The Middle Seat logo: a hand-drawn illustration of a wide turquoise three-seat couch with the middle cushion in a darker teal, and a warm-lit arc floor lamp glowing above it
Audio & Podcast

The Middle Seat

Timeline2025
FormatContentious Interview

A podcast about conflict, connection, and the messy space between. Every episode takes the middle seat between two people to figure out what actually happened between them.

This episode isn't posted publicly. Reach out if you'd like to listen.

Host
Rouya Aldabbagh
Co-Host
Catalina Balladares
Editor
Rouya Aldabbagh
Co-Editor
Catalina Balladares
Producer
Catalina Balladares
Interview Subject
Daniela Améndola

About the episode

The Middle Seat is built around a simple format: each episode, the host sits between two people and tries to piece together what happened between them. This is a contentious interview: a conversation designed to sit inside a real point of friction rather than around it, and to let both people say the parts that usually go unsaid.

This episode turns that lens on two people who know each other better than almost anyone: co-host and producer Catalina Balladares, and her closest friend, Daniela Améndola. Catalina and Daniela have been close for years, through a real falling-out and the slower, less visible work of finding their way back to each other afterward. What hasn't fully been said out loud between them is the subject of this conversation: how they actually got from rupture to a friendship that can hold both distance and closeness at once, and what, if anything, still goes unspoken.

This one is personal for me. I've had a friendship I valued deeply drift apart for reasons I never fully understood, and watching Catalina and Dani find their way back to each other (imperfectly, but for real) felt worth sitting inside. Taking the middle seat for their conversation is, in part, an attempt to better understand my own.

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