Being called brave for simply being yourself is a strange kind of compliment, and the speaker of "They call me" knows it. The poem lines up the names other people hand out (Brave, Dumb, Weird) and then springs a trap in its last lines: the behaviour that earned insults now earns the title of Angel. The central idea is that a crowd's approval is as unreliable as its scorn, because neither responds to who the speaker actually is. "For being myself" appears near the start and again near the end, word for word. The only thing that changes between those two moments is the audience.
The poem is written in free verse, with no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, so its rhythm comes from repetition. "They call me" returns like a refrain, and each time the sentence breaks off at the line end, leaving the label alone on the next line. Brave. Dumb. Weird. These one-word lines are the shortest in the poem, and they land like stamps pressed onto a form. They are capitalised as though they were names, which is how labels work: they stick, and they swap a person for a category. After each stamp the poem slows into longer, quieter lines ("For having a different style", "For liking other things"), so the pattern becomes accusation, reason, protest, repeated three times. The effect is almost call and response, with the crowd shouting and the speaker answering under their breath.
The protests are all questions, and each begins with "But." The first, "isn't that what I'm supposed to be?", is the sharpest. It quietly refuses the compliment: if being yourself is the default expectation, it shouldn't need bravery. The next two shrink in ambition. "Can't I be unique?" and "can't I like what I want?" read like requests for permission, and the plainness of the second is the point. The speaker has to defend the most ordinary right there is, the right to have tastes. The word "can't" does a lot of work here, because it suggests someone is standing in the way.
The poem has almost no conventional imagery. Its main image is the label itself, a word fixed onto a person by someone else. That makes the ending clever. "An Angel" is the only label with an article, and the only noun among the adjectives. Brave, Dumb and Weird describe behaviour, but "an Angel" names a kind of being, and an angel is hardly a human one. Judging by the poem's tone, this praise is not a relief to the speaker. It is just another label, and a pedestal can confine someone as firmly as a put-down does.
The final stanza also shifts in time. "But now they're calling me" sets the present against "when they were telling me not to be," and that tense clash exposes the contradiction without further comment. The earlier "But" opened a plea, while this one opens a turn. The last line is also the longest and slowest in the poem, and unlike everything before it, it ends without a question mark. After three requests for permission, the speaker finally makes a flat statement. It is an accusation, delivered calmly.
The line also closes a loop. The first question asked what the speaker was "supposed to be," and the poem ends on "not to be." It is the same verb, with the instruction reversed. The one clear chime in the poem sits at the start of this pattern, where "be" at the end of a line rhymes with "me" at the end of the next, as if the poem were tying being to identity. The last word then comes back to that sound, and it feels like a door closing.
The poem matters because it takes a familiar experience, pressure to fit in and the odd applause that sometimes follows when you don't, and shows how shaky both sides are. Its language is simple enough to sound like speech, and it trusts the reader to see the irony without spelling it out. The name attached to it, escape_artist, may invite a reading about slipping out of other people's labels, though that is only an inference from the handle. What the text itself offers is clear enough: the speaker stayed the same, and the verdicts kept changing around them.