Selbstliebe.

They want us insecure. 

We queue up, in our single file lines, waiting for their approval, for our validation. 

It filters its way through the layers of our lives so that each and every cell of our beings is in their possession. 

They are the impassable membrane, functioning by default. Because nothing, not even the good gets through.  

It’s unclear whether we exist from the outside or within, because we are only conscious of ourselves and the existence that contains us. 

Were we to dream up a freedom of our own we might defy their iron hold. 

But that would require dreaming up a shape that does not exist yet, a new form. 

They kept us in the dark with the belief that nothing new could be moulded without a torch. 

But I do not need a light to carve a shape in the darkness that implants itself beneath my closed eyes. 

From my own black canvas, I drew up the blue print. 

I saw what only the imagination could fathom and spent my weeks configuring her arches. 

She was rough in conception but smooth marble in completion. 

And as my shape came to final glory I felt a sense of something new, she was satisfaction and self-validation, she broke their iron clamp. 

Contempt turned to content

And I stepped into my new shape.