Edit 45:On Adult Friendships: The Friend Within
An ongoing series on adult relationships
There's a question I've been sitting with for a while. It’s one that shows up every now and then, often at unexpected times, then it’s forgotten, ignored for some time before it finds its way back to me once more.
Am I as good a friend to myself as I am to the people I love?
My first instinct was to say yes. Of course! I know myself, I take care of myself, I'm on my own side. But the more I let the question marinate, the more I realized that knowing yourself and befriending yourself are two different things entirely.
I've written about tiers, about the energy we extend and what we deserve in return. I've written about visibility—about being watched without being truly seen. And most recently, about nearness and closeness, and how the deepest friendships don't always live in the biggest chapters of our lives. What I haven't written about is the friendship that predates all of them, the one that was there before the first playdate and will be there long after the last dinner party: the one with yourself.
Here's what I've noticed: I am extraordinarily patient with the people I love. When a friend is going through something hard, I don't rush them. I don't remind them how long it's taking. I don't subtract points for the moments they wasn't their best self. I give grace freely, and I mean it when I give it. And yet…
When it comes to myself—the misstep I should have seen coming, the boundary I let slide, the version of me that needed more rest than the calendar allowed—I am considerably less kind and infinitely harsher. There's an inner voice, the proverbial elephant with a memory that seems to predate the womb, that keeps receipts. One that brings up the past at inopportune times and can keep me awake night after night. One that is, if I'm being completely honest, a friend I would never keep in real life.
I don't think I'm alone in this.
Something I've been practicing lately—and I use that word carefully, because it is absolutely a practice—is extending the same quality of attention to myself that I try to offer the people I care about. Not in a grand, declaration-of-self-love kind of way. Just in the subtle, daily ways that matter. Checking in with myself the way I'd check in on a friend going through a season. Asking what I actually need, not just what I can manage. Noticing when I've been running on fumes and calling it fine (this one being the worst and most common).
The truth is, the relationship you have with yourself shapes every other one. The way you show up when you're depleted. The things you tolerate when you haven't been tending to your own foundation. The friendships you hold onto past their season because you haven't given yourself permission to grow without them.
Befriending yourself is not the same as becoming self-absorbed. Read that again. Befriending yourself is not about prioritizing yourself over everyone else—it's about making sure you are not, consistently, last.
It means recognizing when you're pouring from an empty cup, not as a failure of generosity, but as a sign that you haven't checked in with yourself lately.
It means letting yourself off the hook for the version of you that existed in a chapter you've since closed.
It means choosing, every so often, to be your own A-tier. Not in a way that leaves others behind, but in a way that means you actually have something real to bring to the table when you show up for them.
I've found that the friendships in my life that feel the most sustainable—the ones with the kind of ease I wrote about in the last Edit—have something in common. They're with people who seem to know themselves well, and who extend that same self-knowledge to the space between us. There's less performance. Less proving. Less filling the silence with noise just to make it comfortable.
They're friends who seem to have made a quiet peace with themselves, and it makes them easy to be around.
I want to be that kind of friend.
And I'm learning that the path there starts not at someone else's door, but with a long, patient look in the mirror, and enough grace to like who looks back.
Have you been a good friend to yourself lately? I'm still learning how.
