Kayla Kim Votapek

Childhood friends have a way of holding the most unfiltered version of you.

This is me and one of my childhood best friends. A musician, a devoted Taylor Swift lover, and one of the people who knew me back when I was my most whimsical, imaginative, uncomplicated self. When you’re a kid, friendship is pure play. You make up worlds. You love the same songs. You dream out loud without a shred of embarrassment. You just play together!

There’s something I want to honor about the friendships of our childhood, even the ones that live in the past now. They shaped us. They held our whimsy when it was brand new. They were proof, early on, that being fully ourselves was something worth doing out loud that play and imagination and joy were how we reached each other.

Not every friendship is meant to travel the whole way with you. But that doesn’t erase what it gave you. I carry the whimsy those early friendships taught me into everything I make now. The kid who loved music and stories and magic? She’s still here. She was real. And the people who played alongside her mattered.

Who’s a childhood friend who shaped your whimsy? Tell me in the comments. Follow along. 💙

The overalls. The buns. The park. Being a whimsical kid! There’s a Korean word for what all of that actually is.
놀자.

In English, we say “let’s hang out.” Neutral. A little passive. Somewhere to be. But in Korean, the everyday invitation between friends is 놀자 which translates, literally, to let’s play.

Let that land for a second. An entire culture where the natural way to ask for someone’s time is to invite them to play. Not to be productive. Not to accomplish something. Just to play, the way we did as children, before we were taught that our worth was tied to what we produce.

This is what I was doing sitting in that park dressed like my younger self. It wasn’t hanging out. It was 놀자. Play as a way of coming home to who we actually are.

Because play returns us to ourselves. It frees us from the pressure to perform and achieve. And it’s only in that freedom, I’ve come to believe, that we can truly create, heal, and connect. Everything I make, everything I build, everything I heal…it all begins here. In play.

So maybe the invitation you need this week isn’t “let’s hang out.” Maybe it’s let’s play.

💙 Save this if you needed the reminder that play is not a waste of time but the way home.

Drop a 💙 if this is the energy you’re carrying into this week!

Hair in buns. Overalls on. Sitting in a park like I have nowhere else in the world I need to be.

I forget, sometimes, how good it feels to dress like the kid I used to be. To let her out. The one who didn’t dress for anyone, who picked overalls because they were comfy and fun, who could sit in a park and be perfectly content doing absolutely nothing productive at all.

Somewhere in the years of becoming a professional, a leader, a whole adult with responsibilities …she gets buried under all of it. Not gone. Just quieter. Waiting for a day like this to come back out.

Here’s what I’m learning: reconnecting with your younger self isn’t regression. It’s remembering. It’s giving the version of you who existed before all the pressure and performance a chance to breathe again. She had good instincts, that kid. She knew how to play. She knew how to just be.

I don’t want to leave her behind on my way to wherever I’m going. I want to bring her with me.

When’s the last time you let your younger self out to play? Tell me in the comments. Follow along. 💙

A few decades older but still hiding behind books.

Books over our faces, laughing at ourselves, being exactly as silly as we were at thirteen. And honestly? That’s the whole gift of a friendship this old. You get to be your most unserious self with someone who has seen every version of you and stuck around for all of them.
There’s something I love about the fact that our joke was to hide behind books. Because stories have always been the thing we hid inside, escaped into, found ourselves through together. Even our silliness is made of the thing that bonded us.

The friendships that last aren’t the ones that stay the same. They’re the ones that let you grow up completely and still be ridiculous together. That hold your whole becoming and still make room for the kid you’ve always been underneath it.

Mel has known me through every chapter. And we’re still writing new ones usually while laughing too hard to hold the camera straight.

Who’s your ride-or-die since childhood? Tag them and embarrass them a little. Follow along. 💚

Before I had language for who I was, I had friends who reflected my light back to me when I couldn’t see it myself.

That’s the thing about the people who knew you young. They met you before you had the words…before you understood your identity, before you could name the in-between. And in the seasons when shame or sorrow made you lose sight of your own worth, they were the ones who kept beaming it back. Steadily. Without being asked.

I think the truest friendships actually are: people who are committed to reflecting each other’s light, especially in the moments when the other one has temporarily lost view of it.

It’s gentle work. It’s steadfast work. And in the hardest chapters, it really is life-saving work.

All the spaces I am building for other people’s stories comes from having learned that being truly seen by someone is one of the most healing forces there is.

Mel and I have been trading stories since we were kids who didn’t yet know who we would become.

We met in middle school! She was my first friend when I moved to a new town. That tender, awkward, formative age when a good friend can quite literally change the trajectory of your life. And somewhere in all the years since, one thing has stayed completely constant: we have always shared stories. The ones we read. The ones we lived. The ones we imagined for ourselves when the real world felt too small.

So standing in a bookstore in NYC with her, both of us holding books, looking at each other the way we have across decades of change; it felt like coming full circle. Two grown women who are still, at the core, the same two girls who found each other over a love of stories.

I think this is why I do the work I do now. Why I write, why I build spaces for other people’s stories. It started here. With a friend. With a book passed between us. With the radical act of imagining a bigger life out loud, together.

🌿 This chapter. Roots. Growth. The friendships that grew you into who you are.

Tag the friend who’s been trading stories with you since the beginning. Follow along. 💚

Lou Lim Ioc Garden in Macau ✨

All curved bridges and still water and archways that frame the light like is were built to make you pause.

After the pose and the play and the fun, I found this moment of stillness, and it felt like the other half of what it means to travel fully. Not just the joy and the energy, but the quiet. The soft, reflective, breathe-it-all-in quiet.
I think there’s a version of presence that’s loud and alive, and a version that’s still and deep. And the fullest way to move through the world is to let yourself have both. To be silly under the sky in one moment and completely, wordlessly present under an arch in the next.

This is what I mean when I talk about being fully human.

It’s not one note. It’s the whole range …the wonder and the stillness, the play and the peace, the bright and the quiet. All of it available, all of it mine, all of it yours too.

I came to Macau to see a new place. I left having remembered, again, how much life there is to feel when you actually let yourself be here for it.

For a long time, I thought belonging was something a place granted you. That you had to earn your way into feeling at home or had to prove you fit, prove you knew the customs, prove you deserved to take up space.

So I moved through new places tentatively. A guest in the world. Always slightly braced for the moment someone might ask what I was doing there.

Somewhere in my travels, that shifted.

I realized the belonging I had been searching for out there was never about changing myself to fit a place. It was about letting myself be fully, unapologetically who I am in a city I had never seen, in a country I had never been to and discovering that the belonging came with me.

This is the quiet freedom no one tells you about. Belonging was never about contorting yourself into something a room could accept. It was about being so rooted in who you are that you no longer need the room’s permission. You walk in whole. You take up space. You let yourself be here.

I don’t shrink to belong anymore. I belong by being exactly who I am.

Somewhere along the way I decided I was done being a careful version of myself in beautiful places.

This is Macau. And this is me, fully in it striking a pose, taking up space, letting myself be a little ridiculous in a city I’d never seen before. There was a time I would have stood politely for a nice photo and moved on. Contained. Composed. The version of me that didn’t want to be too much.

I’m not interested in that version anymore.

Traveling has taught me something I keep having to relearn: presence is a practice. Wonder is a choice. You can move through the most stunning places in the world with your guard up and your shoulders tight, or you can let a new city crack you open and remind you that you’re actually, gloriously alive.

I choose alive. I choose the silly pose. I choose to be fully here.

Where’s a place that made you feel fully alive? Tell me in the comments!

📸 Marion E Hawkinson

Same couch. Same dress. Best friend who’s been through it all with me.

Marion and I ended up in matching dresses , and honestly it felt like the perfect metaphor ! Sometimes the people closest to you just move through life in sync with you. Not because you’re the same, but because you’ve walked beside each other long enough to fit.

Here’s what I know: the seasons that ask the most of us are so much more survivable with the right people in them. The ones who show up in the joy AND the grief. Who sit on the couch with you when you’re glowing, and who also know the harder chapters underneath the pretty photos.

Joy and grief are not opposites. They live in the same body, sometimes on the same day, sometimes on the same couch. And being able to hold both , to be dressed up and happy while also carrying something tender is not a contradiction. It’s what being fully human looks like.

I’m grateful for the people who let me be all of it. The joy and the weight. The dressed-up and the undone🧡