Be Your Own Best Friend
“Be your own best friend.”
Kathleen Keenan-Takagi
My high school music teacher wrote those words in my yearbook because she knew something about me that I had not yet learned to recognize in myself. She knew how hard I worked, how much I expected of myself, and how quickly I could turn disappointment into evidence that I simply was not good enough.
Music was my high school major, and during the four years I spent with her, I took every chorus and music theory class she offered. I also took voice lessons for years and practiced with the kind of determination that should, by all reasonable laws of effort and reward, have transformed me into a magnificent singer.
It did not.
No matter how hard I worked, I never had more than a fair voice. I could learn the music, understand the theory, follow the direction, and sing my part, but I was never going to be the girl whose voice made the entire auditorium fall silent. This was difficult for someone who believed that loving something deeply and working hard at it should automatically result in excellence.
Still, there was nowhere I would rather have been than singing with the choirs or standing onstage in one of our high school plays or musicals. I loved the rehearsals, the costumes, the nervous energy backstage, and that extraordinary moment when the curtain opened and the world outside the theater temporarily disappeared. Even when I was not the most talented person on the stage, I felt completely alive there.
At the time, I measured those experiences according to whether they proved I was good enough. It never occurred to me that they might be preparing me for something entirely different.
Although I am not a singer today, those years taught me how to stand alone on a stage and hold an audience with confidence and ease. They taught me how to project my voice, command a room, recover when something unexpected happened, and continue without allowing anyone to see the momentary panic happening inside me. Those abilities became invaluable when I was a teacher, standing in front of classrooms filled with teenagers who could detect insecurity with the precision of sharks sensing blood in the water. Years later, they would serve me again as a speaker, spiritual teacher, and demonstrating medium.
My voice may never have been remarkable when I was singing, but those experiences helped me discover that I had another kind of voice entirely.
Perhaps we are too quick to decide that something has been wasted simply because it did not lead where we thought it would. We abandon an interest, fail to reach a goal, or discover that passion alone cannot turn us into the next Barbra Streisand, and we assume our effort amounted to nothing. Life, however, has a strange way of repurposing our experiences. What appears to be a failed destination may have been training for a future we could not yet imagine.
My teacher’s words stayed with me because they addressed something much larger than music. “Be your own best friend” sounds simple until we consider how rarely we actually treat ourselves that way. We offer encouragement to the people we love, make allowances for their imperfections, and remind them that their worth does not depend upon flawless performance. Then we turn toward ourselves with a clipboard, a red pen, and the disposition of a particularly humorless judge.
A best friend would have reminded that teenage girl that she did not need to possess the finest voice in the choir to belong there. A best friend would have told her that joy was reason enough to sing, that courage mattered more than perfection, and that the stage was teaching her things she would not fully understand for decades.
Becoming our own best friend does not mean pretending we are brilliant at everything we attempt. Some of us are gifted singers, some of us are enthusiastic altos standing somewhere in the middle of the chorus, and most of us have occupied both roles in different areas of our lives. True self friendship asks us to see ourselves honestly without using that honesty as a weapon.
The parts of ourselves that we criticize most harshly may not need correction as much as they need compassion. We do not have to wait until we are more accomplished, more confident, more attractive, more successful, or more spiritually evolved before offering ourselves the kindness we so freely give to others. We can begin by speaking to ourselves as we would speak to someone we deeply love.
I never became the singer I wanted to be, yet music gave me a stage, and the stage gave me a confidence that helped shape the teacher, speaker, and woman I eventually became. What I once saw as evidence that I was not quite good enough was quietly preparing me to use my voice in the way it was meant to be used.
It simply took me years to become enough of a friend to myself to understand that.