Yesterday a friend texted me a picture of boxed macaroni and cheese and I started crying.

“I’ll never be able to eat this again and not think of you,” she wrote.

I started graduate school five weeks ago and it has been a bit overwhelming. The workload for classes is significant and I also have an internship two days a week. I’m going to school for Social Work and we have had intense conversations about race and privilege and debates about how to be of use in the world. I’m the oldest one in my program by a fair amount, and even though I have almost two decades on some of my classmates, there are times that still feel like I’m in a high school cafeteria all over again. Getting a grip on my new schedule, the work before me and how to navigate new (to me) environments has been exhausting.

When I’ve switched jobs in the past, I’ve noticed how tiring it is to learn all new things. Even if you’re loving every minute of it, your brain is working at a higher level than usual and it takes a toll. In the first weeks of this experience, I found myself fatigued and tense. I just felt out of sorts. This was the first week I felt like I was starting to get used to it, slightly more in control and that was a welcome thing.

Then I got my friend’s text and the tears welled up with a feeling of being recognized by someone who knew you “from before”. I worked with this friend for many years at a company that felt like family to me. In recent years, we both worked from our homes in different states, but we talked regularly by phone and worked on projects together. One day, we caught up on a sales proposal we were working on while we both ate boxed mac and cheese and talked about how there really is nothing like it. It was a simple conversation that involved the dailiness of our lives. The kind of thing you might learn only if you have regular and repeated opportunities to chat with someone.

Over the years, we’ve had other, much more significant conversations and bonded over shared stress and big life choices and funny incidents. I’ve known her for thirteen years (which means many of my classmates now were 10 years old when we met), but our times of frequent contact have ebbed and flowed. I think it’s been a couple months since we last touched base. But today, her simple text reminded me that despite all the newness in my life right now, there are people out there who know me. It gave me a little sense of anchoring in my own life and comforted me in ways I didn’t realize I needed.

Who knew that a box of no-nutrient noodles and unnaturally orange substance could be so darn nourishing?