Every human being who has ever walked this strange, spinning planet has, whether or not they admit it, dreamed of seeing themselves in third person. It’s the secret behind mirrors, behind security cameras, behind every carefully framed selfie and the unspoken popularity of drones. We all want to see ourselves living—not merely existing, but being. We want proof that we were real.

In my memories, it’s always raining.

The rain—my constant companion—has become the atmospheric pressure of my inner world. A drizzly blanket that hushes the chaos and renders everything around me just a little softer, a little less defined. I’ve long suspected that’s why I love it so much. Rain doesn’t just fall—it erases. Lines, noise, expectation. It allows you to disappear, or maybe just be seen more gently.

When it rained at summer camp, we’d run to the main house for breakfast, slipping on muddy patches, shrieking with joy, our hair plastered to our foreheads. After breakfast, we’d dash back to our cabins, our towels already soaked, our socks hopeless, our spirits somehow bigger than our bodies. I see myself now—this impossibly young version of me—bolting through the wet, smiling like the whole damn world was a secret between me and the sky. And in my mind’s eye, she’s coming toward me—closer, larger, unmistakably me. Running up through the summer rain, like the sky itself had made her.

But that’s not the only vision I’ve carried lately. Yesterday, I went to see my daughter. I took her back to where we both grew up—back to Upstate New York near Oneonta. The hills haven’t changed, and the trees still remember our names.

Her name is Makayla, and I met her when she was just turning two years old. I was engaged to her aunt Angie for nearly twenty years, and very early on it became clear that family dynamics—complicated as they were—meant that Makayla and I would be spending a lot of time together.

That time turned into something permanent. She started staying with us more and more often, until the boundaries between what was temporary and what was home blurred into the reality of our lives. I raised her. I was there for everything—every skinned knee, every birthday cake, every bedtime story, and every quiet cry that no one else heard. I came painfully close to adopting her legally. The hearing was scheduled, the paperwork signed. And then, at the last possible moment, it was canceled. Without cause, without logic, and without justice.

But the courts don’t get to decide what love is. I wasn’t legally her mom. I just loved her like one.

Makayla is my daughter. She always has been. She sees me as the person who’s been her aunt, her mother, and now—without question—her lifelong best friend.

There’s something I’ve never really put into words, but it deserves to be said plainly: unfortunately, as much as I would have loved to send her to summer camp—she begged me to as a small child—it just never came to pass. I wanted so badly to give her that same experience that had meant so much to me. Instead, I did everything I could to recreate the magic of it through road trips, lakeside cabins, muddy hikes, swimming holes, and late-night storytelling under the stars. I brought her as close to that feeling as life allowed. I gave her campfire songs without the campground, marshmallows without the mess hall, and the feeling of freedom without the buses and bunks.

She slept on my living room couch. At the time, I was living in an 1800s one-room schoolhouse I’d spent a decade repairing with my own two hands—hauling beams, fixing plumbing, rewiring everything by myself because no one else was going to do it right. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t spacious. It was drafty in the winter and too quiet at night. But it was mine, and it was home. And while Makayla lived with us on and off during those years, that living room couch became her bed. I was working 48-hour shifts back then—coming home bone-tired, boots caked with mud and soot, pulling them off in the same narrow doorway where generations of schoolchildren once hung their coats—and still, I made time to sit with her. To hear her. To love her. Because that’s what you do when someone becomes your whole world. You don’t wait until life gets easier. You love them anyway. You love them through it.

A few months ago, I tried to push her away.

It’s a shameful sentence to write. Amelia and I were going through a very tumultuous time in our lives—one of those overwhelming whirlwinds where everything feels like it’s breaking all at once and nothing, not even love, feels stable or certain. I was trying to hold too many broken things together with fraying threads, and in the middle of all that noise, I hurt Makayla. I tried to push her out of my life—not because she had done anything wrong, but because I was drowning and didn’t want her to see me sink. She didn’t deserve that. She deserved grace. She always has.

Last night, after dinner in Utica, we said our goodbyes the way we always do. I told her that I loved her and that she was welcome to call me anytime. No performance, no fanfare—just that deep, wordless kind of hug that says, I know you, and I love you. She got in her car, I got in mine, and somewhere along the long, quiet drive home, I started crying.

Not out of sadness. Not even nostalgia. It was something more complicated. More holy. I cried because I realized something that had been slowly blooming inside me for years.

She makes friends wherever she goes, not because she’s trying to—but because people feel safe around her. She’s the kind of girl who pulls her car over in the summer to hand bottled water to someone baking on the sidewalk. Yesterday afternoon, she was out driving when she stopped at a red light, got out of her car, and handed a homeless woman two bottles of cold water. No audience. No narrative. No glory. Just instinct. Just kindness. She doesn’t post about it. She just does it.

That same kindness, that same quiet strength. She’s the quintessential American girl next door. The one you sit beside on the porch swing, the one everyone waves to, the one people instinctively trust. But anyone who’s paying attention knows—you don’t fuck with her. She’s got steel in her bones and lightning behind her eyes. She is smart—so goddamn smart. Intuitive, quick-witted, fiercely independent. She’s not just a product of her upbringing—she’s proof that I raised someone extraordinary.

Raising her is one of the best and most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life.

Not was—is.

She’s still that girl who calls me when she’s had a bad day. She’s still the one I’d move heaven and earth for. She and I will always be friends. That’s a bond no name, no judge, no piece of paper could ever define. She is my daughter. In the only way that matters.

So this afternoon, I sit barefoot on my porch in Vermont, my nails painted blue, my lungs full of wet July air. And I carry both visions with me—the little girl I was, and the woman I raised. Both of them running toward me through the summer rain.

And for once, I don’t need a mirror. I don’t need a camera. I don’t need a fucking drone. I just need this moment, because it’s all real, and it always was.