Everyone’s Special Someone

Two people called me special this week. One was my former therapist, the other was a friend. Their words brought back old longing, new gratitude, and a deeper understanding of what it really means to be seen.

When Nancy called me special a few days ago, something stirred inside me. It wasn’t the word itself but the weight of who it came from. Nancy, as many of you know, was my therapist when I was a teenager, the one who saw me long before I could see myself.

We didn’t speak for more than thirty years, not until I reached out to her this past spring after finishing my memoir. Since then, we’ve reconnected, and now she reads my Substack reflections and writes to me every day. Our relationship is no longer one of therapist and patient; it is now built on shared history, mutual admiration, and care.

Nancy recently read my reflection, Spoonfuls, Not Buckets and sent me a message filled with love and memory. She wrote that she was “reliving how special you were to me.” I’m going to let her words breathe.

Nancy has told me many times over the past few months how special I was to her then and how special I have become to her now. I am not exaggerating when I say I would have done anything to hear those words as a wounded teenage girl sitting in her office. Back then, I knew how much she meant to me, but I never felt certain of the inverse.

Therapy can feel like an episode of The Bachelor, the show where twenty-five women compete for the affection of one eligible man, each professing her love while he keeps his emotions contained and, in doing so, holds all the power. That is how therapy felt to me then. I hated not knowing what I meant to Nancy while being so sure of what she meant to me.

It is no exaggeration to say I am alive because of her steady, caring presence and her ability to see beneath my armor, reaching the girl who lived behind the facade I had built. And though I felt her love, I also knew she was paid to sit with me. I struggled to trust that the care was real.

Now, as a therapist myself, I understand how deeply clinicians can care for the people they are paid to treat. But back then, I didn’t know what I meant to Nancy. Even now, hearing her tell me how special I am to her lands with force. It settles somewhere deep, a truth my younger self could never quite believe.

A few days after that email from Nancy, a friend said something similar. We had just navigated a hard conversation, the kind I couldn’t have had a few years ago when I was still immobilized by my fear of conflict. Over the past year, as we reconnected after a long break in our friendship, she has watched me change from someone who avoided hard truths to someone who tries to speak them. After we talked, she said softly, “You’re special to me.”

Two “specials” in one week. Both landed with a kind of heartswell that caught me off guard and got me thinking.

When I was a child, I wanted to be everyone’s special someone: my grandmother’s favorite, my mother’s helper, my father’s pride, and my sisters’ doll. I grew up in a loving family, but one with buried trauma and quiet disconnection, so I learned to read people quickly, to sense what they needed and become it. That was the birth of Surface Me, the part of me that knew how to shape-shift into whatever version of myself seemed most lovable.

It worked for a long time. I felt the safety that came with being adored, the relief of belonging. But it was a fragile belonging, dependent on performance. I could be loved for being special, but only as long as I stayed who they needed me to be. I rarely gave anyone the chance to know the real me who lived beneath the surface. Honestly, I never gave myself the chance either.

It took decades, and more therapy than I can count, to understand how deep that pattern ran. To see how much of my life was spent trying to earn what should have been freely given. To see how often I confused being special with being safe.

The tragedy that changed my life, the plane crash that took five loved ones from my family, eventually moved me to stop pretending, to show my real self, and to be present for the people I love. What that meant, in practice, was that I stopped needing to be special to everyone and started wanting to be special to the right people. My people. And just as important, I learned to tell them what they mean to me.

So now, when someone calls me special, it touches something different. It reaches the part of me that no longer needs to prove her worth. I still like being seen, of course, but what matters now is why I am seen. When Nancy calls me special, she isn’t talking about performance. She is remembering the girl I was and honoring the woman I’ve become. When my friend says it, she isn’t praising me for saying the right thing. She is recognizing the courage it takes to stay in relationship when it would be easier to retreat.

For the first time, being special doesn’t mean disappearing myself to be someone else’s ideal. It means showing up as I am, flaws and all.

I used to think I had to earn love by being exceptional. Now I see that love grows strong and steady when I am real. Maybe that’s what being special really is, not being chosen above others, but being fully myself with the people I love.