BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND!

Note to readers: This article is to appear in the October 2006 issue of The Personal Excellence Journal. It is an excerpt from The Taboo Against Being Your Own Friend (1996) authored by Dr. Fisher. The book is available from www.amazon.com or www.fisherofideas.com or ask for it at your favorite bookstore.


Be Your Own
Best Friend

By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.

The sooner we realize this, the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves. Indeed, it is a long road from being the apple of everyone’s eye to being our own person, warts and all. Some of us never make the transition or transformation. We are programmed from birth as how to think, feel, and even wonder about the mysteries of life. It is called socialization, and society is rather reluctant to deal with new contingencies brought on by drastic change. Society worships control, harmony, and conformity. Society resists change, and attempts to reconfigure new information to conforming criteria, or to what society already knows to be true. Society is rich in denial and impoverished of reality.

Society is the cage we enter when we are born and the cage we must deal with all our days. Society is always looking through the rear-view mirror as it moves ahead, and thus clashes with reality. That is why society often becomes hysterical, unable to accept deviation from its arbitrary norms. Therefore, it must be the individual who is wrong. The individual is meant to feel self-contempt for being out of step with the expected, as if the expected were written in the individual’s DNA code.

The only safe haven in a world of constant change is to be your own best friend by asking:

· How do I feel about myself—not as I am supposed to be, but as I am?
· How comfortable am I in my own skin?
· Am I in control of my own life?
· Is my day from sun up to sundown an attempt to please others because that is what is expected of me?
· Or do I go against the grain and assert myself as I am?
· Do I take the risks that ensure my integrity, my authenticity?
· Or do I play it safe and accept self-hating as my inevitable baggage?

How can you find and relate to yourself in this labyrinth of life—this cage in an age that has no discernible center and has lost its moral compass. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “Man’s problem is not to keep his freedom but to win it. Men are not visible to one another. Too many machines and social structures block the view.” Man is no moral abstraction to Sartre, but a living, pulsing human being in need of his fellow man’s involvement and support, and not likely to get it from his society.

I believe that we must climb this mountain called “society,” first within ourselves before we can negotiate the abyss below and the trap beyond. To the question: "Is there no hope, no exit from this labyrinth?" Sartre replies: “Certainly. You can take action against what people have made of you and transform yourself. It is not a question of knowing oneself, but of changing one’s life. It is not addressed to us yet, but willing or not, it is of us that the fundamental question is asked: By what activity can an ‘accidental individual’ realize the human person within himself?”

I submit the hope is by you being your own best friend. It is a lifelong struggle from childhood through adolescence to maturity to establish a career, a relationship with significant others, and then, should you have children, to go through the process again.

Often, you do to your children what was done to you. You put the same monkey on their backs that was put on yours. You create the same self-doubt in them that was created in you. You blame yourself while growing up by second guessing what you should and should not do, failing to understand why we desired what we actually did. It is a monkey circus we play on ourselves.

Like a spinning top, your life can spin out of control and come to rest exactly where it started without interruption or insight, denying you the freedom to experience life to the fullest. Or you can become obsessively concerned with always looking over your shoulder to see if someone is watching.

Each of us, as we come to our journey’s end, must realize we come in alone and leave alone, and that the portrait we paint can be either like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray or it can be an honest reflection of a life lived.

To have a friend, you must be a friend—starting with yourself. PE

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is the author of the prize-winning article and book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.