How Serena Williams rewrote the playbook for female athletes juggling motherhood and sport.
I got a call this week from a woman who wanted to meet me.
She wanted to do something for me that would honor my lifelong battle with anxiety. She said I should meet a man she’d just met.
So I met him.
He made me laugh. And that was the start of us doing this thing that has been a lifelong love letter to friendship.
He reminded me a lot of myself at my most timid, and he taught me to be brave. He made me feel safe.
I am still learning about him, though. We are learning how to be a better person, and that takes time. I’m still not sure I want to let go of him.
Then a few days ago, I got a call from this same person, saying she wanted to meet me, and to come to a party at her mother’s house in New York. I was hesitant–her mother was 80 years old, and she didn’t know if she would be well enough to come.
But I told her I was going, and she said, “You have to.”
She had invited me to go.
This is the kind of friendship that you build out of the kindness of strangers. So when it turns out to be something so much more significant to you, it is so much more meaningful–not because it is your first love affair, but because it is the woman who you are now falling in love with, and has made a life-changing and life-enriching commitment to you.
“This is the kind of friendship that you build out of the kindness of strangers.“
A couple of months ago, Serena Williams was on the cover of Time magazine. She was in a supermodel body, posing in a swimsuit with the