Editor’s note: Baltimore Fishbowl publishes occasional personal essays from local writers exploring local themes. Here, Leighann Garcia, a Baltimore-based writer and content creator, shares a personal story of her tumultuous friendship with Natasha Guynes, founder of HER Resiliency Center, which provides support to women recovering from trauma. Guynes, a visible figure in activist and political circles, died in May at age 45; a cause of death has not been disclosed.
The messages were coming like rapid fire. I sat on my bed, staring at my phone, in disbelief. It was hard to believe that this was the friend I’d been nearly inseparable with for the last year. I knew there was no coming back from this, at least not in the way I had hoped.
I thought back to the early days of knowing Natasha, how quickly she’d been willing to make herself an important person in my life. The way she’d shown up for me, for my daughter, Gemma, and for the causes that mattered to me. I thought of the previous September, when she’d joined my family and I for a memorial walk in honor of my mom, who had died a few years earlier of ovarian cancer. She’d never known my mother. She walked with us anyway.
And I thought of the way she cared for me after my surgery. I’d only known her for a few weeks by then. I couldn’t drive, and I needed help with Gemma. She insisted on it, even when I told her I had family who could help. “No, I’m closer,” I remembered her saying. She brought me groceries, picked up Gemma from school, shuttled me to and from doctor’s appointments. She’d sat beside me in exam rooms for follow-ups with my surgeon; I didn’t know I needed her advocacy, but I was so grateful to have it.
I knew that she was hurt, as I read her messages, but I’d been over the circumstances of what had happened in my head so many times, and I couldn’t determine where I had gone wrong. I had acknowledged our distance, asked if she was willing to talk. She’d responded by saying she needed space, but then kept sending paragraph after paragraph, loaded with accusations. It didn’t feel fair. Sometimes over the last year, I’d felt myself growing quieter around Natasha, surrendering ground I would’ve normally defended. I was determined not to let that happen this time.
“Leighann,” the message appeared. “Why would I take advice from someone who was FIRED?” And then, seconds later, before I could even process the first: “There, you’ve pushed me enough to get the response you wanted so you can be the victim.”
It was a gut punch. She had taken something I’d trusted her with, something she’d supported me through — the complicated, mostly mutual, quietly humiliating reality of losing a job — and sharpened it into something she could use against me. And worse, she’d tried to get ahead of my hurt, to label it as manipulation, before I could even internalize it as pain. It was lower than I thought Natasha would go.
It had been clear to me from almost the very beginning of our friendship that she was assigning me a role in her life. In those first visits together, when we’d take walks in the park or along the water in the Inner Harbor, she chatted away about her romantic exploits, the man she was deeply in love with and deeply wounded by, and her vulnerability was both intoxicating and confusing for me. “Thank you for letting me share,” she’d say, after a long monologue. Then she’d ask what I wanted to share with her, and listen with the same intensity. It’s not entirely clear to me why her immediate closeness didn’t give me pause — although, I suppose I, too, was lonely for that type of connection. I’d never really had a best friend, not as an adult. While a part of me knew our friendship was a kind of performance, had to be given its duration, I believed that if we played our roles well enough, something real could emerge. And something real did.
I typed back: “Thank you for showing me who you really are.” Then I navigated to her Facebook profile and hit block. This was the language I’d learned from Natasha. Rupture didn’t really count if it wasn’t public, observable. When Natasha burned a bridge, she made a spectacle of it. I wanted to win at her own game, but she’d already beaten me to it.
There had been a growing tension since I started volunteering for her organization, HER Resiliency Center. She had asked for my feedback on the culture and her leadership; she was having issues with staff turnover and couldn’t understand why. HER Resiliency Center was Natasha Guynes’s life work. After surviving addiction and sex work in her early twenties, she dedicated herself to helping women facing many of the same circumstances. She worked relentlessly, tirelessly, to secure resources, build programs, and advocate for people who were often ignored.
It didn’t take long for me to understand why she couldn’t keep her staff, and I found myself in the impossible situation of having to tell someone I loved a very difficult truth. I’d agonized over a way to tell her what I’d observed — the demands on her staff, the blurred lines between personal and professional relationships. When I shared my feedback, she became predictably defensive and shut down. We’d tried to talk about it a few times, and in the end, I’d told her I would take a step back from HER, but the damage was done.
In the midst of our rupture, I had to admit that our relationship had been strained for some time, and I was forced to confront the ways in which my world had bent and grown around Natasha. The ways in which my peaceful life had started to feel chaotic.
I had learned quickly that Natasha could not bear silence, could not bear her loneliness; she called me excessively, several times a day. In all the quiet moments, while driving, before bed. I was struck by her frank communication and confident speaking style. Just like with those walks in the early days, her vulnerability was almost structured, by design. She’d begin those phone calls by announcing, “I’m going to talk about me for a few minutes, and then I want to hear about you.” I hadn’t shared that level of relational intimacy, the minutiae of my days, with anyone since my mother.
We made a good team. She was practical where I was abstract, decisive where I was thoughtful. She could organize a fundraiser, negotiate with politicians, and work a room before I’d made it through the front door. My contribution was different. I kept things light, I made small talk with strangers. I diffused tension. For reasons I didn’t fully grasp at the time, I was often the whimsical one.
It was a strange role for me to play. Growing up, I had often been accused of being too serious, too principled, too willing to dig my heels in on things that didn’t really matter. I had already started changing by then — the loss of my mother, my recent divorce — but standing next to Natasha, the evolution was undeniable.
But she struggled to turn off the part of her that leaned toward advocacy, even with her friends. I didn’t need an advocate most days, and I had rebuilt my mental health from the ground up. Natasha consistently disagreed with my therapist’s treatment approaches. Once, when I was recounting one of my therapy appointments, she stopped me and said, “You need EMDR. Has your therapist suggested it?” When I told her that my therapist and I had mutually decided to table our discussions of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy in favor of other modalities, she insulted my therapist.
It seemed to me that Natasha’s convictions were directly tied to her survival. She knew what had worked for her and what worked for the women she served — peers, she called them. It was a tried and true recipe: Alcoholics Anonymous, sobriety, mental health treatment. But I was not one of those women. It seemed every discussion topic I brought to her was a problem to solve. And over time, I felt the loss of what had once seemed a mutual, intimate exchange. It had started to feel like an extraction.
Feeling the music
Natasha was well known in Baltimore, and she was polarizing in ways that walking contradictions can be. She was beautiful, always well-dressed, with bright red lipstick and high heels, but a husky, deep voice, a Louisiana accent, and a biting tongue. She had once delighted in the duality, but had grown weary of it over time. She struggled to reconcile, however, the fact that her appearance opened doors for her professionally, but was also often a distraction.
Her relationship history was filled with volatile and cyclical affairs. She’d never been married and had no children, and she seemed wired to interpret the smallest slight as abandonment. Her anxiety caused her to lash out aggressively. I recognized myself in her desperation to be chosen, but her impulsivity could be triggering, after I’d worked so hard on emotional regulation and peace.
Before I met her, she’d been involved in a tumultuous romantic scandal, one that had caught the attention of local media. It had caught my attention, too. I didn’t know Natasha then, but we had mutual friends, and I’d been following her for a while on social media and had the sense that we could be friends. When I saw a post she’d written about the end of that relationship, I read it as incredibly brave and honest, and I asked if she’d like to get coffee sometime. We met a few days later, for a short lunch at a cafe. I had wrongly assumed that I was introducing myself to a woman who had survived something difficult and moved on, like me. But I learned quickly that she was still living inside of that story.
Many nights, she’d call me hysterical, inconsolable, and confess what she’d done — frantic, public posts on social media, relentless messages and phone calls to the men she was dating. In those moments, I saw a fragility in Natasha. A brokenness. Her pain, it seemed, was bottomless. She could not be soothed. Eventually, on those awful nights, she would take a sleeping pill and crash. More than once, I got in my car and drove to her house, finding her crumpled in her bed. I was not the advocate that Natasha was. I often felt powerless, confused and out of my depth.
I am not delusional about Natasha’s emotional intensity, though I feel a fierce protectiveness when I reflect on her relationships with men. Like me, she seemed doomed to chase emotionally unavailable partners — the ones who masquerade as emotionally regulated when what they really are is avoidant. On the other hand, she could be deeply destructive. Her bravery and dysregulation were often so intertwined that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. And there are limits to the fantasy that any man, any person, could’ve saved her.
Natasha could collapse under the weight of her obsessions and her impulses, and in fact, seemed to do so easily, but she couldn’t willingly choose to surrender to uncertainty or unexpected joy. Once, I recall her asking me to teach her to dance. She was preparing for an event where there would be dancing, and she’d never felt confident enough to participate.
I put on some music and swayed with her. “Just feel the music,” I said, reaching for the least helpful cliche I could think of. We both laughed. “This is dumb,” she finally said.
She could be spontaneous. Once in the late summer, she announced we were going on an impromptu trip to Ocean City. She handled the logistics, and I contributed little, besides suggesting a late-night photoshoot on the beach. As we stood there on the beach together, I slid off my sandals and ran into the water. I urged her to follow me, but she wouldn’t. In the photos I have of that night, she is perfectly posed – stunning, as always, but stiff.
In the quieter moments of our friendship, when it was just us, Natasha confessed that she envied those of us who could have a glass of wine to take the edge off. She had no escape from the endless loop of her mind, she told me. When she was spiraling, I was sometimes tempted to tell her to just have the damn drink. Intellectually, I knew that would never be possible for Natasha, but still, I sometimes wondered whether she’d become trapped inside a story about herself. She’d been calling herself an “addict” and “alcoholic” since before she was legally old enough to drink. In private, I wondered if it was fair for her to keep carrying the labels that described her twenty-year-old self. Her life story, it seemed – the one she repeated constantly – didn’t allow for transformation.
Her addictions, fragility and self-consciousness were part of a larger, more complicated mix of mental health diagnoses and trauma. Natasha often recounted to rooms full of people her previous attempts at suicide, speaking of them in an almost clinical way, with a familiarity that disturbed me. I was keenly aware that she still struggled with suicidal ideation from time to time. “I’m having dangerous thoughts,” she said to me, one day, seemingly out of the blue. “I feel unsafe.” It struck me how clearly she was able to articulate her cries for help. Without her having to say it, I understood suicide to be a sort of exit ramp, a lever to pull in case things got really bad. I knew that those thoughts would never leave her, not entirely.
Blocked and unblocked
I told myself she had her resources. Natasha was on a first name basis with the staff of almost every treatment center in the state, through her work. Her therapist, whom she saw weekly and sometimes more frequently, was practically on speed dial. She had the phone numbers for crisis intervention services, emergency health clinics. It’s hard to imagine any person more resourced than Natasha was, and I took comfort in that. We both thought of suicide as just a moment, and for me, that was reassuring. You only have to survive this one moment. For Natasha, it was terrifying. It only takes one moment.
After our rupture, I felt some relief. The space she’d taken up in my life was quickly filled by a new romantic relationship, which was its own brand of emotional chaos, and eventually, it turned toxic and destructive. When I finally ended it, I was thrust into the worst depression of my life. Among the grieving I was experiencing for that relationship, it seemed all my other grief had caught up to me, too. My mother. My marriage. My career. And Natasha.
I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was standing at the edge of an abyss, and that some mysterious gravity was pulling me into it. I felt bottomless.
In the depths of my darkness, I reached for the words Natasha had taught me. “I am having dangerous thoughts,” I said to my therapist. “I am not safe.”
Natasha had more darkness to come, too. I learned through friends and through occasional news updates that her organization had effectively closed its doors, after the state allegedly refused to reimburse contractual expenses. In very predictable Natasha fashion, she’d filed a lawsuit. And I rooted for her, quietly, from a distance.
I’d seen some writing of hers on Substack and LinkedIn, always a bit vague and coded. But the photos and videos I saw of her seemed hopeful — pictures of her on wellness retreats, traveling, ditching the red lipstick. I saw that she’d gotten a dog. Yes, I thought. Yes.
The question of whether I missed her is not a straightforward one. Our friendship was so comparatively small in the span of my memory, it almost felt like a dream, or a strange time-warped fold in the universe. Life filled up, like it always does. But when I searched for specific memories — for the beginning of my life after divorce, for my first tentative steps toward a kind of freedom — I’d find her there. I have never been able to replicate the level of closeness we shared. I doubt that I ever will.
And, I’m not proud to admit, I sometimes gave into the temptation to flatten Natasha into the world’s two-dimensional image of her. A “pick me,” an attention-seeker, a narcissist. Some said, in the wake of her lawsuit, that she was getting what she deserved. All the bridges she’d burned continued to haunt her. But she and I were not enemies. Still, it was easier to simplify her than it was to hold the nuance of what that relationship had meant to me.
When she died, it had been three years since our last communication. A mutual friend delivered the news; the cause of death was still unknown. I felt a sting in my chest. I thought of the lever. Of the abyss. Of the gravity, the bottomlessness. And I knew.
Whatever had caused me to loosen my grip on the world, seemed to cause Natasha to tighten hers. I still don’t entirely understand why.
In grief, it’s easy to imagine that there could’ve been a future for us, with clearer boundaries, with mutual healing. I don’t know if that’s true. I’d like to think I would’ve taken her call, and I never blocked her phone number. Neither of us deleted any of the posts we made together, they’re all still there, perfectly preserved. After I heard the news, I went straight to Facebook and hit “unblock,” knowing that nothing would change, that she still had me blocked on her end. But her profile appeared. She had unblocked me. When?
“I think we might be best friends,” she’d said to me once, over dinner, a few months after we met. As usual, I was struck and caught off guard by her radical honesty, her candor. It felt childish and silly, but she was serious. I smiled.
For an impossible moment, it seems — we were.
This essay has been edited for length. A longer version can be found at Leighann Garcia’s Substack page.
