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Choosing to Show Up, Choosing to Care: A Celebration of Friendship and Shared Humanity

By Lisa Judson Sometimes, the people you never expected to meet become the people you can’t imagine your life without. Friendship is a funny thing. We spend our lives collecting people. Some stay for a season. Some for a chapter. Some disappear for years and somehow walk back into our lives as though they’ve never been away. And then there are the ones who become your people . Friendships are the lifeblood of life. They bring laughter, tears, support, comfort and solidarity. They bring a kick up the backside when you’ve wallowed for long enough, or a good-natured correction when you need one. Honesty, reliability and love bring it all together. I often wonder how I’d manage without my tribe. You see, I know lots of people. From all kinds of times and places in my life — school, work, church, the lake where I swim. And yet, I’ll admit, my inner circle is small. You know what I mean. Those friends who are your ride or dies . The ones you can call at any time of the day or ...
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Our Top Posts of the Month (September 2026)

Check out our top blog posts for the past month. Posts are listed by the number of page views they attracted during the month, most popular first.
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Ten Things You'll Learn From Our Book: Celebrating a Decade of HIGH TIDE LOW TIDE

Does your friend live with bipolar disorder? Do you know how to help? We wrote HIGH TIDE, LOW TIDE: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder for you both. Our first book was published in September 2013, but Fran and I have always celebrated the anniversaries of our launch party rather than the publication date. On that basis, October 1, 2026 is our book’s tenth birthday. My first thought on realising this was “Wow!” closely followed by “How on earth did that happen?” I wasn’t sure how to mark the occasion. I’d left it a bit late to organise anything major. A reprise of our 2013 launch party — held simultaneously online and in person at Fran’s apartment in Maine — was too daunting to countenance. A conversation with our friend Aimee who blogs at I’m NOT Disordered helped enormously. “Could you do ten things you learned from writing the book?” she asked. “Ten reasons to buy it? Ten things someone could learn from it?” Her third suggestion really appealed to me. (Thanks, A...
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Q: Why Are Questions So Hard For Me to Answer?

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. — Richard Feynman This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend and fellow blogger Aimee Wilson. Aimee said she likes question and answer posts because the structure makes them easier to put together. I agreed but said I find it hard actually answering the questions. Aimee seemed surprised. “But we’ve done them together and you’ve always done really well!” It’s true. We’ve collaborated on several Q&A posts here at Gum on My Shoe and on Aimee’s blog I’m NOT Disordered . I’ve used the format on other occasions too, including Every Grey Hair Is a Badge in response to fifteen life prompts by Holly Hatam. That doesn’t mean I find them easy or straightforward. The conversation left me wondering where my issues might lie. Aware of the irony of using the Q&A format to explore my problems answering questions, I reached out to ChatGPT. “I find Q&As challenging to answer,”...
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You Are a King (or Queen) in Your Own Kingdom

Wake up and live your life on your own terms, you are a king in your own kingdom, a god in your own universe. — Bangambiki Habyarimana We’d been discussing life stuff. End of life stuff, actually. Wills and obituaries and eulogies and celebration of life arrangements. That kind of thing. The kind of thing I’d scarcely thought about until a few years ago. A day may come when I have it all in order. But — as Aragorn might say — it is not this day. This day I have something different in mind. Related, but different. Because all this end of life talk got me thinking about what’s most important about a person. How can we hope to capture the essence of a lifetime, a life, a whole entire person, in a few hundred words? A “standard comprehensive obituary” is somewhere between two hundred and four hundred words. A eulogy is usually longer, between five hundred and a thousand words, “lasting approximately three to five minutes when spoken.” Forgive me for thinking this is scarcely en...
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The View from Base Camp: How to Support Your Friend When Their Mental Health Puts Them at Risk

TW: Mention of suicidality and self-harm
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Our Minds Aren't Always Our Best Friend: Changing the Stories We Tell Ourselves

TW: Mention of suicide and suicidality
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