The best gift someone could give me isn’t something you can buy. It’s the feeling of being held in a way that asks nothing of you — the quiet, steady presence of people who know how to make space for your whole self without needing you to explain it.
For me, that gift often arrives in the form of a weekend at the lake house with my friends. There’s something about that place — the slow mornings, the soft light on the water, the way time loosens its grip — that makes it easier to breathe. It’s where the coffee tastes better because someone else poured it, where the air feels like permission, where I can exhale without bracing.
But this year, the gift came in an unexpected shape.
One of my friends’ kids took my hand and pulled me toward the little beach by the lake. We wandered down to the playground, and suddenly I was spending time with a child for the first time in years. They’re on the gender spectrum like me — not pinned to one box, not interested in choosing a single lane. Just… themselves. Fluid. Bright. Unapologetically in motion.
Watching them run across the sand, climb the play structure, narrate their own adventure with total conviction — it was like seeing a younger version of myself out in the wild. A living echo. A reminder. An enlightenment.
“Ohhhhh,” I thought, “so that’s how I must have come across when I was 10.”
There was something healing in that recognition. Not nostalgic — more like a gentle recalibration of memory. A chance to witness my own childhood energy without the fog of adult interpretation. To see the softness, the curiosity, the in‑between‑ness that I carried long before I had language for it.
And the fact that it happened in the presence of people who love me — people who make room for that version of me and the current one — made it feel like a gift wrapped in resonance.
The best gift someone could give me is exactly that:
a moment where I feel seen, safe, and reflected back to myself in a way that makes my life make more sense.
A moment where belonging isn’t something I earn — it’s something I’m invited into.
Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan
Stories That Are All True 
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