To My Best Friend

When you think about a best friend, what do you think of?

Someone to share adventures with? Someone to tell all of your secrets to? Someone who calls you on your B.S., but loves on you when you're down? Your person?

Hate to break it to you, but mine has yours beat by a mile.

Probably literally, because my best friend runs marathons.

I couldn't exactly tell you the moment that we became friends. I believe a mutual friend introduced us at one of our many homeschool field days - she played soccer, I played volleyball. Her older sister helped me to study for the ACT since I was woefully unprepared for standardized testing as I prepared for college. Somewhere between then and college, she became my best friend.

Honestly, it was a match made in heaven. It takes a special kind of person to deal with my unorthodox mixture of intelligence and awkwardness, along with my tendency to be slow on the uptake when people are being sarcastic.

Which, let me be perfectly clear, is hilarious when you consider that she has one of the driest, most sarcastic senses of humor you could find.

We were both Communications dual majors - she journalism and public relations, I journalism and theatre. A lot of our classes overlapped, and to this day we can laugh about classes that we took together, both major-related and not.

One of my favorite college memories with her is when we took Abnormal Psychology together. There was a chapter in the book that I was dreading - Abnormal Sexual Behaviors. As a homeschooled girl growing up in Purity culture, sex was not a topic that I was comfortable talking about. My bestie was quite amused by my redness and sliding down in my seat in the back of the lecture hall, doing my darndest (and failing) not to let on that I was uncomfortable. She's known since then that, when it comes to things that embarrass me, I have absolutely no poker face.

Living with our respective parents in a small college town meant that we didn't have our own spaces for hanging out together, but we made sure to go out to eat often or spend time at other college friends' apartments. There was little that we didn't share with each other, even when we didn't spend all of our time together. She is much more of a social butterfly than I am; honestly, she's the extrovert that adopted this introvert.

And every performance that I had, from musicals to my voice recitals, she was there to cheer me on.

My bestie is the type who is going to tell it to you straight, then comfort you when you ignored her reasoning and things went wrong. Don't mistake me, she'll remind you that you were wrong and should have listened to her, but only after she's made sure that you're alright. She's not one to beat a dead horse, either; she'll tell you once, then remind you that you're an adult and you make your own decisions.

One of the ways that remind me of what an amazing best friend she is for me is our shared love of books. We've both been bookworms since we were young, and she still continues to read staggering amounts of books in a short amount of time (I read faster than most, but she puts me to SHAME). This has given me the added bonus of a built-in editor, who will read my writing and give me feedback on it.

I mentioned that she doesn't sugarcoat anything, yes? That extends to writing feedback. When I was younger, such feedback often made me question if I were a good writer at all and consider quitting. But it was her constant reassurances of "Janis, if it was completely unsalvageable, I would have just told you that," that convinced me to keep working.

It's so valuable as a writer to have someone to bounce ideas off of, especially when that person knows you so well that they can tease ideas out of you that you didn't even know that you had. My bestie does that so effortlessly that it's ridiculous.

Bestie truly is my sister. I can't imagine going through life without her encouragement, her love, her reminders that I am an amazing, talented, and beautiful individual and that I should stop being mean to myself and believing it.

Yes, we now live far from each other and the most recent picture that we have together is from my college graduation, and yes, we don't get to talk every day. But isn't that the mark of true best friends? No matter how often I get to see her or talk to her, I know there's no one I'd rather call my bestie.