Rooting for Friendship

This morning, I was part of a zoom call with some other professionals. One of the women shared some barriers she was facing and our leader said, “I’m rooting for you!” It stuck me that all of us want cheerleaders who hope for our very best in life. However, as a gardener, roots have a whole different meaning.

My whole life, I’ve struggled socially. I didn’t always know how to explain it, but I often felt just a little off, like I was watching the rules of connection play out in real time, always trying to catch up. At 54, I can count on one hand the number of close female friends I’ve had in my entire life. I am not talking about acquaintances or people I’ve shared lunch with a few times. I’m talking about the kind of friend who knows your weird food preferences, has seen your house in its worst state, and would not flinch if you called sobbing at two in the morning. I am talking about a real friend, the kind who walks with you through life, not just beside you when things are easy.

Over the years, I felt a deep ache when I saw women with those wide, glittering social circles. Their friendships looked rich and easy: full of traditions and group photos and birthday trips with matching shirts. I remember a woman I once worked with who was going through an absolutely brutal divorce. She faced legal battles, financial hardship, emotional devastation, and deep betrayal. I asked her how she was holding us, and she told me that she didn’t know what she would do without what she called her “bestie squad.” They showed up. They rotated through hospital rooms, helped her move, brought her dinner, sat beside her in court, and even chipped in to send her on a cruise when the divorce was finalized. These aren’t just people who were rooting for her. They were her people. They were her anchor and were keeping her sane in a season of complete devastation. They were rooting FOR her.

I wanted a squad like that. Well, I suppose I just wanted just one friend like that, the one person I could do life with. Someone to take trips with, whether our spouses came along or not. Someone who would watch my dogs and already know the routine. Someone who would bring food without asking. Someone who knew my secrets and stayed anyway. I longed for one person who could carry a bit of my history and still look me in the eye with warmth.

Cue Sheila.

A few years ago, our English department welcomed a new teacher. At Oak Ridge, this almost never happens. Most teachers who land a job there stay until retirement, often for thirty or forty years. The turnover rate is low, and new arrivals are few.

During the strange and stressful COVID year we switched to hybrid teaching, Sheila became my teaching partner. There were no grand declarations or immediate labels. We did talk early on about how it felt like we had known each other for years, but mostly, she just kept showing up. She paid attention. She listened. Over time, without asking for space or demanding significance, she made a place beside me. She rooted in.

Those two years—2020 and 2021—stretched all of us as educators. For me, they became some of the most creative years I’ve ever had in the classroom. Sheila was right there with me, not just managing the chaos in our classrooms, but helping to carve out brave spaces for students in a world that felt unpredictable and upside down. Our friendship grew quickly during that time, and I do think the pressure-cooker of pandemic teaching fast-tracked our connection. Still, I believe it would have happened either way.

On the surface, we are quite different. Sheila is the calm, wise presence people naturally turn to when they’re hurting. She listens deeply, speaks gently, and carries a quiet confidence that settles the air around her. When students or colleagues need someone to hold their grief or help them untangle something hard, they find their way to her.

I’m… not quite like that. When people come to me, it’s usually because they need a fighter. I’m the one who picks up the sword and shield and marches into the storm. I push against injustice. I make noise when something needs to be fixed. I move fast and feel deeply, and I rarely sit still long enough to be called “gentle.” I bring the fire; Sheila brings the peaceful extinguisher.

What makes me laugh, though, is how often people confuse us. More than once, I’ve been in a conversation with a colleague who clearly thought I was Sheila. I never correct them. I just smile, take some mental notes, pass along the message to her later, and go on about my day. For years, people at work called me “Doc” even before I earned my doctorate, simply because they thought I was Dr. Morton. I took it as a compliment because if people thought I was as brilliant and grounded as Sheila, I was clearly doing something right. At some point, without realizing it, I stopped wishing for a best friend and started recognizing that I already had one.

When I say Sheila is “rooting for me,” I do not mean she cheers from a distance. I mean she is rooting with me, settling into the soil of my life and helping me stay grounded. She holds me steady when I feel like I’m unraveling. She reminds me of what is true when my thoughts start spinning in all directions. She helps me return to myself when everything around me feels unsteady. She supports me, yes. But more than that, she creates space where I can be fully known and still completely safe. Her presence isn’t loud or flashy. It is quiet, faithful, and unwavering.

It is only in the last year that I realized how being on the spectrum shaped so much of how I moved through the world although I didn’t always have the words for it. I ached with loneliness. I often felt like I was watching connection happen around me, trying to mimic it without ever really touching it. I learned how to make people laugh, how to ask the right questions, how to be useful or interesting or intense enough to keep people close. But underneath, I felt like a con artist inside my own body—desperate for belonging, but convinced I wasn’t capable of the kind of deep, mutual relationship other people seemed to find naturally.

I also ached because I thought I would make a good friend. I would be there for them. I would be loyal and honest. I would stand alongside them and encourage them to be the best version of themselves. It wasn’t that people didn’t see that in me. I know that people saw me as friendship material, but the role of bestie was often already filled, and that brings another kind of loneliness.

As a result, I have often planted myself in hard places. I didn’t just stumble into difficulty; I sought it. I moved toward pain and injustice, toward people who were grieving or discarded, and I tried to be a voice or a shield or a bridge. I believed it was noble, and sometimes it was. Equally, I also believed, deep down, that I didn’t belong in the center of the circle. I had not earned a place there. I thought I could serve from the edges. I could love other people from the fringe, but I never really believed someone might choose to root themselves beside me.

That is why Sheila’s friendship undid me in the best way. The book of Proverbs tells us that “a friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). Ecclesiastes says that “two are better than one… if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). I used to read those verses and think they were lovely in theory but clearly meant for other people or maybe someday when I would find a great husband. I believed in the idea of friendship, but I had quietly decided it was a gift God gave to women who were easier to love.

Sheila proved me wrong. Her love has been steady through joy and grief, through ordinary days and overwhelming ones. She has lifted me when I fell, not just with kindness, but with presence. And in doing so, she has helped me see Jesus more clearly. Jesus does not wait for us to prove our worthiness. He does not need us to mask or perform or fit in with a social script we never fully understood. He chooses the fringe. He steps into the margins. He plants himself in the hardest places. He calls us friend.

In the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, “I no longer call you servants… instead, I have called you friends” (John 15:15). That word, “friends”, carries weight. It is not transactional. It is not performance-based. It is chosen. It is rooted. Jesus has always been the Friend I needed most, even when I did not yet recognize His nearness. But through Sheila, He gave me a glimpse of that friendship with skin on. She rooted herself beside me without asking for anything in return. And, since I am being completely vulnerable, slowly, something began to heal in that little girl who made up imaginary friends so that she could have a person.

I stopped feeling like a con artist. I stopped believing the lie that I was incapable of relationship. I began to see that being deeply known and deeply loved could exist in the same space—and that maybe, just maybe, I had always been worthy of that kind of love.

So, this is my encouragement: Maybe you have believed, like I did, that friendship was something for other people—people less complicated, more polished, more “normal.” But you are not too much. You are not unworthy. You are not a project or a placeholder or a background character in someone else’s story.

You were made for connection, and not the surface kind, the rooted kind. The kind that doesn’t flinch when the truth shows up tired and messy and afraid. The kind that holds you without fixing you, and stays even when the staying costs something.

I still don’t have a big circle of besties. I probably never will. Through Sheila, I have been given the most healing glimpse of the friendship Jesus offers—the kind that does not leave, the kind that knows and still loves, the kind that roots deep and holds fast. If it happened for me—a woman who spent decades feeling like a stranger to her own heart—it can happen for you too.