You know when you see a little kid running around, or playing dress up or even singing a song they learned in school, and you can just feel the innocence and freedom rolling off of them? In that energy there is no fear, no self consciousness, no apology for being exactly whom they are. Eventually, that freedom begins to wane. It is the nearly inevitable effect of adulthood, of growing up. For most people, they let their hearts fade into the background, evening their edges out in an effort to become a mirror of their peers, another faceless personality stumbling around in a crowded, dull hall stuffed full of a jumble of others bulging with stifled uniqueness. They’ll tell you to be yourself and embrace who you are. They’ll tell you to accept your flaws and flaunt your talents, but most people don’t want that, not really. What they want is for you to fill up the empty pieces of themselves with your outstanding normality, the normality they cannot seem to find.

So why? If no one has this coercively sought commonness, if no one is happy pretending to have it, then why do we continue to strive for it? The little forces shoving us further towards it are hidden everywhere, calling to us like a whisper in our ear, you’re getting warmer, in a game of hot-and-cold. It’s casually dropped in the phrase, Is that what you’re going to wear? uttered by friends followed by a too-reluctant-to-be-reassuring, It’s cute... It’s in the mothers who whisper in their daughters' ears about all of the flaws that no one else sees, all the while snatching up their dinner plates before they can consider a second helping. It's in the teachers that unsubtly suggest to their students that they take the AP Physics course over an art class, because everyone knows there's no money in art. It’s in the fathers who tell their sons to “man up” at any sign of emotion and their daughters to wear less makeup, because you don’t want to give a boy the wrong idea. It’s little things, small words we hardly notice and slight shifts we barely see, it’s these things that break us, that shove us so often and so violently to the ground in the hope that eventually, we will become a part of it. A gray smudge on the cement that will wear out with time until it’s nothing at all.

So don't let them. Don’t let them turn you into nothing at all, because you are most certainly more than everything.