The People I Was Looking For Before I Knew I Was Collecting Them

Originally written before my life changed. Revisited from the other side of everything I thought I knew.

Good friends are like fuel for the soul.

I wrote some version of that sentence years ago, before I understood just how much those words would eventually mean to me.

Before grief.

Before becoming a widow.

Before losing a career I thought would remain part of my identity.

Before lawsuits, financial uncertainty, reinvention, rebuilding, Broken Arrow Dancewear, and The People We Collect.

Before my life split itself so definitively into before and after.

When I originally wrote this, I thought I was writing about friendship.

Reading it now, I realize I was writing about something much bigger.

I was trying to understand connection.

I was trying to understand why some people enter our lives and become family while others can share years of our history and somehow become strangers.

I was trying to understand why I needed people so deeply.

And without knowing it yet, I was beginning to understand the people we collect.

The Friendships I Thought I Was Missing

For most of my adult life, I looked around and wondered how other people seemed to create these enormous, lifelong circles.

The 30-person ski trips.

Family lake weekends with friends from high school.

College girlfriends who still vacation together decades later.

Wedding parties filled with people who had known each other since childhood.

I've never been a bridesmaid.

I've only attended a handful of weddings as an adult.

And for years, that bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

I wondered what I was doing wrong.

Why were those relationships so important to me when I seemed to continually surround myself with people whose definition of friendship looked completely different?

Eventually, I started noticing something.

A lot of it connected back to my career.

When Your Career Becomes Your World

I remember being told in the police academy to keep friends outside of law enforcement.

At the time, I didn't completely understand why.

Then I became the cop with the good stories at the party.

People wanted to hear about the crazy calls.

The unbelievable nights.

The things most people only see on television.

But being interesting at a party isn't the same thing as being known.

I sometimes wondered whether being a police officer created an invisible wall between me and everyone else.

No one necessarily wants to tell their cop friend about the weed they smoked at a party or the time they almost got arrested.

I never intended to judge anyone.

But that doesn't mean people didn't assume I would.

So naturally, I gravitated toward other people in the profession.

People who understood the hours.

The humor.

The adrenaline.

The things we saw.

The things we couldn't unsee.

And there were incredible friendships there.

Some of the memories I made during those years will stay with me forever.

But eventually I understood the academy advice.

When everyone around you sees the world through the same lens, you can forget there are other ways to look at it.

The outside world gives you perspective.

Mike reminded me of that often.

The Strange Intimacy of Law Enforcement

Law enforcement creates an incredibly specific kind of closeness.

You can spend twelve or fourteen hours beside someone.

You can experience something traumatic together and then eat terrible diner food at 2 a.m.

You can laugh until you cry.

Argue about life.

Debate everything.

Talk about absolutely nothing.

And then walk into a situation where you would quite literally trust that person with your life.

Those relationships feel enormous because, in those moments, they are.

What confused me was how easily some of that closeness disappeared when the shift ended, the assignment changed, someone promoted, someone transferred, or someone retired.

I would think:

We would've died for each other.

But apparently we couldn't text each other on Christmas.

That disconnect stayed with me.

It still does.

And being a woman made some of it more complicated.

I spent most of my career surrounded by men.

Those were often the conversations I understood.

That was my environment.

Meanwhile, I increasingly found myself craving relationships with women who understood parts of me that couldn't exist inside a squad briefing or patrol car.

I wanted girlfriends.

Real girlfriends.

I wanted weekend trips.

Neighborhood gatherings.

Phone calls that had nothing to do with work.

People who knew my children.

People who knew my husband.

People who knew me.

Not Sergeant Andrea.

Not Officer Andrea.

Not the person who could handle the crisis.

Just me.

When Friendship Starts Feeling Transactional

As the years passed, my priorities changed.

I became increasingly tired of relationships that felt based on convenience.

Who could help whom?

Who had access?

Who was useful?

Who could get someone ahead?

I didn't want to feel useful.

I wanted to feel loved.

I remember asking myself questions like:

How can someone say they'd die for me but we can't find fifteen minutes to talk this weekend?

Or:

How can some of my fondest memories involve people who don't even send a happy holiday text anymore?

Those questions hurt me.

Sometimes they made me resentful.

But they also started teaching me something I didn't understand at the time:

Not every meaningful relationship is a permanent one.

Some people are incredibly important to a particular chapter.

That doesn't automatically mean they're supposed to appear in every chapter afterward.

I wasn't very good at accepting that.

I liked holding on.

I liked history.

I liked continuity.

I liked believing that if I loved someone well enough, friendship would automatically survive changing jobs, moves, marriages, children, schedules and life.

Life has since taught me otherwise.

I Get My Energy From People

One thing about me hasn't changed.

I love people.

I love big holiday gatherings.

Last-minute dinners.

Neighbors wandering over.

Long phone calls.

Birthday parties.

Family packed around a table.

Friends sitting in the kitchen long after everyone should have gone home.

Connection gives me energy.

But at some point, I had to learn the difference between connection and consumption.

Not every relationship deserved unlimited access to me.

Not every phone call needed to be answered.

Not every crisis belonged to me.

Not every friendship was healthy simply because it was intense.

I had to create boundaries.

And I hated it.

Boundaries felt unnatural to someone who received so much of her energy from other people.

But eventually I realized something important:

If a relationship repeatedly takes me away from the people and things I value most, I have to look at the cost.

There were times I spent hours being the person someone else needed while my own kids needed bedtime stories, baths, attention, or simply their mom.

At the time, I thought being endlessly available made me a great friend.

Looking back, I'm not sure it always made me the person I wanted to be at home.

But I Needed Somewhere to Put It Too

The truth is more complicated than saying I simply needed better boundaries.

Because I needed those people too.

I needed somewhere to put what I was carrying.

You can't come home from witnessing horrific things and process them with your toddler.

You don't want to describe the darkest corners of humanity to your children.

And even with a loving spouse, there were things I wanted to shield Mike from.

Part of me wanted our home to remain untouched by some of the things I saw.

So friendships with people who understood became a release valve.

They didn't need the backstory.

They already knew.

For a long time, I didn't understand what years of carrying those experiences were doing to my mind, body, relationships and personality.

Eventually, I did.

The Version of Me I Didn't Want to Become

I became angry.

Exhausted.

Guarded.

Frustrated.

I found myself craving connection and simultaneously pushing people away.

Work came home with me even when I didn't talk about it.

Frustration spilled into my family.

I became physically tired.

Emotionally tired.

I stopped recognizing pieces of myself.

I wanted to be the mom in yoga pants at school pickup talking about the latest Netflix show.

I wanted to obsess over a ridiculous Martha Stewart dinner recipe.

I wanted to remember Spirit Week.

I wanted to plan trips.

I wanted friendships that weren't built around trauma, hierarchy, politics or survival.

I wanted to be softer.

And I was terrified I had forgotten how.

I Started Looking for Another Way

Eventually I began looking around for mentors.

Role models.

People whose lives looked more like what I wanted mine to become.

And one uncomfortable realization kept returning:

There were fewer and fewer people in my professional world whose entire lives I wanted to emulate.

That mattered to me.

I didn't want to sacrifice my family for a job.

I didn't want my identity to become inseparable from my title.

I didn't want to wake up years later and realize I had spent all my energy serving an institution while the people I loved received whatever was left.

At the time, I wrote:

My husband needs me more than my job does.

That sentence is hard to read now.

Because I didn't know how finite that time would be.

I didn't know our story would end the way it did.

I didn't know that someday I would give almost anything for one more ordinary night when Mike and I were worrying about work, money, kids, dinner or schedules.

But I'm grateful I understood—even then—that the people mattered more.

I didn't always live it perfectly.

None of us do.

But I knew.

So I Left

Eventually I decided I had to go.

Actually, that's not quite right.

I ran.

I needed a plan.

I needed financial stability.

I needed my family.

I needed friendships.

I needed space to discover who I was outside of a badge and rank.

At the time, leaving law enforcement felt like one of the most dramatic reinventions of my life.

That's almost funny to write now.

Because I had absolutely no idea how many times life was going to ask me to reinvent myself.

And Then Life Changed Everything

There is the woman who originally wrote this blog.

And there is the woman writing this paragraph today.

They are the same person.

But they aren't.

The woman who wrote the original version thought she understood major transitions.

She thought leaving a career was starting over.

Then life showed her what starting over could actually mean.

I lost Mike.

I watched the life we'd built change almost overnight.

I had to help our children grieve while trying to understand my own grief.

There were legal battles.

Financial uncertainty.

Another career loss.

Questions about identity.

Questions about relationships.

Questions about home.

Questions about what stays and what you let go.

And once again, I found myself asking:

Who are my people?

Only this time, the question wasn't theoretical.

The answer mattered.

The People Who Show Up When Life Gets Ugly

Grief has a strange way of clarifying relationships.

Some people surprise you by how fiercely they show up.

Others surprise you by how quickly they disappear.

People you barely knew may become anchors.

People you thought would be beside you forever may not know what to do with the version of you that emerges after everything changes.

And sometimes the greatest heartbreak isn't just losing a person.

It's realizing how many relationships belonged to the life you had before.

I've had to learn that lesson slowly.

Painfully.

But I've also collected extraordinary people along the way.

People who couldn't fix anything but stayed anyway.

People who listened.

People who laughed with me.

People who helped with my kids.

People who encouraged ridiculous ideas.

People who reminded me that I was still allowed to create something new.

People who saw possibility when all I could see was debris.

And that understanding eventually gave a name to something I had apparently been writing about all along.

The People We Collect.

Building While Becoming

Here's another thing I didn't understand when I first wrote this:

Sometimes rebuilding doesn't happen after you're healed.

Sometimes rebuilding is part of healing.

Broken Arrow Dancewear came out of that season.

On paper, building a business while your personal life is changing dramatically may not look particularly rational.

But Broken Arrow became more than a business to me.

It became movement.

Creation.

Community.

Something tangible I could build when so much around me felt beyond my control.

It allowed me to take years of being a dance mom, a leader, a businesswoman, a problem solver and a person who genuinely loves connecting people—and make something from it.

Then came The People We Collect.

The blog.

The podcast.

The stories.

Another business and another form of rebuilding, but also something deeper.

A place to explore the idea I was unknowingly circling when I wrote this original essay years ago:

Our lives are shaped by the people we collect along the way.

Some arrive through work.

Some through motherhood.

Some through grief.

Some through business.

Some through childhood.

Some through love.

Some because your children happened to love the same sport or activity.

Some because they sat beside you during the worst moment of your life.

Some show you exactly who you want to become.

Others teach you exactly who you don't.

What I Know Now

When I first wrote about friendship, I was searching for permanence.

I wanted people who stayed.

I wanted history.

I wanted reciprocation.

I wanted the family vacations and the girls' weekends and the people who remembered birthdays.

I still want some of those things.

But my definition of meaningful connection has changed.

I don't think the value of a relationship can always be measured by how long it lasts.

Sometimes someone enters your life for three months and changes you forever.

Sometimes someone shares twenty years with you and eventually belongs to a chapter you can't return to.

Sometimes people love you deeply and still don't know how to walk with the person you're becoming.

And sometimes, when your entire life collapses, someone completely unexpected walks into the wreckage and says:

I'm here.

Those people matter.

All of them.

Maybe I Was Writing This Story All Along

Reading my original words now feels almost eerie.

I thought I was writing about friendship.

Then I thought I was writing about leaving law enforcement.

Then I thought I was writing about boundaries.

I wasn't wrong.

But there was another story underneath all of it.

I was trying to understand how people shape us.

Why we hold on.

Why we let go.

Why losing some relationships hurts so deeply.

Why others seem to arrive exactly when we need them.

And why becoming ourselves often requires allowing our circle to change.

Maybe The People We Collect didn't really begin when I decided to start a podcast.

Maybe it started years ago.

Maybe it started with the officer wondering why the people who said they'd take a bullet for one another couldn't manage a Christmas text.

Maybe it continued with the mother realizing she wanted more time around the dinner table.

Maybe it grew through the wife who knew her husband deserved more of her than her career did.

Maybe it broke open with the widow who suddenly discovered which people would stay when there was nothing left to fix.

Maybe it continues now through the entrepreneur building something new while still honoring everything that came before.

Because that's what I'm learning.

We don't become new people by throwing away every previous version of ourselves.

We collect those versions too.

The cop.

The wife.

The mom.

The widow.

The friend.

The girlfriend.

The entrepreneur.

The woman who thought she had everything mapped out.

And the woman who now understands that absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

They're all me.

And every person I've collected along the way has left something behind.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe life isn't about collecting the largest number of people.

Maybe it's about recognizing the ones whose fingerprints remain on the person we're becoming.

And making sure we leave something good behind on them too.

So I'll ask you the question I couldn't quite articulate when I originally wrote this:

Who are the people you've collected?

And who are you becoming because of them?