📌 In This Deep Dive
In Netflix’s Don’t Say Good Luck, the performance of “She Used to Be Mine” bridges Sara Bareilles’ Broadway musical Waitress with Sophie’s personal coming-of-age tragedy. As her mother battles terminal cancer, the iconic song shifts from a story of trapped adulthood into a heartbreaking eulogy for Sophie’s own lost youth. Below, we unpack how Sophie channels Jenna’s internal pain into her real-life grief, transforming a final stage performance into a powerful moment of emotional survival.
There’s a moment in Don’t Say Good Luck when the director of the Waitress musical speaks to Sophie as she prepares for the lead role, pushing her to be “Jenna, not Sophie.” It’s an invitation to bring real authenticity to the character she’s about to play, channeling a piece of her actual life and the things she’s truly feeling into the performance. That’s where the advice to ask her mother what it felt like to be pregnant with her comes from: Sophie is basically being asked to “become” Jenna in a way, projecting her current real-life emotions onto her character.
Cut to the ending of Don’t Say Good Luck, and you realize Sophie pulled it off: when her Jenna performs the musical’s signature song, “She Used To Be Mine,” she manages to bridge the track’s original meaning directly with her personal story. A song originally about innocence lost way too fast turns into a forced farewell to youth, right as the world compels her to grow up overnight.
“She Used To Be Mine”: The Original Song From Waitress in Don’t Say Good Luck
For anyone unfamiliar, Waitress is a real-life musical that became a massive Broadway hit back in 2016. Building on the success of the 2007 indie film of the same name, the show was directed by Diane Paulus, with singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles composing an original score tailor-made around lead character Jenna and the rest of the cast.
“She Used To Be Mine,” one of the musical’s centerpiece tracks, serves as one of Jenna’s key emotional confessions in Waitress. In the show, Jenna is a young woman working at a bakery who discovers she’s pregnant. The news turns her world upside down, especially since her marriage to her husband Earl is abusive and suffocating.
Realizing she’s about to bring a baby into the world as the product of a failing relationship opens Jenna’s eyes, making her realize she’s spent her life making choices that never actually aligned with what she wanted for herself.
In its original context within Waitress, “She Used To Be Mine” is a song about the quiet pain of watching your own youth and innocence slip away into the past. Jenna looks at her present life and admits that the person she has turned into has effectively stolen her true identity.
It’s not simple to say
Most days I don’t recognize me
These shoes and this apron
That place and its patrons
Have taken more than I gave ’em
The main character doesn’t recognize who she is today, and she starts talking about the girl she used to be in the third person, as if that girl were someone completely detached from her now. That “she” is literally her younger self, with all her dreams and flaws, but with a unique fire that could have turned her into a woman full of pride and self-worth.
She’s imperfect but she tries
She is good but she lies
She is hard on herself
She is broken and won’t ask for help
[…]
She is gone but she used to be mine
So in Waitress, “She Used To Be Mine” is basically a song dedicated to the most authentic version of ourselves that got lost over time. In Jenna’s case, life moved way too fast and made her an unfulfilled adult before she even realized what was happening, when her youthful energy could have pushed her to build a much better life instead. But that energy has pretty much faded, and Jenna honors it by pouring her heart out in these lyrics.
And at the same time in Don’t Say Good Luck, Sophie realizes that the song is speaking directly to her, too.
The Meaning of the Song for Sophie in Don’t Say Good Luck
In the Netflix movie, Sophie gets her own personal share of teenage pain and heartbreak. She’s supposed to be a regular girl focusing on her studies, crushing on kids her age, pursuing her passion for acting, and celebrating the surprise of landing the lead role in her musical. But life had other plans for her: her mother’s cancer came back, leaving her with only a few months left to live. Sophie finds herself trapped in a tight grip of inner turmoil, torn between the grief of her mother’s illness on one side, and the effort to stop this personal tragedy from destroying her life, especially during such a delicate phase of growing up.
As her dad tells her, everyone is trying their best to stop it from hurting so much, but maybe that’s impossible. And so, just like Jenna, Sophie is forced to face the fact that she became an adult way too fast, pushed by life events that hit far too quickly. That’s why, when Don’t Say Good Luck reaches its finale and we see Sophie sing “She Used To Be Mine” in the Waitress musical, we realize she’s actually singing about her real life.
And it’s not what I asked for
Sometimes life just slips in through a backdoor
And carves out a person who makes you believe it’s all true
And now I’ve got you
Sophie addresses this adult version of herself that suddenly arrived while life was taking shape, and she confronts it head-on. She knows she grew up too fast, but she wants to face the present with real grit. The young girl full of enthusiasm and optimism who came before might be gone for good, but there’s still a way to save enough of her to become someone to be proud of. Rewriting the past isn’t an option, but the endings that haven’t taken shape yet are still waiting, and we still have time to decide how they turn out.
And you’re not what I asked for
If I’m honest, I know I would give it all back
For a chance to start over
And rewrite an ending or two
For the girl that I knew
That’s how “She Used To Be Mine” becomes the song where Sophie takes back control of her own life, too. She rebuilds the Waitress stage set right in her backyard, and Don’t Say Good Luck closes with Sophie performing that exact track just for her mom—her exclusive audience—celebrating one of their final meaningful moments together before life takes her away.
You’re never really ready for events like these that rip away your sense of balance without permission. But living means turning everything that happens to us into who we ultimately become, and it’s always up to us to let every joy and every pain shape us into someone we can actually be proud of.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sophie sings “She Used to Be Mine,” the signature ballad from the 2016 Broadway musical Waitress, written and composed by Sara Bareilles.
Yes. Waitress is a real 2016 Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles and a book by Jessie Nelson, based on the 2007 indie film starring Keri Russell.
While her death is not shown on screen during the final performance, the film makes it clear that her cancer is terminal and her remaining time is extremely limited, making Sophie’s backyard performance one of their final shared moments.
Yes, Sunny Sandler performs her own vocals as Sophie in Don’t Say Good Luck, including the climactic rendition of “She Used to Be Mine” at the end of the film.
