that my new job mattered more than DJing… so I let it go.

That bet paid off, professionally. I got promoted quickly into a leadership role: Chief of Staff, a job everyone in the office called “the glue.” I wasn’t leading in any traditional sense but I was connecting dots, surfacing tension, aligning priorities, and trying to keep a fast-moving leadership team rowing in the same direction. I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but that was my first real practice of facilitation.

But that chronic loneliness and emptiness grew even louder. Turns out it’s quite lonely at the top.

So I signed up for a Yoga Teacher Training. I loved yoga and told people I wanted to deepen my practice, and maybe teach on the side… but the honest reason was that I was hoping the room would hand me the kinds of friends I had been searching for.

Through that program, I made a lot of “yoga friends” but the relationships ended there. Professionally, it turned out I wasn’t cut out to teach. Modifying postures and tracking the anatomy of twenty different bodies at once didn’t come to me naturally and wasn’t enjoyable. I did deepen my practice and am grateful that I can pull out a yoga mat and do a sequence on my own, but teaching yoga and building a yoga community never really happened.

I moved to Madrid, completed my MBA, broke off an engagement, and took a job that landed me in Barcelona. That’s when facilitation formally landed in my lap with a training sponsored by my company. I was trained in a framework called the SpiralMethod, and I used it to build and lead structured, intentional dialogue sessions for an executive team that had barely been speaking to each other. I watched the trust and communication between us change because of work I was doing in that room. Eventually, I designed and ran a full leadership development program around it.

DJing, yoga, and facilitation. I picked up each of these three things that seem to have nothing to do with each other in my search for deeper connection.

While DJing and teaching yoga didn’t work out, I can see now how they were building blocks that helped me be more prepared to understand and facilitate the practice of SUCO… and honestly, it feels a bit kismet. They seemed random and distinct at the time, but looking at SUCO, I can see how the skills I learned from each activity are all interwoven in one practice, and it’s kind of hard to believe.

It’s been a year and change since I moved back to Chicago.

One little year… and I managed to get twenty people to join me on my rooftop on a Saturday evening to do something they’d never heard of, because I asked them to and because they trusted that I wouldn’t waste their evening.

When I think about the version of Lauren who spent all those years searching for her friends, searching for her community, searching for people who might take a chance on her, I smile as I think about how far she’s come and how much better it is than she ever imagined.

Creating something like this doesn’t happen by accident… and it certainly doesn’t happen by force, either.

I think it happens by staying recognizably yourself for long enough that the right people find the frequency and lock onto it. Movement has always been my language, even when it looked like DJing and unteachable yoga poses - I just needed to find the right outlet.

So all this to say - if there’s a version of you that’s been picking things up and putting them back down, wondering what any of it is for, keep picking up what feels right. Keep putting down what doesn’t. You may not see the shape of it for a decade. But stomping on a rooftop with twenty people who trust you is a pretty good place to end up after all that uncertainty.

I never designed it this way. It’s just what happens when your hobby doubles as your community.

I’m lucky, because I know how rare that is (having never been able to find community in yoga or solidcore). One of the hardest things about growing up is finding time for your friends. Life gets busy if you’re busy living it. Calendars fill up, responsibilities pile on, and the people who don’t have a standing time slot in your week are the first ones to quietly disappear from it.

A lot of people I’ve met over the years describe some version of the same thing: friends move away, have kids, get busier, and they lose the casual hangouts they used to have when everyone lived down the street in university.

Everything becomes more of a production. If you’re seeing someone, it’s for a birthday, a networking event, some kind of occasion… rarely just the casual, unstructured time that lets a spontaneous, deeper moment of connection happen.

Which is why when my friend Sarah told me about her ritual of “Friend Thursdays,” I thought it was the most beautifully simple idea for fostering friendship I’d heard in a while.

It came out of a conversation with her therapist. She admitted something a lot of us have felt but rarely say out loud: “I don’t feel like I’m good at anything right now. Not good at my job, not a good friend, not a good daughter, because I’m spread too thin, and nothing gets my full attention.”

Her therapist asked her a simple question: “When was the last time you saw your people? They always lift your spirits.”

Sarah realized she’d been swinging between two extremes: either out with someone every single night, which left her exhausted, or a total hermit, which left her lonely. She shared how she wished there was a centralizer for all of her friends. Her therapist asked her if her friends got along with one another. They did. So her therapist asked: “Why don’t you be the centralizer?”

She suggested making a WhatsApp group with friends with the qualifier that if you texted all ten and only one showed up, you’d still be happy to get an hour with that person one-on-one. And if all ten showed up, it’d be the best night of your life. That WhatsApp thread was all the infrastructure she needed.

Sarah created the group and told everyone: I’m starting this thing called Friend Thursdays. You’re all people I want to see more regularly, and I want you to know that when you’re overwhelmed, when you need a friend, or just want a hang, Thursday is always there. Every week, there’s community. Come if you want. No worries if you can’t. There’s no obligation and no guilt.

It’s led to plenty of wonderful nights with friends, sometimes one-on-one and sometimes in groups.

One of the things she didn’t expect to be so touched by was the Thursdays she couldn’t make when a few of her friends, who wouldn’t have gathered without the group, found time together anyway. The group had begun to hold itself.

Friend Thursdays has given her an anchor for her week. She no longer needs to scatter herself across Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights trying to keep up with everyone. She has one sacred day. If she’s in town, she’s there - every single week. When nobody shows up, she feels the sting a little but she gets over it fast, because she knows next Thursday is already on the calendar.

My favorite part is that it doesn’t have to be a big night. One Thursday, our friend Allison was leaving town the next morning to train for a half marathon. She said she’d swing by for an hour, tops. In the end she stayed forty-five minutes, overlapping with another friend who swung by on her way home. It wasn’t a ton of time together, but Sarah remembers it as one of the fullest Thursdays. That brief connection point was all they needed.

I admire Sarah so much for this initiative. For having the courage to tell her friends, “Hey, I’d like to see you all more often.” And for creating this container for other friends as well.

A huge part of why it works is that everyone in the group already gets along (many of them are also my friends and it helps that they’re all just really lovely people). Sarah may have created the group, but it’s not just Sarah’s night. It’s a night for everyone.

And Thursday, it turns out, is the perfect night for this. Everyone’s saving their energy for the weekend, so you can show up a little tired, a little unpolished, and it’s fine. Nobody needs it to be a big night out. It just needs to be real.

My equivalent of Friend Thursdays is Monday climbing and beer (which, yes, I’ll get to writing about soon enough). In the meantime, here’s what I’d leave you with: can you plan one thing a week that you look forward to with your people? If you already have one or are thinking about one, I’d love to hear it!

As someone who has historically been prone to worrying (I can be a real nervous nelly sometimes), this practice has helped me elect the present and connect with it deeply.

In my experience, the present moment is where abundance lives. The world is our oyster. We get to make conscious, active choices about our lives and how we want to live them, and damn, if that just isn’t where the magic is.

I’ve had various morning routines for the past six years but I’ve never felt so genuinely thrilled to hop out of bed as I have with SUCO sessions first thing.

I’ve been on a deep SUCO journey for the past three months but it’s been more holistic than simply waking up and shaking. I’ve intentionally let the purpose of it seep into how I live the rest of my life.

The mission behind SUCO sessions is to get people to feel fully.

We are here to remember what it means to feel freely, live fully, and be truly deeply human.

It was only through this practice that I started to notice the ways I’d been distracting myself from the present moment.

You might be thinking: what does any of this have to do with human connection and belonging? Turns out all of it: I tend to distract and numb myself most when I’m feeling lonely.

Which is funny… because I didn’t think I was lonely.

When I think about my loneliest years, I think of my twenties - New York, then DC, plenty of acquaintances and painfully few friends, nobody but my ex to actually tell my life to. I was chronically lonely and fully aware of it, which somehow made it worse. I was social. I put myself out there. But I’d always end up at home with him, downloading every detail of my day - which felt like connection, but probably was actually a symptom of my codependence. I never had to sit with the loneliness, because I always had somewhere to put it.

These days, I don’t consider myself lonely. Comparatively, I’m not. I have great friends, family nearby, a calendar that never has a blank week, group chats I have to mute just to get anything done. I’m no longer that twenty-something with a handful of friends and nobody but her ex to hand her deepest thoughts to. I feel like a critical member of more than one community, and I’m actively building new ones alongside people I love.

And yet, for the year before this practice, as a single woman with significantly more alone time than I’d had in any coupled-up chapter of my life, I was never really choosing to be home alone. I didn’t like being alone, so I avoided it. I’d get on my phone, an hour would disappear, I hadn’t done anything that counted as living, and I’d just postponed whatever it was I was actually supposed to be feeling.

Yes, discomfort is inevitable, and of course we want to numb and distract ourselves from it sometimes. It acts as relief for a brief moment. But distraction and numbing, done on autopilot and unconsciously, are something else. An insidious kind of theft. We rob ourselves of actually feeling. And when we rob ourselves of feeling, we rob ourselves of the lesson in that feeling. We rob ourselves of the experience the universe intended for us to have. We stay stuck.

Which led me to the question: if being alone right now is, in fact, a choice I have made, then why don’t I actually enjoy it?

So I’ve started to romanticize my own solitude instead of just surviving it. I (frequently) put my favorite song on repeat until the neighbors could probably hum it back to me. I turn on the moody lights. I take myself on that artist’s date and spend my time exactly the way my inner child would have requested. I’ve always valued presence, but three months of SUCO changed how I understand it. I thought I already knew how to give someone my full attention. I just never thought to give it to myself.

I don’t think the goal is to fill the alone time. I think it’s to actually be there for it - the same way I’d want to be fully there for a friend, a partner, a good conversation.

So I’m done numbing. It’s time to feel it all: the discomfort, the joy, the random Friday nights that I choose to spend alone.

The core crew started with a few Spaniards and Catalans, a Frenchie, a Venezuelan coach, and me, an American who had fallen into CrossFit somewhat accidentally and couldn’t seem to stop. We called ourselves los pioneros del outdoor. It was early COVID, shortly after lockdown. We were scared. And somehow, that park became one of the most important places in my life.

I had first discovered CrossFit the year before, in Madrid. When I moved to Barcelona, I went looking for a gym (or a “box” in CrossFit terminology) that would become home. I tried a few. Then I walked into Condal CrossFit and ended up in a class coached by a Venezuelan named Ricky.

It was love at first sight. Not romantic (though Ricky does have a certain charm), but the kind of love you feel when someone actually sees you. He made sure I was practicing good form. He made jokes. He acknowledged my Spanish, which has always been something I’m a lil proud of. He had a way of making the room feel like it already belonged to you.

When COVID hit and training with a mask indoors was particularly challenging, Ricky got creative. He started offering two classes a week outdoors, small groups in the fresh air, socially distanced enough to feel safe, and I decided it was the best option I had. I had no idea that it would turn into five years and one of the most impactful communities of mine in Barcelona.

At first, it was just a handful of us. But the group became regular and something started to happen. Something that only happens when you show up in the same place, at the same time, with the same people, week after week (more to come on that in future posts). Deep friendships were made. The kind that sneak up on you.

We showed up as cheerleaders at marathons and Ironman races. We celebrated birthdays. We cheered for PRs, and completely lost our minds the first time someone finally pieced together double unders. These relationships are unique and special.

I’m not the first to write about it. There are plenty of articles on the power of group fitness classes. I’ve written about this before but it takes 40-60 hours to make a friend. Fitness classes are an easy way to rack up those hours.

One of my favorite takes on this comes from Mikala Jamison’s “A Ridiculous, Perfect Way to Make Friends“: group fitness classes fulfill many conditions that social-psychology research has shown to forge meaningful connections between strangers - proximity, ritual, accumulation, and shared experience. And there’s something else.

“When you’re sweating, feeling a little out of control of your physical self, whooping and yelling, there’s a vulnerability,” researcher Tara Friedman told her. “If you buy in, then you’ve shared something. There aren’t that many contexts as adults where you have that opportunity to be vulnerable together.”

That was us. Every Monday and Wednesday. Sweating through it together.

My pioneros, all from different countries, of different ages, with different reasons for being there, became some of my closest friends in Barcelona.

We occasionally hung out outside of CrossFit, but mostly we didn’t need to. There was something complete about it on its own and the regularity created a kind of intimacy that’s rare.

Leaving that outdoor group was one of the hardest parts of leaving Barcelona (although happy ending if you haven’t read yet about my new box in Chicago).

Just three months after my move to Chicago, Ricky and his partner Ane Lore finally opened the one thing that they had been dreaming of: their own box. They called it Saman CrossFit.

Having trained with Ricky for over six years, I knew it would be a success. Saman just celebrated its first year, and I sat down with them both to hear how it’s gone.

Saman is a massive Venezuelan tree with a sprawling canopy so wide and full that people have gathered beneath it for generations. In the Venezuelan savanna, when people finish their work in the field, they don’t just rest under the saman. They meet under it. They celebrate. They throw parties. The tree isn’t just shade. It’s a gathering point. 😭

“We didn’t want to put a flag on the box,” Ricky told me. “Because we believe flags divide. The most beautiful thing we could do was a tree.”

He paused, then added: “A place where everyone can come together, no matter where they’re from.”

I’ve watched Ricky build community for years, so I came to this conversation with a specific question: how does he actually do it? What does belonging look like, in practice, from the inside?

“It starts from the intro,” he said. “A good welcome. Sharing with people what I love. Asking their names. Actually knowing each person.”

He laughed a little. “Maybe it’s the Latino in me. That sense of “mi casa es tu casa.”

But it’s more than warmth, he explained. CrossFit itself is structured for belonging in a way a traditional gym isn’t. When you train in a group, you show up for each other. Skipping feels different when someone is expecting you. Struggling feels different when someone is next to you. “When you create a group,” Ricky said, “it’s very hard to fail. Very hard to miss.”

He’s also watched what happens in people’s bodies when they move together regularly. The physical changes are obvious: strength, endurance, confidence. But what follows isn’t just physical. “You see the change in their body and it helps create strength of mind. Self-confidence. A new relationship with yourself.”

He said something that stayed with me: “I feel like I help more people working in a box than I ever could working for someone else. My contribution to the world is greater inside a space like this.”

Saman opened in July of 2025, arguably the worst possible month to open a gym in Spain. Why you ask? Summer, my friend. Everyone is on vacation. The ungodly heat. No air conditioning.

They opened with fifty people.

“People paid six months in advance to support the project,” Ricky said. “In the worst months. Just to support.”

People also showed up with paintbrushes. With cleaning supplies. With their Saturday mornings. When Ricky shared the process on social media, his community responded by wanting to be part of it. Not customers. Participants.

Today, Saman has 150 members. The neighborhood, apparently, has made its feelings clear: don’t you dare move.

“I believe a lot in energy,” Ricky said with a small smile. “This is very hippie. But when you have good energy, you attract people who have the same.” 😭

I asked Ane Lore where the slogan, A place to belong, came from.

She was quiet for a moment before answering.

“It came from my experience here in Barcelona,” she said. “I didn’t ever really find a community like this. You walked in, did your workout, and left. That was it. It was never really a space where you could become part of something. That was my experience.”

She wanted to go deep into what a box could actually be. “A space that invites you to stay. To be part of it. To feel like it’s yours.”

I keep coming back to what Ane Lore said. That she walked into gyms all over Barcelona and just... never felt it. Never felt like she belonged. And instead of shrugging and accepting that as the way things were, she and Ricky went and built the thing she’d been missing.

I find this kind of thing almost unreasonably moving. Ricky spent thirteen years coaching across Venezuela, Mexico, Bilbao, Barcelona - accumulating something he probably couldn’t have named at the time. Ane Lore carried the ache of never quite feeling at home in a gym. And together, they took all of that and turned it into a place where 150 people now show up, feel seen, and don’t want to leave.

I’ve written a lot on this Substack about how hard it is to find belonging as an adult. How rare it is to stumble into a space that actually feels like yours. Ricky and Ane Lore didn’t stumble into it. They built it. From scratch. With paintbrushes and a dream and an absurd amount of love for the people who walked through their door.

I feel lucky to have found them before any of this existed… and even luckier to watch what they’ve made.

Saman has been open for one year. They’ve figured out air conditioning for this summer. But they don’t stop dreaming. Ricky has dreams of a masia or a rural farmhouse turned weekend sports retreat. He wants a generation of kids to grow up training there. He wants coaches who feel the values of Saman in their bones.

But mostly, he wants people to feel like Saman is theirs. Not his. Theirs.

“I want people to feel they can be here for their whole life,” he said.

I think about those seven years of Monday and Wednesdays in los jardines de baix guinardo.. About the friendships I made by simply by showing up in the same place at the same time to do something hard together.

Belonging isn’t always announced. Sometimes it just accumulates. Class by class. Monday by Monday. Under a very wide tree.

Saman CrossFit is located in Barcelona. If you’re ever in the city and looking for a box (or just looking for a room full of people who will learn your name), you know where to go.

Saman en Español

Todos los lunes y miércoles a las 7 de la tarde, un pequeño grupo de nosotros nos reuníamos en un parque de Barcelona para entrenar juntos.

El grupo inicial estaba formado por algunos españoles y catalanes, una francesa, un entrenador venezolano y yo, una americana que había llegado al CrossFit casi por accidente y que no conseguía dejarlo. Nos llamábamos los pioneros del outdoor. Era el comienzo del COVID, poco después del confinamiento. Teníamos miedo. Y, de alguna manera, ese parque se convirtió en uno de los lugares más importantes de mi vida.

Había descubierto el CrossFit el año anterior, en Madrid. Cuando me mudé a Barcelona, me puse a buscar un gimnasio (o un “box”, como lo llaman en el mundo del CrossFit) que pudiera sentir como mi hogar. Probé varios. Luego entré en Condal CrossFit y acabé en una clase que daba un venezolano llamado Ricky.

Fue amor a primera vista. No romántico (aunque Ricky tiene un cierto encanto), sino el tipo de amor que sientes cuando alguien de verdad te ve. Se aseguró de que practicara con buena técnica. Hacía bromas. Reconoció mi español, del que siempre me he sentido un poco orgullosa. Tenía una manera de hacer que el espacio sintiera como si ya te perteneciera.

Cuando llegó el COVID y entrenar con mascarilla en interiores era complicadito, Ricky se las ingenió. Empezó a ofrecer dos clases a la semana al aire libre de grupos pequeños con distancia de seguridad, y yo decidí que era la mejor opción que tenía. No sabía que duraría cinco años, tampoco que se convertiría en una de las comunidades más importantes de mi etapa en Barcelona.

A través del tiempo, el grupo se fue consolidando y algo empezó a ocurrir. Algo que solo pasa cuando apareces en el mismo lugar, a la misma hora, con las mismas personas, semana tras semana (más sobre esto en futuros posts). Se crearon amistades profundas.

Fuimos a animar en maratones y en Ironman. Celebramos cumpleaños. Aplaudimos los PRs, y perdimos completamente la cabeza la primera vez que alguien por fin encadenó los dobles. Estas relaciones son únicas y especiales.

No soy la primera en escribir sobre esto. Hay muchos artículos sobre el poder de las clases de fitness en grupo.

Uno de mis artículos favoritos sobre esto es el de Mikala Jamison, “A Ridiculous, Perfect Way to Make Friends“: las clases de fitness grupal cumplen muchas de las condiciones que la investigación en psicología social ha demostrado que forjan conexiones significativas entre desconocidos: proximidad, ritual, acumulación y experiencias compartidas. Y hay algo más.

“Cuando estás sudando, sintiéndote un poco fuera de control de tu cuerpo, gritando y celebrando, hay una vulnerabilidad”, le dijo la investigadora Tara Friedman. “Si te entregas, entonces has compartido algo. No hay muchos contextos en la vida adulta donde tengas esa oportunidad de ser vulnerable juntos.”

Eso éramos nosotros. Cada lunes y cada miércoles. Sudando juntos.

Mis pioneros, de países distintos, de edades distintas, con razones distintas para estar allí, se convirtieron en algunos de mis amigos más cercanos en Barcelona. Salíamos juntos de vez en cuando fuera del CrossFit, pero en general no lo necesitábamos. Había algo completo en ello por sí solo, y la regularidad creó un tipo de intimidad que es poco común.

Dejar ese grupo al aire libre fue una de las partes más duras de dejar Barcelona (aunque hay final feliz, si aún no has leído sobre mi nuevo box en Chicago).

Solo tres meses después de mi mudanza a Chicago, Ricky y su pareja Ane Lore abrieron por fin lo que llevaban tiempo soñando: su propio box. Lo llamaron Saman CrossFit.

Habiendo entrenado con Ricky durante más de seis años, sabía que iba a tener éxito. Saman acaba de celebrar su primer año, y me senté con los dos para escuchar cómo ha ido.

El saman es un árbol venezolano enorme, con una copa tan amplia y frondosa que la gente se ha reunido bajo él durante generaciones. En la sabana venezolana, cuando la gente termina el trabajo en el campo, no solo descansa bajo el saman. Se reúne. Celebra. Hace fiesta. El árbol no es solo sombra. Es un punto de encuentro. 😭

“No queríamos poner una bandera en el box”, me dijo Ricky. “Porque creemos que las banderas dividen. Lo más bonito que podíamos hacer era un árbol.”

Hizo una pausa y añadió: “Un lugar donde todo el mundo pueda juntarse, sin importar de dónde venga.”

He visto a Ricky construir comunidad durante años, así que llegué a esta conversación con una pregunta concreta: ¿cómo lo hace? ¿Cómo es la pertenencia, en la práctica, desde dentro?

“Empieza desde la intro”, dijo. “Una buena recepción. Compartir con la gente lo que me gusta. Preguntar sus nombres. Conocer a cada persona de verdad.”

Se rio un poco. “Quizás es lo latino que tengo. Ese sentido de “mi casa es tu casa.”

Pero es más que calidez, explicó. El CrossFit en sí está estructurado para la pertenencia de una manera que un gimnasio tradicional no lo está. Cuando entrenas en grupo, te presentas para los demás. Faltar se siente diferente cuando alguien te espera. Sufrir se siente diferente cuando alguien está a tu lado. “Cuando creas un grupo”, dijo Ricky, “es muy difícil fallar. Muy difícil faltar.”

También ha visto lo que les pasa a las personas cuando se mueven juntas de forma regular. Los cambios físicos son evidentes: fuerza, resistencia, confianza. Pero lo que sigue no es solo físico. “Ves el cambio en su cuerpo, y eso ayuda a crear fortaleza mental. Confianza en uno mismo. Una nueva relación contigo mismo.”

Dijo algo que me quedó grabado: “Siento que ayudo a más gente trabajando en un box de lo que podría trabajando para alguien. Mi aportación al mundo es mayor dentro de un espacio como este.”

Saman abrió en julio de 2025, posiblemente el peor mes posible para abrir un gimnasio en España. ¿Por qué? El verano, amigo. Todo el mundo está de vacaciones. Un calor insoportable. Sin aire acondicionado.

Abrieron con cincuenta personas.

“La gente pagó seis meses por adelantado para apoyar el proyecto”, dijo Ricky. “En los peores meses. Solo para apoyar.”

La gente también apareció con brochas. Con productos de limpieza. Con sus mañanas de los sábados. Cuando Ricky compartió el proceso en redes sociales, su comunidad respondió queriendo ser parte de ello. No clientes. Participantes.

Hoy, Saman tiene 150 socios. El barrio, por lo visto, ha dejado su postura bien clara: ni se te ocurra moverte de aquí.

“Creo mucho en las vibras”, dijo Ricky con una pequeña sonrisa. “Esto es muy hippie. Pero cuando tienes buena vibra, atraes a gente que tiene más o menos lo mismo.” 😭

Le pregunté a Ane Lore de dónde salió el lema, “A place to belong.”

Se quedó un momento en silencio antes de responder.

“Surgió de mi experiencia aquí en Barcelona”, dijo. “Nunca encontré realmente una comunidad así. Entrabas, hacías tu entreno y te ibas. Eso era todo. Nunca fue un espacio donde pudieras formar parte de algo. Esa fue mi experiencia.”

Quería ir a fondo en lo que un box podía llegar a ser. “Un espacio que te invite a quedarte. A formar parte. A sentir que es tuyo.”

Sigo volviendo a lo que dijo Ane Lore. Que entró en gimnasios por toda Barcelona y simplemente... nunca lo sintió. No existía una comunidad con esa sensación de pertenencia. Y en lugar de encogerse de hombros y aceptarlo como algo normal, ella y Ricky fueron y construyeron lo que les faltaba.

Este tipo de cosas me parece demasiado emocionante. Ricky pasó trece años entrenando por Venezuela, México, Bilbao, Barcelona, acumulando algo que probablemente no hubiera sabido nombrar en ese momento. Ane Lore cargó con el peso de no haberse sentido nunca del todo en casa en un gimnasio. Y juntos, tomaron todo eso y lo convirtieron en un lugar donde 150 personas se presentan, se sienten vistas y no quieren irse.

He escrito mucho en este Substack sobre lo difícil que es encontrar pertenencia de adulto. Lo poco frecuente que es tropezar con un espacio que de verdad sientas tuyo. Ricky y Ane Lore no se tropezaron con él. Lo construyeron. Desde cero. Con brochas y un sueño y una cantidad absurda de amor por la gente que cruzó su puerta.

Me siento afortunada de haberlos encontrado antes de que todo esto existiera... y aún más afortunada de ver lo que han creado.

Saman lleva un año abierto. Este verano ya tienen el aire acondicionado resuelto. Pero no paran de soñar. Ricky sueña con una masía, una casa rural reconvertida en retiro deportivo de fin de semana. Quiere que una generación de niños crezca entrenando allí. Quiere entrenadores que no solo conozcan los valores, sino que los sientan.

Pero sobre todo, quiere que la gente sienta que Saman es suyo.

“Quiero que la gente sienta que puede estar aquí toda la vida”, dijo Ricky.

Pienso en esos siete años de lunes y miércoles en los jardines de Baix Guinardó. En las amistades que hice simplemente por aparecer en el mismo lugar, a la misma hora, a hacer algo difícil juntos.

La pertenencia no siempre se anuncia. A veces simplemente se acumula. Clase a clase. Lunes a lunes. Bajo un árbol muy grande.

Saman CrossFit está en Barcelona. Si alguna vez estás en la ciudad y buscas un box (o simplemente una sala llena de gente que aprenderá tu nombre), ya sabes dónde ir.

No, really.

I recently completed an in person active meditation retreat where they confiscated my phone for an entire week. It was a much more holistic retreat than that makes it sound, but this post is about my phone.

It’s not lost on me that I have an addiction to that little device I carry everywhere, opening it without even knowing why, reaching for it before I’ve consciously decided to do anything at all. I opened a journal entry from last year and found myself writing about the exact same thing. Some patterns are stubborn.

Each year I choose a word of the year and this year I landed on intention… but the one place I’ve struggled to maintain any semblance of intention? That dang phone.

The program I’ve been doing invited me to look honestly at the ways I distract and numb myself. There are a few. But the biggest offender is definitely the phone.

Returning to the world with my phone in hand, I noticed something immediately: everything felt different.

A baby in a stroller waved at me - not at everyone passing by, but specifically, deliberately, at me. I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in years on the street who just happened to be in the city for the day. I noticed people interacting with each other with patience and care. I caught a woman fixing her outfit while she waited for her bus and then spotted the same woman two hours later on the other side of the city. None of this is remarkable on paper, and yet it all felt incredibly more vivid than usual.

I’ve always been someone who notices the beauty in ordinary moments and reaches out to connect with people. But there is a new level of awareness available to me that I was unable to access before… and it’s hard not to notice what had been blocking it.

These apps are designed to keep us reaching for them. The dopamine hits are engineered with little heart rewards, the infinite scroll, the little red notification dot. Silicon Valley has spent billions of dollars perfecting the exact reflex I am trying to break. The pull is real and intentional. It sometimes seems like the only solution is to delete them all and walk away.

And yet, I’m not ready to walk away. I want to return to my phone with more consciousness about how and why I use it - starting with the app I love most and trust least: Instagram.

Honestly, I love instagram. I find out about events I actually want to attend. I discover so much music, both from friends and from surprisingly well-targeted ads. I learn about AI. I get inspired by what other people are making and thinking. I stay connected to friends scattered across the world.

And my favorite thing about it? Something called pebbling.

The term comes from Gentoo penguins, which present rocks to their mates as tokens of love and to help build their nests. In human terms, pebbling is the act of sharing a small, thoughtful meme, article, or link with someone to express affection and strengthen a bond. Seeing something that makes you think of a person and sending it their way. The little digital equivalent of saying “I thought of you today.”

That kind of small, unsolicited, and warm connection is genuinely one of my favorite things. It’s the opposite of numbing.

Which is exactly what made it so uncomfortable to watch myself do the other thing.

Because I also watched myself reach for my phone to avoid the tasks I didn’t want to do. Not to connect with anyone. Not to pebble a friend. Just to escape the mild discomfort of whatever was sitting in front of me.

That’s not connection. That’s hiding.

And that’s the distinction I’m trying to hold onto: the phone as a bridge versus the phone as a trap door. One takes you toward something. The other just takes you out of the moment you’re in.

I don’t want to delete Instagram. I just want to know why I’m picking it up.

That’s the intention I’m after.

I had been living in New York City for a year and had started a new job as a Community Manager at WeWork a week earlier. Living in New York City was my dream. I had read about it in Just Kids by Patti Smith and A Freewheelin’ Time by Suze Rotolo and hoped for the bohemian version of New York, alive with accidental friendships and creative collisions and the feeling that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

That was far from what I found.

I had no plans for my birthday and decided to enjoy the nice weather with a walk home from work. I called my dad back as I began my walk and sat down on a bench in the park to take it. We talked about nothing in particular until he said the thing he genuinely, lovingly meant: “I hope you spend the day surrounded by people you love and who love you.”

I immediately felt the tears welling up in my eyes.

The intention was beautiful. But at that moment in my life, it was one of the hardest things to hear. I thanked him quickly and rushed to get off the phone. And then sat there on that bench, surrounded by strangers walking in pairs and trios, everyone apparently belonging somewhere. Except for me… on my birthday.

I had nobody to celebrate with. My long-distance boyfriend was in DC. My roommate was wonderful but didn’t think to make a plan. I didn’t need a party. I just wanted someone in my city to want to be with me that night. And there wasn’t anyone.

I’ve thought about that bench a lot since then.

It was undoubtedly the saddest I’ve ever been on a birthday and one of the loneliest moments I can remember. I spent many years afterward feeling chronically lonely, but that birthday was the clearest measure of it.

There’s something about birthdays that reveals the shape of your life as it actually is. A birthday strips away the ordinary routines that can make loneliness feel manageable. It asks a simple, brutal question: who shows up? And when the answer is nobody, there’s nowhere to hide from it.

What I didn’t consider then is how many other people have their own versions of that bench. The person who moved to a new city for a job and spent their first Thanksgiving eating takeout alone. The woman who threw herself a birthday dinner and worried, for weeks beforehand, whether anyone would come. The man who described his social life as “wide but shallow” with a hundred acquaintances, but nobody to call in a crisis.

Loneliness at this scale doesn’t look the way we picture it. It doesn’t look like an elderly person eating alone in a diner. It looks like a capable, ambitious young woman crying in a park in New York on her birthday, surrounded by people and completely invisible.

It’s so common. And so rarely said out loud.

Last weekend, I celebrated my birthday in Chicago, one year into building a life here, surrounded by family and friends that I genuinely love. The contrast to that park bench is not lost on me.

But I want to be honest about what this year has actually looked like.

I have felt lonely in Chicago. I have missed the friends and the rhythms of my Spanish life. I have felt out of place.

And still, I showed up. Through discomfort. Through the invitations I wasn’t sure I wanted to send, the rooms I wasn’t sure I belonged in, the work of letting people see me before I was certain they’d want to.

The part nobody tells you about building belonging is that it’s slow. It’s a hundred small choices - saying yes to the thing you’re too tired for, initiating instead of waiting, showing up even when you’re not sure you’re wanted. It accumulates so gradually you almost don’t notice it happening.

Until one day you do.

I didn’t find this by accident. I built it over time.

I share this because if you’re somewhere in the middle right now - somewhere between the bench and the table - I want you to know: the middle is real, and it’s hard, and you are not the only one sitting in it.

The table comes. Keep going.

There’s one thing that’s standard in the US and quite rare in Spain: a self checkout lane. This is a choice I almost always avoid unless I’m in a huge rush and need to get out of there. Otherwise, I don’t mind waiting in line to pay for my groceries. It’s a brief pause and an opportunity to talk to someone. To connect about something. Anything. Maybe recommending something I’m buying. Maybe just making eye contact and sharing a smile with another human being on an otherwise ordinary Monday.

In Spain, my grocery trip would generally be to about three or four stores. The big Sorli where I’d get basic items. Grà de Gràcia for nuts and coffee. The frutería for fruits and veg. The panadería for bread. At each one of these shops I’d have an opportunity to speak with someone, and quite frankly, I relished it. These weren’t deep conversations. But they were real ones that always meant something to me.

Coming home to the US, I noticed the contrast immediately. One grocery store. And maybe one interaction - if I’m lucky enough to avoid the self checkout entirely.

And I get it. American life wasn’t designed for lingering.

So much of this country is built around cars. You don’t dawdle in a drive-through or a parking lot. European cities with walkable plazas and café culture literally architect slowness into daily life. There are accidental third places on every corner where idle conversation just happens. You don’t need a reason to be there. You don’t need to buy anything to justify your presence. You just exist alongside other people, and connection emerges from that.

We’ve also internalized a story that time is money. “Busy” has long been a weird sort of status symbol in the US. Saying “I’ve been slammed” signals importance in a way that “I’ve had a lovely, leisurely week” never could. So people perform busy-ness (often subconsciously) even when they’re not. And that performance gradually becomes the reality.

People are lonelier than ever, but we’ve also lost the habit of connecting. So even when we do have a free moment, we default to our phones instead of the person standing three feet away from us.

We’ve optimized everything for efficiency and quietly stripped out all the “useless” moments that actually made life feel human.

Turns out I’m not just being nostalgic. The science agrees with me.

Researcher Gillian Sandstrom has spent years studying what she calls “weak ties;” those brief, easily dismissed interactions with baristas, cashiers, and neighbors that most of us barely register. In one study, participants who engaged in a genuine social interaction with a barista by either smiling, making eye contact, or having a brief conversation, experienced greater feelings of wellbeing and belonging than those whose interaction was limited to an efficient, impersonal transaction.

Separately, behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has spent years studying the gap between what we expect will happen when we talk to strangers and what actually happens. In a 2014 study, commuters were asked to either strike up a conversation with a stranger, sit in solitude, or do whatever they’d normally do. The talkers reported the most positive commute of the three groups. The loners had the worst. Before the experiment, participants predicted solitude would win. They were wrong and the findings held true for both extroverts and introverts.

We are opting out of something that would make us happier, based on a prediction our brains are completely making up.

We are rushing past each other for no good reason.

So here’s my one practical suggestion:

Plan one day a week where you build a 15-minute buffer into everything you do.

Not a productivity hack. Not optimization. The opposite, actually. Just leave earlier than you need to. Arrive with margin. See what happens when you move through the world with a little extra space.

What happens, in my experience, is that life gets roomier and I notice things I don’t when I’m rushing to my next appointment. A dog doing something silly across the street. The quality of afternoon light. The wind blowing through the trees. The face of someone who looks like they might need a smile. You have time to respond instead of just react. And you become available to the moment, to other people, to whatever small unrepeatable thing is about to happen right in front of you.

Which brings me back to the checkout line.

When I have the time, I will always - always - choose the line with a human cashier. The one exception, fine, is buying condoms. But I've just now publicly declared that I do in fact buy them, so maybe next time I'll have the nerve to make a joke about it with the cashier. That person might be my only chance to connect with a stranger all day, and I’m not going to hand it to a touchscreen.

Those interactions are small, sure. But these micro-moments, accumulated over a life, add up to the feeling that you are not moving through the world alone.

The dawdle, the linger, the willingness to be briefly human with a stranger is not wasted time. That is the time.

So go ahead. Add the buffer. Choose the slower line. Leave your phone in your pocket for one errand and see what finds you.

It’s late, I’m on the couch, and before I’ve even decided to do anything, my thumb has found Hinge. Or Bumble. I open it. I scroll. I close it. I open it again, minutes later, as if something might have changed.

I’m not really looking for anyone in those moments. I’m just feeding something.

I have almost always been on the apps as a single woman. The way I view it: if I know I want a partner, why wouldn’t I be an active participant in trying to find him? I know countless couples who had met this way. I met my last boyfriend on the apps - three beautiful years I wouldn’t trade for anything. It’s the era we live in. I’m not a Luddite, and I’ve never wanted to refuse a perfectly good tool just because it was less romantic than the stories I imagined as a young girl.

So I used them. For years. I’ve been on more dates than I could honestly count… probably upwards of fifty. I’ve met some lovely fellas. I’ve met some duds. I’ve had a few of those couple-month relationships that don’t quite become anything but leave you slightly softened and with a lesson for the next one.

Dates were never the hard part. I used to be a recruiter, and I’m endlessly curious about people, so first dates have always felt rather comfortable to me - albeit sometimes exhausting. I’m good at hearing someone’s story. I’m good at telling mine. I genuinely enjoy getting to know people, regardless of where it ends up.

I also believed I had decent luck with the apps. I tended to like the men I’d met on them more than the ones I’d met in the wild, which made sense to me, since we’d both passed at least one filter before meeting.

Nothing dramatic happened to make me stop.

But I have started to feel like the energy around it is all wrong.

So I hit delete.

My phone is ADDICTIVE. And dating apps are one of the pesky addictions on there. The dopamine is real. I find myself justifying that it’s time well spent because it’s in service of finding my partner… but if I’m being honest with myself, I’m just on there searching for my next hit.

I open the app when I’m feeling lonely. Not because I’m looking for love in that exact moment, but because I want to skip past the actual experience of being lonely. The apps are a numbing technique. A way to step sideways out of the room I’m sitting in.

I’m currently in the middle of six weeks without alcohol, without television, without a handful of other things I’d been using to numb the discomfort of solitary moments. It made me realize the dating apps were simply another method of the same. This little detox has helped me become much more clear on the energy I’m radiating at each moment.

And in that clarity, the apps started to feel out of place. Not bad, exactly. Just incongruent with the life I’m trying to live.

There’s a different energy I want to use to call it in.

And honestly, it just starts with getting out of my house and following my curiosities… which, I’ll admit, is much easier when it’s not winter in Chicago.

I’m focusing on how full and complete my life already is. Enjoying me. Enjoying my freedom. Going to the places I love, doing the things I love, and trusting that’s enough. If I happen to meet someone while I’m out there - well, hooray.

Now, I’m not declaring forever. And I’m not saying that anyone else should delete theirs. I have friends who built whole, beautiful lives off the apps, and I was one of those people in a previous chapter.

But for now, I’m choosing to be fully inside my own life. Without the side menu of strangers in my pocket. Without the option to numb out of an evening by swiping through faces.

If I meet someone, I’d like to meet him the way I prefer to meet most people… by accident, in the middle of doing something I love. With a glance held a second too long. With a small smile that says, te veo.

Veremos. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Which is a strange thing to say about someone who has always self-identified as an extrovert, worked in highly social jobs, and felt completely at ease in professional settings. At work, I was fine. But the moment I was expected to connect with people outside the structure of a job, a role, a clear reason to be in the room, the stress kicked in.

What if I can’t find anyone to speak with? What if I say something stupid? What will people think of me?

These questions ran through my mind in a constant loop during my 20s. Leaving the house required a strange kind of courage. One that nobody else seemed to need. I wasn’t an outcast and I was never bullied. And yet, here I was, running the same loop before every party, every event, every room full of people I didn’t know well enough.

Why was extroverting always so hard for me?

Looking back, I think the anxiety was rooted less in fear of other people and more in a fundamental discomfort with myself. Loneliness is an insidious condition. It makes you so hungry for connection that you show up wrong for it, when you show up at all. Too eager. Too performed. Not quite yourself. And people can feel that, even when they can’t name it, which only deepens the loneliness you were trying to escape.

I wasn’t trying to be inauthentic. I was just so afraid of not being accepted that I never gave my real self the chance to be. And the cruelest part? Abandoning yourself in a room full of people is its own kind of loneliness - one that’s harder to shake, because you did it to yourself.

As I found more comfort with who I actually am and began to own my authentic nature, the volume on those ruminating thoughts started to turn down. Not off. Just down. The thoughts still come. They just don’t get to make decisions anymore.

That distinction matters, because this piece isn’t about conquering social anxiety. It’s about something more actionable: accepting bids for connection, even when, especially when, your nervous system would rather you didn’t.

A “bid for connection” is simply any moment when someone reaches out and invites closeness. They happen in every relationship, at every stage. But the ones I want to talk about here are a specific kind: the invitations that pull you toward people you don’t know well enough yet. A birthday party for a friend’s friend. A gym celebration with no agenda. A holiday party full of familiar strangers. These are the moments that feel optional, and sometimes end up being the ones that matter most.

The anxiety before them, I’ve come to understand, is not a warning. It’s just weather.

This past holiday season, Cool Beans - an expat club I’ve written about recently - held their holiday party. I know the organizers and had friends attending, but when I walked in and didn’t recognize a single face, I felt the panic settle in anyway. What do I do? Who do I speak with? That pull toward my phone was real and familiar. I never give in to it, because I know it only builds a wall right when I need a door.

After a few minutes of standing there alone, familiar faces started appearing around the edges of the room. The relief was immediate and disproportionate - the kind that reminds you how strong that initial feeling actually was. Strong enough that I still remember it months later.

My CrossFit gym celebrated their fourth birthday the way they always do: a fancy potluck, no workout, just people and food and conversation. I train with these people at least twice a week and have written about the particular magic of this gym before. But showing up without a class structure to hide behind felt different. No shared suffering to bond over, no coach giving us direction. Just people. Talking.

I showed up anyway. Nerves and all. Sat down with a plate of food, asked someone about their recipe, and let the conversation go where it wanted. By the end of the evening I knew more about the people I sweat next to twice a week than I had in months of early mornings together. Turns out there’s a whole life happening on the other side of “how are you feeling about today’s workout.”

A friend invited me to a birthday sleepover at his brother’s house in Indiana. The plan was to camp in the backyard with a group of people I’d mostly never met, overnight. I was new to Chicago and hungry for connection, so I said yes. I also had an hour-long drive to second-guess it.

He’s a lovely person, so I figured his people would be too. They were. But that did nothing to quiet the thoughts on the way down.

What actually happened is a story as old as time: person does the courageous thing, universe delivers. His friends were warm, his family even warmer. Home-cooked pozole on arrival. Bachata I absolutely could not keep up with. A late-night conversation by the fire with someone who felt immediately like a friend. Chilaquiles in the morning as we took down our tents. One of those rare plans where every little detail is a pleasant surprise.

These three moments aren’t remarkable on paper. That’s the point. Just a person who felt the nerves, accepted the bid, and showed up anyway.

The discomfort of the in-between moments is part of it too - the silences, the lulls, the seconds when you’re standing alone and the instinct is to reach for your phone. Don’t. Sit in it. Look around. Smile at someone. Listen to a nearby conversation and wait for your moment. That discomfort is exactly where connection gets made - not in spite of it, but because of it.

You’re not always going to be talking. You’re not always going to be “on.” And the sooner you make peace with simply being in a room - present, unhurried, enough - the sooner the room starts to feel like somewhere you belong.

The anxiety before the next event will probably come back. It comes back for me every time. But I’ve stopped waiting for it to go away before I say yes.

Accept the bid. Go in uncomfortable. The rest tends to follow.

I say rediscovering because Chicago isn’t entirely new to me. But after eight years of living in Europe, moving back felt less like coming home and more like starting over. The rhythms are different. The social dynamics are different. And the unspoken rules of making friends as an adult in a big American city? Completely different.

I was lucky enough to have a soft landing thanks to an incredible Italian friend who, knowing this transition would be harder than it looked, brought me to an event hosted by Cool Beans, an expat club building something special in Chicago.

I’m not technically an expat. But after nearly a decade abroad, I understand the particular texture of life lived far from where you started: the way you become fluent in navigating unfamiliarity, the hunger for connection that isn’t transactional, the strange grief of watching a friend group dissolve across time zones and life stages. More than anything, I’ve found it’s simply easier to connect with people who haven’t spent their whole lives in one place, and people who are, by nature, open to building something new with whoever shows up.

This is exactly what Cool Beans was built for.

​The club was founded by three Italian women, Simona, Alessandra, and Francesca, each of whom arrived in Chicago by a different route and at a different moment in her life. Simona came from Naples for what was supposed to be one year of work, a decade ago. Alessandra drove to Chicago at the end of a cross-country Route 66 road trip after finishing her master’s in San Diego, fell in love with the city, and never really left. Francesca arrived from Piacenza in January 2021, relocating for work after years of moving around Europe.

None of them knew each other. They found each other the way many expats do: through a combination of longing, timing, and a Facebook group of questionable quality.

“There’s this Italians in Chicago Facebook group,” Francesca told me, laughing. “It’s kind of… well, there are some weirdos in there. A lot of Italian Americans who want to be Italians. A lot of spam.” But she had just arrived, knew almost no one, and posted anyway. Alessandra was one of the few people who replied.

Around the same time, Simona was going through her own reckoning. Her closest friend in Chicago, her former roommate, and a person she considered to be practically family was leaving for Europe. Her broader social circle had splintered the way they do in your 30s: marriages, kids, suburbs. “I was honestly thinking,” she told me, “okay, I’m gonna get my citizenship, and then the day after, I’m gonna leave.”

She met Francesca on the street, mid-conversation with a group of friends, and they exchanged numbers on instinct.

What struck all three of them, looking back, was how easily it might not have happened. “We realized how many times you have to renew your friend group,” Alessandra told me, “and how hard it is to start from zero. We were lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. But we were also in the right mindset. Francesca could have just walked by and not said anything. I could have seen her post and just not replied.” The chance was there, but it required something: a willingness to be open at exactly the moment when it would have been just as easy to close off.

What the three of them recognized, almost immediately, was that their situation wasn’t unique. “We were all in a place where we were looking for connection,” Alessandra said. “And we realized this could be for someone who’s been here ten years, or someone who just moved here, or someone in their late 30s whose friends are all having kids and moving away. Look at us. We’re five people, all different, all with the same needs.”

Cool Beans held its first event in April 2024, a networking-style gathering in a West Town pop-up gallery space they found for free, decorating it themselves and covering the drinks out of pocket. About $150 each. They threw a party for strangers and paid for it themselves.

“We wanted to create the kind of environment for other people that we had been lucky enough to stumble into,” Alessandra said.

From there, the club has grown into something more layered. There’s a weekly newsletter, now a year old, that functions as a curated guide to the city for people who feel overwhelmed by it: events, neighborhoods, recommendations filtered through the lens of someone who actually lives here rather than a listicle written by an algorithm. There are monthly events, always hosted at small, independent businesses, often in partnership with other Chicago communities cross-pollinating their network in a way that feels organic rather than strategic.

The founders are refreshingly honest about the learning curve. The holiday party nearly broke them financially. The newsletter burned Francesca out when it ran a long-form essay every single week. An early co-founder, based in New York, eventually stepped back. “We were confused about what the goal was,” Francesca said. “And probably sometimes we still are.”

But they kept adjusting. They started charging for tickets. They got more specific about their audience: professional expats in their 30s and early 40s, not students, not tourists, people who came here for a career and found themselves friendless on a Wednesday night. And they kept showing up at their own events, introducing strangers to each other like they were hosting a dinner party, not running a business.

“If I see a person by themselves,” Alessandra told me, “I feel like it’s my job to make sure they’re not by themselves. Because they’ve already done the hardest part, which is showing up.”

I think about that a lot. Showing up is the hardest part.

I’ve found that walking into a room of strangers, even one designed to be welcoming, requires a particular kind of courage regardless of your age. I felt that anxiety at the Cool Beans holiday party last year. As someone who genuinely can’t stand jazz music, I waited until the jazz act was ending to show up on my own. I walked in the door, scanned the room, and didn’t see a single familiar face. I thought a bunch of friends would be there but in the brief moment I was there alone, I felt a sense of panic rush through my body as I saw a room of people I didn’t know.

That moment was short-lived. The room was packed and familiar faces slowly started to surface from the crowd. It turned out I knew more people there than I initially realized.

That sensation stayed with me, though, because it wasn’t entirely new. Social anxiety has been a familiar sensation for most of my adult life, and walking into a room alone has never gotten easier, no matter how many times I’ve done it. So when I see someone standing on their own at the edge of a room, I recognize it. I make a point to start up a conversation.

And what I’ve noticed is that other people at these events pay it forward. They introduce you to someone else. They make space. And I think that’s because they’ve watched Simona, Alessandra, and Francesca do it, genuinely, every single time.

“When you belong,” Alessandra told me, near the end of our conversation, “you can just say what you want to say. You don’t have to think about it first.”

That’s it, really. That’s what a year in Chicago has taught me, and what Cool Beans, at its best, manages to manufacture out of thin air: the feeling that you don’t have to perform, translate yourself, or earn your place. You just show up and know that you’ll meet someone there.

Cool Beans hosts monthly events across Chicago and publishes a weekly newsletter for expats and internationals living in the city. Follow them on Substack and Instagram to find out what’s next.

I’ve been turning that question over ever since, and I think the answer has less to do with the bike than with what it carried: an identity, a city, and a man named Pol.

I’ve been getting around cities on bikes since my sophomore year of college, when I met a cute hipster who lived on the other side of town and used his bike to get everywhere. Naturally, I needed to do the same.

By the time I landed in Madrid, a bike was non-negotiable. I bought a crappy second-hand one assuming I’d ride it for a year. Then Barcelona came calling with a job offer, and the bike came with me. I loaded it into a van alongside a small jungle’s worth of plants and two friends good enough to help me move without being asked twice.

One morning I pulled up to the office with a flat tire and walked into El Bon Pedal - the nearest shop still open during lunch (which in Spain counts as a minor miracle). The guy behind the counter was friendly, the shop was cute, and he told me to come back to pick it up at seven.

When I returned, he’d fixed my flat… and he’d put a bell on the bike.

A bell. That’s it. Pol didn’t upsell me, didn’t ask for a review, didn’t send a follow-up email. He just did something small and unrequested that said: I see you. That’s the whole playbook, honestly.

That was all it took. I was a loyal customer from that moment on.

For the next year, any time I had an issue with the bike, I brought it to Pol. Then the climbing gym in the center of the city closed, and I was forced to make the trek out to what I jokingly called “Mordor.” Google Maps promised a thirty minute ride but my clunky honker of a bicycle laughed at that estimate and it typically took me forty-five.

I needed a new bike. I told Pol, borrowed a multi-tool from him to lower the seat for a test ride on a bike I was eyeing from a friend at the gym, and then promptly fell twenty feet and broke my wrist in a climbing accident.

When I could finally walk again, I brought the tool back to Pol and sheepishly told him I wouldn’t be buying the bike I’d been considering as the drop handlebars seemed too aggressive for my newly fragile wrist. He nodded, thought for a second, and said: “I think I have the bike for you.”

He disappeared into the back of the shop and came out with a sleek black brand-less single-speed. I took one look at it and assumed there was no way. He told me to take it for a spin.

I could FLY. I shaved fifteen minutes off the ride to Mordor and never looked back.

Over the next six years, that bike and I navigated Barcelona together. Pol installed a self-locking mechanism on the tires and a chain on the seat so they couldn’t be nicked. He protected it like it mattered. And it did.

I wore my Bon Pedal tote bag everywhere… only to find out after I moved to the US that “bon pedal” is Catalan slang for getting absolutely hammered. A detail Pol never thought to mention.

Any excuse to stop by the shop, I took it. A flat tire, a gear check, passing by for a catch-up. Over years, I could drop by with a puncture and Pol would fix it on the spot, no fuss. It was the kind of relationship that becomes one of the small anchors of a life in the city.

When I think about el cariño que le tengo a esa bicicleta (the tenderness I feel for that bike), I realize most of it wasn’t really about the bike at all.

It was about what the bike gave me: the freedom to move through the city on my own terms, to be the kind of person who arrives everywhere windswept and locks up outside. An identity I’d been building since that college hipster first made cycling seem like the obvious way to get around.

And it was about Pol. A relationship that started with a flat tire and was sealed by an unnecessary bell.

I found out my bike had been stolen on a visit back to Barcelona - a friend of a friend had borrowed it and locked it up carelessly. When I shared my disappointment, one person responded with cruelty. Pol, a man I pay to fix my tires, lent me his absurdly nice carbon fiber bike for a few days without a second thought.

As I rode through the city on it, I kept waiting to feel the loss more acutely. But what I mostly felt was gratitude.

The bike was just a bike. What came with it wasn’t.

When I think about the highlights of that trip, it wasn’t a particular party, dinner, or event. It was the collection of ordinary moments shared with friends: bumping into someone I love in the plaza or on the street, sharing a walk (or even just part of one), someone coming over to sit on my sofa and talk about everything and nothing.

No agenda. Just hanging out.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve overcomplicated friendship. In an era of curated plans and Instagram-worthy gatherings, connection can start to feel like something that needs to be produced rather than something that simply happens between people who make space for each other.

When I think back to my lonely chapter, I realize these moments of shared nothingness were the moments I craved the most.Doing absolutely nothing with people who accept me exactly as I am. No performance required. Just existing, together, in the quiet ordinariness of an unremarkable afternoon.

There’s something about the unstructured moments that creates the conditions for real intimacy. When there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to hide behind. The conversation has nowhere to go except inward - towards the things that are actually on our minds, the concerns we’ve been carrying, the fears we haven’t said out loud yet. The silence isn’t awkward; it’s generous. It makes room.

I’ve noticed that my deepest conversations with friends rarely happen at the dinner table. They happen in the car afterwards, or on the walk home, or lying on the floor of someone’s living room at midnight.

These are the moments that bring us closest.

This isn’t an argument against dinner parties or celebrations - those things have their place and their joy. It’s more of a quiet plea to resist the idea that friendship requires orchestration. That we need a reason, a plan, a venue. That showing up in a meaningful way means showing up with something to offer.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is simply be near them. To take a walk with no destination. To sit in comfortable silence. To say, without saying it: I don’t need you to be anything other than what you are right now.

Barcelona reminded me that what I’m actually most hungry for is the slow accumulation of unremarkable time spent with people I love. The quotidian made sacred, simply by being shared.

As I sit writing this in my notebook on a terrace in a bikini, I can confirm: the sun and temperatures of Barcelona in February are an absolute gift.

It has been a joy seeing my dearest friends, training with my Crossfit team, escaping to the mountains a mere 1.5 hours away to climb, shopping, eating, and drinking at all my regular spots, walking through the pedestrian streets, people watching in plazas… and yet, this isn’t home anymore.

So much has remained the same, a few things have changed. I still feel a sense of belonging and familiarity, a warmth from most everyone I encounter… but something has fundamentally shifted in how I relate to this city.

So why doesn’t it feel like home? I’ve basically picked up my old routine. I see the same people - close friends, loose ties, the coffee shop folks and bartenders that create that deeper sense of neighborhood belonging. (Something I’m still building in Chicago. I don’t yet have a local spot where I know la gente, but I think that’s less a failure of the city and more just a matter of time.)

In my mind, it’s always been the people and relationships that make a place feel like home. And I still have those here. So what’s changed?

I’ve always been a nester. I love making a space feel warm and cozy, and I wondered at first if the short-term rental was the culprit. But the place I’m staying is perfectly comfortable, quite similar to my old flat. That’s not it.

I wondered if it was routine. But I’ve slipped back into rhythms here almost effortlessly. I even went to my old climbing gym on a Tuesday (genuinely forgetting that Tuesdays used to be my climbing days before I switched to the gym in Gava) and was pleasantly surprised to find that I knew at least 10 people there that I hadn’t coordinated to climb with. As soon as I walked in, I saw faces I’d seen twice a week for nearly three years. Not close friends, but the kind of acquaintances you can only accumulate over time in a place: people I’d worked problems with on plastic, shared beta with, celebrated sends with. Some look older. Some look exactly the same. Two have babies now.

I’ve even bumped into 4 people on the streets since being back.

Part of what I’ve always loved about life here is how low the friction is. Friendship in Europe, and in Barcelona especially, doesn’t require planning. You walk to someone’s apartment, you hang out for an hour, you walk somewhere else. Don’t want to invite folks over? The plaza does the work for you; it’s a gathering spot that requires no host, no reservation, no occasion. The bar around the corner might have terrible lighting and plastic stools, but it has people in it, of all ages and backgrounds. There’s always somewhere to go that doesn’t require spending a lot of money or traveling very far. The fancy cocktail bar and the crappy neighborhood bar exist within the same few blocks, and both have guests.

In the US, and in Chicago, I sometimes feel like the hangout is organized around the venue rather than the people. Which isn’t inherently wrong but it does require more coordination, more commitment, more distance. The spontaneity that makes friendship feel easy gets engineered out of it.

And yet knowing all of this and genuinely preferring the European way of life, I still know that this isn’t home anymore.

As I press myself to identify why that is, sitting on this terrace with the February sun on my shoulders, I’ve come to think: home isn’t where your people are, or where your routines live, or even where your history is. Home is where your future is pointing. Barcelona is a story I’ve already lived - a beautiful one, one I’m deeply grateful for, one I’ll keep returning to. But I know how it goes. Chicago is still being written.

The moment home shifted wasn’t when I booked my flight back to the States. It was when I decided, quietly and then all at once, that I was building something new. The belonging I felt here took years to accumulate: the best friends who are perfectly content sitting with you on your sofa, the Tuesday/Thursday climbing crew, the coffee shop regulars, the bartender who remembers you passing by on your bicycle nearly every weeknight for 5 years. This didn’t appear overnight, and it won’t in Chicago either. But it will come. It always does… for those willing to show up long enough to become a regular.

That, I think, is the whole game: stop waiting to feel at home, and start doing the things that will make you one. The rest (the friends, the bartender who knows your order, the Tuesday crew) follows.

I moved to Barcelona nearly a decade ago without knowing a soul and was lucky enough to be immediately welcomed into a group of Argentinians who invited me to every gathering, every dinner, every spontaneous plan. They understood what it meant to be far from home, but more than that, they seemed to instinctively know how to make room for one more person at the table.

I quickly learned they weren’t just being kind to me specifically. This was simply how they lived.

Culturally, they are some of the most welcoming and inclusive people I know. Beyond just my personal experience, survey data consistently shows Latin Americans ranking among the highest in the world for social support and community ties. When I think of my Latino friends, they tend to roll deep with a crew. They have best friends but also extended circles of people who show up for each other, who gather regularly, and who treat friendship as abundant (which it is)!!!

In many Latin American communities, life is structured around the group rather than the individual. People walk to local shops, chat with neighbors, and invite one another into their homes. Festivals and holidays spill into streets and plazas, reinforcing social ties in ways that feel increasingly out of reach in American life. Even distance doesn’t stop this. My Latino friends send voice messages all the time, keeping the conversation going with their actual voices instead of just typing.

Meanwhile, Americans get into our cars, drive home to our separate houses, and wonder why we’re so lonely. We talk endlessly about the epidemic of isolation, about wanting connection, about rebuilding neighborhood fabric and social trust.

And yet, we’re shutting out the people who actually know how to build the thing we claim to want: rich communities, a sense of belonging, neighborhoods where people look out for one another.

The irony of it all is too much to watch.

Which makes the current moment even more absurd: Latin culture is everywhere in American life right now. Bad Bunny just played the Super Bowl Halftime Show. A Puerto Rican artist who sings in Spanish, is one of the biggest global stars in music, breaking streaming records while staying rooted in his language and identity.’

This isn’t happening at the margins. Bad Bunny has proven that it’s mainstream. And yet we’re treating the people carrying this culture as threats to be removed rather than neighbors to be welcomed.

The loss here isn’t just moral. It’s practical. At a time when American social trust is at historic lows, when we’re more isolated and atomized than ever, we’re rejecting the people who have actual, lived expertise in building the thing we’re desperately missing.

As I watched Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I couldn’t help but notice how he placed community at the forefront. People were on stage doing every day things: selling cocos, playing dominos, getting their nails done. An actual wedding even took place! Bad Bunny was the star, but in a way that elevated everyone around him. He even whispered into the camera that he got where he is because he never stopped believing in himself, and that we should do the same. When he shouted “God Bless America” and then listed out all of the countries that form part of Americas, I had chills. This is an artist who understands the power of community and is using his art to remind us of what already exists in Latino communities across America.

I recently spent a day in Little Village, a predominantly Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. The shopkeepers were incredibly friendly, welcoming, and happy to charlar. La Catedral, a local restaurant, was buzzing with groups that gathered around tables in español y inglés. Despite the bitter cold keeping most people indoors, there was still this sense of warmth and life - the kind that comes from spaces built for gathering.

I don’t say this to romanticize or to suggest other neighborhoods lack kindness. But there’s something specific happening in communities structured around these values that I believe can be reinforced and highlighted elsewhere.

And now ICE is tearing through these neighborhoods, spreading fear that will hollow out exactly what makes them vibrant. People will stop gathering in public spaces. They’ll stop walking to the corner store. They’ll try their best to stay invisible. This serves no one.

If you live near one of these communities, now would be a good time to show up. Spend money at local businesses. Be visible. Be kind. Remind people that not everyone sees them as a threat to be removed. Because what’s being destroyed isn’t just individual lives; it’s the social fabric we keep saying we want to repair.

When I reached the doors, I turned back once more… and there he was, still looking at me. I smiled. He waved. So I waved back.

It was cold outside and we were both bundled up in our giant parkas, but I immediately felt warm.

It wasn’t a conversation and not a single word was spoken. Just smiles, a wave, and that rare feeling of being seen by another human being in the middle of an ordinary errand. And yet, I carried that thirty-second exchange with me all week.

I’ve been practicing the art of what I call “catching smiles” for years now. It’s a non-invasive, low-effort bid for connection. A way of saying “I see you” without lifting a finger or opening your mouth. Just eye contact and the smallest shift of a facial expression.

But the fact that I’ve gamified this fundamentally simple element of human connection should tell us something.

When I’m out playing “catching smiles,” I’m paying attention and keeping score. How many smiles will I catch today? Who will smile back? Who will look away?

Some people light up immediately, as though they’ve been waiting all day for permission to soften (much like the grocery store gentleman). Some people glance away, guarded or preoccupied. But most? Most don’t ever make contact to begin with. They’re mid-text, mid-thought, mid-scroll. Or they’re just somewhere else entirely, even though we’re standing three feet apart in the produce section. The opportunity to give or receive a smile never even materializes. We’ve designed it out of the interaction entirely.

This pattern raises the question: why does something so natural (literally hardwired into our biology) now require conscious effort?

We’re built for connection. Our brains evolved in small groups where eye contact meant safety, belonging, and survival. For most of human history, not acknowledging someone in your environment would have been the anomaly.

And yet here I find myself, treating eye contact and shared smiles like a scavenger hunt.

When did smiling at strangers become performative, risky, or optional? It’s as though we’ve collectively learned that it’s better not to initiate, impose, or have the slightest opportunity to be misunderstood.

So we shrink our bids for connection until they’re nearly invisible.

But I’m not. I keep playing my silly little game. Partially because I truly find it to be a fascinating social experiment but also because I hope that each smile I catch is a reminder to that person that we’re all just waiting for permission to be human with each other again.

This game isn’t about winning (although a double digit smile excursion is always to be celebrated). For me, this game is about being the first person who makes eye contact in a world that’s nearly forgotten how.

I’m not suggesting we all become aggressive smilers, forcing connection on unwilling strangers at Jewel-Osco. But maybe we could start small. Look up once today. Catch someone’s eye and see if you can catch just one smile.

Not because you’re trying to solve loneliness or fix modern disconnection in one grocery store trip, but because thirty seconds of warmth in a cold parking lot actually matters. It mattered to me. It might matter to them.

And who knows? Maybe they’ll turn around too.

After eight years living in Spain and quite literally discovering myself through the language, it felt like Spanish had firmly woven itself into my identity. I showed up differently in Spanish and found myself better able to access my confidence and pride. Losing that wasn’t an option.

Yes, I continued to charlar with my friends in Spain but it’s not quite the same as striking up a conversation with someone in real life.

So I chased it. Relentlessly.

A Lyft driver with a Hispanic name? I’m tossing out palabritas en español. Someone at the grocery store on a call in Spanish? I’m lingering nearby, hoping for an opening. I wasn’t trying to network or build community… I just desperately wanted an opportunity to speak the language I love..

What I didn’t expect was that this singular, slightly obsessive pursuit would lead me to some of the most meaningful relationships I made this year. It turns out, when you chase what you love with wild abandon, your people find you.

These stories are a thank you to the gente que entró en mi vida en 2025 and a reminder that sometimes the best connections come not from trying to connect, but from refusing to let go of what makes you feel alive.

You said sí, not yes

The first story begins in an elevator.

After an exhausting week of networking, I decided to listen to my body and left a networking event a bit early. As I stepped into the elevator, I asked the woman beside me a question I can’t remember… but her response? Clear as day: “Sí.”

I grinned from ear to ear, “you said sí not yes. De donde eres?”

Turns out she’s from Chile, echoing my final year in Barcelona, when I found myself surrounded by some of the most amazing Chilean friends. We hit it off immediately and walked around the block talking nonsense with each other. Keen to get to know her better, we agreed to meet the following week for a drink.

I suggested the one bar I knew where we could sit outside undisturbed: The Dandy Crown. Over drinks, we talked about our work with startups and the various ideas I wanted to bring to life. When I mentioned one concept that excited me but felt too daunting to tackle alone, she looked at me and said: “That one!”

The next day, we bought the Chicago license for Fuckup Nights and we were off to the races, building a community where people can show up authentically and share their stories of failure in order to celebrate the resilience and lessons that come from it.

Originating in Mexico City, it seemed right that two hispanophiles would be the ones bringing this event to Chicago, and let me tell you, Sofia knows how to put on an event.

People who attended our first Fuckup Nights remarked on how welcoming and inclusive it felt. I imagine the irreverent name helped set expectations, but it was Sofia’s eye for detail and my passion for cultivating real community that made the evening special. She thought about everything: the lighting that made people feel seen but not exposed, the way we arranged seating to encourage conversation, the careful balance between structure and spontaneity. Sofia was thinking about how people would feel walking through the door. That attention to ambiente and that intangible warmth was all her.

Enter Natalia

As we planned our first event, Sofia brought in her friend Natalia from Bolivia.

Natalia integrated into our team seamlessly, bringing an energy and operational focus that complimented me and Sofia.

The three of us have found a rhythm that feels rare: we challenge each other, trust each other, and genuinely enjoy spending time together. Our meetings flow in full Spanglish and my little heart swells with gratitude every time.

I’m excited about the community we’re building but am even more grateful to be building it alongside two women who turned a chance elevator encounter into something meaningful.

That same day, different building

The same morning I met Sofia, I met another woman walking into a Pilates networking event.

As we entered the building I heard her speaking to a friend and couldn’t help myself. “Are you from Spain?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yes!”

Nuria is from a small pueblo outside of Tarragona (about an hour from Barcelona) and I immediately started gushing about meeting another Catalana in Chicago.

We stayed in touch, and I found myself watching her content on Instagram and LinkedIn. This woman knows how to create authentic and engaging content. As someone who struggled to get in front of the camera to promote my own business, I figured I could learn a thing or two from her.

We grabbed coffee so I could pick her brain. Turns out, she’d recently pivoted her business and was focusing on helping female entrepreneurs get comfortable in front of the camera.

Bingo!

I’ve been working with Nuria over the past three months and it has been a joy and delight to partner with her as I prepare to find my own voice more confidently on screen. Not only is Nuria whip-smart with brilliant frameworks for strategically communicating with your target audience, but she is also fun and human… y me deja soltar palabras en español without skipping a beat.

Swiping right on Spanish

Earlier this summer, I decided that if I was writing about friendship in the modern age, I should probably try a friendship app.

Swiping for friends felt ridiculous… until I saw a profile that read: “Funny and open-minded Spanish girl looking for connections.”

Maria had just moved from the same Barcelona neighborhood as me, just two weeks after I left. We met (yes, at The Dandy Crown), and within minutes were swapping Gràcia stories and laughing about our parallel moves to the U.S.

A month later, she was living in my guest bedroom while apartment hunting. By the Fourth of July, she was meeting my family at the lake house.

My pursuit of Spanish didn’t just lead me to Maria. It gave us an instant foundation of shared experience, inside jokes, and a language that felt like home. She’s become one of those “2 a.m. friends” I wasn’t sure I’d find again.

(I wrote a piece about my experience on Bumble BFF here and a piece about what I think friendship apps get right and wrong here.)

Nearly a year into my new life in Chicago, I’m genuinely happy with the amount of Spanish I continue to speak in my daily life. But more than that, I’m grateful for what chasing that language has given me: business partners who share my vision, a creative collaborator who’s helping me grow, and a friend who feels like she’s always been part of my story.

You don’t find your people by forcing connection or following some networking playbook. You find them by chasing what makes you feel alive with wild abandon, curiosity, and a willingness to ask “¿De dónde eres?” to a stranger in an elevator.

These relationships feel like kismet, the kind that only appears when you stop searching for people and start honoring that which makes you feel most like yourself.

Sometimes your people are waiting in an elevator, or outside a pilates class, or on the other side of a swipe. You just have to be brave enough to say sí.

As the story goes, my mom booked a wellness retreat to escape the Chicago winter. She had gained some weight and wanted a place where she could kickstart good habits. She didn’t want anything fancy - she wanted something spiritual. So when a last-minute spot opened up at Rancho La Puerta, she took it because, as she put it, “she needed to get out of dodge.”

There was only one spot left, and she was fortunate to get it. Most people arrive at 11am, many of them return visitors who know the rhythms of the place. My mom got there around 3 or 4pm, not knowing any of this.

She was sitting in a chair by the pool, her back to the land, when she heard it: “Hello there!” in a musical, singing voice. She heard it again, “hello there,” and turned to see a strikingly beautiful woman walking toward her.

“Are you talking to me?” my mom asked.

“Yes! Welcome!” the woman said warmly. My mom asked if she worked there. “No, but I love visiting here,” she replied. My mom was called away to check in, and as they parted ways the beautiful woman said, “See you around.”

The next day, my mom was late to lunch because of an issue with her room. By the time she arrived, an hour late, the staff told her they could either seat her alone or place her at a table that was already on dessert.

That’s when she saw the woman from the pool again. “Hello! I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.

Her name was Carol. She looked like a model and had all the confidence in the world. Over lunch at a table of ten, my mom found herself surrounded by people working on their careers, writing books, living interesting lives. They shared ideas and life stories, and as they departed, Carol leaned in: “I’ll see you in the morning. Do you want to go on a hike?”

The next morning, Carol found my mom at breakfast. She invited her to try yoga for the first time. Carol was an experienced yogi, but she did the beginner class alongside my mom anyway. Afterward, they talked about journaling, investments, the businesses Carol had started. “I liked that kind of head,” my mom told me. “It matched my head.”

Carol had been a model years prior and gave my mom fashion and makeup tips. Two days into the retreat, she even gave her makeup.

But it was the evenings that sealed their friendship. After dinner that second night, Carol said, “Why don’t you come to my room? I have M&Ms.” She always brought M&Ms, knowing the desserts at the retreat were just okay. My mom went, telling herself she’d just have a few.

The next day, Carol upped the ante: “I also have wine.”

“I’m really trying to lose weight,” my mom protested.

“If you start the hike with me tomorrow morning, you’ll be able to have wine,” Carol countered. “You see the moon going down and the sun coming up.”

So that second night became M&Ms and wine.

On the third day, Carol proposed something even bolder: “Why don’t we go out to town tonight?”

“We can’t,” my mom said. “We’re in this compound.”

Carol smiled. “We’re going to get away and have some authentic Mexican food. And margaritas.”

And they did… with the full knowledge that they’d have to hike it off in the morning. From then on, Carol showed my mom the hidden scale in the back of the gym, the secret spots, the way to navigate this place she clearly loved.

By the next year, they’d stayed in touch. Carol was designing a farmhouse with enough room for our whole family to visit and be part of farm life together. There was always room for one more.

When I asked my mom what kind of friend Carol was, she paused. “An incredible friend. There was a deep sharing about the knowledge of life and wisdom of life. I grew and she grew from that friendship. A trusted confidant.”

What I only learned this year was that Carol had shared with her sisters before that trip that “she was going to Rancho La Puerta and she was going to make a friend.” There’s something so tender thinking about an adult woman on a mission to make a friend… and the fact that she chose my mother as her target and was intentional about making it happen. My mom didn’t know she was in the market for a friend. But Carol had made it her mission.

The story came up over Thanksgiving this year. Carol left this earth eight years ago, but her friendship with my mom blossomed into a beautiful web of connection. My family has spent many Thanksgivings at Carol’s family farm outside San Diego. They’ve become like extended family to us, all because of the closeness that began with M&Ms and wine at a wellness retreat.

Thanksgivings at the farm are beautiful not only because of the location, but because of how welcoming Carol’s family remains. The table is always open to anyone who wants to join: internationals, folks who live far from family, anyone who needs somewhere to share a meal. There’s always room for one more.

Carol’s welcoming legacy lives on. And it all started because she saw a woman sitting alone by a pool and sang out, “Hello there!”

After gaining 10 pounds in my first year in Spain (thanks to an enthusiastic relationship with jamón), I needed something a bit more than my yoga practice. Back in DC, I’d loved the strength training at Solidcore, but I never found a Spanish equivalent. When my boyfriend decided to try a drop-in class at the CrossFit box (gym) connected to his favorite coffee shop, I assumed it would be a one time thing.

After all, everything I’d heard about CrossFit was full of red flags: cult-like behavior, injury-prone workouts, aggressive gym bros.

So when he signed up for a month of classes after that first session, I was shocked. By his third week, my curiosity got the better of me. I had to go check it out for myself.

One drop-in session was all it took. The coach paid attention to my form. Students of all ages and fitness levels worked side by side. And most importantly, they made the workouts fun. That introduction in Madrid would spark a relationship with the sport that would become one of my foundational communities in Barcelona.

My CrossFit community in Barcelona was near and dear to my heart. After two years of consistent training, I came to view myself as a core member of that community - welcoming newcomers and maintaining the vibes. People from different countries and different ages all gathered together on Mondays and Wednesdays to work out in the park (writing about this here makes me realize that this deserves a future post).

When I moved to Chicago, I knew I would need to find my CrossFit home. But finding it turned out to be a bit more challenging than I anticipated.

The Search

Last summer, during a trial run in Chicago, I found a box that seemed promising. The coach modified workouts for my limitations. I started recognizing faces, exchanging hellos. I thought I’d found my spot.

When I returned for the holidays, I enthusiastically told everyone I’d be moving back in April. They smiled, nodded, and seemed happy to hear it.

But when April came and I started showing up regularly, something felt off. Nobody seemed to care that I was back. I hadn’t expected a parade, but I’d hoped for at least a flicker of recognition, maybe a “Hey, good to have you back!”

The silence was telling. I hadn’t built the connections I thought I had. It was time to start shopping around.

Walking Into Archetype

A friend from the climbing gym mentioned his wife went to Archetype CrossFit in Lakeview. I decided to give it a shot.

The moment I walked through the door, I could feel the energy of this place.

“Hey there, welcome!” The greeting came immediately. It wasn’t perfunctory, but genuine. The coach started chatting with me, asking about my background, making me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Then the workout began with something I’d never experienced at a box before: the question of the day.

“What food can you not live without?” the coach asked as we warmed up. Around the room, voices chimed in: pizza, pasta, BLT sandwiches, chocolate. It was silly, but brilliant. In less than five minutes, every person in that room had spoken, had been seen, and had taken up space.

After class, I found the owner, Matt Holden. “You’ve created something truly special here,” I told him. “I’m so glad to become a part of it.”

Building Something Special

Last week, I sat down with Matt to understand how he’d built Archetype and why it felt so different from every other CrossFit gym I’d tried.

His story started like many athletes’: team sports through college (lacrosse, in his case), then the jarring transition to traditional gyms after graduation. “I’d run on the treadmill, do some curls, not talk to anybody, then leave,” he told me. Sound familiar?

When he finally tried CrossFit despite his skepticism, something clicked. “It felt like being at practice again. There’s the other people in class who are kind of like your team, there’s the coach leading you through it.”

But Matt’s path to opening Archetype was anything but linear. After leaving a sales career that didn’t feel right, he worked at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, a restaurant group known for its community-focused, employee-forward approach. “That’s when it really clicked,” he said. “I want to have a small business. I love having a place to be in a community with people and having a local impact.”

The question then became: what kind of business?

For someone who’d found belonging through fitness, who’d discovered community in every new city through CrossFit gyms, the answer was obvious. When the gym he was coaching at closed during COVID, he saw his opportunity. In March 2022, Archetype opened its doors. The name

The Philosophy Behind the Welcome

What struck me most about Archetype wasn’t just the friendly atmosphere. Plenty of gyms claim to be welcoming. It was how intentionally Matt had designed belonging into every aspect of the experience.

Take those silly questions that start each class. “A lot of people roll their eyes at the question of the day,” Matt admitted with a laugh. “Especially when you’ve been coming for years. But every single day, each person gets the floor for a second. Everybody’s voice gets in the room.”

It’s a small thing. But in a fitness culture where people can attend the same gym for years without ever learning each other’s names, it’s brilliant.

There’s another practice I hadn’t even consciously noticed until Matt pointed it out: “Whenever anyone walks through the door, you say, ‘Hey, [name], welcome.’”

It reminded him of his mom coming home from work when he was growing up. “She’d walk in the door and go, ‘HelloooOooOoOo!’ to announce to everybody she was home. Every single time it put a smile on your face,” he said. “That’s the feeling I want everybody to have when they walk in here.”

Then there’s the workout structure itself. Where many CrossFit gyms post one workout and expect everyone to figure out their own modifications, Archetype uses a tiered system with different levels that allow beginners and experienced athletes to work side by side, each challenged appropriately.

“The philosophy is accommodating each individual and what they need more than just the outcome of the workout,” Matt explained. “You’re coming in and you had knee surgery so you can’t jump on a box? Here’s what we’re going to do for you. Here are your options.”

This isn’t revolutionary fitness science. But it represents a fundamental shift in perspective from “what’s on the board today” to “what does each person in this room need?”

The Village Effect

What’s perhaps most remarkable about Archetype is how much of it Matt didn’t plan.

Jeremy, one of the coaches, was actually the first person to sign up as a member when the gym was still under construction. “He’s been here for every single part of it,” Matt said. “And he’s had great ideas. He’s contributed every step of the way.”

Like the annual drag brunch, which was Jeremy’s idea and is now a beloved tradition. Or Jeremy’s barbell class. Or Tajuan’s gymnastics class.

“So much of what we are is because of the team and the great ideas other people have brought in,” Matt reflected. “I’ve tried to do the best I can at hearing those ideas and giving people runway to make it work.”

He paused, then added something that stuck with me: “It’s truly like a village coming together.”

Creating Space for Everyone

We talked about the Lakeview community and how Archetype sits at the intersection of Boystown’s gay community, a thriving Jewish population, and a significant senior community near the lake.

“It has been so cool to provide a space where everyone can come in and feel confident being themselves,” Matt said. He estimated that at least half the gym’s members come from the Boystown community.

Then he said something remarkably self-aware: “I’m a straight, white cis man. That is who I am. And so I know that my walk of life is different than someone who’s gay or trans or whatever.”

He spoke about feeling privileged to empower coaches like Tajuan and Jeremy, part of the gay community, to welcome others in ways he knows he can’t, despite his best efforts. “Having people who have a better skill set than me in terms of relating with other people... that’s been really cool.”

It was a moment of humility I’ve rarely heard from gym owners. An acknowledgment that building an inclusive space isn’t just about good intentions but about stepping back and elevating voices that can create belonging more effectively than your own.

The Work Ahead

Archetype recently launched a Fitness for Seniors program, a twice weekly, 45-minute class focused on building strength. Within two months, they’re regularly seeing 10 people per class.

“Somebody mentioned the other day that one of the members is going to Florida for the winter,” Matt told me, his eyes lighting up.” And another member said, ‘Oh well, before you go, we should all go out to lunch.’” He pumped his fist. “That’s the sort of thing where I’m like, yes, it’s working.”

There are plans for a kids program eventually, as the community’s members get married and start families. There’s Karly, the nutritionist who recently joined the team. There’s Dr. Jordan, the physical therapist who runs a clinic out of the space.

But mostly, there’s the daily work of keeping the doors open. “Since we’ve opened, five or six CrossFit gyms in Chicago have closed,” Matt said soberly. “That just tells you it’s not a given that we get to keep doing what we’re doing.”

What keeps him motivated? “Helping people make progress,” he said immediately. “Watching people get stronger, get better range of motion, move more confidently.”

He told me about Jesse (one of my pals in the 12pm class), who came in with shoulder issues he’d navigated for years, thinking he’d never lift well again. Now he’s stronger and more functional than ever.

“Somebody coming in and thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll do my best, but I’m probably never going to get past X’ and helping them actually get past that? That’s just so cool.”

My Own Journey

I’ve been a member of Archetype for about six months now. I don’t have best friends in the class yet, but I smile when I think about how long it took to build my strongest CrossFit relationships in Barcelona. Those deep friendships I treasure now? They didn’t exist for the first year. They were built over time, through consistent showing up, through shared struggle and celebration.

After 6 months, I’m starting to see those relationships grow at Archetype. I know the 12pm regulars and look forward to seeing them on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

There’s something profound about celebrating a PR with people who know you’ve been working toward it. About having someone remember that you’re working on pull-ups, and asking how it’s going. About walking in on a tough day and hearing “Hey, Lauren, welcome” and meaning it.

Matt told me he worries sometimes about pulling back the curtain too much, about explaining the intentional design behind the welcome. I told him I don’t think that diminishes it at all. If anything, knowing that someone thought carefully about how to make me feel like I belong makes me appreciate it more.

Community doesn’t just happen. It requires intention, attention, and daily practice. It requires leaders who are willing to step back and empower others. It requires a philosophy that puts people before workouts, connection before competition, welcome before exclusivity.

It requires someone to decide that when you walk through the door, you matter enough to be greeted by name.

That’s what Matt has built at Archetype. Not just a gym, but a practice in belonging. A village coming together, one silly question at a time.

And on the days when the workout feels impossible, when I question why I signed up for this, when I’m take a breather and wonder if I can finish, that’s when I hear it.

“Come on, Lauren. Let’s go.”

And I remember: this is what I came for.

I’m riding and I’m looking out and I’m so glad that people are out enjoying themselves.

Having fun. Smiling

Because the world is a very dark place.

With everything going on in the world, we need this fun day.

Take a break from everything and don’t worry so much.

Just have fun today.

Just relax.

Everyone is smiling and having fun.

Just smile.

My goodness take a break.

Breathe.

Everyone was out in an excellent mood. Kids and parents were dressed up. Folks were connecting. Laughing. Eating candy. Saying hello. Having a chit chat.

There’s something beautiful that the phrase that everyone repeats is “Happy Halloween.” It’s almost as though it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein everyone is wishing each other a happy evening and so it truly becomes a happy evening.

It had been about 8 years since I celebrated a proper Halloween - the kind where the entire city transforms, where you can’t walk a block without seeing decorations, where everyone is in on it. Spain has Halloween, sure, but it’s less of a cultural moment.

As Halloween approached, I noticed myself get increasingly excited about the holiday. As the date approached, more and more homes began to set up their decorations and it became clear that the neighborhood of Lincoln Park takes Halloween seriously.

Our next door neighbor turned decorating into performance art by revealing new items each day. First came the skeletons positioned at a dining table as if mid-conversation. Then a massive caution sign. A projector threw a ghost into the window. A witch dangled from the tree branches. RIP signs sprouted from the soil. Caution tape wrapped the fence. Each time I passed the house, I began a search for the new item and couldn’t help but smile as I imagined the grown-ass adult placing her Halloween item each evening.

It became my thing during the weeks leading up to the holiday. As I walked around the neighborhood, I would smile thinking of all of these adults getting sparks of joy from the holiday. It reminded me of my mother - the queen of Halloween in our house. While she wouldn’t dress up, she’d put on her Halloween shirt and our house would always be decked out with Halloween decorations.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes at 11, I remember lying in the hospital bed thinking about how much Halloween was going to suck going forward. How was I going to enjoy this candy-focused holiday when I now needed to count every single carbohydrate that enters my body?

That October my mom swiftly took action and found a way to make sure that I’d enjoy the holiday. We hung black plastic tarps through our garage and created a little maze/haunted house. If her objective was to get me to eat less candy, it worked. Instead of trick or treating, my friends and I were creepy little actors scaring adults and children from the neighborhood all weekend. I think she may have been trying to get me to eat less candy, but I think her real objective was to make sure I continued to love the holiday.

Honestly, Mom (because I know you’re reading this), mission accomplished.

That Lyft driver was right. The world is dark. But here’s what I learned watching my neighbors transform their homes, remembering my mom building a haunted house to save my Halloween, seeing families spill onto sidewalks with plastic pumpkins: we need our silly little holidays. We need excuses to greet strangers, to become someone else for a night, to collectively agree that for one night, we’re all going to look each other in the eyes, smile at each other, and wish each other a happy evening.

My mom understood this at my bedside in that hospital room. That Lyft driver understood it too. Halloween isn’t really about the candy or the costumes. It’s about grown ass adults deciding that creating joy - for themselves, their neighbors, random kids they’ll never see again - matters enough to haul skeletons out of storage and spend an evening in the cold.

It’s a lot easier to build friendships when you’re close to your friends. Let’s grab a coffee. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go climb together at the gym and talk about our week. Easy.

But what happens when you can’t get together? You’re stuck with text messages, voice notes, and the occasional video call.

The Asynchronous Friendship

I made many of my closest friends while living in Spain. After a chapter where I thought I didn’t know how to make friends, I feel unbelievably lucky to have connected with so many people that I deeply care about. I wouldn’t trade these friends for anything.

But damn, is it hard to stay connected.

I listen to your audio messages as soon as I wake up. Then I need to craft my reply. I want to thoughtfully respond to every single detail that you shared… and so I take my time… sometimes a month.

I finally re-listen. I write down notes about the points I want to respond to. But, yes, it’s sometimes a month after you first sat down to leave me your audio update. Is anything even relevant then?!?

Regardless, I respond. I respond with the care that shows I really listened. I heard everything you said. Then I give you a whiplash reply with all of the ridiculous things going on in my life.

Social media helps. I respond to your stories and posts - partly because I’m interested in them, partly to hold that light thread between us as tightly as possible.

The Math of Friendship

This has all got me thinking: how many relationships can one really manage at a time?

Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar is famous for “Dunbar’s number” - the number of stable relationships people can cognitively maintain at once. The proposed number is about 150, though it ranges between 100 and 250.

These layers exist because our time for social interaction is limited. You have to decide how to invest that time. The strength of our relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.

Dunbar’s number and Hall’s findings make it clear: it takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a close friend. Close friends are expensive in terms of time investment to maintain.

The Healthy Pruning

The fact that it’s challenging to maintain friendships means that you have to prioritize people and also accept that some people will become more distant when the distance is greater. Dunbar describes this natural ebb and flow as a “healthy pruning.” Don’t be fazed by the loss of friends. It’s part of the journey.

But if you care about the relationship, then it means following up and responding. Even if it takes a month. Even if the audio message you’re replying to feels outdated. Even if you’re juggling a hundred other relationships across time zones.

Maintaining friendships across an ocean takes work, time, and effort. It takes patience on both sides - mine to craft the response that shows I heard you, yours to wait for that response to arrive.

So why do I share this? Perhaps because I want to ask you and thank you, my cross-ocean friends, for your patience. For staying in the slow dance with me. For understanding that a month-long gap doesn’t mean I care any less.