I am a flake. Not the semi-delicious Cadbury creation --a flake in the human sense. In case I had any doubts about my flakiness, I have it on good authority from sources outside of myself that I am a flake. Are you a flake, too?
What is a flake anyway? The definition I found on the Interweb suggests that a flake is a person who is crazy, eccentric, or unreliable. Based on recent use of the term 'snowflake', I would also add sensitive.
What is wrong with being sensitive? Or eccentric? And what the heck does 'crazy' mean anyway?
I get the thing about unreliable, but honestly, sometimes things need to fall apart because they do fall apart (see William Butler Yeats or Chinua Achebe if you are in doubt about this). And reliable in what sense? I've had the same job for 15 years and I pay my bills, if that's the metric you use to define 'reliable'. I'm sure plenty of flakes do (and the ones who don't, I can guarantee you, beat themselves up about it because they are sensitive, remember?). We also try to show up for people because we know what it is to need people --flakes are so full of empathy and emotion, it's hard to function sometimes.
Perhaps if we thought of ourselves like croissants, buttery in our lightness, prone to breaking off in leaves in response to the world around us, but still whole inside? Or some other better metaphor that would say we're not so bad, really? We're flexible, empathetic, responsive, ...
Flaky. It's not so bad.
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