A Lighter Way to Ride
I am my own best friend first.
That sentence took a long time to become true.
There were long stretches of my life where I was mean to Alvin. At war with myself. I had a real talent for saying the most hurtful thing possible and calling it “just the truth.”
Unsurprisingly, being brutal with myself made it easier to be brutal with other people. When you live under constant internal critique, sharpness starts to feel like a personality trait instead of a defense mechanism. People will even compliment you for the brusqueness if you garner a few laughs out of it. It has fans.
These days, I move differently.
I dance by myself. I laugh with myself—often at myself (which: fair). I talk to myself like someone worth listening to. And I’ve learned to appreciate my experience in the world, not as something to fix, but something to inhabit. Aloneness, it turns out, can be a form of intimacy. I like to think of it as building kinship with my soul.
Getting here has been a journey. But I had help: practices, people, & spaces that taught me how to sand down my edges. And even then, this is a relationship that I still tend to. It is by no means a finished state.
I believe everyone has to find their own way into self-friendship, often times through some sort of lived-in, daily practice.
You know there’s that old saying: if you want to change the world, start with your house.
I’ve come to realize that it begins even earlier than that. Before you can show up differently in your home—or with the people you love—you have to learn how to live gently inside your own internal walls. How you speak to yourself becomes the blueprint. From there, it’s a series of concentric circles as you move through your relationships, your community, and the world beyond your door.
Everybody’s path is going to be personalized, probably littered with a series of honest experiments. But what matters is noticing what makes you softer instead of smaller along the way.
I hope today you look at yourself in the mirror and give yourself a hug, maybe even a high five. Hype yourself up, if only for a moment! There is real power in being on your own side and discovering the version of yourself you don’t have to brace against. The one who makes the ride feel a little lighter.
Be gentle with the soul strapped into this strange, beautiful ride called being alive.
