Stop Flattening Yourself

Part 2: Look at What This Is Doing to Us

We’ve learned how to do this so well we don’t even notice it anymore.

“I am this.”
“I am that.”
“I am…”

We say it to locate ourselves.
To stabilize something that feels uncertain.
To make sense of who we are in a world that keeps shifting beneath our feet.

And there is truth in what we say.

You are shaped by your past.
You do carry desires, wounds, longings.
You do hold roles, identities, experiences that matter.

But somewhere along the way, something subtle happens.

What begins as a way of understanding ourselves
quietly becomes a way of reducing ourselves.

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“I am my job.”
“I am my failure.”
“I am my strength.”
“I am my story.”
“I am what happened to me.”
“I am what I’ve built.”

And slowly, the vastness of a human life begins to collapse inward—
compressed into something smaller and more manageable…
until it becomes dense, self-contained,
a kind of inner gravity
where not much can escape.

Not curiosity.
Not contradiction.
Not growth.

Only what fits the version of you that has been decided.

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We are not doing this because we are shallow.

We are doing this because we are trying to survive.

A clear definition feels safer than ambiguity.
A fixed identity feels steadier than something unfolding.
A single story feels more manageable than a life full of contradictions.

So we choose something we can point to and say,
“This is me.”

And for a moment, it works.

Until it doesn’t.

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Because what once helped us orient ourselves
begins to confine us.

If I am my success, I must protect it.
If I am my failure, I cannot move beyond it.
If I am my role, I cannot step outside of it.
If I am my past, I am bound to repeat it.

And anything that challenges that definition
starts to feel like a threat—not to an idea, but to me.

So we defend it.
We reinforce it.
We filter everything through it.

Does this affirm who I believe I am?
Does this challenge it?
Does this fit?

And slowly, the world becomes smaller—
not because it is small,
but because we have reduced the way we engage with it.

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We have always been warned about this kind of seeing.

“Man looks at the outward appearance,
but the Lord looks at the heart.”
— 1 Samuel 16:7

We learn to look at what can be named, categorized, and explained.
But the heart—the depth of a person—cannot be captured that way.

Not in others.
Not in ourselves.

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Look at what this is doing to us.

We cannot rest, because we are always maintaining something.
We cannot grow, because growth threatens the identity we’ve secured.
We cannot be known, because we’ve already decided what is allowed to be seen.

And perhaps most quietly of all—
we lose access to parts of ourselves we no longer have language for.

The parts that don’t fit the sentence.
The parts that contradict it.
The parts that are still becoming.

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“We see in a mirror dimly…”
— 1 Corinthians 13:12

We think we see clearly.
We think our definitions are accurate.

But when we mistake a partial reflection for the full reality,
we begin to live inside distortions.

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And then, without even realizing it,
we begin to see others the same way.

That person is their politics.
That person is their mistake.
That person is their role.
That person is their label.

We flatten them—
not because they are flat,
but because we have learned to see that way.

Because we have done it to ourselves first.

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We didn’t start by flattening others.

We started by shrinking ourselves
into something we could manage, explain, and protect.

And once you learn to live that way,
it becomes the only way you know how to see.

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But there is a cost to living inside something that small.

You cannot love what you refuse to see.
You cannot understand what you will not enter.
You cannot offer presence to another
if you are fragmented within yourself.

So we try harder.

We try to be more understanding.
More compassionate.
More patient.

But we are attempting to see others fully
while still refusing to see ourselves honestly.

And it doesn’t work.

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Because the way you see yourself
sets the limits for how you see everything else.

If you are a category,
others will become categories.

If you are a role,
others will become roles.

If you are a single story,
others will become stories you can summarize and set aside.

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It’s not that what you’ve said about yourself is false.

It’s that it’s incomplete.

And incomplete truths, when treated as final,
become distortions.

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“For you have died,
and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
— Colossians 3:3

Your life is not fully visible.
Not fully definable.
Not fully accessible through labels.

It is hidden.

Not as something lost—
but as something too deep to be reduced.

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But to live that way—to actually allow that to be true—
requires something most of us have spent our lives avoiding.

Honesty without editing.

The kind that doesn’t rush to resolve tension.
The kind that doesn’t force clarity where there is still mystery.
The kind that allows contradiction to exist without immediately trying to fix it.

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Because the moment you stop forcing yourself into a sentence,
you have to face something much larger.

A self that is still unfolding.
A self that holds both beauty and brokenness.
A self that cannot be controlled as easily
as a carefully chosen definition.

And that can feel destabilizing.

Even frightening.

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But where there is Spirit, there is something else.

Freedom.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:17

Not the freedom of finally defining yourself correctly—
but the freedom of no longer needing to.

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When you stop flattening yourself,
something shifts.

You begin to notice what you had previously ignored.
You begin to feel what you had previously numbed.
You begin to see contradictions not as threats,
but as invitations to go deeper.

And without trying,
your vision of others begins to change.

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Because now, when you look at someone,
you no longer need them to be simple.

You no longer need them to fit into a category
so you can understand them quickly.

You recognize something in them
that you have begun to recognize in yourself.

Depth.
Complexity.
A life that cannot be summarized without losing something essential.

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The goal was never to define yourself perfectly.

It was to be known.

“Whoever loves God is known by God.”
— 1 Corinthians 8:3

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And so you slow down.

You listen differently.
You see more.
You care in ways that are not driven by fixing or defining,
but by a willingness to remain present.

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Not because you’ve mastered anything.

But because you’ve stopped reducing everything.

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We often think the answer is to learn how to see others better.

But that’s not where it begins.

It begins here:

Stop abandoning yourself.
Stop reducing yourself to something manageable.
Stop mistaking a partial truth for the whole of who you are.

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Because you don’t learn to see others
by studying them harder.

You learn to see others
by refusing to look away from yourself.

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You are not a sentence.
You are not a category.
You are not something that can be summarized and set aside.

And neither is anyone else.

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© 2026 Kevin David Kridner. All rights reserved.

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