01/29/2026
This flag was gifted to me last year by a friend—wise beyond her years—whom I’ve known and worked alongside for nearly a decade now.
The gift put a huge smile on my face. It was offered as a friendly reminder to simply be myself… something that can be surprisingly hard to do in a world that is always nudging us to fit neatly into one box or another.
As I looked at it this morning, I was reminded of a story from Bangkok, Thailand, in the mid-1950s. During a prolonged period of heat and drought, a seemingly ordinary clay statue of the Buddha began to crack.
When monks looked more closely, they noticed a glimmer of gold shining through the clay. What they ultimately discovered was beneath the unassuming exterior was a gold Buddha statue, hidden for centuries to protect it from invading armies. What appeared plain and unremarkable on the surface had, all along, been something priceless.
Uncovering our own gold—what sets us apart in a world that often asks us to conform—may be the work of a lifetime. Like that statue, we sometimes coat ourselves in protective layers: habits, roles, expectations, self-doubt. And still, beneath it all, our essential nature remains whole, luminous, and untouched.
In all the history of the human race, there has never been—and will never be—another you. Your gifts, the things that light you up from the inside out, your lived experiences, your particular flavor of weird and wonderful… they only get this one brief lifetime to be expressed.
And here’s the thing: the very qualities that set us apart are often the same ones that connect us most deeply to the world. As the world shifts and changes, what we bring—especially when it’s honest and unfiltered—can take on new meaning, quietly giving others permission to lean more fully into themselves, too.
So yes.
Let’s let our freak flags fly—for all the world to see.
