“Speak from the heart” “My parents act like children”
I say something meaningful at school, something that sounds quite philosophical but digestible to anyone. An insight of the world that’s quite catchy like “The headteacher shouldn’t read from a script at assemblies, students would listen to her messages.”
Those conclusions circled round, were repeated a lot and shortly afterwards* re-explained to me, like I was never the one who said it, like they didn’t want to admit to themselves that I was the one who had this amazing insight. Perhaps they had to claim it as their own because they were a void of emptiness and could never come up with anything original, and this lie that they told themselves tamed that insecurity. They had to trick themselves into believing that it was their own original insight. I had to remind myself to pity them for that, instead of being annoyed that my credit was stolen, and that I had completely vanished from the equation, or that they had the audacity to think that they were more enlightened by me by explaining back something that I had just explained to them., in the literal same wording, and in a proud, patronising way like this stuff was new to me.
*the use of the term shortly applies to the area of time between a few minutes and a couple of days.