Who is Your Gift Really For? On the Narcissism of Unsolicited Devotion

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Last week, I drew the ire of the nose ring brigade on Twitter (and some of my kind and reasonable mutuals as well). The drama came from my reaction to a viral tweet by some girl in her thirties named Maddie Rune, heretofore unknown to me:

"Made a new friend, our daughters are the same age, I loved her company. She was going through something hard, so I handwrote her 1,000 words of original poetry/fiction, because that's how I show love...I'm a deeply creative person. She said she didn't have time to read it, called it weird, and didn't even take it. My soul left my body, reentered my body just to die again, and am now watching my own embarrassment from a small cloud above my house. Adult female friendship in your 30s is a horror movie and I keep volunteering to be the first victim."

I felt my lip curl in disgust as I read her tweet, shaking my head in disbelief. The comments, at least initially, were even more outrageous. Thousands of people were outraged on Maddie's behalf. The friend was heartless, incapable of accepting love, a symptom of everything wrong with adult relationships in 2026.

Others, myself included, asked why a grown woman would hand a near-stranger a thousand words of her own poetry and then be surprised when it landed badly. Maddie blocked me, even though I didn't reply to her actual tweet. And I had a multitude of anons in a state of mouth-frothing anger at my response

Some of my mutuals expressed distress at what I'd said, asking why I wouldn't be happy at a handmade gift from a friend. I did some explaining about the difference in what my mutuals were describing and what Maddie actually revealed to us about herself and the motivations behind her "gift."

Because yes, tweets are short and they don't tell you everything. But this one tells you enough... and tells on her.

When a gift isn't a gift at all

My general policy is to treat all adults as intelligent people—socially and intellectually. That being said, we're all swayed by our past experiences, so I want to walk you through her tweet again, dissecting why it rubbed so many people the wrong way. And why missing that red flag is a problem.

To start, read her tweet again, and count the first-person references.