Who doesn’t have this dark desire to go back to at least one teacher to say

Who doesn’t have this dark desire to go back to at least one teacher to say, ‘sorry miss when you said I wouldn’t amount to anything with this attitude, you were um, wrong. Wow look at me now!’ 

Who doesn’t want to go back and thank at least one teacher? Probably the one who said, ‘keep trying you’re worth it.’ I didn’t hear that enough. And really it didn’t damage me because I learned to say it to myself. 

Instead I heard things like, ‘you’re smart but you are your own worst enemy,’ over and over, while I tried to prove that actually I have always been  my own best friend. That’s why I still loathe adult pep talks. 

If you go into it, you discover that goldfish don’t have the ridiculously short memory problem that we’ve been told they have. They can spot their friends and relatives in the fishbowl apparently months down the line. And they know to avoid the little sharks.

Old fashioned teachers had the same misconception about the kids in their classes. They somehow enjoyed the thought that we would never think deeply enough to imagine life outside of the bowl.

Now I pity the ones that were fooled into swimming in circles forever.