Flat

Do you ever feel flat?

2-D, not 3-D?

And you’re fighting to be 3-D, you’re inflating yourself with funny jokes and pretty stories and all the things that get you attention and noticed, but it’s all for nothing.

Because someday you’ll run out of funny jokes and pretty stories.

Someday you’ll run out of attention, and you’ll collapse.

You’ll be flat.

Pale and lifeless, reaching up and tugging at those who are effortlessly 3-D (What is it, that they have? Is it that elusive thing, termed self confidence?)

You’ll be begging for their attention, but you don’t make them laugh anymore, you don’t make them smile; you don’t give them anything, so they won’t give any of their attention to you.

They’ll let you melt and all you’ll leave behind are your words, scribbled on parchment.

2-D words.

There will be nothing left to record your fight for individuality.

You need individuality. You need proof that you have a purpose, that you have a worth. That you are meant to be here.

They run on their own attention. They know they are worth life. They don’t need someone to tell them.

You do. Because you started flat, and they started whole.

You fight against the demons who make you flat

Who crowd your brain, telling you aren’t worth it.

Worth being 3-D.

Who dehumanize you, who take away your reasons for living.

You live for the accolades of others, and the others never last very long.

So enjoy the laughs and the congratulations

Enjoy the attention for now, because someday it’ll be gone.

Someday they’ll be gone, and all you’ll be is flat.

You can’t always rely on others to tell you that you’re special. That you’re beautiful, that you are important for something and someone. That someone would miss you.

Sometimes your own word has to be enough. Sometimes, you just have to know.

Because the attention won’t always be there.

You don’t always want to entertain, or write stories, or do whatever gets you attention.

But you have to.

Because without the attention the demons come and they pop your bubble

Literally.

And you shrink and you scream and you claw yourself back to 3-D just long enough to entertain the masses.

And they blow you up and you feel like you’re the top of the world, but that only lasts as long as you have their attention

Only lasts as long as it takes for them to flit to the next thing.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take a step back?

To drop the pen, drop the smile, and breathe?

Breathe just one breath that’s for yourself, that doesn’t have a double purpose?

To know, deep inside, that you are good enough for yourself and that’s all that matters?

To not constantly put yourself out for other’s approval?

Wouldn’t it be nice…not to be flat?

You can do it, you know. You can pump yourself up.

You don’t need them. You need yourself.

Those demons, they’re squashing you (Because, you see, there’s another way to become
whole. You can make others flat.)

They are the reason everything you do is for the approval and attention of others.

Will today be the day you kick them out?

Will today be the day you smile for yourself, and know you’re beautiful without having to ask
someone else?

Flat is just a restricted state of mind, after all.

Self confidence…is a state of being.