Women Who Inspire Me #14: My Best Friend

Posted on January 28, 2019

My second instalment of my “Women Who Inspire Me” series 2019 edition is one that hits close to home. My best friend. I’ll leave her anonymous but she’s the best, and everyone should love her. Anonymously.

My Best Friend

My best friend is one of the most marvellous women I know. I’ve known her for two decades now, and one of the things that first united us was that we were the two tallest people in our class. (I was 5’6” basically at age 10 and then I never grew again.)

We shared the same intense and slightly eclectic education for 7 years (ages 11-18) that involved dressing up like medieval history characters; dance concerts; and making “ancient” artefacts, smashing them up, burying them and having another class dig up your artefacts and piece together what civilisation you represented. We shared a common hatred of mathematics. We ran the school’s Arts, Culture, & Literary Journal together.

We had sleepovers where we’d stay up all night watching embarrassing films, eating pizza, and giving each other henna tattoos.

There was a famous occasion where I was sick in the middle of the night at a sleepover and she rolled over in her sleep and shouted “someone get Manda a towel” before falling back to sleep. (The girl whose house it was went and got her mom. They stood outside in the snow and hosed vomit off of my sleeping bag whilst I continued to be sick in the bathroom for a good 6 more hours. Getting a stomach bug in the middle of a sleepover is no fun.)

Because of our mutual hatred of math, we convinced our Calculus teacher to let us have class outside so that we could draw function graphs on the sidewalk in chalk. She and I drew no graphs, and convinced my high school boyfriend to draw our graphs whilst we drew elaborate pictures of fancy eggs.

We went on trips together. We graduated from high school and went to university, and somehow managed to stay just as close even though we were so far apart.

She came and visited me in Atlanta, I visited her one famous summer in DC. We saw each other back in New Mexico. Since moving abroad, we’ve had reunions in Paris, she’s had layovers in London, and most epically, she was my maid of honour and stayed with us in London and then in Scarborough. That all sounds fairly easy, but it’s spanned nearly 10 years of us having graduated from university and living on the other side of the world from each other.

There are few people in the world whose opinions I value as much as hers.

She’s whip-smart, hilarious, dedicated, passionate, generous and caring. She has big ideas and is always thinking of ways to add value to her community. She has a Master’s in something that actually makes a difference (unlike mine in Art which is purely selfish). She taught in some really challenging situations as a new teacher and rises with grace to challenges thrown her way.

I know how lucky all her students are to have a teacher who cares so much about them.

She’s been working abroad for the past few years; and though moving to another country, finding a new community, setting up a new life and working, can all be so stressful and debilitating, she’s forged her way ahead; made some fabulous new friends, prioritised her health and happiness and is still making an impact as a teacher, whilst thinking about how to change the system for the better.

If I could only channel a 10th of her braveness, kindness and social awareness, I would be a much better person.

I also know that this is just the beginning for her. I’m sure one day there are going to be loads of girls that have her on their own personal “Women Who Inspire Me” list. But you heard about her here first.