It is as though her willingness to simply be herself inspire...

It is as though her willingness to simply be herself inspires me to notice the places in which I am not doing that. Her unapologetic expression of who she is and what she likes becomes a portal for my own awareness about where I am holding tension where I don’t need to be, where I am assuming I need to be someone the world wants me to be, or else be misunderstood, lost, alone.

Saved by Becky Mak and

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The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonate with, and if we’re lucky, some part of the world might too.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... See more