That post was shared over 200,000 times. Not because people wanted to save flies, but because they recognized something they’d lost in themselves: the willingness to extend grace without a calculator running in their head.

Outside her kitchen window, a half-dozen flies buzz lazily around a bowl of overripe bananas she leaves out for them. She doesn’t see pests. She sees neighbors.

She has been mocked on social media—a video of her rescuing a fly from a puddle of dishwater went viral for all the wrong reasons. Commenters called her “insufferably gentle” and asked, “Does she think flies have souls?”

She pauses, and the pigeon—a scruffy, one-eyed creature she calls ‘Captain’—nuzzles into her palm.

“My dad used to say I had soft hands for a hard world,” she recalls. “He wasn’t wrong about the world. He was just wrong about what it takes to meet it.”