Bertha Larkins

Bertha Larkins is a freelance journalist who covers loneliness, community, and the quiet social crises nobody makes documentaries about. She spent her twenties as the friend who organized everything — the group trips, the birthday dinners, the check-in texts that held entire friendships together.

Then she hit thirty, received a chronic fatigue diagnosis, and had to rebuild her entire understanding of what friendship could look like when you cannot always show up. She writes with warmth, gentle humor, and the kind of permission-giving that comes from someone who has lived the tension between wanting to be a good friend and needing to protect her own energy.