Crack me open

▶Watch this week's reflection · 2:06

This week I keep returning to the street art of Charlie Burrowes, who paints love letters onto walls across Melbourne, out where any stranger might stop in front of them. One of them asks the person she loves to come lay across her ribs and crack her open.

One line pulls the whole thing taut: the weight of who you really are. A second letter almost answers the first, its writer wanting only to breathe a little easier and be more of what she already is. Charlie made these for the people who've moved her, and put them up in public where strangers would find them. What stopped me wasn't the tenderness. It was the mechanism underneath it. She isn't asking to be fixed, or filled, or led. She's asking the other person to be nothing more than fully themselves, because that's the thing that lets her breathe.

There's a version of you that isn't performing anything, and it's more contagious than you think. When you stop managing how you land and are simply yourself, something in the people near you recognizes itself and comes forward too. You don't move them by being impressive. You move them by being real enough that their own realness feels safe to show.

Where this week did someone's plain humanity give you room to drop the act?

We don't just move the people near us. We might be the permission their own light's been waiting for.